Dark Heir

by Faith Hunter

  My mouth fell open.

  My best friend ever looked up at me, her eyes practically glowing with happiness. “Life. There was life in it still.” Her eyes spilled over and tears ran down her cheeks.

  And maybe that was what I’d learned through all this, through dealing with the undead. That even in the midst of death, there was often a spark of life left. That life went on even in the heart of mortality. And that perhaps that was something the undead had forgotten—the beauty of simply being alive.

  I walked to Mol and sat on the wet ground, the rosemary plant between us, its fresh scent filling the small garden.

  Read on for a special preview of the first book in Faith Hunter’s Soulwood series,

  BLOOD OF THE EARTH

  Coming October 2015 from Roc

  Edgy and not sure why, I twisted the water out of the laundry and carried the basket off the back porch. I hung my T-shirts and overalls on the front wire, my two long skirts on the outer wire, and what my mama had called my intimate attire on the wire between, where no one could see them. I didn’t want another visit from Brother Ephraim or Elder Ebenezer because of my wanton ways. Or even another courting attempt from Joshua Purdy. Or worse, a visit from Ernest Jackson, Jr., the preacher. So far I’d kept him out of my house, but there would come a time when he’d bring help and try to force his way in. It was getting tiresome having to chase churchmen off my land at the business end of a shotgun, and at some point God’s Cloud of Glory Church would bring enough reinforcements that I couldn’t stand against them. It was a battle I was preparing for, one I knew I’d likely lose, but I would go down fighting one way or another.

  The breeze freshened, sending my wet skirts rippling on the line as if they were alive. Red, gold, and brown leaves skittered across the three acres of freshly cut grass. Branches overhead cracked, clacked, and groaned with the wind, leaves rustling as if whispering some dread tiding. The chill fall air had been perfect for birdsong; squirrels had been racing up and down the trees, stealing nuts and hiding them for the coming winter. I’d seen a big black bear this morning, chewing on nuts, halfway up the hill.

  Standing in the cool breeze, I studied my woods, listening, feeling, tasting the unease that had prickled at my flesh for the past few months, ever since Jane Yellowrock had come visiting and turned my life upside down. She was the one responsible for the repeated visits by the churchmen. She was the one who had brought all the changes, even if it wasn’t intentional. Maybe it had been worth it all—saving all the children—but I was the one paying the price, not her. She was long gone and I was alone in the fight for my life. Even the woods knew things were different.

  Sunlight dappled the earth, and cabbages, gourds, pumpkins, and winter squash burst with color in the garden. A muscadine vine running up the nearest tree, tangling in the branches, had started dropping ripe fruit. I smelled my wood fire on the breeze, and hints of that apple-crisp chill that meant a change of seasons, the sliding into fall. I tilted my head, listening to the wind, smelling the breeze, feeling the forest through the soles of my bare feet. There was no one on my land except the wild critters, nothing wrong that I could sense, but the hundred and fifty acres of woods bordering the flatland around the house, up the steep hill and down into the gorge, had been whispering all day. Something was not right.

  In the distance I heard a crow call a warning, sharp with distress. The squirrels ducked into hiding, suddenly invisible. The feral cat I had been feeding darted under the shrubs, her black head and multicolored body fading into the shadows. The trees murmured restlessly.

  I didn’t know what it meant. It wasn’t an omen or a portent, as there were no such things according to my maw-maw. But I listened anyway. I always listened to my woods and the gnawing, whispering sense of danger, injury, damage was like sandpaper abrading my skin, making me jumpy, disturbing my sleep. Something was wrong even if I didn’t know what it was.

  I reached out to it, to the woods, reached with my mind. Silently I asked it, What? What is it?

  There was no answer. There never was. But as if the forest knew that it had my attention, the wind died and the whispering leaves fell still. I caught my breath at the strange hush, not daring even to blink. But nothing happened. No sound, no movement. I lifted the empty wash basket and stepped away from my old-fashioned solar clothes dryer—turning and turning—my feet on the cool grass, my gaze cast up and inward, but I could sense no direct threat. Yet chill bumps rose on my skin. What? I asked. An eerie fear grew in me, racing up my spine like spiders with sharp, tiny feet. Something was coming. Something similar to Jane but subtly different. Something was coming that might hurt me. Again.

  From down the hill I heard the sound of a vehicle climbing the mountain’s narrow, single-lane, rutted road. It wasn’t Ebenezer’s rattletrap Ford truck, or Joshua’s newer Toyota long bed. It wasn’t the high-pitched motor of a hunter’s all-terrain vehicle. It was a car, straining up the twisty Deer Creek Mountain.

  My house was the last one, just below the crest of the hill. No one came up here. No one but trouble. The wind whooshed down again, icy and cutting, a downdraft that bowed the trees. They swayed in the wind, branches scrubbing. Sighing. Muttering, too low to hear.

  I raced back inside my cabin, dropping the empty basket, placing John’s old single-shot, bolt-action shotgun near the stove under a pile of folded blankets. His lever-action carbine .30-30 Winchester went near the front window. I shoved the small Smith & Wesson.32 into the bib of my coveralls, hoping I didn’t shoot myself if I had to draw it fast. I picked up the double-barrel break-action shotgun and checked the ammo. Both barrels held three-inch shells. The contact area of the latch was worn and needed to be replaced, but at close distance I wasn’t going to miss. I might dislocate my shoulder, but the strangers would be a while in healing too.

  I debated for a second whether I should switch out the standard shot rounds for salt or birdshot, but the woods’ disharmony seemed to be growing, causing a particular and abrasive itch under my skin. I snapped the gun closed and peeked out the blinds to see a four-door sedan coming to a stop beside John’s old Chevy C10 truck. Two people inside, a man and a woman.

  Strangers, I thought. Not from God’s Cloud of Glory Church, the cult I’d grown up in. Not a local vehicle. And no dogs to check them out for me with noses and senses humans no longer had. Just three small graves at the edge of the woods.

  A black-haired, dark-eyed man stepped out of the driver’s side. Maybe Cherokee or Creek if he was a mountain native, though his features didn’t seem tribal. I’d never seen a French man or a Spaniard, so maybe one of those Mediterranean countries. He was tall, like the churchmen, maybe six feet, but he wasn’t dressed like a local. More citified, in black pants, starched shirt, tie, and jacket. He had a cell phone in his pocket, sticking out just a little. Western boots, old and well cared for. There was something about the way he moved, feline and graceful. Not a farmer or a God’s Cloud preacher. Not enough bulk for the first one, not enough righteous determination in his expression or bearing for the other. City clothes.

  He opened the passenger door for the other occupant, and a woman stepped out. Petite, with black skin and curly black hair. Her clothes billowed in the cool breeze and she put her face into the wind as if sniffing. Like the man, she moved all catlike. Feral. As if she had never been tamed, though I couldn’t have said why I got that impression.

  Around the house, my woods moaned in the freshening wind, branches clattering like old bones, anxious, but I could see nothing about the couple that would indicate danger. They looked like any other city folk who might come looking for my herbal teas. As they approached the house, they passed the tall length of flagpole in the middle of the raised beds of the front yard, and started up the seven steps to the porch. And then I realized why they moved and felt all wrong. They weren’t human. And I saw the weapon bulge at the man’s shoulder, beneath his jacket. In a single smooth motion, I braced the break-action shotgun against my shoulder,
slammed open the door, and pointed the business end of the gun at the strangers.

  “Whaddya want?” I demanded in my childhood God’s Cloud of Glory Church dialect. They came to a halt at the third step, too close for me to miss, too far away for them to disarm me safely. The man raised his hands as if he was asking for peace, but the little woman hissed. She drew back her lips in a snarl and growled at me. I knew cats. This was a cat. A cat in human form. A devil, according to the church. I trained the barrel on her midsection, just like John had showed me the first time he’d put the gun in my hands. As I aimed, I took a single step backward so my back was against the doorjamb, to keep me from getting bowled over or from breaking a shoulder when I fired.

  “Paka, no,” the man said. The words were gentle, the touch to her arm tender. I had never seen a man touch a woman like that and my hands jiggled the shotgun in surprise before I caught myself. The woman’s snarl subsided and she leaned in to the man, just like one of my cats might. His arm went around her and he smoothed her hair back, watching me as I watched them. Alert, taking in everything about me and my home, the man lifted his nose in the air to sniff the scents of my land, his nose widening and contracting. Alien. All so alien, these two.

  “What do you want?” I asked again, this time with no church accent, and with the grammar I’d learned from reading my once-forbidden and much-loved library books.

  “I’m Special Agent Rick LaFleur, with PsyLED, and this is Paka. Jane Yellowrock sent us,” the man said.

  Of course this new problem was related to Jane. Nothing in my whole life had gone right since she had darkened my door. The Cherokee vampire hunter who worked for vampires might as well have brought a curse on my home. She had a strange job, wore clothes and guns and knives like a man, and I had known from the beginning that she would be trouble. But I had liked her. So had my woods. She moved like these two, willowy and slinky. Alert.

  She had come to my house asking questions about God’s Cloud of Glory. She had wanted a way onto the church’s property, which bordered mine, to rescue a blood-sucker. Because John and I had left the church, Jane had figured that I’d be willing to help her. And, God help me, I had.

  I’d paid the price for helping her and wished now that I’d left well enough alone.

  “Prove it,” I said, resettling the gun against my shoulder. The man slowly lowered his hand and removed a wallet from his pocket, displaying an identification card and badge. “Not good enough. Tell me something about Jane that no one but her knows.”

  Paka leaned away from the man and sniffed the wind, her mouth open and lips pulled back, then leaned toward me and sniffed again with a sucking scree of sound. It was the way cats scented the world around them.

  “Jane is not a human, though she apes it better than some,” Paka said, her words strangely accented, her voice scratchy and hoarse. “She was once mated to my mate. He is mine now.” She placed a possessive hand on his arm.

  Well. That was more than I had expected. When I’d talked to Jane she had told me that the man she would send would break my heart if I let him, as he’d broken Jane’s. This Rick was what the romance novels I’d read called tall, dark, and handsome, a grim, distant man with too many secrets. A heartbreaker for sure. I wondered whether Paka would cut out his heart when he got around to breaking hers.

  Rick pulled out his cell phone and tapped and swiped it a few times with his thumb. He read from the screen. “Jane quoted you as saying, ‘Woman, I been in trouble from God’s Cloud of Glory and the colonel ever since I turned twelve and he tried to marry me. Anything you can do to piss him off will just make my day.’ She also said you make the best chicken and dumplings she ever tasted. That about right?”

  That was it exactly. I frowned. Around me the forest rustled, expectant and uneasy. “I was doing just fine until Jane came along. She made my problems a lot worse. But yeah, that sums it up.” I broke open the shotgun, leaving it draped over my arm, and backed into my home, standing aside as they mounted the last of the steps.

  My black cat, Jezzie, raced out of the house and Paka caught her. The two hissed and batted at each other, and Jezzie left scratches on Paka’s arms. Scratches that bled, yet Paka didn’t seem to notice. The tiny woman laughed, the sound as odd and scratchy as her words. And the strangest thing happened—Jezzie rolled over, lay belly-up in Paka’s arms, and closed her eyes. Instantly, she was asleep. Jezzie didn’t like people; she barely tolerated me in her house, and let me live here because I brought canned food. From the corner of the doorway, Cello peeked, the meek and terrified cat staring up at Paka, her tail twitching. Paka extended her other arm and Cello leapt up, sprang along Paka’s arm to stop on the woman’s shoulder. The cat’s eyes looked excited, maybe a little too focused, the way they got when she spotted something that might be fun to chase.

  Around the grassy property, the woods quieted, as if waiting for a storm that would break soon, bringing them rain to feed their roots.

  “Come on in,” I said, backing farther into my house.

  I watched the two strangers enter. I wondered what was about to happen to my once sheltered and isolated life. I wondered what the churchmen watching my house with binoculars from the next property would have to say about it. What they would do about it. Maybe this time they’d kill my cats too, the way they had shot my dogs. More graves to feed the earth. Grief welled up in me and I tamped it down where no one could see it, concentrating on the here and now and what I knew about the couple.

  Paka seemed less human than Rick, more cat. Not necessarily unstable, but all claws and instinct, with a taste for games and blood. Rick was with PsyLED. I’d looked up the paranormal department of Homeland Security and discovered that PsyLED stood for Psychometric Law Enforcement Department of Homeland Security, and they investigated and solved paranormal crimes—crimes involving magic, blood-suckers, were-creatures, and witches. So why were they here, except to cause me more trouble?

  Warily, keeping my body turned toward them, I backed into the main room of the house, sliding my feet on the wood floor into the great room that was the living space, with the eating area and the kitchen at the back. I jutted my chin toward the far end of the old table and mismatched chairs that had been John’s maw-maw’s. “Sit a spell. I’ve got some hot tea steeping on the Waterford.”

  The man pulled the woman’s chair out for her and they sat. Solicitous—that’s what the romance books called it. Stupid books that had nothing to do with the life of a mountain woman. City women, maybe. But never the wives and women of God’s Cloud of Glory Church. When I was sure the visitors were in positions that would require them to make two or three moves before they could attack, I set the shotgun on the table and got out three pottery mugs. I wasn’t using John’s maw-maw’s good china for strangers who I might have to shoot later. That seemed deceitful, and though John was dead and gone, I’d still want him to be proud of me.

  With a pot holder, I moved the teapot to the right of the woodstove, where the hob was cooler, and removed the tea strainer. I could have made some coffee—the man looked like a coffee-drinking type—but I didn’t want to encourage them to stay. I poured the spice tea into the mugs and put them on an old carved oak tray, with cloth napkins and fresh cream and sugar. I added three spoons and placed the tea tray on the table.

  “Welcome to my home. Hospitality and safety while you’re here,” I said, hearing the reluctance in my tone. It was an old God’s Cloud saying, and though the church and I had parted ways a long time ago, some things stayed with a woman. Guests should be safe so long as they acted right.

  The nonhumans took the tea, the woman adding an inch of the real cream to the top and wrapping her hands around the mug as though she felt the chill of winter coming. The man held his mug one-handed, shooting surreptitious glances at my stuff. I noticed that his gun hand stayed empty, where he could get to his weapon fast.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “I asked you once, and I’ll ask again: What do you want?” And know
ing . . . knowing . . . it would be nothing but trouble.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Faith Hunter was born in Louisiana and raised all over the South. She writes full-time, tries to keep house, and is a workaholic with a passion for travel, jewelry making, orchids, skulls, Class II and III white-water kayaking, and writing.

  Many of the orchid pics on her Facebook fan page show skulls juxtaposed with orchid blooms; the bones are from roadkill prepared by taxidermists or a pal named Mud. In her collection are a fox skull, a cat skull, a dog skull, a goat skull (that is, unfortunately, falling apart), a cow skull, the jawbone of an ass, and a wild boar skull, complete with tusks. She recently purchased a mountain lion skull and would love to have the thighbone and skull of an African lion (one that died of old age, of course).

  She and her husband own thirteen kayaks at last count and love to RV, as they travel with their dogs to white-water rivers all over the Southeast.

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