Black Water

by Faith Hunter

  I got back a single sentence from Eli. This intel sucks.

  “Yeah,” I muttered to the empty, quiet room. “It does.”

  Still with no plan, I started in on the current legal charges filed by the state of Tennessee. That part of the research was mind-numbing, and meant more extra-strong tea. Lots more. The charges were scary, and if true, meant that the so-called Christians treated their womenfolk no better than the Taliban treated theirs.

  Close to dawn, I spotted two names that could mean assistance in my quest. John Ingram and his wife, Nell, had left the church and moved to the other side of the ridge some years past. Outcast or reformed, I didn’t know, but people who had former ties with cults could provide helpful suggestions. So could access to their property, one hundred fifty acres that shared a narrow border with God’s Cloud’s church property. “Oh yeah,” I said to the silent room. “Oooooh yeah.” I sent the couple’s names to Alex for a full workup, and a text to Eli to look at the boundary of the two properties as possible access points.

  I was back at the clan home half an hour before dawn, made my report, and then rode Fang into the rising sun and back to the hotel, where I sacked out for four hours of desperately needed sleep.

  ***

  Unfortunately, when I woke, it was to learn that John Ingram had died several years before, and that his young widow had no high school diploma, no GED, no telephone, no cell phone recorded under her name, no computer, and a dozen guns registered to her. She used wood, solar, and wind to power her meager needs, and her house had a well and a septic tank. She had a driver’s license, and paid insurance on an old Chevy truck. Nell lived off the grid. In other words, Nell was a recluse. The only thing she did have was a very active library card. She might be a hermit, but Nell was an eclectically self-educated hermit who had library books checked out on varied subjects, and the books were checked out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Every week. For the last five years.

  Nell studied herbs, plants, farming, carpentry, electric wiring, remodeling, world and U.S. history, business mathematics, banking, religious history, and philosophy. Currently she had five books checked out: Philosophy for Beginners, written by Osborne and illustrated by Edney, Solar Power for Your Home, by David Findley; A History of the Church in the Middle Ages, by Donald Logan; Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English; and a trilogy of contemporary romances by Nora Roberts. There were a dozen different music CDs and two DVDs checked out, one a chick flick and the other a techno-disaster thriller. Yeah. Eclectic. But it was Wednesday. And according to the library checkout timetable, which Alex had easily hacked, Nell Ingram always left the library at two p.m.

  I packed up and took off on Fang, most of my weapons left in the hotel room so I didn’t scare anyone. My cell was fully charged and I felt as though I was part of the world again. Being so cut off had been creepy. I had no idea when a cell phone had become part of my security blanket, along with the blades, stakes, and guns, but it had.

  ***

  Knox County’s main library library was called the Lawson-McGhee Public Library, located on the corner of West Church Avenue and Walnut Street, with a little public park behind it, and public parking close by, where I left Fang, two spaces down from Nell’s beat-up but scrupulously clean pickup truck, which I confirmed by her license plate number. Security was so much easier in the modern day, with access to so many public records protected by such poor security.

  I wandered around the block, scoping out the neighborhood, which had churches, public buildings, trees, and clean streets, and decided the location was pretty, even if the library itself wasn’t. The building looked like something out of the seventies, bulky and blocky. It was built of nondescript brown brick, had few windows, a few emergency exits that sounded an alarm when opened, and no security cameras on the exterior.

  As I approached the front entrance, I saw two homeless, bearded guys sitting on the front steps, being rousted by a cop. They needed showers and access to washing machines, but looked as though they preferred to sleep out under the night sky, weather permitting, or in a tent, rather than in a house. One of the guys had dozens of military patches on his old jacket, and the other had only one arm, no prosthesis, and stood with a hard lean to one side, as if he lived with pain.

  Just on the off chance that the men were really U.S. veterans, I gave them each a twenty to get a decent meal. Maybe they’d spend it on cheap wine, but how they used my gift wasn’t something I could control. Mostly I just wanted to say thank you for their service, and say it loud enough to remind the cop of that gift. When the homeless men took off, they were happy, the cop was thoughtful, and I was, well, I was still me, a two-souled Cherokee skinwalker who at least now had constant Internet access. But I was in a city I barely knew from previous security jobs, not well enough to rescue a kidnapped vamp. I had no backup, a thought that once would never have crossed my mind but now seemed acutely important. I liked working with the Youngers. I missed working with them, and hated that they were so far away.

  I felt the magic the moment I walked inside the library. It wasn’t powerful or deadly like the magic of Molly, my best friend and the mother of the aforementioned godchildren, or cold like most vamps’ magic. At first, this energy had no taste, no smell, and there was nothing I could see, unlike the glowing motes of witch power and the gray place of the change of my own magic. Yet I could sense it on the air, as if it danced across my skin, testing me, trying to get an impression of what I was. I stepped to the side of the entry and worked to exude calm as I studied the place, searching out the person who emitted the odd sensation, and trying to discern what I was really feeling.

  I drew on my Beast’s senses. She was awake, deep inside me, alert from the joy of riding Fang through the city. She loved riding a motorcycle, the wind in my/our face, the sights flashing by, the smells that reminded her of home, of the mountain world that we had left behind for the contract in NOLA. It had been supposed to be a short gig, but it had blossomed into a lot more. I opened my lips and drew in the air, the synesthesia-like feeling I rarely experienced reaching up and taking hold of me.

  The magic was faint, but not weak, a green-gold with an edge of smoky charcoal gray. It smelled like sunlight on leaves in old-forest woods, and like the fire that would raze it to the ground, the scent indistinct and dampened, as if reined in. No human alive could have followed such a scent, but I had Beast’s senses to draw on, and I had also been a bloodhound a time or two. When I had shifted back to human, I was pretty sure that my Beast had hung on to some of the olfactory senses bred into the tracking dog’s DNA. I located the scent trail walked along it.

  Knox County’s main public library had books, a video department, an audio department, and, like any modern library, it also had a room of loaner PCs, which was where the scent originated. I followed it through the library to the computer room, where old-fashioned PCs were kept for public use. The magic was coming from the far corner, from a girl hunched over the screen, her fingers flying over the keyboard as she searched the Internet. I settled into a chair within line of sight of her but from behind, and not close enough so that she’d see me unless she was hunting me. I logged on, watching her from a safe distance. I had only an old driver’s license photo to go by, but I thought that this, this mousy little thing, this unregistered magic user, could possibly be Nell Nicholson Ingram. How ’bout that?

  Something about her scent was teasing forward in my memory, my ancient, less-than-half recalled Cherokee memory from a childhood so far in the past that no one alive today could remember. Well, except for the undead, who lived forever if they weren’t staked or beheaded. But there was something I couldn’t place in that scent memory. At least, not yet.

  The girl had brown hair, straight and long, tanned skin, slight rings of dirt deep under her fingernails, though she smelled and looked clean. She wore a long-sleeved T-shirt, bibbed
overalls (what they once called hog-washers), and lace-up work boots. But the clothes weren’t a fashion statement. More as if they were what she wore because she had to, as if she was too poor to afford anything else. She could be a farmer. Or work in a greenhouse, or for a landscape company, off the books, as there was no record of that on her meager tax forms. She was a woman who put her hands in the soil.

  Her magic almost had an earth-witch smell to it, but it felt different. Very different. It wasn’t something I could put into words, but the difference pricked my skin. She was slight but wiry, muscular but not in a bodybuilder way, more as though she did hard physical labor work. And she looked hyperalert, as if she stayed on edge, as though she was always in jeopardy. There was a slight scent of adrenaline in the air, tinged with worry. But she didn’t seem afraid, not exactly. Just tense and vigilant. I managed to snap a photo with my cell.

  She whipped up her head and looked around the room, eyes narrow, mouth firm. It was indeed Nell Ingram, older, harder, but her. I bent to the screen, typing in my e-mail addy and sending notification to the Youngers that I’d found Nell. Bent over, I looked involved and unaware of anything around me, while I kept her in my peripheral vision, smelling, knowing that fight-or-flight impulse she was feeling.

  After several minutes of indecision, Nell went back to her screen, and I was cautious about centering my attention on her again. Her magic was peculiar, but it clearly had a sensory net of spatial awareness, an ability to tell when she was being studied or hunted. My Beast had the same awareness. Most wild things did.

  As I keyed in my e-mail, I kept half an eye on the girl, my mind working on the scent memory. The word came to me slowly, the Tsalagi syllables sounding in my mind, whispery and slow. Yi-ne-hi. Or maybe yv-wi tsv-di. Or a-ma-yi-ne-hi. Fairies, dwarves, the little people, or in her case, maybe wood nymphs would be closer. Mixed with human. Mostly human. Fairies in Cherokee folklore weren’t evil, just private and elusive, and sometimes tricksters, but this girl didn’t look tricky. Just wary. But the magic was woodsy, like the fey, the little folk. In American tribal lore, only the Cherokee had fairies and little people, possibly from the British who intermarried among them for so many centuries.

  ***

  When it looked as though she’d be there awhile, I did a quick search for places to buy personal things I hadn’t brought, like ammo, new underwear, and combat boots. I also found several barbecue restaurants. I had eaten on the run since my lunch in Asheville at Seven Sassy Sisters Café, and I needed a good meaty meal.

  Just before two p.m. the girl finished with her research. I closed down my browser and watched her leave the room, then quickly took my place at her computer and looked into the Internet search history. It was an invasion of privacy, but I was intrigued. Nell had spent a lot of time on just four sites, one on a legal case against a polygamist cult out West, one on a site where unusual herbs could be ordered in dried or seed form, one on herbal antibiotics, and one on Greek history, specifically the god Apollo and how similar stories were prevalent in many ancient people’s mythology. I logged off and left the library, following Nell’s scent trail.

  She had lingered at the checkout desk and left through the main doors, turning onto Walnut, crossing the street to walk on the far side, away from the unattended police unit parked on the street in designated parking. Then she had crossed back over the street and into the tiny parklike area, where she stood with her back against a tree. Watching for me.

  “Busted,” I murmured, pulling my cell. I hit a button, then set it in my T-shirt pocket, where it stuck up above the fabric, videoing everything as I cautiously approached her.

  Nell gave me half a smile and slid her hand from behind her. She was holding a small snub-nosed .32. “So busted,” she said back. She had heard me, which was really strange. Even witches didn’t have preternatural hearing. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will,” she said, a faint east Tennessee twang in her words. “Then toss you in the back of my truck, cover you with a tarp, drive slowly out of the city and into the woods, and bury you.”

  “You do that a lot?” I asked.

  She smiled, and I had the uncanny feeling that she had, indeed, disposed of bodies before. This girl—this woman—was way more than she seemed. Way more than her scant records had indicated. “Who are you?” she asked, sliding the weapon back beside her leg.

  “Jane Yellowrock. I’m—”

  “The vampire hunter whore who has sex with the vampire Leo Pellissier in New Orleans.” She pronounced it Pely-ser, but I wasn’t going to correct her pronunciation.

  “I don’t sleep with fangheads,” I said, unexpectedly stung by the whore accusation. “I do take their money when the hunt is justified, and I do provide security when they pay for it.”

  “So. Just a whore of a different kind.”

  And that made me mad. I took a step closer and she lifted the weapon again, a hard twist to her lips. “Remember that burial in a remote place.”

  “I remember. So let’s talk about the philosophy of whoredom. All people provide services for money. You look like a farmer. You sell jelly and honey and preserves and fresh tomatoes and eggs and veggies to the tourists?” She gave me a scant nod, her long hair moving beside her narrow face. “What does that make you?” I asked. “A vegetable whore?”

  She giggled through her nose. The sound was so unexpected that she stopped, midgiggle, her eyes going wide. It looked as though Nell Ingram had forgotten how her laugh sounded. Which had to suck.

  “I’m here to find a missing Mithran,” I said. “What you call a vampire. She disappeared with the leader of the God’s Cloud of Glory Church, a man who calls himself Colonel Ernest Jackson. He walked her to his car and drove off with her. This was four, no, five, nights ago. No one has heard from her since.”

  Nell’s face paled beneath her tan in what looked like shock. “Then she’s dead,” she said baldly. “Or been passed around so much she wants to be dead.”

  I lifted my head. “I’m going in after her. I need your help.”

  Nell lifted the .32 again and backed slowly to her truck, opened the door, checked the interior with a swift rake of her eyes, and climbed in. She switched the gun to a left-hand grip, which looked rock solid, the weapon still aimed at my midsection, as though she practiced with both hands, for, well, for moments like now. She started the truck and backed slowly out of the parking spot and pulled down the road. I smelled fear on the air. Nell Ingram was terrified.

  I didn’t move, just watching her go. Then I pulled my cell and asked, “You got that?”

  “I got it,” Alex said. “I want to marry her. There’s nothing so sexy as a woman who knows how to use a gun, and can hold off a skinwalker with a hard look and a, what was that? A .38?”

  My mouth twisted in grim humor. “Worse. A .32.”

  “She took you with a .32?” he said, appalled and laughing all at once. “I am totally in love.”

  “Shut up, Alex. I’m going to follow her home.”

  “Copy that. Restore the cell to video when you get there so we have a record.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I closed the cell’s Kevlar-protected cover and straddled Fang. I turned the key that started the bike, which was one reason why I wouldn’t buy it. Key starts were totally wussy. I rode a Harley, and a real Harley had that kick start. That’s all there was to it. Not that my opinion was shared by many, but it was mine and I was sticking to it.

  ***

  Long miles of city driving and then country roads followed. I stayed out of her rearview, following by scent patterns and dead reckoning. All the way to Nell Ingram’s farm.

  I turned off the curving road that switchbacked up the low mountain, or high hill, into the one-lane entrance of a dirt drive, and over a narrow bridge spanning a deep ditch sculpted to carry runoff. The mailbox had no name, only a number, 196, Nell’s address on her tax records. I keyed off the bi
ke, rolling Fang behind a tree where it would be hard to see from the road. The driveway angled back down and curved out of sight through trees that looked as though they had somehow escaped the mass deforestation of the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. The trees were colossal. Healthy. Some trees were bigger than three people could have wrapped their arms around. Farther down the drive and up the hill were even bigger trees. The leaf canopies merged high overhead, blocking out the sunlight and creating deep shadows that seemed to crawl across the ground as sunlight tried to filter through, just enough to make a bower for ferns and mosses and shade-loving plants. High overhead, the leaves rustled in a breeze I didn’t feel, standing so far below.

  I had no idea why, but goose bumps rose on my arms and traveled down my legs, in a sensation like someone walking over my grave, a saying used by one of my housemothers at the Christian children’s home where I was raised. Creepy but not for any obvious reason. Standing behind the tree, I turned slowly around, taking in the hillside with all my senses. On the breeze I smelled rabbit, deer, turkey, dozens of bird varieties, black bear, early berries, late spring flowers, green tomatoes, herbs, okra-buds, and bean plants, plants I remembered from the farm at the children’s home and from Molly’s garden. But there was that slightly different something on the breeze that made my unease increase. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. For no reason at all.

  I had no cell signal, but I texted Alex to look at every sat map he could find and study the land and the mountain, a message that might get to him now, but would certainly reach him the next time I was near a tower. I had a feeling that there was something hidden here, like a place of power, a terminal line, or some place that was holy to the tribal Americans. Some place I should see while I was here, though that was outside of my job.

  In the distance, the sound of Nell’s truck went silent, leaving the air still and . . . and empty. No motors, no traffic, nothing sounded as the roar of the truck faded. I could have been transported back a hundred years or more. No cars, tractors, no airplanes overhead. As the silence deepened, birds began to call, a turkey buzzard soared on rising thermals. Dogs barked somewhere close, the happy welcoming sound of well-loved pets. I liked this place. My Beast liked this place.