“Stop that,” I said, my tone sharp. “Get outta my head.”
“I’m not in your head,” Tandy said softly. “I’m an empath, not a mind reader. Normally.”
“What’s that mean? Normally.”
“I can feel your reactions, just as I can feel other people’s, but with you, after having spent the better part of the day hiking along your land, in your woods, I can . . . I can feel much more with you.” Tandy lifted his eyes from the floor to my face and he smiled, his reddish eyes bright. “I like you. But you think you’re too dangerous to be anyone’s friend. You think you’ll do damage to them, put them in danger from . . . your cult? No. That’s not it. But something. You also think that having friends will call attention to you in ways that will bring trouble down on you and them.”
“Stop that,” I whispered. “I got no friends. Women aren’t allowed to . . .” I stopped, horrified at what I had been about to say.
“Have men friends?” Tandy asked. “Only women friends, and then only women that their male authority figures approve of?” He held my gaze with his own. “Only friends that their husbands or fathers say they can have? Their own sister-wives or cousins or half sisters? Only people in the church?” I backed slowly away, until I felt the heat of the stove at my back.
“In your own way,” Occam said, drying the last clean dish, “you were just as caged as I was when you were a child. Still are, I’m thinking.”
“That’s not religion,” Tandy said. “That’s cult talk. Real religion is about love and redemption and healing, not putting people down, segregating them into smaller and smaller groups so they can be controlled. Controlling people is evil, real evil. Even God doesn’t control people. He gave us free will.”
I blinked at the words. At the truth in them. For years I’d been reading and studying about cults and how they affected people. How they squeezed them down into a small constricted place and kept them there. Controlled. That was it exactly. Converts had no free will, the cult taking away that one right given by God. To choose.
T. Laine brought over the last of the dirty dishes and set them in the sink. “You got a deck of cards?” she asked me. I shook my head. Cards?
Tandy plucked my washing cloth from my hands and wrung it out before he elbowed me aside and continued washing the dishes. Occam nudged me away from the kitchen, with a soft, “’Scuse me, ma’am. We got work to finish here.”
I stood at my kitchen table watching two men—men—washing my dishes. There was something practically obscene in the vision. Obscene and wonderful.
“Well,” I said. “How about that.”
Tandy turned around and winked at me and then went back to washing. Tandy’s clothes hung on him as if he was wearing a big brother’s hand-me-downs. Occam’s jeans and tee fitted to his form as if he’d been poured into them. Both men were barefooted, like me, and the sight was strange. John had never gone without shoes or slippers. Neither had Daddy.
Feeling odder than I had since I was twelve and first came to live here, I walked into the living room and curled up in John’s old recliner, watching as the witch and the human woman found a deck of cards in one of their backpacks and started a fast-paced game of cards. And I noted that the devil himself didn’t rise up out of the cards and set the place on fire.
SIX
Things got more bizarre when I felt a vehicle on the road, driving up the hills, and I knew, without a doubt, that Paka and Rick were inside. My awareness of the cat was far stronger than it should have been, as far away as they were.
My heart raced; my breath came too fast. I shouldn’t know this, except that I had claimed her.
“Nell?” Tandy called, his voice filled with the same alarm I was experiencing. Barefoot, I left the room for the front porch, the chill in the air biting through my bare soles. Orion hung in the Southern sky, revealed above the tree line as the lawn slid down the arch of the hill. I pulled my cardigan closer and waited.
Behind me, in the house, Tandy watched me through the window, outlined by lantern light. The empath looked twitchy the few times I looked back, feeling the emotions I was feeling, but not knowing why. It had to be confusing for him. But with people in my house and others on the way, I was out of my element. I waited, seeing the vehicle’s lights flicker through the trees, hearing the strain on the engine, climbing the rutted road.
I was still alone on the porch when a van turned in, its headlights picking me out where I stood in the cold, my feet on the smooth boards of the porch as the engine was turned off and as Rick and Paka got out, the doors closing quietly. I wrapped my arms around me as they approached in the total dark, sensing Paka’s sexual satisfaction in her body language, and Rick’s dissatisfaction in the stony look on his face. He was most unhappy and swatted Paka’s hand away when she clung to him. They stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
“You think giving us catnip is funny?” he asked, his tone far too mild for the roiling emotions I was picking up from them.
“I had me a fine giggle at the time,” I said. “Now, not so much.” I had a feeling that a were-creature who was born in her animal form treated mating a mite differently from the way a human did, making my actions more dangerous than I had expected. “You all scratched up?”
Rick blew out a breath and rubbed a hand over his face, which was bristly with whiskers. Something peeked over his shoulder at me, furry face inquisitive. Pea. She ducked her head back down, and I realized she was playing hide-and-seek, clinging to his shirt back. “If I said I was still bleeding,” he said, “would you be happy?”
“Not really. Not anymore,” I said. “I see the attraction of Paka—believe me, I do. Her magic makes my cats tame, and my land practically dances in anticipation every time she’s near.” I didn’t add, but you don’t want to be tied to her, though it must have been in my tone, because Paka slanted her cat eyes at me. Rick sighed a curse, a plain old American curse.
I said, “You know, that word always seems to lack in imagination, as if you ain’t got the learning to communicate what you really mean.” Rick nearly laughed, surprise bubbling up in him before dying away. “You can come in,” I said. “Hospitality to you both.” I went in and sat in John’s recliner, pulling my feet up under my body to warm my toes.
Once inside, Paka raced to T. Laine and JoJo, gathering them up in a group hug, as if she had missed them for days. Carefully bypassing Tandy, she also hugged Occam, who patted the seat next to him, the way a human would tell a child where to settle. The neon green creature leaped from Rick’s shoulder, where it had been play-hiding, across the furniture, to join her on the sofa. My two house cats—no, three, as the one from outside raced in through the open door—were a big ol’ pile of cat, on top of the humans. The human forms. I wasn’t sure how to refer to them all. The cats were growling, spitting, and purring, and finding laps and nooks and crannies between bodies to curl up in. I’d been trying to catch the feral cat for weeks so I could get her shots and neutering. But it looked like she had decided that werecats on the premises was a good reason to make an appearance.
I figured I’d have to name the new mouser; she was making herself at home and becoming domesticated fast, rolling her scent all over Occam, batting at him, scratching him to show affection. He batted back, gently, murmuring in his Texan accent, “Hey there, sugar. Ain’t you a purdy lil’ thang.” With her black head and aggressive personality, I decided she would be Torquil, Thor’s helmet, not Sugar.
Rick, on the other hand, who was supposed to be a werecat too, was standing at John’s desk—no, at my desk—ignoring us all, his back to the room as he paged through papers he had brought in. He was the lone cat, maybe? Like a lone wolf, but a leopard version? Rick ignored the chatter as if he didn’t really care what the others did, arranging printed papers and a laptop on the desk.
Several long, narrow, parallel trails of blood dotted his starched shirt as he moved, reopening the wounds in his back, wounds scratched there by Paka, in what had to have been wild and bloody sex. I shook my head. I had been mean to give them catnip. I should be ashamed. But I wasn’t.
I turned my attention back to Occam, who was now watching the card game. These people were bewildering and fascinating. While I was thinking, Rick placed two six-packs of beer on the center table, passing bottles around. I’d been so focused on other things that I hadn’t even noticed he’d brought them in. Beer. In my house. My eyes went wide, and I covered my mouth.
John would come back and haunt me. He’d had a fit when Leah traded for the muscadine wine the first time, saying, “We will not consort with the devil in my house, woman.” But he’d settled when Leah had starting quoting Scripture about the health benefits of wine, and ended up muttering about drunkards, eternal judgment, and uppity women. He had even learned to enjoy a glass from time to time. He’d have done anything for Leah. And later for me.
John had been honest and kind, and that was a far better compliment than I could offer about most humans. And he had been hospitable in his way. I could almost hear his voice saying, “Hospitality means more than opening the door. It means accepting the person you welcomed, warts and all.” If Leah Ingram had offered hospitality to strangers, then she would have let them drink beer in her house. And she wouldn’t give them catnip. At that thought, shame gushed back.
The three others, Tandy, JoJo, and T. Laine, were playing a loud and energetic game of cards, which included lots of cursing, insults, name-calling, and flipping each other off when a point was scored. It looked like fun, but I didn’t know how to play or how to ask if I could learn. They clinked bottles and drank, sticking the rest in my refrigerator. The beer made them more unruly and noisy. I frowned mightily at them, but they ignored me, and I didn’t know how to take that.
I was studying the people and the cats so intently that I missed what Rick said until he repeated it. “Your work at the market was helpful. Here’s the contract you asked for, signed by the head of HR, for the position of consultant.” He tossed a sheaf of papers into my lap, sealed with a fancy clip. “You said you wanted to know what we’re investigating. Sign everywhere it’s highlighted in yellow, and I’ll read you in. You can skip the drug testing for the moment.”
I neatened the sheets of paper and scanned the first page. The paperwork was for hiring me to be a temporary consultant with the Psychometry Law Enforcement Division of Homeland Security. Beer and cards and now this. John was probably rolling over in his grave with horror.
But I wasn’t rolling over in horror. Excitement leaped up in me like a flame through gasoline, a hot, bright poof of exhilaration and anticipation that washed away the momentary guilt. I wasn’t sure what was happening in my life, but I wanted it, whatever it was.