Blood of the Earth

by Faith Hunter

  “One good thing came of the interviews on the church grounds. Your sister’s family has been cleared of working with HST. Their passports were part of mission trip the church was planning, to Haiti, to dig wells and teach microfarming. And share the word of God according to God’s Cloud.” The last was said with a dose of sarcasm, and I didn’t object. But a sense of relief feathered through me, alleviating my breathlessness, knowing that Caleb and Priss hadn’t been part of HST.

  “But we have a time crunch. According to Mrs. Clayton,” Rick said, “Mira doesn’t have long. We still don’t know what species Mira is, and for all we know, she’s a singularity, something that made it through, or fell through, one of the liminal lines’ weak spots, the places where there’s a weakness in reality, but whatever the girl is, she’ll be dead in just hours. That brings us back to looking at Nell’s suspects, Simon A. Dawson Jr. and Boaz Jenkins.”

  Rick looked at me for a moment before continuing. “According to statements made to police and FBI, and Sister Erasmus’ statement, both Dawsons were on church property, visiting with family and friends, including Boaz Jenkins and the preacher, Ernest Jackson Jr., prior to the attack on us. Dawson Sr. was found dead, full of silver shot. No one’s seen Dawson or Boaz Jenkins for forty-eight hours. We have the photos of them in the SUV at the shooting, Dawson’s rehab, and his presence on church property. All that shows they are involved with HST, but not who, exactly, among our list of possible suspects, took Mira Clayton. The involvement of the Dawsons and Jenkins in the kidnapping of Mira Clayton is circumstantial at best, and what we have now would never hold up in court. Circumstantial also won’t help us find Mira, if indeed they took her.”

  I didn’t know what liminal lines were, or weak spots, though both sounded like the church’s description of entrances to hell. Now wasn’t the time for an education, however, and I didn’t ask. I said, “So, there are four kidnappings, three by one group, Mira’s by another group, probably a faction of the bigger group?” Rick nodded his head, and, encouraged, I went on. “A few churchmen are part of group two, the smaller group. And at the Stubbins farm, the two groups met, and maybe divided, leaving behind a boy who was away and a dead body?” Rick nodded again. “And we don’t know where any of them, from either group, went?”

  “Remind me to let you do summations from now on,” Rick said with that tight smile.

  “You said chasing suspects led you into the Stubbins farm.”

  “Joshua Purdy.”

  “What happened to Joshua?” I asked. “Last I saw, he was leaping through the air, right at you.”

  That tight nonsmile pulled Rick’s face down into an emotion I didn’t have a name for except it wasn’t happy. “In the initial phases of the action, we had an . . . altercation. He shot a little boy, so I shot Joshua, cuffed him, and threw him in the back of a squad car. While I was applying pressure to the boy’s wound, Joshua ripped apart the cuffs, tore the door off the squad, and got away, down toward the Stubbins farm.”

  My mouth hung open in front of a new slice of pizza. It stayed that way.

  “The kid will be fine,” Rick said gruffly. “But I lost the one person whose questioning could tie everything together.”

  I was now able to translate the expression on his face. It was loathing, for himself, for not being able to do everything right. “The boy’s life is worth more than Joshua,” I said. “We’ll catch him.”

  “I don’t need platitudes,” he spat, fury crossing his face.

  “I’m not offering platitudes,” I said back, just as mean. “I was speaking fact. If you want to wallow in guilt and misery, by all means have at it. But wallow later. Right now you have a job to do. So do it.”

  The people in the room went still and silent, as if they’d never thought to tell Rick what he needed to hear. That was a shame. And it was something I seemed to have an unexpected talent for. That and summations.

  A ghost of a smile crossed Rick’s features and his shoulders relaxed. He shook his head and scrubbed his hands through his hair before dropping them to the chair arms. “Good advice. Okay. We have files on all the known HST members, and the info hasn’t resulted in a single arrest. We have new squares, and those squares are Simon Dawson Jr., Joshua Purdy, Boaz Jenkins, and the dog scent at multiple sites. We need deep background on them all. They’re connected to HST, and we need to find how they intersect with Mira Clayton. Mira is our single paranormal taken; she’s the only abductee whose family hasn’t received a ransom demand. It’s possible that she was taken by an offshoot of HST for a reason different from the other girls. And based on the locations of the dog scent, it’s also possible that the churchmen are that offshoot.”

  JoJo said, “Boaz was living on the church compound with his wives and children until two days ago, when he disappeared. He had zero intersection with society outside of the church. He had no property, no job, no friends, and no family outside of the church. His wives are clueless, but it’s presumed he’s with Joshua.”

  I thought about Mary, but there was nothing I could do to help my old childhood friend.

  “I want JoJo and Tandy to visit the Master of the City, Ming, at the Glass Clan Home and talk to the vamps who used to feed Dawson. See if Ming’s people showed him or told him anything about secure places where they kept blood-meals, a place he might keep an abductee. I want T. Laine and Occam in research, taking over all the intel from the feds, and paying attention to anything they’re keeping from us.”

  Rick turned his full attention to me, “I want you on the church premises, talking and making nice-nice with the natives. Find out if we’re on the right track with this. Get any locations Dawson or Jenkins might have gone to family property, hunting cabins, that sort of thing, and what weapons they have. They’ll volunteer things to you, Nell, that they might not to us. You’re our ace in the hole with the church.”

  I put down the pizza slice and pressed a hand to my stomach, feeling the gnarled scars. A pit opened in my middle at the thought of going back inside, but I understood the need. Until the young girls—human and not—were safe, my own lack of security was unimportant. I wondered if Mary would talk to me. If my family would. “Okay.”

  He said, “Check your e-mail on your laptop periodically.”

  I understood that the others would get dinged on their cells or tablets as needed, but my cell wasn’t as smart as theirs. And I needed to get the stolen cell phone I had given to Sam back to the owner. “I will.”

  “Their answers might give you an idea who to talk to and what additional questions to ask. One thing,” Rick added. “How many times did you shoot the preacher, Ernest Jackson Jr.?”

  I felt the blood drain from my face. Tandy sat up straight, staring at Rick. Occam growled softly. My chin went up. “I shot him four times with one of Daddy’s shotguns. Point-blank. Dead center. I reckon the FBI will want to question me. Am I gonna face charges?”

  Rick leaned in, closer, into my personal space, his pretty black eyes staring into mine, his nostrils fluttering with scent. “No. Because Jackson Jr. got up from the crime scene and walked away.”

  I blinked, feeling as if I was on the brink of something, like a high cliff with nothing beneath me. Possibilities flitted and stung at the back of my mind like angry hornets, but nothing settled. When I didn’t answer, Rick placed a series of crime scene photos in front of me. Three were photos of the place where I’d left Jackie lying, the blood pool looking as if a mop had been swished through it. A single set of bloody footprints raced away from the dais in the chapel. I studied the photos. No one had picked him up and carried him away. He had gotten up and run.

  Jackie wasn’t dead.

  No one could have survived being shot four times with a shotgun at close range. It wasn’t possible. I touched my shoulder. The recoil bruises told me it hadn’t been a nightmare. I hadn’t missed, and the gun hadn’t been loaded with foam pellets or paintb
alls. I said, “I only got a glimpse of him after. His blood was pooling around him on the floor. His clothes were shredded, and pulped flesh showed through. His skin was going gray. He was dead. Deader than dead.”

  “Concur,” Occam said. “Bowels had released. He smelled dead.”

  Rick said, “Yet he was seen running through the compound, bloodied and wild-eyed, according to some of the people questioned. Running toward the Stubbins farm. In the same direction as Joshua.”

  I remembered the woods’ awareness that Jackie was running away, before Brother Ephraim died, moving faster than human. I remembered his note about the way my sisters smelled. I remembered the sense of awareness of something inhuman stalking on the far side of the new wall of thorns at the boundary of the Stubbinses’ property and mine. The sense that the darkness that was Brother Ephraim had been trying to get to that inhuman entity. The sense of something not right about Jackie. I took a slow breath, tight and painful.

  Were Jackie and Ephraim inhuman? Nonhuman? I sat back, hands open and empty in my lap. Was Joshua nonhuman? The same kind of nonhuman? Joshua had gotten away from police custody, and in pretty dramatic fashion. Jackie had come back from the dead. And . . . Brother Ephraim was a shadow in my land. Were they all—

  “Nell?” Rick said, and there was a demand in his tone, his body leaning in toward mine in a fashion that reminded me of him prisoning me into my chair at the FBI headquarters.

  I almost flinched, until I realized that was a churchwoman response. Rick was pushing my buttons, a phrase T. Laine had used during a card game when somebody had bluffed a hand. I leaned toward him, so close my nose was nearly touching his, and asked, “Did Paka get close to Jackie’s blood? Close enough to smell if his blood smelled like Brother Ephraim’s?”

  “No,” Paka said. “I am not officially PsyLED, but a consultant as you are. Pea and I were not at the crime scene.”

  I looked at Occam. “How about you? Did you smell his blood?”

  Occam inclined his head as if processing memories. “There was too much GSR and too much human blood scent, but . . . yeah.” His eyes were half closed, like a cat, thinking. “Something was off, now that I think about it.”

  “Metallic?” I asked.

  His cat eyes found mine, glowing slightly in the hotel lights. “Yeah, Nell, sugar. Like metal and acid.”

  I nodded and thought of all the evidence, the odd things that didn’t fit, and the one thing that stood out most was that Dawson Sr. had been killed with silver shot. “Can you get some of Jackie’s blood to sniff?” I asked Rick. “’Cause I’m guessing he isn’t human. Like Brother Ephraim wasn’t human. And the Dawsons probably aren’t, and weren’t, human. Like maybe all of Jackie’s closest cronies aren’t human. I’m thinking this because Jackie had been biting his concubines and drinking their blood.”

  The senior agent had that strange expression on his face, the one where he was putting things together, connecting disparate elements into some kind of cohesive whole. One small part of what was going on in his brain had to be the legal aspects of everything that had happened, including the part where the FBI kept trying to keep us out of the investigation and the CIA had compiled a list of paranormal names.

  I said as much and added, “Or factions of the CIA too. A few people here and there, with mutual prejudices, getting together to do a particular type of evil.”

  Rick flipped through the pages in the HST listing of nonhumans. “Jackie isn’t listed. Neither are any of the other men from the church.”

  I said slowly something that had been percolating in the back of my mind. “If Brother Ephraim wasn’t human, then human laws and grindylow laws didn’t apply to him.”

  Rick’s eyes crinkled and he tilted his head in acknowledgment, indicating that he had just come to the same conclusion as I had. If Brother Ephraim hadn’t been human, then, because he was committing violence, his death would be considered self-defense. Paka would never have been guilty of breaking any law, not a were-taint law upheld by Pea, and not any law that Rick, as a PsyLED agent, had to uphold. Neither would I, at least about Brother Ephraim.

  That did, however bring to mind the curiosity that Pea hadn’t recognized the nonhuman blood of Brother Ephraim when he lay dying in the trees. Hadn’t noted the odd smell of the man’s blood. Or Joshua’s blood in Paka’s claws. Or . . . had she? She had allowed Joshua to be led away. She had given me a drop of Ephraim’s blood. An offering. What did that mean?

  Rick leaned back in his seat, now holding a travel mug of coffee, the smell strong and fresh. “Presuming Jackson’s crew were a nonhuman faction, working with Dawson. Dawson Sr. was shot with silver, indicating that maybe the Dawsons aren’t human. Also suggesting that there are problems in that faction or with the part of HST that they aligned with.”

  “HST would have killed Mira Clayton the moment they realized she wasn’t human,” JoJo said. “But if someone else took her—”

  “Like a church faction that liked the way she smelled,” T. Laine said. The girls bumped fists and, in a synchronized motion, they pointed all four index fingers at me.

  “Factions joined with factions,” JoJo said. “Just like Nell said.”

  “We talked about a copycat early on,” Rick said. “But all the inconsistences make sense if a small nonhuman faction of God’s Cloud was working with HST, and then broke away from that combined group and went out on their own. First that group tried to get Nell, then kidnapped Mira Clayton, then Nell’s sister.” Rick nodded, liking the conclusion. At one time I might have called it deductive reasoning, but it looked more like instinct.

  “The colonel, Jackie’s father, kidnapped vampires for blood in the past,” I said, adding to my part of the debrief. “Word came out later that Jackie had cancer and was drinking the blood for healing.”

  “So taking Mira was deliberate, thinking she was a vamp?” T. Laine asked, sounding frustrated.

  “No. Her social media was full of photos of her in daylight,” Rick said. “They knew she wasn’t a fanghead. But she’s nonhuman, and her blood may be even better than vamp blood.” Rick tapped a pencil on the table, little bounding taps, like a snare drum.

  “Vampires can mind-bond with anyone who drinks their blood. Unless. . . . maybe if they aren’t human,” T. Laine said. “Why didn’t we pick up on that before? Churchmen were drinking vampire blood and not getting mind-bound.”

  “Except Joshua,” I said. “He got addicted.”

  “Which is not, technically, the same thing,” Rick said, mulling things over.

  “I’ll go by the lab first thing in the morning,” he said. “I’ll sniff-test all the blood samples. And if they’ll part with small samples, I’ll bring them with me. I’ll get them to run DNA on Jackson’s blood ASAP, for nonhuman markers.” He looked at Occam. “I want you to take Nell to the compound and sniff the blood on the floor of the church building, now that other scents have cleared out.”

  Occam nodded.

  “We have a lot of unanswered questions,” Rick said. “Where is Jackie? Is he with Dawson? With HST or a splinter group? More important, what is Jackie?”

  I might have added, And how did Brother Ephraim maintain conscious awareness after I fed his soul to the earth? I hadn’t told them what had happened to Ephraim, hadn’t shared the dark part of my magic. And because of Paka’s involvement in his death, they hadn’t asked. As if they were afraid of what might come out if they opened that particular can of worms. But . . . if Ephraim had been inhum—nonhuman, that might explain a lot.

  More pieces fell into place and my mouth slowly opened. I said, “All the K-nines went squirrelly. Sam’s hunting dogs went squirrelly. And the smell of strange dogs was everywhere. Scent-marking places. Could they be non-were, shape-shifting dogs?” Rick and the others looked at me and I realized that I was the last one to reach the potential conclusion. I pressed a hand harder to my middle and a
dded one more mental question, perhaps the most important one. What am I? What are my sisters? Because Mud, at least, is like me.

  Our meeting was over moments later, and I pondered the questions all the way back home to shower and change clothes, silent as Occam drove me, his thoughts closed to me and mine to him. He seemed content to be my personal driver. Or guardian. On my lap were my laptop and a new cell phone, provided by Rick because Sam had already returned his.

  At Soulwood, as Occam waited in the unit’s van, I cleaned up and dressed warmly, in layers: my last gray skirt over leggings. This time I brought a coat, gloves, and a muffler. On the way to the van, I picked up a potted plant, a batch of geraniums I had rooted, the pot protected from the weather, hidden in the walkway and still blooming. The temperatures had gone cool, and they were blooming, bright pink and white in the same pot. Mama might like it. Silent again, we made the drive back to the church grounds.

  * * *

  When we got a signal, I checked text messages. It felt strange to have access to such electronic things, expensive toys, just as strange as it did to be going back inside the church compound, for the second time in one day, after so long away. I was an outsider for real now. One working with the law enforcement of the United States of America, to uphold its laws, even ones I disagreed with. An outsider with electronic toys, and protected by a wereleopard.

  As we reached the bottom of the mountain, the cell dinged, and it was Rick. “I just heard from the local LEOs,” he said without greeting. “Your father is out of recovery. He’s awake and doing as well as can be expected.”

  Tears blurred my vision for a moment and my heart did some strange square-dancing beat before settling. I said, “Thank you. I gotta go.” I ended the call, stuffed the cell into a pocket, and wiped my eyes. Occam, without taking his eyes from the road, patted my shoulder. It was oddly and unexpectedly comforting.