“That’s what its species does,” Rick said, his voice empty of everything but dread. “They live with us, like pets and friends, but they’re here for one reason, as a deterrent, to keep us from spreading the were-taint or killing humans. For a were-creature to kill a human or to bite and transmit the were-taint, the punishment is death. Always.”
And Brother Ephraim hung on the tree limb, not far from us. Pea knew what had happened to him. Somehow. And for the weres, Pea was justice and vengeance and death. “And though Paka hurt Brother Ephraim saving me, there’s no hint of mercy?”
“No. None,” Rick whispered, his eyes on his mate. Tortured. But oddly I didn’t see love as I understood it, or even love as the library books suggested it might be. It wasn’t a happy love. It was addled. Addicted.
I remembered my sense of Paka as a tamer of cats. Paka had magic, and her magic was . . . I shook my head slightly, trying to figure it out in time to avoid whatever was primed to happen here, hovering over us like the sword of death.
“I smell her victim’s blood,” Rick said dully. “His bowels have opened. His bladder gave way.” Rick took a shaking breath, the sound broken. He looked up into the trees, as if trying to locate Ephraim. “The stench of death rides the breeze.” His tone made me think of poetry, as if he were quoting something.
“But if Paka hurt a human and he didn’t die at her fangs,” I said, “and he didn’t turn into a werecat, then what?” At my words, Joshua whimpered, as if the claws at his neck and face tightened.
“The only way that could happen would be if someone else killed him before he died at Paka’s fangs.” And then Rick’s eyes tightened and I knew his thoughts had taken a turn, hopefully to follow mine.
I closed my eyes and wrapped my fingers tighter around the roots, letting them speak to me about the body so high overhead. Brother Ephraim was near death, his heart racing, his breath so light and thin that scarcely any air moved through his lungs. So much blood drenching the tree branch, falling onto the ground in quiet splatters, the forest soaking it up, waiting for me to feed it fully. “Brother Ephraim is nearly dead,” I said, “but not quite.”
“Pea . . . ,” Rick said, his voice clotted with emotion, his face showing conflict and pain. He didn’t love Paka. But he was tied to her. Magic, I thought.
I shivered, my hands still buried in the clay, my fingers still gripping the roots, the power of the forest still flowing through me. “My choice,” I said to them, my eyes on Pea. At the words, a foreign emotion flooded me, engulfing me. I gasped once, like a drowning victim thrown into an icy stream. The sensation flashed through me, a raging flood, steeling my breath. Something powerful, primeval, elusive. Far more than I could grasp. It washed over and through me and away, a flash flood, too much, too potent, to really comprehend. And it trickled away, leaving nothing.
They were looking at me strangely and, not sure what had happened, I finished the thought, “My land,” I said, the words ringing strangely. “My enemies. My judgment.” I knew something had happened, but it was gone, fleeting and intense.
The little green thing chittered at me, as if waiting for me to say something more, so I did, drawing on the ancient emotion that had washed through me. “He’s dying. There’s no way to get him to a hospital in time. But this is my land, my woods. And he’s my enemy, who came to do evil to me, just like Joshua Purdy”—I inclined my head to the pile of rock—“came to do evil to me.
“Paka’s fangs haven’t spilled his blood, just her claws, so he’s safe from weretaint, right?”
Rick nodded, the movement jerky.
“So it’s just Brother Ephraim, who’s dying.” But the biggest problem wasn’t Ephraim or Joshua. Jackie was in my woods, drawing close. I didn’t have long to save Paka, who had saved me. To do so, I’d have use my strongest magic for the second time in my life. I didn’t know if I could stem the flow, once I set it free.
And Joshua had bled on the land too.
THREE
Pea chittered at me, trying to say something I couldn’t understand.
I tilted my head, my wet hair clinging to me with cold. My body felt numb rather than frozen, which meant I was hypothermic. “Brother Ephraim, who is near death, once controlled the punishment house,” I explained to the furious green critter. “It’s the place where women were sent to be reminded that they were only the helpmeet, not the man, that they were born to do and be and feel and live as their menfolk told them.
“He had my mother one time, for a whole day. She came back changed, crying in the night, flinching at the slightest move. Daddy brought her home, but he never did a single thing against old Brother Ephraim, even when she had a baby the next spring that looked more like Brother Ephraim than like Daddy.” I settled my eyes on the thing that had leaped from Rick’s shoulder. It sat on the ground, feet caught in roots and earth, its small body tense and rigid, prepared to attack Paka the second it got loose, steel claws glinting. “Ephraim hurt my mama. He hurt a lot of women. He came here today to hurt me, to take me back into the church against my will and punish me. I know that because he told me so. The judgment is mine. His life is mine. The choice is mine. Mine. Not yours.”
I leaned forward, against the pull of the muck. My arms began to slide free, slowly. I wanted to be covered when Jackie got here.
“Joshua, now, he’s just an angry, silly little boy who’ll still be a silly little boy twenty years from now, if he lives. While he’ll most likely continue on this road and become the same kind of evil as his friend Jackie, he hasn’t actually accomplished much in the way of evil.” And I wouldn’t sentence him to death despite the blood he had shed on the forest floor, blood that was mine to take. The woods seemed to flow beneath my feet in reaction to my words, making me wonder what it heard, what it felt from me. The big black cat retracted her claws and stepped away, still poised over her prey in threat. With a back paw, she sent Joshua’s shotgun spinning off the rocks into the darkness. It clattered down the stones.
I lifted my chin and raised my voice so it would carry up the pile of rock. “You hear me, Joshua? I’m offering leniency. I’m offering mercy.” Joshua said nothing and I called out, “You hearing me, Josh? ’Cause iffen you don’t answer me, I’ll let that big ol’ cat eat you.” I almost added, the way it ate Brother Ephraim, but I didn’t.
“You’re insane,” he shouted back, gasping. “You need to be locked away, chained in the attic, where crazy women go.”
“That’s not an answer,” Rick said, his voice oddly low and without emotion. I thought it might be his cat talking. “Answer the lady.”
“I hear,” Joshua ground out.
I figured that was the best I was going to get. I dropped my voice again, low enough to exclude Joshua. “The leader of God’s Cloud of Glory Church is nigh,” I said in my strongest childhood dialect. “He’ll wanna kill us all. He will not be a respecter of the law. He finds pleasure in destruction and death and the pain of his victims.” I leaned harder and my left hand came free, slinging clay and pond goo across the small clearing. I swished the hand in the pond water to clean it and held my bib up over my breasts, as I swiveled and leaned away to free my right hand. The moment it was free, I swished it too, and stood, bare feet on the edge of the tiny pool. I slipped my hand into the bib and around the small .32. Joshua was incompetent, too busy feeling up breasts and not busy enough making sure his prey was defenseless. I gripped the gun with my right hand and held the bib with the left, swiveling to see the path where Jackson Jr. would appear.
“Jackie!” I shouted. “Brother Ephraim is gone and Joshua is pinned down, weaponless. You come into this clearing and you’ll not make it out again!”
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!” the words screamed, batting through the trees, a hollow sound, lacking in the power Jackie always found from the pulpit and the microphone that gave him a range God hadn’t.
I smiled, more a twitch of lips than anything else. “That all you got, Jackie?” I mocked. “That old line about witches? I got a gun and two helpers.” I looked at Pea. “Maybe three.”
“You got no help. You got no backup. You are mine; all the women are mine.”
Was that the way things were now in the church compound? All the women belonging to one man? I didn’t believe it. Even the rancid old pedophiles wouldn’t give up all their womenfolk to the preacher. But some families might have married off the older daughters to the preacher, just as Lot, in the Bible, had offered his daughters to the crowd of rapists to keep himself and his men friends safe. That sounded like the thinking of some of the churchmen.
I said, “Wrong again. I got me a special agent of PsyLED here, Jackie.”
Rick called out, “I’m Special Agent Rick LaFleur. I’d like to talk to you about a number of things, one of which is the attack up at the house. Do you know who shot up the house owned by Nell Ingram?”
There was no answer. Through the soles of my feet, I felt Jackie move away, not back toward the house, but up along the ridge, fast, weirdly fast. Running with his tail between his legs at a speed I’d need to think about later. A speed maybe given him by the vampire blood he’d drunk in years past, blood provided when his daddy kidnapped vampires for him to drink from. The forest carried his emotional overload—fury, panic, sexual frustration. Fear brought about by the unexpected presence of law enforcement.
I relaxed my shoulders and said to Rick, “He’s gone.” I told the leopard, “Let the little boy go. No harm, no foul. This time.” I might hate Joshua Purdy, I mighta killed a man here in the heart of the woods once, but then as now, I was a judge, not a murderer, and judges should have some small speck of mercy about them, somewhere.
Paka backed away, leaving Joshua laying on the stones, bleeding and terrified. I could smell urine and knew he’d pissed his pants, not that I blamed him. I looked at Rick. “You sure he isn’t gonna go catty on the full moon?”
“Yes. I’m sure,” he said, his voice tight. “She didn’t use her teeth. There was no exchange of body fluids.” Rick moved cat fast and knelt, one hand fisted in the green fur of the thing with its feet buried in the earth. He put away his gun and petted the creature like a kitten, a swipe from ears along its back and tail. “Pea,” he said, as if the animal could understand him. “Nell says the man won’t die at Paka’s fangs.”
It didn’t sound like any kind of cop talk I’d heard on the films I watched. It sounded like a paranormal conversation rather than the law of the United States, conversation with the metaphoric hand of justice rather than the hand of the written law with Is dotted and Ts crossed, which was good for me. It meant that Rick was unlikely to consider my next acts as a crime. Rick added, shaking the green creature slightly, “He won’t turn on the full moon. And Paka didn’t kill him.”