by Faith Hunter
I had been part of two previous cases of dark death arts—blood-magic curses and salamander death energies. They were supposed to be rare and maybe for the average law enforcement officer they were. Maybe if I was a deputy I’d never see one, but this was my third. And not a one of them matched the typical death magics theorized and taught in PsyLED Spook School. Not a one.
“Do you smell it?” FireWind had stopped, his face lifted. Sniffing the air.
Occam and I followed suit. “Nothing except country and turned earth and harvest,” I said.
“I smell what Nell does. Nothing. Why?”
FireWind frowned slightly, his eyes flowing over the landscape. “I am getting whiffs of the death and decay. Faint on the wind. That and chemicals I can’t identify. Something other than pesticides and herbicides and fertilizer.”
Occam and I glanced at each other. His brows rose. I shook my head.
“Let’s move in beside the drive and read at ten-foot increments,” FireWind said. Which we did. An hour later, my fingers were aching, my back was stiff, I was sweating, and my coffee high was long gone. But the trailer finally came into view, something made in the sixties or seventies, with tiny windows placed up high, a rickety front porch and cinder-block steps, and a couple dozen wild privets that had grown a good twenty feet high and nearly obscured the metal structure. We kept moving in, ten feet at a time. After the umpteenth reading we were nearly at the front door and the energies in the grass hadn’t changed.
I pressed against my lower back, stretching hard, trying to stay alert. To my boss I said, “This don’t make a lick a sense. If Cale was a magic practitioner, we shoulda gotten higher readings everywhere, and shoulda been getting higher and higher death and decay readings as we got to the place he laid his head. In fact, if he was creating death and decay, those readings should be off the chart right now. And his car, at the accident, shoulda been red-hot with them. Ain’t nothing any stronger here than back there where we started.” I thumbed at the drive and the farmer’s house.
“I agree,” FireWind said, staring across the property.
“How about down there?” Occam asked, pointing.
The drive we had been following curved past the trailer, down a low hill. About half a mile later a small building appeared. On the sat map, I had seen a small vine-covered roof, what I had assumed was a shed. As we moved toward it, the slight breeze died and the day’s humidity began to rise. I was sweating in long wet trails beneath my clothes.
As we rounded the curve, a barbed-wire fence came into view and a farm gate blocked the way. On the other side, halfway down a low rolling hill, perhaps another half mile away, was the shed.
I mentally compared the shed on the satellite photos to the building in front of us. The tin-roofed outbuilding had never seen a coat of paint. There was a single closed door but no windows on the two sides I could see and the far side had a small porch. A power line ran to the building. More telling, the kudzu was dead. Kudzu didn’t die until frost set in. Yet every single leaf within a ten-foot radius of the near walls was dead, dry, broken off the spiraling vines. The plants at a much longer distance were also dead, in a long trail.
I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and in my hand, which been aching for too long now. I tucked those fingers beneath the other armpit to warm them. I wasn’t going to be worth much if I didn’t get a break and a lot of Soulwood time. And sleep. I surely needed two days of sleep.
We came to a stop, and FireWind was watching me. “Yeah,” I breathed. “There.”
“Approach slowly,” FireWind said. “I want a reading every five feet.”
“No. Nell needs to stop,” Occam said. He pulled my hand from beneath the warmth. My fingers were blanched white and the little pin-sized holes in it had grown larger, exposing dead flesh beneath. I should have bled, but I never had. Because dead flesh doesn’t bleed.
“Ingram,” FireWind said softly, his tone full of reproach. “You were supposed to say something.”
“I can give it another few readings,” I said.
“Nell—” Occam started.
“I know my limits. Five more fast readings, and one deeper one. Then I need to get to Soulwood.”
Occam didn’t like it, but this was one of those job things where he had no right to protect me any more than he would another unit member. Here he was not my boyfriend. Here he was a partner. The near snarl he sent me and then sent our boss told us both how much he didn’t like it, but he stepped back and aimed the wand of the psy-meter at the shed. He walked five short steps and took a reading, walked five more, took a reading, leaving us behind, the stiffness of his spine communicating how unhappy he was, but he didn’t persist in his disagreement.
FireWind and I followed up to and through the gate. A hundred yards beyond the gate, I bent to the ground and touched a blade of a weed. I yanked my hand away. “Death and decay energies,” I said to my boss. “A little stronger.” Yeah. This was the place.
It took another half hour of careful approach, with readings to both sides, before we reached the shed. By then I was shaking and cold and miserable and wanted to throw up from the stress and the death and decay on my fingers and crawling up my arm.
The shed door was latched with a simple padlock-style hatch, the kind with a metal loop you could hook a lock through, but this one was secured with a leather thong. It was drawn tight, knotted in a Spanish bowline, a knot taught by churchmen to their sons.
FireWind glanced at Occam, who gave a quick nod. Occam put the psy-meter 2.0 on the ground and drew his weapon, holding it down beside his leg as he moved in a crab step around the building. FireWind inspected the door, and the wood to either side, then bent to shine a light around the threshold. He was looking for traps, which did nothing to improve my shakes, and made me realize that I was in no condition to help should this be a ruse or an ambush. I pulled the potted plant closer into my abdomen, feeling the pot’s edge grind against my rooty belly. Stuck my burned fingers into the soil. I didn’t feel it when they touched the soil, which seemed very bad.
Occam reappeared on the other side and gave a stiff, sharp nod.
FireWind lifted a pants leg, exposing a leather sheath strapped there. From it, he pulled a knife, which shocked me. I was pretty sure that eight-inch blades were against regs. Occam joined him at the door. FireWind jutted his chin to Occam, who leaned close to the doorjamb, out of the way but close enough to provide cover. With a swift downward motion, FireWind sliced the leather latch and kicked open the door. Occam ducked inside and called, “Clear,” before stepping back out.
FireWind pulled sky blue P3Es from his gobag and we put on booties, gloves, and masks before we went in. Electric lights came on, illuminating the interior. I followed last, the overheated air still escaping with a chemical stench, the place feeling like an oven and stinking like a commercial soap maker.
The inside of the shed was in little better shape than the outside, with a deeply stained concrete floor, a dilapidated sofa, electric lights, and two large steel cylinders, standing upright, reflecting light from the overhead bulbs and the open doorway. One of the round contraptions was a good four and a half feet high and that much around; the other was a third that size; and both were older than I had thought at first glance, corroded and spotted with filth around the seals.
“What are they?” FireWind asked of the steel devices. It sounded like a rhetorical question, but I knew the answer.
I frowned, not liking the fact that I was about to pull on information I knew from my church background. Not that this had anything to do with the church. I hoped. “They’re commercial-sized cookers. Well, technically they’re called fully jacketed stationary kettles.” I pulled up the info on my cell to refresh my memory. “You can poach, boil, sauté, or steam for canning, making soups, barbecue sauce, whatever, in large batches. The whole thing is on a mechanism that allows it to tilt
for easy pouring.” I patted the large one and bent over to see the gas burner, which was off. The stench in the room was making my eyes water. “The big one is still hot,” I said, “and the goop at the seal says that whatever was cooking is still inside. This one holds a hundred gallons.”
“Are they expensive?” Occam asked, a strange look on his face.
“The big one sells new for between sixteen and thirty thousand, depending on the extras.”
“Dollars?” FireWind said, startled.
“Dollars. The little one holds six gallons and sells for closer to five.” I patted it too, but it was ambient temp in the overheated shed. I stepped back to the door and breathed in fresh air. Occam followed.
“No way an ex-con has the money for this,” Occam said.
“So does the canning equipment, and this shed, belong to Holy Bear or has it been repurposed from elsewhere?” I said, thinking.
“Holy Bear?” FireWind asked.
“The farmer. It’s his nickname. His mama gave it to him when he was a baby,” I said.
Occam shook his head, sucked in a deep breath from near the door, and walked over to the bigger cooker. “Namin’ a kid that was jist mean.”
“Maybe not Holy Bear,” I said. “We mighta crossed a property line at the gate. Someone else may own this land.”
“Yes,” FireWind said. “But it’s convenient and too coincidental for the death and decay energies to be here unless planted by someone to kill Cale Nowell, or planted here by Cale Nowell.”
“Is there a cannery around here where used equipment might come available every so often?” I asked. “Or maybe Holy Bear puts up commercial vegetables? Maybe to sell canned produce or soups at a local farmer’s market?”
FireWind, who seemed unaffected by the smell, toed a pile of bags in the corner and said, “Several pounds of lye: both sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide.”
“Maybe making soap?” I asked. “That’s what I thought when I first walked in and smelled it, but I don’t see tins for pouring soap bars. And I don’t see canning facilities, no table, no jars, no spoons, strainers. No . . .” I stopped, my eyes on the bags of lye. A memory struggled up from the darks of my mind. “Strong bases can . . .” I tilted my head, making sure I remembered what I thought I did. The memory rose through me slowly and solidified. “. . . Can dissolve bodies.”
FireWind looked at me, waiting, so I went on. “At three hundred degrees, a pressurized lye solution can turn a human body into a liquid in three hours.” I studied the kettle and more slowly I said, “This kettle isn’t pressurized. It won’t heat much above the boiling point of water, two hundred twelve degrees or so. It might take an additional hour or two to complete the process.”
“Nell, sugar. That don’t sound much like Spook School teaching. That sounds like, well, like something else,” Occam said, trying not to bring up the church, but then, where else would I have learned what I was talking about?
I frowned hard at the oversized stainless-steel kettle.
FireWind asked, “Are you saying that you think this is part of the recipe for the death and decay energies?”
Recipe . . . That word brought up more memories. “We used to make bone broth with the bones of beef cattle, pigs, eggshells, chicken bones.” I stopped, dredging through my memory for more. “Vinegar. Some apples, if I remember right. Once, just before I left with the Ingrams, some of the men were dumping in the bones for the broth and talking. One of them said that about the lye. About dissolving bodies. They laughed. They said a full-grown man would come out pure liquid with the consistency of mineral oil.”
A tan liquid, they had said, thick and almost creamy. The men had known all that for certain, which meant they had dissolved a body to get rid of it. And they had been laughing until they saw me standing behind the door, listening. My head had been painful, my scalp aching because my hair had been bunned up for the first time. I had just started my first period and . . . and the man talking had been the Colonel. The man who had come for me, demanding that I become his wife or concubine. Had he come because he hoped to keep me from talking about what they had said? “Ohhh,” I breathed, too many thoughts and memories dumping into the forefront of my brain.
“Nell. Why would they know that?” Occam asked gently.
“What? Oh. Um. I could guess, but I don’t know the answer to that.”
“Are you okay?” he asked me.
“No. Not really. But I’ll hold for a bit longer.” I glanced at my boss. “I don’t have any idea what this has to do with the recipe for death and decay.”
“But it is conceivable that there is a body inside,” FireWind said, looking from the lye bags to the big kettle.
My mouth had gone dry and I tried to wet my lips, but my tongue dragged along, tearing them. “I think we’re gonna have to open it and see. And if it’s lye, it’ll be caustic.”
“Do we need breathing equipment?” Occam asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
FireWind unlatched a lever on the kettle’s side. The kettle moved a little on its horizontal axis. “The spout points that way.” He indicated the back wall.
Occam holstered his weapon, ran his hands along the wall to one side, and shoved upward, making something click. He moved to the wall’s other side and shoved up, making a similar-sounding click. The exterior wall groaned a little and light poured in from one side as the entire wall cracked opened several inches.
As Occam worked, FireWind adjusted the psy-meter 2.0 and took a reading, with the small wand pointed at the kettle. “I’m not certain what’s going on here,” he said, “but the psy-meter is reading death and decay magics stronger here than outside. Let’s get CSI in here for a full CBRNEP workup, and make sure the portable null room is on-site.”
Occam and he moved to the front door and started pulling off their P3Es for collection by the PsyCSI team. I didn’t move. “Nell?” Occam asked.
I stepped around them to the back wall and placed my gloved hand on the old wood. There was no death and decay. I shoved the wall-door fully open. On the other side of the shed was a twelve-foot area, round on the shed side, draining down to a dry creek on the far side. Everything beyond the shed was dead, down to the ground, the dirt itself looking thick and hard and almost roasted. Lifeless. Dead plants everywhere. I clutched my potted tree close to my chest. I didn’t even have to touch the earth to know the earth was dead. Didn’t have to. But. I gripped a fingertip and pulled off one glove, the blue nitrile dangling. I stepped out there and bent, placing a bare fingertip to the bare branch of a sapling.
In an instant, a fraction of a heartbeat, death and death and death swarmed from my fingertip to my palm, around my wrist, up my arm. Holding me in place like burning icy chains. A scorching wreath coiled from a vine of fiery frozen thorns.
A cage of arctic agony.
Superheated broken black glass.
Death stole my breath. Blistered my flesh. I staggered. Breaking the contact with the dead tree.
Dropped the potted tree. Tried to catch it.
Death stabbed into my chest like a red-hot poker. Stopped my heart.
I fell. The pot hit the ground with a distinct crack. Clay shattered, spilling Soulwood soil in a tiny avalanche. My hand landed in the soil. I fell, Soulwood soil cupped in my hand.
The Green Knight thundered toward me, his massive pale green horse in a full gallop, lance aimed at me. I knew what would happen this time. I braced myself anyway. The lance pierced my chest and the Green Knight raced through me. Rammed into the fiery, raging death land.
The death and decay rose up, blacker than tar, blacker than a night with no stars, yet red as steel in a forge, heated, glistening like glass. Rising up, amorphous yet cutting, dense as a sizzling fog. Death and decay and the Green Knight met on a field, green on one side, burning coals on the other.
Deat
h parted.
The Green Knight galloped into the blackness and disappeared.
FOURTEEN
I came to sitting on the seat of the car, my body leaning forward, sweating and shivering, the sun through the windows nowhere near warm enough. I made a faint hand motion, heaved, and Occam turned my body to the side, supporting me. I didn’t vomit, but it was a near thing, and the sick, gaggy feeling left me gasping. The P3Es were gone, a faint memory of someone cutting mine off me. A blanket appeared from somewhere and went around me, warm as the car, a loomed geometric pattern in bright reds and blues on an undyed wool background.
It was soft and smelled vaguely of horse and hay and tobacco. It was sweater-soft.
“Ingram,” FireWind said. “Did you break protocol?”
“No. I touched a branch with one fingertip. Just like I’m supposed to.” My fingers ached. I was afraid to look at them. “You know how I told you the land has a mind of its own and it sometimes . . . does things?”
“I recall our debriefing after the incident with the demon you trapped and the forest growing overnight.” His tone told me that he knew then and knew now that I had still not told him everything.
I sat up, eyes closed as the world spun about me. When the earth settled, I glanced down and saw dead brown leaves at my fingertips. Occam’s body was between the big boss and me, and I watched as he plucked withered leaves out of my hairline and off my fingertips. He didn’t look me in the eyes. He was mad that I had done something stupid, mad enough that his eyes were glowing the gold of his cat. But he didn’t say anything. He just finished grooming me and put a bottle of tepid water in my hand. I drank. I could feel more dried leaves in the toes of my field boots. They’d be crinkled and squished. I drank some more. “Well, there’s the tree I made.”
“The one you call the vampire tree,” FireWind stated. “I have observed the tree on your property line eating, or perhaps digesting would be the better term, a field mouse. I assumed that was why you called it a vampire tree. However, there has been no discussion of you making the tree. What do you mean by this?”
