by Faith Hunter
Rick held up a hand in a gesture for peace. “The witches are not your enemies. One of the city’s PsyLED special agents is a witch and she is as baffled and concerned as we are. She spoke with the local coven leader. They don’t know anything about the circles and they’re . . .” He paused. “Not fearful, but wary. Worried. They say the witch circles are a dangerous and forbidden magic and they refuse to help us apprehend the witch who is casting this curse. They say it’s an outside witch, not one of their own.”
“And you believe them?” Heyda asked, skeptical.
“Yes. Both as a law enforcement officer and as a wereleopard.”
“Are the witches also under the summoning?”
Rick shook his head. “I don’t think so. But they’re casting auguries for the future and reading the cards. They told our agent that all the readings so far point to ‘grave danger.’”
“How many circles?”
“Twelve,” Rick said, “over the three moon cycles.”
Ming’s lips tilted slightly down and she said, “Maggot. You have read the land at the circles of summoning?”
“I have. Mithrans were there, either before or after the summonings were cast.”
Ming’s eyes tightened, her white-powdered face giving little away. “My clan is spread about the city. Only a few lair here. None have reported such a summoning. Heyda, you will contact the ones who lair otherwhere to see if they have been called and did not report it.”
Heyda murmured, “Yes, my mistress.”
Rick asked, “Why wouldn’t they have already contacted the Master of the City if they’ve had problems?”
I was looking at Heyda when he spoke and I caught the barest flinch in the skin around her eyes. I knew that look. Fear. Ming’s people were afraid of her, and Heyda couldn’t say that. But I could. “You rule your people with an iron hand, don’tcha?” I felt the brush of Ming’s magic. I dug my fingernails into the wood before it got too strong and I forgot what I wanted to say. “People, even blood-sucking people, don’t look for help to the ones who show no mercy.”
Ming speared me with a look and I almost reared back, losing face, in vampire terms. Almost. Instead, I pressed my nails into her chair arm so hard that I damaged the shiny finish, the bare wood beneath soothing. After a space of time, Ming’s eyes narrowed. Stiffly she said, “Will you read my property to see if the summoning is in the land?”
And now we knew the real reason we had been commanded to visit the clan home of the Master of the City of Knoxville. Ming wanted another favor, without us understanding that it was a favor. I had been setting and keeping careful boundaries in this meeting, boundaries that established who was head honcho, who was alpha. That alpha person was my boss. Pointedly, I looked at Rick. I was being deliberately heavy-handed enough that Ming was certain to pick up on all my clues. “I have my blanket in the truck. I can do that favor for Ming of Glass now, if you like.” I put careful emphasis on the word you.
“Yes,” Ming said, answering for him.
“Special Agent Ingram, you have my permission,” Rick said at the same time.
I replied to Rick in the vernacular of Unit Eighteen. “Boss, it’s unlikely that I’ll note anything except the sensation of Mithrans on this land.”
“You will sense maggots,” Ming said. This time there was no playfulness in her tone.
I took my badge and closed my fist around it, keeping it out of sight so Ming would know that I was speaking as Nell, not a cop. “Ming of Glass did not kill her guests when we placed ourselves at her mercy by answering her invitation. I will read her land for her as a favor and a kindness.” I left the room for the front of the house and the door, hearing the softly indrawn breath of Heyda. Yes, I thought. Think on that. You don’t want to make it official? Then it’s tit-for-tat and quid pro quo. Now Ming owed me a boon and a favor.
* * *
• • •
On first read, I got nothing on the land except the crawly sensation I associated with vampires and dead things. Then I pushed into the earth with my consciousness, calling on Soulwood, and the earth opened up around me, colors sparking and tumbling and full of power. Ming’s land was more active than my own, the energy lively and youthful. I realized that, in some way, Ming had sealed this land to herself and fed it for decades. She called it her hunting grounds. I wondered briefly if she had spilled human blood on it in sacrifice to claim it, but I was pretty sure that spilling blood for the land was an ancient European custom, not Asian. If Ming spilled blood it was her dinner, not a sacrifice, though the land might not know the difference.
I studied the earth all around and decided that no witch magic had penetrated the ground itself. Nothing in the trees. Whatever the attack had been, it left no trace. Withdrawing, I stood and carried my blanket to the truck.
Rick was leaning against his vehicle, sunglasses over his eyes, his silvered hair swept back, ankles crossed, one hand dangling from his pocket, the other rubbing his mangled tattoo. “Ingram.”
I gave him a nod and opened the truck door. Heat billowed out. I had forgotten to leave the windows open an inch. I tossed the blanket inside to the passenger seat.
“You did good catching the thing about tea. I’ve visited at the Glass Clan Home before and been offered tea, always iced.”
“It might notta been an insult. What’s polite in one culture—Southerners drink a lot of iced tea in summer—is an insult in another. Ming’s an old vampire. She’s adapted, but I bet not enough to offer a respected guest tea from commercially packaged tea bags. When someone she respects is a guest, they probably get the good tea, something loose leaf from a single estate.”
He gave a faint smile. “I’m guessing she’s starting to respect you.” He shifted slightly and changed the subject. “What did you find in the earth?”
I leaned into the heated cab and found a water bottle. It was an old one I had filled with Soulwood water and, though it was disgustingly warm, I opened it and drank it anyway. The taste of Soulwood was a refreshment I couldn’t explain to anyone. I capped the empty and tossed it back in the truck to refill later. “Nothing useful. The witch magic didn’t soak into the land. The property itself wasn’t compromised. I’m guessing it was a calling, just like what you’re getting. I also have a feeling that when she talks to the vampires who lair off-site, she’ll find they’ve had issues that they didn’t report.”
Rick nodded slowly. “You did good, Ingram. Go home. Get some sleep.”
I was exhausted. I waved to the humans guarding the grounds, climbed into the heated cab, and drove home. With Mud at Mama’s I didn’t have to be alert. I slept like a log, which was still funny in all sorts of ways.
NINE
I woke to the sound of someone knocking on my door and the sensation of my land in happy welcome. Occam is here. I crawled out of bed, sweaty, sticky, and summer-miserable, and checked the time to discover that I’d slept a whole four hours. I shoved my arms into a robe and passed the cheval mirror to see a leafy woman with green eyes and very bad bed-head. I tried to tame the crazy, damp ringlets, but it was like yanking on kudzu vine—a study in wasted effort. I twisted the tangled mess up in a bun, stuck a long bobby pin in it, and went to the door.
Occam stood on the other side, leaning a shoulder on one of the porch posts. His face was in shadow, arms crossed, muscles bulging at the T-shirt sleeves. The scars on the side of his head appeared less rough and his ear actually had a curve of cartilage, a bit more healed than when I’d looked last. There was even a fresh spot of hair sprouting on his scalp where there had been only white scars before. Shifting was speeding his healing. Shifting on Soulwood was maybe speeding it even more. There were two brown paper grocery store bags at his flip-flop-clad feet, which were scar free, with rounded nails. Surprised to see him, I opened the door and stared at my—the—cat-man.
I said, “You’re supposed to be working, twelv
e on, twelve off, day shift.”
“Afternoon, Nell, sugar,” he said, his voice low and gravelly. “You look pretty as a picture.”
A before picture in one of those beauty magazines, I thought, but since Occam looked a lot like the boogeyman in an old Grimm fairy tale, I didn’t say it.
“Rick gave me the afternoon off, putting me on split shift today. He wants me there at moonrise, which will be close to two a.m.”
To keep Rick safe, to help him not shift and race off to be slaughtered by a blood witch. I held the door wide. “Come on in. Hospitality and safety,” I said, paraphrasing from my church days. “I need to clean up, but I’ll be with you in a bit.”
“I’ll make us breakfast,” he said. “Eggs and ham in the microwave, some juice. I’d do banana pancakes except for the fact that you don’t use your stove in summer and it’s too hot to use the brazier in back.”
It was afternoon and it wasn’t too hot for the brazier, or not too hot for a churchwoman, but I wasn’t going to argue with a man who was gonna fix me a late breakfast. I dragged myself to the shower and cleaned up fast in the cool-to-tepid water from the cistern. As I showered, I mentally went over my long-term and short-term to-do list and added to it. The windmill that pumped my water into the cistern needed its semiannual mechanical inspection and maintenance. The old pump needed lubricating on a regular basis and that had been ignored while I was a tree. I also needed to figure out what to do about providing hot water to the upstairs bathroom. The little hot water heater on the back of the wood-burning stove was fine for the small downstairs bath but was insufficient for adding an upstairs shower. That meant buying a hot water heater and more energy usage. Coming into the twenty-first century and letting Mud be a townie girl was going to be expensive.
I dressed in the jeans and tee from Ming’s and twisted my freshly washed, overly curly hair into clips off my face. I opened the door and the smell of sizzling ham in the main room whooshed into the bedroom and woke up my hungries. It was only microwave ham and eggs, but any pig-based meat was good meat. I stopped in the doorway to catch a view of Occam bent over my sofa, tucking something up under the cloth bottom. “Got a mouse?” I asked.
Occam jerked upright and spun around. And looked guilty.
I frowned at him. “Occam?”
He chuffed a breath, sounding very catty. “You caught me.”
“Doing what?”
He reached under the sofa and tugged something out, scratching sofa and wood floor in a muffled scraping sound. It was a small gobag. He looked sheepish. “I’ve been keeping a bag of clothes here in case I needed to shift and change and didn’t have anything in the car. You know. Emergency supplies. Toothbrush. Soap. Just in case.”
“Whyn’t you just put it on the shelves?” I pointed to the wall with my few books and lots of Leah’s and John’s old things.
“Because it was . . . invasive?”
“And hiding things isn’t?”
“I didn’t want you to think that I thought I was living here.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I closed it. Living here? Oh. Like living in sin here. I started to grin but squashed it. Occam was trying to be nice, not realizing that the church’s idea of living in sin was vastly different from the rest of America’s ideas. Concubinage and polygamous marriages were normal where I grew up. As a church widder-woman, I could take up with an unmarried man if I wanted to and if my daddy didn’t object. As a former church widder-woman, I could do what I wanted and not ask my daddy. “You can put the bag in the bedroom at the top of the stairs, across from Mud’s room. There’s a closet with a bunch of John’s old things that I never got around to throwing out.”
“Oh.” Occam looked as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands and he finally tossed the bag on the sofa. “Okay. So. Um. So we should talk.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. In the church a woman said, “We should talk,” when there was trouble brewing and she wanted to head it off at the pass. Or when she was feeling neglected in some way. Or when the children had a problem. A man never said that. A man said, “I’m calling a family meeting,” at which point he laid down a new rule or law. This was odd. And interesting.
“I’m listening,” I said. But I didn’t sit down, and I put my shoulders back and my fists on my hips. I had learned that posture in the body language class during Interrogation 101 at Spook School. It meant, I’m not afraid and I’ll fight back if you try something I don’t like. It was an alpha-woman move.
Occam looked away and then back at me quickly, as if he’d caught himself doing something he hadn’t intended. “You know I was out of the country while I was healing and you were on disability.”
“I was a tree,” I said distinctly. “But go on.”
Occam hesitated, not even breathing for a bit too long, processing my words and my stance. I waited, face tight.
“I went to Gabon. In Africa.”
“Uh-huh. I know that.”
“To heal.”
“I understand that. You died. I brought you back and healed you where I could. You’re still scarred up and the two fingers you lost are still stiff and useless. Your ear is a mess but getting slowly better. You won’t take off your shirt so I can see what still needs to be done to heal you.”
“There’s things you don’t know. Things I haven’t told you. Not to keep them a secret, or because of anything . . .” He stopped. Started again. “After the fight when I was burned, I was . . . a gibbering, screaming half cat.” He studied me, adding slowly, “I had third-degree burns over seventy percent of my body. My lungs were damaged. My esophagus and trachea were mostly gone. When Soul came back to her senses, she put me back in a silver-lined cage and T. Laine spelled me to sleep, hoping I’d heal.”
I hadn’t known all that. There was probably a lot of stuff I had never known. But it’s hard to know things when no one wants to tell the truth, when they want to spare you from the painful things in life. Or when they just don’t think it matters and therefore don’t tell you stuff that might be important later on.
“Rick was a lot better off than I was and he flew to Gabon soon after the fight, to look for a healer capable of working with weres. He found a clan of wereleopards with a were-healer willing to help us heal. He flew back and packed me up and brought me to Gabon with him.”
“I know that.”
“The healer was a . . . like a tribal shaman, I guess. He spoke only French and the tribal language, one of the Bantu languages, and Rick left me with him and came back to the States. I understood some things by hand gestures and there were enough similarities with Spanish that I could follow other things, but I was alone.”
This stuff was new. Stuff I didn’t know. “Okay,” I said, my ire slipping away.
“There were a lot of ceremonies and a lot of horrible stuff to drink. Strange things to eat. They put me in moving water to debride the burns, and the children born into the black leopard clan kept watch over me to make sure the crocs didn’t find me and attack.” As he talked, Occam’s eyes had begun to glow golden. His voice had dropped to a growly note of cat. “Believe it or not, the pain of healing was a hell of a lot worse than the burns themselves because the nerves in the burned tissue were burned dead, but when the water ripped the dead tissue away, it exposed the nerves and . . . no one can ever believe that level of pain unless they’ve been burned like that.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. If I hadn’t been a tree, I might have helped him.
He shrugged slightly, more a tip of his head than anything defined. “I got better. The pain got less. I came back to help you de-tree.”
I smiled at his choice of words.
“However, while I was healing alone in Gabon and while you were a tree, the Dark Queen and the New Orleans fangheads killed a lot of European vamps. They also killed a mess of were-creatures, including some African wer
elions and Kemnebi, Rick’s black wereleopard alpha.”
I had read the reports—every special agent in PsyLED had read the reports—but I had a feeling Occam’s monologue was leading to something that I didn’t know, so I didn’t react. I waited. Occam didn’t respond agreeably to a woman just standing there, waiting, restrained, silent. I had to wonder if his mama or some woman in his past used to throw things. Pots. Dishes.
“This part isn’t in the official reports. And I don’t know the details. But somehow Jane, the Dark Queen, made Rick her beta and somehow, through the Merged Laws of the Cursed of Artemis, Rick inherited Kemnebi’s property.” He smiled slightly. “And ended up with Kem’s family. Four wives and their kids.”
“Rick . . .” I stopped. I didn’t know where this speech was going, but I didn’t like it. “Okay. Rick has four wives. Like the church.”
“He offered them annulment. Or divorce. But they won’t go.” Occam’s eyes went the nervous bright gold of his cat. He scrubbed his hands on his jeans; his palms were sweating. “Together as a leap, with Rick as their off-site alpha, they have a strong pack magic and have managed to repel all the males who might want to take over. They like things the way they are. No male on-site.”
“Okay. I’m’a be honest here, Occam. You’re rambling.” But Occam seemed to have reached the end of his ability to communicate. Or the look on my face had stopped him. Or my scent, which had to be communicating my reaction even better than my words or expression. “Occam, what are you trying to tell me? Spit it out.”
“I slept with the leap of leopards, all in a pile, as part of a healing.” Occam turned a darker shade of red. If his color was an indication, he was about to die from apoplexy. “And I had to be naked. That’s the first thing.”
I had heard of pack magic for helping injured were-creatures to heal. I didn’t know if it was real power or something like a sugar pill, but Occam didn’t have a family or a pack or anything except Rick, and Rick had saved him when I couldn’t by sharing his new family. I reckoned that meant I owed Rick something, except that would mean that Occam and I were a . . . thing. But he had used the words slept with and naked. “Occam, are you trying to tell me that you had sexual relations with one or more of Rick’s wives?”
