by Faith Hunter
I had noted early on that this death and decay was similar to natural processes.
I could try.
I looked to my bosses. “I’d like to try to neutralize the death and decay. Now that I know what it is, my magic is enough like it to, I don’t know, maybe nullify it?” Or maybe send it into magma and let the crust of Earth neutralize it. I had done that before.
“Ingram,” FireWind said. “Reading the land, especially this death and decay, has been dangerous to you. You may understand it better, but that will not make it less hazardous.”
I had claimed Soulwood long before I killed a man and fed his body and soul to the woods. I had claimed it with a few drops of my blood on the roots of the married trees behind my home.
If I was careful, if I used my magic—mine, not the vampire tree’s, not Soulwood’s, mine—and didn’t let it use me, I might be able to fix this without feeding it a blood sacrifice, without killing someone. Without becoming a tree. “I’ll be careful. I’ll go slow. And I’ll pull away at the first sign of trouble.”
“For the record,” Rick said, his white hair swinging forward as he leaned to make a point, “I’m against this. Totally and unequivocally.” He made eye contact with FireWind and the expression was all wild leopard, vicious and untamed, a challenge even I could see. FireWind lifted an eyebrow in unconcern. Rick finished, “Nell is too important to this unit, too important as . . . as my friend for this.”
Friend. Friend wasn’t a law enforcement word. Or a boss word. It stood on its own. I warmed.
“Noted. Do you see another option?”
Rick snarled, his cat breaking through.
“Neither do I. We are not far from Hugo Ames’ house,” FireWind said. “You can try there.”
* * *
* * *
I had admitted to Unit Eighteen how I had claimed land in several locations, with a blood sacrifice, mine or another’s, and now the entire unit, except for Occam and T. Laine, was gathered on the street a safe distance away, watching. I sat on my faded pink blanket on the edge of Hugo Ames’ rental property, the potted cabbage on the blanket between my folded knees. Occam, Lainie, and the plant were closer, in case I needed rescuing, in case my magic wasn’t enough and I needed help, needed to call on my land to enter the fight. I had tried to tell them what might happen, but mostly, I had no idea.
Occam was immediately behind me, his knees touching my back, standing with a steel blade drawn, ready to cut me free from roots and vines if the land tried to claim me. He was quietly furious and desperately afraid, but we had agreed that my life was mine, to do with as I saw fit. Afraid or not, he was backing me up, proving his promise to let me choose in all things. He also carried a small plastic bag of healthy farm dirt that I had dug from the side of the road on the way over.
I looked at him and said, “I love you, cat-man.”
“I’ll keep you safe or die trying,” he said.
“You’un jist cut me loose like you always do.” But it might not be same and we all knew that.
Lainie was kneeling beside me, having insisted that she be close with null pens primed and ready, in case anything went wrong. She had also prepared incantations for special workings and had brought a sterile steel lancet for a blood draw. Lainie thought her incantations and workings might allow her to strengthen my magic, like a battery powering a motor. One of the incantations was a scripture verse we had chosen on the way over. I didn’t think any of that would help, but I wasn’t going to naysay her.
The unit had walked through the steps I’d take to try and neutralize death and decay using a different sort of sacrifice. Not a bunch of salamanders or the blood of invading vampires, but a sacrifice of life. However, to get the attention of the death and decay energies, I needed bait. Bait meant me.
I studied the remains of the house. No coven had shielded the energies yet and they had spread. We had left only a few hours past, and now the roof had caved in, the side wall had fallen inward. Two dead pine trees had dropped limbs and bark and one of the trees had broken off at the roots and fallen. The birds had disintegrated. The stench coming from the remains of the house was worse, if that was possible.
“I’m ready,” I said. “Occam, I need the two piles of soil, here and here.” I pointed in front of my knees to the ground just outside of the death and decay infecting Hugo Ames’ house.
He tipped the bag and shook it to make two small piles of local farm soil. Beside me, T. Laine tore an alcohol pad open and, to make her happy, I cleaned my finger with it. She opened the lancet and held it out to me.
I stabbed my fingertip and inhaled a gasp. “Dagnabbit!” It hurt. It hurt worse than when a plant stabbed me with a thorn. Maybe, like a plant, I was becoming sensitive to steel. And dagnabbit was an exceptionally unsatisfactory word for the pain.
My blood ran down my finger as I steadied my breath. Curling my fingers over my palm, I caught the blood-trail and the drops. I placed my other palm flat on one pile of dirt and said, “Okay. Step two.”
From the King James Bible, T. Laine said, “For, behold, the Lord cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain.” She had assured me that this was not a sacrilege or a blasphemy, to use scripture to cleanse the earth, though I knew most members of my church would see it that way.
I shook off my uneasiness and sank my consciousness into the earth. I hadn’t read deeply in weeks, hadn’t searched for the sleeping sentience, the soul of the hills. It hadn’t occurred to me to search here at all, so far from the mountains, so far from home. But I dove deep, just beyond the death and decay, reaching through loam and clay and shattered rock, through limestone riddled with holes and full of water, through ancient riverbeds with rounded stones and curved boulders, farther, deeper, into the dark. I touched the sleeping sentience, the presence of the Earth, or one of them.
When I was certain that it was deeply somnolent, I placed my blood-filled palm onto the other small pile of farm dirt.
T. Laine was saying the biblical quote over and over, her words rushing like water across dry ground. My blood soaked through and touched the land beneath. Lights crackled and sparked and the energies of the land below me came alive. It was a three-dimensional palette of spinning bright green, churning dark red, and the almost painful deep purple of bruises.
The death and decay spun like a top, swirling like a fire devil. It rose up, hot as liquid glass, yet glacier cold. Alert, but not attacking. Not sentient, not self-aware. It was blind and seeking, sizzling and fiery, frozen and shattered. But not alive.
It was death. Emptiness.
But so very powerful. A burning frozen black hole where no life was, or could ever be.
The energies of death rolled closer.
It was like watching opposites attract, the positive light and joy of fecund life and the brittle burning/icy opposite, the negative darkness and emptiness of death and decay. My own power, the power of yinehi, of nature and earth, reached out toward the death energies, the wrong energies.
Carefully, I held my magic back. Not letting the energies touch.
When the conflicting energies were stable, only inches separating them, I sank into the earth. Deeper. Getting a feel for the parameters of death and decay, how wide its reach, how deep into the soil.
Slowly I wrapped and wove my magics into threads and then skeins, the soft spring green of leaves, the dark burgundy red of summer flowers, the deep purple of grapes and berries. I pulled in the browns of soil and the sparkling reflections of falling water, the powerful black of local marble and the charcoal of local granite, the greens and grays of limestone.
I twisted and knotted my energies together, weaving a basket of life, vines and roots and thorns and rocks and soil, strong, alive, and healthy. The power of the Earth. Though there was no light so
far beneath the surface, colors glimmered and flashed, the cool green, green, green wrapping like roots, circling around the burning emptiness that was death. I slid the weaving through the ground, pulling and shifting it until it surrounded death and decay, fencing it in. But not touching it. Not letting it touch me, though the emptiness searched, my blood calling to it as it flowed.
Time passed. And I thought I had won.
I held it there. All of it, cupped and wrapped and twined in my magics.
But . . . something was wrong. There was a pain. I slitted my eyes open to see Occam, kneeling beside me, his blade flashing and cutting, slicing and sawing through icy blackness coiling around my fingers. “How . . . ?” I tried, but no sound came. The death and decay had found me. I sank back into the earth and scanned the energies trapped there. And I saw the tiny hole, a spot of blackness against the vibrant colors.
It was no bigger than the tip of my pinkie finger. The tendril of the blackness had found it, had pushed through the hole and slid along the outside of my magics. Up to the lines of energies that flowed from me to my basket. And into me.
Pain flared, branding hot and cold as space. It swept up my arm and into my chest. I heard a moan. Felt a weight, heavy, pressing.
Realized that on the surface, I wasn’t breathing. Knew that moan had breathed out my last bit of air. I fought back into myself. Up along the pathway of energies.
Death and decay crawled and oozed, a sickly green now, as it digested my life force.
My magics weren’t enough. Not against this.
I forced my body to take a breath. And I screamed. And screamed. Until the screaming stopped.
I reopened my eyes. Cat-Occam was face-to-face with me, so close I could feel his cat whiskers on my cheeks. His fangs were bared, only inches from my face. His leopard was snarling.
EIGHTEEN
“Occam,” I whispered, my voice hoarse from screaming, my mouth dry as drought-parched dirt. But my cat-man heard. He pulled back enough for me to focus on his amber cat eyes and on the people around me. FireWind and Rick were slashing and sawing at the vines of death. T. Laine was stabbing null pens into the ground around me, still repeating her scripture.
“The cabbage. Now,” I whispered.
Lainie said, “Done that, Nell. It withered and died. You got anything else to suggest?”
I licked my lips. “Soulwood. Blood. Bindings.”
“Son of a witch,” she said. She drew a silver blade. “LaFleur. Gimme your fingers.”
He didn’t ask why. He just held out his hand. T. Laine sliced along all four tips. Blood spurted and flowed. “Bend across Nell and bleed on her. Occam. I’m going to cut your ear. You bite me and I’ll be pissed.”
I missed the movement of the cut, but felt warm wetness on my face as Occam smeared his blood onto me. Growling. Panic in the sound.
“Nell,” T. Laine said. “Draw on Soulwood. Draw!”
I reached into the earth through their cat blood. Reached for my land through the bindings that had tied them to Soulwood when I healed them. The land answered. Soulwood flared high, bright and singing like a bell. It formed a spear of might. The same kind of spear that I had used to kill Brother Ephraim. The spear flew through the darkness of the earth and landed in my blood-filled palm. I gripped the spear of life and power and might.
I stabbed through the webbed basket of my own energies and into the heart of death and decay.
It screamed. Darkness flashed, heated molten knives.
I felt more blood on me. More. More. And the land took it all.
The somnolent presence deep and deep rolled over. And over again. Struggling to awaken, struggling against the energies above it. The earth shook.
“Earthquake!” someone shouted. Occam shoved me down and lay across my torso, his cat blood slathering my face and neck. Dripping onto the blanket and beneath me and the ground beneath it.
“LaFleur,” FireWind said, demand in his tone. “You have to shift. You’ve given too much blood. Shift! Now!”
I couldn’t help Rick. I couldn’t help Occam. Not until I healed the Earth and sent the presence back to sleep. And that meant I had to put this spell into the magma in the center of the Earth. Now. Right now. Lessons from the last time I fought death, that the Earth was all healing.
I reshaped the spear of Soulwood, the light and life of all that was good in the universe, re-formed it into a net, but one much stronger than the basket I had tried to weave all alone. I tied the magic net and the life of Soulwood around death and decay and cinched it tight. Soulwood flared, bright as the sun, and encircled the energies that were so opposite to its own. It sent love and willingness into me.
I shoved the net deep and deep, into the magma that rolled and roiled and pressed upward, seeking outlet to relieve its own terrible pressure. Surging into the cracks of the earth, in search of the surface, filling every vacant weakness—the cracks I had inadvertently made not so long ago.
Soulwood and I pressed the energies deep. Into the heat. The earth trembled and shook. Death and decay resisted for one awful moment, clawing at my chest. Cutting into Rick and Occam.
The presence in the Earth rolled over. The heat and energies of the Earth accepted death and decay, pulling it into itself.
As if a far stronger magnet had attracted the energies, death and decay turned from me and latched onto the power of the active core of the planet and . . . slipped into a crack. Into the magma. It was sucked down in a long spiral. And it was gone. Absorbed totally.
Or, this part of it was. There was more in other places. In the power sink. In Stella Mae’s house, her pasture, and so many other locations. But I had done all I could for now.
I heard shouting and sirens. Pain like nothing I had ever felt before stabbed me, electric and icy all at once, profound and all-encompassing, a cold tearing claws into me, as if they scooped out everything inside me and tossed it on a trash heap.
Soulwood saw it. Felt it. Wrapped around me. It sent vines and roots and tendrils plunging up from the earth to wrap around me, into me. Healing. Healing. Healing as only it could. The pain eased. Time passed. My pain vanished.
I took a breath, still intent on the earth beneath me as Soulwood worked, as life crept back to the land beneath me. That life reached up to the surface, reached for sunlight and rain and air. Soulwood searched through the roots of grass and trees on the periphery of the property, the ones with the faintest spark of life, and fed them. It drew water from the limestone beneath the ground and pulled it toward the sun. Acting on its own. Its sentience giving it full choice and full control over its own power.
When it was satisfied, it found others that belonged to it and healed them. Occam. Rick. Beings Soulwood had claimed. Energies poured into them, merging with their were-energies and creating the wholeness of a full moon shift.
A sound, a crash that shook the ground, almost pulled me back to the surface, a vibration that rocked the land. But I heard T. Laine repeating the scripture, and I reached back deep, to the sleeping energies of the spirit of the Earth, the sleeping power of the hills. I soothed it, petting it with Soulwood’s power. It quivered and it slept.
Breathe. I needed to breathe. Air rustled through my leaves. Filled my lungs.
I blew out in a long soft sigh.
Once again, I opened my eyes. Blue sky was overhead, streaked with golden and orange clouds. Sunset. The day was gone. I was cold, shivering.
I raised my head to find I was trapped beneath vines and roots, a cage of greenery like a basket over me, as if my land had done to me what I had tried to do with death and decay. But there were no roots growing through me. No vines or thorns growing into me or piercing me. I was still flesh and blood.
A tree grew near the soles of my feet, massive. It was leafed out, golden in the autumn chill. Near me on the edge of the tattered pink blanket, Occam lay, also under
a leafy cage, human shaped and naked, having changed from his cat back to human.
I turned my head to see Rick, in his black wereleopard form, sleeping under his own viny cage. A neon green grindylow was perched on his shoulder, chittering at me accusingly, as if I was responsible for the vine cage that enclosed her. This one’s steel claws were out, her cat lips pulled back to expose long pointed canines. She hissed.
“I totally agree,” I said to her.
“Ingram. You’re awake.” I turned my head to see FireWind, sitting on the ground on the far side of a fire. He had dug a shallow pit and lined it with rocks. His fire burned merrily in it.
“I think so.”
“You are growing leaves.”
I reached up and touched my hair. It was, once again, wildly curly, red, and full of leaves, not just at my hairline but all through it. I touched my face, which still felt like skin, thank goodness, and held up a hand to see my fingernails were woody and leaves had sprouted all along the cuticles. I didn’t sigh in dismay, but I wanted to. “Yeah. It happens.”
“A bird just landed in the yard. It didn’t die. You were successful.” It was a statement, not a question.
I focused on the big boss. He had removed his jacket and unbraided his hair. It flowed in a braid-kinked veil across his shoulder and down across his still-crisp white shirt. He was sitting on the ground in his black dress slacks, his knees crossed, his shoes off and feet bare. I smelled charred herbs, the smoke of ritual, and knew that he had participated in the healing of the earth in his own way, with a ceremony of healing.
“Is she okay?” a voice croaked.
“She is. Drink some water, Kent,” FireWind said mildly, “or I’ll get up and pour it down your throat.”
“You can try,” T. Laine said, her voice rasping.
“Have you been repeating that scripture for . . .” I looked up at the sunset. “All these hours?”
