by Faith Hunter
Following orders, I stood, shaking. Occam stood with me. I gathered my blanket and my potted cabbage and trudged to my car. Got into the passenger seat. Occam got into the driver’s seat. He didn’t start the car. Instead he took my hand, his warm and strong. I clasped it back. “I’m hungry. Want a steak?” he asked.
I turned to face him. He was watching me, a small smile on his face. “You’uns not mad at me?” I asked.
“Nell, sugar, I’ll love you forever. Someday I’ll tell you about the time I killed and ate a man.” He turned on the car. Smiled a satisfied cat smile. “For the record, humans do not taste like chicken.” He turned the car and drove back to the law enforcement center, sharing a silence that felt . . . amazing. And terrifying.
SEVENTEEN
On the way back to HQ, we stopped at Tina Ames’ house. Tina was Hugo’s mom, and the sheriff himself was standing with her on the front stoop, one arm around her shoulders.
“Looks like they just told her about Hugo,” Occam said. “Gimme a minute and let me read her for death and decay and witch magics. Unless you can tell just from looking at her?”
I shook my head, making a negative sound, and he left me to my thoughts, thoughts pulling me deep inside myself. They were thoughts about Soulwood and about the bone-wood that we had just left. Thoughts about the feel of the death and decay at Stella’s farm, that stark absence of life.
“All of earth is magic,” I whispered. “All of the land, everywhere. Even the land tainted by death. The magic of the land is still there. It’s just been changed somehow.”
Maybe, just maybe, I could help the land to heal the death and decay. Maybe I could help the witches to neutralize the energies that they had currently shielded, but which were also leaking into the earth. Maybe I could do that without claiming the land or sacrificing a human. Or dying for the land.
The bone-wood in the circle of stones . . .
Had she lost control of the land? Had she begun to become a tree, like I had? Occam said I had been learning control. Had I learned enough control to try to heal without spilling the blood of an enemy? Without needing to harm myself? Without my friends needing to call in a military strike to take out the dark yinehi that I could become?
Occam got back in the car. “Nada,” he said. “Not a single blip. Hugo’s mama’s as human as they come. She’s the last of her female line. The Ames witch blood dried up.”
“But, maybe like with Margot, there were some genetics leading to a gift of some sort,” I said. “We need to find Hugo’s wife. And we need to know who stayed before at the rental trailer where Cale lived.”
* * *
* * *
We walked into the local county law enforcement center, which was bustling and overcrowded. We were just in time to hear JoJo on the para freq channel, saying, “LaFleur, FireWind. I got something.”
Both bosses waved us all into a small conference room, we shut the door, and Rick called HQ on his cell. He put it on speaker and said, “LaFleur here, with FireWind, Ingram, Occam, Kent, and Racer. What do you have?”
“Hugo Ames’ estranged wife is one Carollette Myer Ames. Until two weeks ago, when she quit, she worked part-time at Merry Promotions as needed. With her husband. She worked there while Stella was on tour. I tracked her phone for the day the T-shirts were delivered to the horse farm. Guess who made the trip from her own home to the horse farm that day?” Everyone in the little room perked up until JoJo added, “Only problem is, there is no record of Carollette being a witch.”
I turned her name over in my mind. “Did we read the woman . . . What was her name? The one with the cigarettes and the liquor?”
“Ethel Myer,” T. Laine said. “Hugo’s landlady.” Her eyes lit up with more life than I had seen for days. “Myer! Ethel Myer and Carollette Myer Ames, Hugo’s wife. I’m betting good money Ethel and Carollette are related.”
“She knew an awful lot about the families and the affair.” I looked up at Occam. “When we got to Ethel’s house, not a one of us opened her file. Not a one of us read her. Why didn’t you read her with the psy-meter?” My face scrunched up. “Why didn’t I read the land when we got close to the house?”
“Daaaaang,” T. Laine said. “I bet good money it’s because there was a suggestion, a compulsion to listen, believe, and get out of there.” The light left her eyes. “I didn’t catch it.”
“And if she’s a paranormal death practitioner?” FireWind asked softly.
“We had our chance to take her out,” Occam said. “She won’t be surprised again.”
“She’ll hit us with death and decay if we go back there, or she’ll just be gone,” T. Laine said. “JoJo, does she have a cell? Can you track it?”
“Already on it,” Jo said through the cell phone speaker. “Already looking up DL, voter registration, social media presence. And one thing to know. Our country hick chick had me research who rented the property before Cale Nowell moved in. That mobile home is where Carollette Myer Ames grew up with her mother, Reba Myer, single parent, deceased. No father was listed on Carollette’s birth certificate.”
“So it’s just coincidence that Cale moved into that same trailer? No way. They have to be connected some way,” T. Laine said, pulling up her tablet. “Checking witch family ancestry sites for Myers.”
“Cale was in the commune,” I said, pulling myself out of my mental mire. “Hugo was in the commune. They likely knew one another there. It’s also likely that Hugo would have known where his wife grew up. Maybe Cale and Hugo talked? Maybe they were still friends? Maybe that’s how Hugo found Racine/Cadence Merriweather and started blackmailing her, through Cale? That makes sense. Everyone liked Cale. People were trying to help him after he got out of jail. Hugo was probably one of those people and helped Cale rent the trailer, where he also ended up contaminated by death and decay. All because he knew Hugo. But how did he end up dead and being ridden by the necromancer, Hugo’s wife, Carollette? Unless the power sink and the kettle full of people-soap was still there because Carollette needed to use her power or store it when it got to be too much, and she needed the power sink to do that.”
JoJo said, “I’ve got the GPS on Hugo’s car somewhere here. Hang on.” We heard keys tapping.
“Timeline fits,” Occam said. “Commune, to Stella, to Cale, to Hugo, to Carollette, who was betrayed by Hugo sleeping with one of the people at Melody Horse Farm, which leads us back to the commune. A nice, convoluted, but circular trail.”
Her voice vibrating with excitement, Jo said, “Got it. Hugo Ames’ car made the trip to Cale’s trailer four times since Cale got out of jail. We have our connection point.”
“Good work,” FireWind said. For him that was high praise.
“If we can find Carollette before she sees us, we could deliver null pens all around her,” T. Laine said.
“How old is Ethel Myer?” I asked, my fingers having found their way into the soil of my potted plant. I hadn’t realized that I was carrying it around.
“She’s forty-two,” JoJo said. “Hang on for DL pic.”
T. Laine cursed softly and said, “Jo, she looks eighty. We had her! And we didn’t take her.”
I placed the pot on the table beside me, my hands around it, my eyes on it so I didn’t have to look at them. “Ethel is a witch. Maybe even a death witch, because her magics are slowly killing her, that and the cigarettes and the liquor. But death and decay kills faster than what we saw at her place. And death and decay is not witch magic,” I said, “although it could have come from the same source, back far in the past, mutated genetics that resulted in witches, in yinehi, maybe other creatures, maybe recessive genes that pair up when certain people breed too close.” I felt T. Laine’s eyes on me and I took a steadying breath. “Anyway. What I’m trying to say is that death and decay is old earth magic, ancient magic like mine, but turned on its head and perverted, fueled by sacrifice.”
I could feel my bosses’ eyes on me. I had told FireWind, Soul, and Rick a lot about my magics. Rick knew even more from the time Paka had nearly killed Ephraim. It had been kept off my record. So far. I didn’t look up or meet anyone’s eyes. I was staring at my potted cabbage, my fingers touching Soulwood soil. I was growing tiny green leaves on the tips of my fingernails. One unfurled, dark green with red veining.
“When was this determined?” FireWind asked.
“Today,” I said. “That’s what I’m here to report. I recognized the origination of the death and decay on the old Ames farm. The family were normal witches. One of them married . . . I don’t know, maybe a second cousin. Or even a boy from the church. Stranger things have happened. And then, probably due to intermarriage, recessive genes began to pop up. Around seventy-five to a hundred years ago, a yinehi, a nature creature like me, was born, grew up, and was killed and buried on the Ames farm. Yinehi magics appear most strongly when the woman is attacked and has to defend herself. Something about the adrenaline spike of self-defense brings them to full power. The bones I discovered under the ground were mostly tree.”
I had been attacked. My sister Esther had been attacked. We grow leaves. My sister Mud had not been attacked and it was my goal to make sure she never was. She could still use her earth gifts to make things grow, but hopefully she would never—
“Ingram?” FireWind said.
I realized I had fallen silent.
“The second time the recessive genes appeared is more recent, about ten or maybe fifteen years ago, if the power sink I discovered is any indication, probably at puberty. The energies there are just a little different from mine, but recognizable. As if they come from common stock.”
My mind went all sorts of places, remembering T. Laine’s fear that the magic would get into the water table. Would infect the earth itself.
Would Soulwood be enough to defeat that kind of magic? Even with the Green Knight to help? The magics had killed the potted vampire tree, at least enough for Occam to cut it down.
His body still as stone in my peripheral vision, FireWind said, “Oral tales speak of such a creature. The Tsalagi might call it ajasgili.”
I lifted my head to him. His face was both expressionless and full of emotion at once. Grieving and angry, stoic and firm.
He said, “The ajasgili will be very different from the white man’s witches, and I fear this dark magic user will be different from what I might have known once upon a time. Find the ajasgili, the magic practitioner of death and decay. I will seek authorization for extreme measures to shut her down.”
Extreme measures was a PsyLED code word for military. The top brass in PsyLED and in Homeland Security were creating—probably had been for a long time—protocols for every magical eventuality. Worst-case scenarios included intervention by fighter jets, special units with high-tech gear, maybe bombs. Margot was standing still as a marble statue in the corner, reading us all for truth, for lies, for things left unsaid. Her face was sheened with strain, as she followed our words and FireWind’s judgment.
Her voice tense, T. Laine said, “I have a Myer witch family, last recorded in 1902. Either they died out or went underground.”
“Ethel Myer isn’t a yinehi or an ajasgili,” I said. “Ethel didn’t look like me, no wood fingernails, no leaves.” I had a feeling that Ethel would read exactly like a witch, not like death and decay. The trigger in the T-shirts had been created by a witch. “Ethel probably made the trigger. And that means she knows who the ajasgili is. She sent us to the Ames farm.” I stopped, thoughts whirling. “What if Ethel recognized what I was? What if she knew what I was and she sent me to the farm?”
“Why would she do that?” T. Laine asked.
Tilting up a thumb in uncertainty, I said, “Maybe Ethel understood how badly the entire thing had gone wrong. Maybe she thinks her ajasgili is growing very dangerous.”
And they would bomb the ajasgili. For certain, unless—
“What if extreme measures don’t work?” I asked. “Death and decay works on everything except null energies. What if our ajasgili shuts down high-tech weaponry before it’s fired? The power sink I found was the place where she stored her magics when they got to be too much to carry safely. That means that the ajasgili knows how to store, use, and direct death and decay.”
Unit Eighteen were all staring at me. I could feel the weight of their attention, their worries, their fear. I went on, speaking into the silence. “If there was a chance that ambient death and decay magics would cause our semiautomatics to malfunction, why not something bigger.” It was technically a question, but I stated it as a fact.
I could almost hear the frown in her voice as T. Laine said, “Someone sent that man chasing Ingram in his truck. Someone killed a kind old man and forced his body to drive his truck to PsyLED, wait there, and then chase down the first person who exited.”
Occam said, “Someone sent Cale Nowell on a drive in the countryside until he crashed his car. How close was he to his trailer? Could Carollette have been at the power sink, maybe planning to use her kettles, when he came home? Killed him accidentally and made him drive himself away?”
FireWind said, “That makes sense. If the ajasgili is losing control of her magics, then anything is possible.”
I shook my head and lifted a bit of Soulwood soil in my fingers, letting it dribble back into the cabbage pot, my finger leaves rustling. I looked at FireWind. “You were there too, when the truck charged across traffic to kill me.” I sifted Soulwood soil through my fingers. “You knew what I was when you first saw me. When you first took my scent. At Melody Horse Farm, you said you smelled the ajasgili. You had her scent. What if she knew that? What if she heard us talking the night she killed Ingrid Wayns? Or before she killed the stallion? She had access to a witch who might have provided obfuscation charms that let her be there with us.” I looked up from the soil. “Whoever sent the man to HQ may have wanted any of us.”
The rest of the team were silent, watching. FireWind jutted his chin in agreement. “Your scent is like all living things. The scent of the ajasgili was like the earth of graves. Like the absence of life.”
I thought about Soulwood. About the vampire tree. About its image of killing me. What if I had misunderstood what it was saying? What if it wanted a sacrifice? Was asking permission. Or what if it was simply asking me to give it permission to live, knowing I could, and might someday, kill it? “Oh,” I breathed, my thoughts whirling as too many possibilities tried to find places inside me at once. I looked back at the potted cabbage and kept my eyes there. Without lifting them to LaFleur or FireWind, I said, “May I speak to you both privately?”
Somehow, they knew who I was talking about because the others left the room, Occam’s gaze on me in case I needed him. I shook my head, the tiniest shake, and he went on out. The door closed.
I raised my eyes and looked from Rick to FireWind. Rick’s once-black hair was a glacial white now. With the new age lines, he looked older than FireWind, though FireWind had decades more years. There was compassion in Rick’s near-black eyes, a kindness I hadn’t expected. I had missed him, a man I had detested at first. I had actually missed him. My eyes filled with tears.
“Nell?” Rick asked.
I realized they had been waiting for a while. I had forgotten to breathe while I thought. I inhaled hard. Blew out. Took another breath. “I might be able to stop her,” I said. “The ajasgili.”
Over the cell, which was still on, JoJo said, “Lainie’s searching for a familial connection between Carollette’s parents, something that might create an abnormal witch-type gene.”
I said, “It should be within just a few generations, based on the body buried on the old Ames farm, which was abandoned in the early to mid 1900s. Maybe after 1902 when the Myer witch family went underground.” I remembered the trees on the land. Some had seemed larger, older t
han I expected. The yinehi buried there had been like me, like my sisters, not an ajasgili.
The ajasgili was similar, except her magics drew life from the land and left it barren, and stored death in the land, opposite to the way that I gave life to the land. This ajasgili was feeding death to the land, storing and using that power. Feeding death to her enemies.
Was that similar to the way I had killed Brother Ephraim? Had I come close to becoming an ajasgili? Was it intent or was it all genetics? And if genetics, had Ephraim been gwyllgi? The grindylow, Pea, had confirmed that he wasn’t human. His life force had contaminated the earth.
What if Ephraim was ajasgili?
Leaves budded and curled from my hairline at the thought.
I’d found a way to block off that life force, to fence it in, just like T. Laine and the Nashville coven had blocked off the death and decay and captured it in shields to keep it from spreading.
“Ethel Myer and Carollette Myer Ames are related back four generations,” JoJo said, “when two first cousins married, so that gives us a recessive at that time. And their grandparents, two generations back, were second cousins. According to the witch-family lineages T. Laine sent me, there was an Ames witch family in Tennessee prior to the very late 1800s but nothing recent—” Her words broke off. “Hang on. Hugo and Carollette come from a common ancestor. The Ameses and the Myers all came from a common Ames witch line.”
Three generations back my parents had a common ancestor or two. All church families did. Keeping the family lines straight was paramount in polygamous churches. Did inbreeding in families with latent or recessive witch genes stimulate abnormal magical abilities and create unusual magic users? Like me? Like the gwyllgi? Like the ajasgili?
I had neutralized Brother Ephraim’s evil from the land. I had reclaimed the land from the death magic of the salamanders. I had used my magic to fight a demon. In each case there had been sacrifice, of myself and of blood. It nearly killed me. I had given myself to the land to heal it and had become a tree in the process, one time for six months. I almost didn’t make it back.
