by Faith Hunter
“Pea! No!” Rick screamed. And I knew something horrible was about to happen. The thing drew in its body to leap. Steel glinted at its feet. Wrong, so very wrong.
“No,” I whispered. In response to my thoughts, the ground seemed to close over its back feet. The critter whiplashed and rolled, its body stuck, as if on flypaper. It squealed, the sound catlike and mad. The small creature rippled and went still. Like the others, it looked at me. It wasn’t a rodent. Not a cat. Something else. Something with dark steel claws the size of good butcher knives, longer than it should be able to use, small as it was. Neon green, shaped like a small cat, claws out. Steel claws. An animal with steel claws longer than my hand. It was so foreign that the forest would have rejected it and spit it out, sending the thing rolling, had I not clenched my mind around its feet. Yet, even through the ground, I couldn’t get a feel for what the creature was.
Rick stared at his mate, his face and eyes fierce and angry and hurting. I had no idea what the expressions and emotions meant, but they were deep and intense, an agony of the soul. “Paka. No. Please, Pea. She was trying to save the woman, Nell.”
The thing on the forest floor hissed, its claws flashing. I didn’t know what it was, but I had a feeling what it intended. “Why does it want to kill Paka?” I asked.
Paka, sitting atop Joshua, growled low, the sound vibrating through the air and the earth. Her claws had pricked him, making him bleed, and I could sense that blood seeping into the ground, Joshua’s blood and Ephraim’s blood, strange and metallic. The earth was thirsty, so eager for sustenance that it made my mouth go desert dry and my stomach cramp with need. Eight years since I had fed it. Eight long years. Distantly I heard Joshua whimper.
“That’s what its species does,” Rick said, his voice empty of everything but dread. “They live with us, like pets and friends, but they’re here for one reason, as a deterrent, to keep us from spreading the were-taint or killing humans. For a were-creature to kill a human or to bite and transmit the were-taint, the punishment is death. Always.”
And Brother Ephraim hung on the tree limb, not far from us. Pea knew what had happened to him. Somehow. And for the weres, Pea was justice and vengeance and death. “And though Paka hurt Brother Ephraim saving me, there’s no hint of mercy?”
“No. None,” Rick whispered, his eyes on his mate. Tortured. But oddly I didn’t see love as I understood it, or even love as the library books suggested it might be. It wasn’t a happy love. It was addled. Addicted.
I remembered my sense of Paka as a tamer of cats. Paka had magic, and her magic was . . . I shook my head slightly, trying to figure it out in time to avoid whatever was primed to happen here, hovering over us like the sword of death.
“I smell her victim’s blood,” Rick said dully. “His bowels have opened. His bladder gave way.” Rick took a shaking breath, the sound broken. He looked up into the trees, as if trying to locate Ephraim. “The stench of death rides the breeze.” His tone made me think of poetry, as if he were quoting something.
“But if Paka hurt a human and he didn’t die at her fangs,” I said, “and he didn’t turn into a werecat, then what?” At my words, Joshua whimpered, as if the claws at his neck and face tightened.
“The only way that could happen would be if someone else killed him before he died at Paka’s fangs.” And then Rick’s eyes tightened and I knew his thoughts had taken a turn, hopefully to follow mine.
I closed my eyes and wrapped my fingers tighter around the roots, letting them speak to me about the body so high overhead. Brother Ephraim was near death, his heart racing, his breath so light and thin that scarcely any air moved through his lungs. So much blood drenching the tree branch, falling onto the ground in quiet splatters, the forest soaking it up, waiting for me to feed it fully. “Brother Ephraim is nearly dead,” I said, “but not quite.”
“Pea . . . ,” Rick said, his voice clotted with emotion, his face showing conflict and pain. He didn’t love Paka. But he was tied to her. Magic, I thought.
I shivered, my hands still buried in the clay, my fingers still gripping the roots, the power of the forest still flowing through me. “My choice,” I said to them, my eyes on Pea. At the words, a foreign emotion flooded me, engulfing me. I gasped once, like a drowning victim thrown into an icy stream. The sensation flashed through me, a raging flood, steeling my breath. Something powerful, primeval, elusive. Far more than I could grasp. It washed over and through me and away, a flash flood, too much, too potent, to really comprehend. And it trickled away, leaving nothing.
They were looking at me strangely and, not sure what had happened, I finished the thought, “My land,” I said, the words ringing strangely. “My enemies. My judgment.” I knew something had happened, but it was gone, fleeting and intense.
The little green thing chittered at me, as if waiting for me to say something more, so I did, drawing on the ancient emotion that had washed through me. “He’s dying. There’s no way to get him to a hospital in time. But this is my land, my woods. And he’s my enemy, who came to do evil to me, just like Joshua Purdy”—I inclined my head to the pile of rock—“came to do evil to me.
“Paka’s fangs haven’t spilled his blood, just her claws, so he’s safe from weretaint, right?”
Rick nodded, the movement jerky.
“So it’s just Brother Ephraim, who’s dying.” But the biggest problem wasn’t Ephraim or Joshua. Jackie was in my woods, drawing close. I didn’t have long to save Paka, who had saved me. To do so, I’d have use my strongest magic for the second time in my life. I didn’t know if I could stem the flow, once I set it free.
And Joshua had bled on the land too.
THREE
Pea chittered at me, trying to say something I couldn’t understand.
I tilted my head, my wet hair clinging to me with cold. My body felt numb rather than frozen, which meant I was hypothermic. “Brother Ephraim, who is near death, once controlled the punishment house,” I explained to the furious green critter. “It’s the place where women were sent to be reminded that they were only the helpmeet, not the man, that they were born to do and be and feel and live as their menfolk told them.
“He had my mother one time, for a whole day. She came back changed, crying in the night, flinching at the slightest move. Daddy brought her home, but he never did a single thing against old Brother Ephraim, even when she had a baby the next spring that looked more like Brother Ephraim than like Daddy.” I settled my eyes on the thing that had leaped from Rick’s shoulder. It sat on the ground, feet caught in roots and earth, its small body tense and rigid, prepared to attack Paka the second it got loose, steel claws glinting. “Ephraim hurt my mama. He hurt a lot of women. He came here today to hurt me, to take me back into the church against my will and punish me. I know that because he told me so. The judgment is mine. His life is mine. The choice is mine. Mine. Not yours.”
I leaned forward, against the pull of the muck. My arms began to slide free, slowly. I wanted to be covered when Jackie got here.
“Joshua, now, he’s just an angry, silly little boy who’ll still be a silly little boy twenty years from now, if he lives. While he’ll most likely continue on this road and become the same kind of evil as his friend Jackie, he hasn’t actually accomplished much in the way of evil.” And I wouldn’t sentence him to death despite the blood he had shed on the forest floor, blood that was mine to take. The woods seemed to flow beneath my feet in reaction to my words, making me wonder what it heard, what it felt from me. The big black cat retracted her claws and stepped away, still poised over her prey in threat. With a back paw, she sent Joshua’s shotgun spinning off the rocks into the darkness. It clattered down the stones.
I lifted my chin and raised my voice so it would carry up the pile of rock. “You hear me, Joshua? I’m offering leniency. I’m offering mercy.” Joshua said nothing and I called out, “You hearing me, Josh? ’Cause iffen you do
n’t answer me, I’ll let that big ol’ cat eat you.” I almost added, the way it ate Brother Ephraim, but I didn’t.
“You’re insane,” he shouted back, gasping. “You need to be locked away, chained in the attic, where crazy women go.”
“That’s not an answer,” Rick said, his voice oddly low and without emotion. I thought it might be his cat talking. “Answer the lady.”
“I hear,” Joshua ground out.
I figured that was the best I was going to get. I dropped my voice again, low enough to exclude Joshua. “The leader of God’s Cloud of Glory Church is nigh,” I said in my strongest childhood dialect. “He’ll wanna kill us all. He will not be a respecter of the law. He finds pleasure in destruction and death and the pain of his victims.” I leaned harder and my left hand came free, slinging clay and pond goo across the small clearing. I swished the hand in the pond water to clean it and held my bib up over my breasts, as I swiveled and leaned away to free my right hand. The moment it was free, I swished it too, and stood, bare feet on the edge of the tiny pool. I slipped my hand into the bib and around the small .32. Joshua was incompetent, too busy feeling up breasts and not busy enough making sure his prey was defenseless. I gripped the gun with my right hand and held the bib with the left, swiveling to see the path where Jackson Jr. would appear.
“Jackie!” I shouted. “Brother Ephraim is gone and Joshua is pinned down, weaponless. You come into this clearing and you’ll not make it out again!”
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!” the words screamed, batting through the trees, a hollow sound, lacking in the power Jackie always found from the pulpit and the microphone that gave him a range God hadn’t.
I smiled, more a twitch of lips than anything else. “That all you got, Jackie?” I mocked. “That old line about witches? I got a gun and two helpers.” I looked at Pea. “Maybe three.”
“You got no help. You got no backup. You are mine; all the women are mine.”
Was that the way things were now in the church compound? All the women belonging to one man? I didn’t believe it. Even the rancid old pedophiles wouldn’t give up all their womenfolk to the preacher. But some families might have married off the older daughters to the preacher, just as Lot, in the Bible, had offered his daughters to the crowd of rapists to keep himself and his men friends safe. That sounded like the thinking of some of the churchmen.
I said, “Wrong again. I got me a special agent of PsyLED here, Jackie.”
Rick called out, “I’m Special Agent Rick LaFleur. I’d like to talk to you about a number of things, one of which is the attack up at the house. Do you know who shot up the house owned by Nell Ingram?”
There was no answer. Through the soles of my feet, I felt Jackie move away, not back toward the house, but up along the ridge, fast, weirdly fast. Running with his tail between his legs at a speed I’d need to think about later. A speed maybe given him by the vampire blood he’d drunk in years past, blood provided when his daddy kidnapped vampires for him to drink from. The forest carried his emotional overload—fury, panic, sexual frustration. Fear brought about by the unexpected presence of law enforcement.
I relaxed my shoulders and said to Rick, “He’s gone.” I told the leopard, “Let the little boy go. No harm, no foul. This time.” I might hate Joshua Purdy, I mighta killed a man here in the heart of the woods once, but then as now, I was a judge, not a murderer, and judges should have some small speck of mercy about them, somewhere.
Paka backed away, leaving Joshua laying on the stones, bleeding and terrified. I could smell urine and knew he’d pissed his pants, not that I blamed him. I looked at Rick. “You sure he isn’t gonna go catty on the full moon?”
“Yes. I’m sure,” he said, his voice tight. “She didn’t use her teeth. There was no exchange of body fluids.” Rick moved cat fast and knelt, one hand fisted in the green fur of the thing with its feet buried in the earth. He put away his gun and petted the creature like a kitten, a swipe from ears along its back and tail. “Pea,” he said, as if the animal could understand him. “Nell says the man won’t die at Paka’s fangs.”
It didn’t sound like any kind of cop talk I’d heard on the films I watched. It sounded like a paranormal conversation rather than the law of the United States, conversation with the metaphoric hand of justice rather than the hand of the written law with Is dotted and Ts crossed, which was good for me. It meant that Rick was unlikely to consider my next acts as a crime. Rick added, shaking the green creature slightly, “He won’t turn on the full moon. And Paka didn’t kill him.”
“My land. My rules,” I said to Pea. “Paka goes free, so you can back off, you little green . . . thing.”
The green thing turned to me, chittered in disgust, and sniffed the air as if perplexed. Animals picked up conversations from body language, but I was pretty sure that this one understood English. It spat, clearly repulsed, and looked up into the trees, chittering some more.
Pea went silent, its nose still working like a rabbit’s, twitching and bunching.
To Rick I said, “Would you take Joshua away, outta my woods? Paka and me, we got us a little talking we need to do.” The black cat looked at me, her eyes a beautiful shade of greenish gold in the early night, her black mottled coat disappearing entirely in the shadows. “We can walk back to the house together. Okay?”
Rick looked from me to his mate and shrugged. “Paka doesn’t like other females. It’s taken her a week to settle in with the trainees.”
“She’ll be fine with me,” I said, hoping I was right, hoping my claiming of her for the land hadn’t done something to her. I had only ever claimed plants, not a breathing animal, let alone a werecat.
Rick released Pea’s green fur and climbed the stones, bent, slung Joshua’s arm over his shoulder, and half carried him back down. None too gently, he helped the man back along the narrow trail to the house, shouldering Joshua’s bent gun without missing a step. “I’ll see him on his way and wait for you at the house,” Rick said. Being part cat, Rick had no trouble negotiating the path in the fast-falling dark; Joshua stumbled a bit and Rick didn’t seem to care, dragging the smaller man until Joshua caught his feet.
When they were out of earshot I reached into the woods and into the ground, feeling for Pea. I had no idea how I had buried its feet, trapping it, and I didn’t want to get close enough to use my hands to free the green thing. But I thought about letting it go, and instantly Pea bowed its back, digging in with its hand-claws, freeing its back feet. Hissing, it sat and began cleaning those steel back claws on the ground, the feel of metal sharp and cutting, as if razor blades slashed me instead of the forest floor. Then it raced into the shadows, reappearing back at my feet so fast I would have missed it had I blinked. It carried a droplet of Brother Ephraim’s blood on one steel claw, and held the blood up to me. Hesitantly I leaned down and extended a finger. Pea smeared the drop of blood onto my fingertip, careful to not cut with its claw. It chittered at me, its tone oddly formal sounding, as if this was a ceremony of sorts. I hoped it wasn’t a death sentence aimed at me.
I wasn’t sure what all this meant, and said to it, “I accept the blood, and the price, if there is one.” It chittered at me, softer now, and backed away.
I searched the ground for Paka’s life force, then felt for Brother Ephraim above us in the trees. Both were present in the woods, part of the earth beneath my feet and part of the woods over my head. Somehow I’d claimed them both when I claimed Paka. Maybe claiming predator and dying prey made them one? Maybe because Paka had eaten part of Brother Ephraim and his flesh was her flesh? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of much of anything in the land that was mine, except that it had claimed me too, long ago. With something like instinct, I had been claiming it back ever since. And now, with that same instinct, I was choosing to feed its magic, its power, again, by taking another life. That wasn’t something I had ever wanted to do. Or maybe I was ly
ing to myself and I had always wanted to use the power of the woods, always wanted to feed them. To the werecat, I said, “You feeling any different?”
Paka sat, front paws together. Watchful.
I almost said, I did something when you were tracking Joshua an’ me. The forest, it was wanting to stop you. I told it you were mine so it let you through. I hadn’t thought to claim the others, which seemed wise in retrospect. But Paka appeared no different now from before. Calmer maybe. Hunting living prey made cats calm and happy. Killing made them happier still. So I didn’t tell her what I’d done, mostly because I had no idea how to undo it. I’d play a wait-and-see game instead, and maybe not ever have to confess. The coward’s way, but I had often feared that I was a coward, shamed by some part of me that I never even saw, never knew. “Your prey. He’s still alive, up in the trees.”
Paka’s big head raised up, looking into the trees, and dropped down, then back up, nodding once, her eyes aiming back at me like weapons. “His life is the forest’s to take,” I said.
Paka did nothing, so I turned my back and took the slow steps into the dark, to the ground beneath the tree limb where Brother Ephraim lay, as close to death as a man could get and still cling to this Earth. Blood had dripped and splattered on the leafy forest floor. I stared at it, not sure how to do this. I had only ever done this once before, in fear, fighting for my life, against a man who wanted to hurt me. So much of my woods was unknown to me; so much of my power over it was unknown as well, and I had intended it remain that way if possible. But Jackie and Joshua were never gonna let me be. Not now. And tonight indicated that the woods and I were closer, more twined, than I had previously thought.
I bent my knees, placing my palm on the blood. Blood didn’t have an odor that humans could smell, not until it began to sour and rot, but this blood smelled metallic, bitter, something odd just at the edges of my ability to detect. Beneath my hand, the forest was seething with need, with hunger, the scent and patter of blood, the stench of bowels still releasing, and the reek of fear, the race between predator and prey, all had waked it. The woods thrummed through me, as if blood that pulsed and air that breathed.
