Beneath the Black Moon (Root Sisters) (10 page)

Cam
licked her lips, feeling chilled. “I will.”

Mattie
nodded and turned away, her eyes closing again as she relaxed in her chair. By
the time Cam was stepping out of the house, blinking rapidly in the sunlight,
Mattie might as well have been a million miles away.

Brent
was waiting for her not far from the door, with Martin, Mattie’s older son,
watching him closely. Martin wasn’t as outgoing as his younger brother Louis,
and he didn’t appear too pleased by Brent’s presence. 

“Cam,”
Martin greeted her as she approached Brent.

She
smiled and waved, caught the unasked question in his eye and nodded her answer.
She and Diana would be there when the clock struck two hours past midnight.

Brent
glanced between the two of them, sensing their familiarity and ease with each
other, and seemed to relax a little. “We’re going now?” He asked.

“Yes.”
Cam paused to wave farewell to Louis, who was chopping wood on the other side
of the clearing.

“Why
did you come here?” Brent asked as they walked back into the forest. The
atmosphere between them was different now. It had been ever since he had
grabbed her and stared into her eyes just before they were interrupted by
Louis. Cam was uncomfortably aware of him, of his body, and her own felt
sensitive, almost inflamed. It would probably have been a great deal worse if
Mattie Deveraux hadn’t just imparted so much bad news. As it was Cam felt
nervous and distracted.

“I
brought Mrs. Deveraux— medicine,” she said quickly, catching herself before she
said ‘food’. Brent would have known immediately that was a lie, because she had
given the entire basket of food to the Charmon family. “I had a bottle in my
pocket,” she told him.

“She’s
ill, then?” Brent asked. Was it just her imagination, or was he walking closer
to her than he had been a minute ago? Cam stepped to the side, practically off
of the path, to stay away from him. She needed to think clearly. She was very
close to escaping Brent. She hoped to lose him at the cemetery. Her mother’s
grave was the last stop of the day.

“Not
exactly,” Cam said. “One of the other people in the clearing is.”

Brent
nodded agreeably and then pinned her with his stare. “They are rootworkers,
aren’t they?”

Cam
stopped so quickly that she nearly fell flat on her face. “Excuse me?”

“Practitioners?
Whatever they call themselves,” Brent said. “You know what I mean.”

“W-where
did you hear about that?” Cam asked.

“Gaynor
is full of gossips,” Brent said matter-of-factly. “I’d never heard of such a
thing before now, but apparently it’s some sort of religion.”

“Not
exactly,” Cam said. She didn’t want to tell him too much, but she also didn’t
want to overdo her pretend ignorance. He was far too sharp. If he thought that
she was trying to steer him away from a certain topic, he’d be certain to keep
coming back to it. “Some practice it as a religion. Some don’t. Some have
combined it with Christianity.”

Her
own grandmother was mostly Catholic; just as Solange had been, but she also
practiced conjure. Caro appeared to have combined Catholicism and voodoo into a
single religion, but she leaned more towards the Conjure. Cam was technically Protestant,
like her father, but most days she felt more Catholic, thanks to her
grandmother’s influence, and she had been working with roots since she was a
small child. It was a highly personal thing, and was frequently different for
each person.

“Why
do they call themselves that?”

“Rootworkers?
Because they use roots and herbs,” Cam said.

“Like
witches.” Brent said, and there was an interested gleam in his eyes.

“Not
at all like witches,” Cam told him, although she could see why he would draw
the comparison. “They also use everyday items, like playing cards or mirrors.
And most of the time conjure is used for good purposes, for health and
protection. Well, so I’ve heard.” She added quickly. The last thing she wanted
was to give him the impression that she actually had first-hand experience.

“Conjure?”
Brent asked, his eyebrows quirking.

“Another
name for it.” Cam said.

“But
it could be used for ill?” Brent asked.

An
image of the burning carriage house filled Cam’s mind. “Yes,” she told him.

“To
hurt people? Even to kill them?”

He
was probing too deeply and making her nervous again. “Theoretically,” She
slipped into her vapid belle voice in hopes of drawing him away from the
subject. “You seem to be getting a little carried away, Mr. Anderson. Isn’t
there anything else you’d rather talk about?”

“Brent,”
he corrected her with a grin. “And don’t ever speak like that. It makes you
sound like Miss Taversly, and I like you far better as yourself.”

Cam
turned quickly to face him, trying to discern whether he was joking or not. If
not, he had all but admitted to liking her better than Marianne… was such a
thing even possible? She’d just taken him to every hovel in the forest,
including one inhabited by family full of ‘witches’.  She couldn’t help but
think that he had to be longing for ordinary girls like Marianne. His
expression was very convincing though. How did he do that? When he looked at
her he made her feel as if she was the most precious woman in the world.

Perhaps
Brent Anderson had some conjure of his own.

“What
about to make people ill?” He asked. This time his voice was quite serious.

“Theoretically,
yes,” Cam said. “Why are you so curious?”

Brent
turned to look at her, smiling slyly. “Why do you know so much about it?”

“I
grew up here,” Cam told him, feeling a little more confident when she caught
sight of the cemetery’s picket fence in the distance. “There are some things
you can’t help but learn about if you grow up in Gaynor.”

“Hm,”
Brent said. “Then why do I suspect that Marianne Taversly, for instance,
doesn’t know anything at all about any of this?”

“Why
do you keep bringing up Marianne?” Cam asked him right back.

“Because
she is your polar opposite in all things.”

“Oh,”
Cam couldn’t help herself, and the corner of her lip quirked up in the pleased
smile. “Whether you meant it that way or not, I’ll have to take that as a
compliment.”

“It
was intended that way,” Brent told her, and Cam felt as if she was glowing.

Get
a hold of yourself, Cam, he’s only buttering you up for information.

“Well,”
Cam said as they emerged from the forest and began to climb the hill on which
the graveyard stood. “I’m afraid this is the end of our journey. I am perfectly
capable of going alone from here.”

“You’re
going to the graveyard?” Brent asked with a frown.

“Yes,”
Cam told him softly. “And I require privacy.” For more reasons than one.

Brent
hesitated. He couldn’t exactly argue with that. What kind of a man would force
his company on someone who wanted to visit her mother’s grave alone?

I’m
free of him
. Cam thought with relief. Free of his captivating
stare, his questions, and heat that flooded her at the mere sound of his voice.

“As
you wish,” he told her, and they bid each other farewell at the church gate,
under a sky that was beginning to darken with clouds. Cam did not allow herself
to watch Brent walk back down the hill, but instead lifted the latch on the
cemetery gate and let herself inside. Gaynor Hill Cemetery was a soft, peaceful
place, a sharp contrast to the painful, fiery death that Solange had suffered.
Wide rows of white tombstones stood in the shade of tall oak trees. The oldest
grave markers, which dated to the late 18
^th
century, were obscured
entirely by green ivy. A white marble angel stood in one corner of the cemetery,
weeping stone tears into a shallow pond. Behind the pond a stand of weeping
willows rocked in the breeze. The church itself was small, pretty and
unremarkable, but there was something comforting about the graveyard.

Cam
stood for a moment under the oaks. She could see her mother’s headstone out of
the corner of her eye, and it was as if it beckoned her. She hesitated for a
moment and removed an empty glass jar from the pocket of her skirt. She glanced
around to make sure that she was definitely alone, and then stooped to grab a
fistful of soft Mississippi earth. Graveyard dust was the richest and most
powerful dirt. It had the life and souls of ancestors in it and empowered the
hands that touched it. When the jar was full and her hands smelled of rich,
warm earth, Cam went to her mother’s resting place.

***

Unseen,
Brent stared at Cam from just within the forest. She made a striking picture,
all alone in the cemetery on the hill, outlined against the clouds and watched
over by a lone raven in one of the graveyard oak trees. He was still
contemplating all that he had learned on their walk, but one thing he didn’t
need to mull over was the way that he responded to her. Besides his ever growing
attraction to her, which had made their walk together almost painful at times,
there was something about her that captured his imagination. She tried so hard
to stifle her natural vitality, to react to his questions the way that she
thought she was supposed to, but she fought a losing battle. There was no
stemming her fury or stopping her smiles. If he studied her closely enough,
every emotion was there, easily read from her eyes. What he couldn’t understand
was the source of those powerful emotions. He couldn’t imagine what caused her
fear or what gave her that faraway look in her eyes.

He
knew she had secrets, that much had been obvious to him from the beginning, but
what he couldn’t understand was how everything fit together. He felt
instinctively that she was somehow involved in what was happening to Hattie,
but he couldn’t imagine how to connect the two of them. What he did know was
that he wanted her. It was an irresponsible and selfish desire given the
circumstances, but he wanted to touch her, to talk to her, to lick the secrets
from her skin and listen to her whisper late into the night. For now, his
priority had to be his dying sister-in-law, but he couldn’t let Cam go either.
She touched him too deeply, stirred him too powerfully.

***

That
night, Cam didn’t let herself fall asleep. She waited until the clock struck an
hour past midnight and then climbed out of her window and crept across the
balcony. She stopped when she reached her sister’s darkened window. Nerves made
her hands shake as she reached up to tap the glass, using just the tip of her
fingernail to make the slightest of sounds on the pane. There was no response,
so Cam tried again, tapping just a little bit louder. Finally, on the fourth
tap, the curtains were pushed open, so quickly that for a moment Cam worried
her father had discovered them. But no, it was Diana who stood on the other
side, already dressed, candle in hand. Cam beckoned quietly to her sister, who
set the candle down and promptly unlatched the window.

“Are
you ready?” Cam asked.

“As
I’ll ever be,” Diana confirmed drily, but there was a gleam of excitement in
her eye. They made these errands every few weeks, bringing supplies to Mattie’s
son Martin, who was in charge of stocking a hideout where escaped slaves were
hidden until they could make the perilous passage north to freedom. Cam and
Diana had never actually been to the hideout, nor had any contact with the
escapees, but they brought food that Caro and Grandma squirreled away in the
kitchen. They had been running these errands since Cam was fourteen and Diana
seventeen. It was one of the few things in their life that hadn’t changed after
Diana’s scandal. It was also one of the few things that they could do to take a
stand, since they had no political standing and no finances of their own.

Cam
frequently wished that she had been born a boy. It wasn’t that the thought of
being a man was that appealing, but God, she would have had choices. She could
have struck out on her own, found a trade that didn’t involve keeping slaves
and supported herself. As it was she was all but chained to her father side
until she married (and it was beginning to look unlikely that she ever would
marry) and so she had very little say about what went on in his household. Cam
tried to repress her resentment, to hide her anger the way that she hid
everything else, but it wasn’t easy. Cam was certain that life wasn’t supposed
to be this way. A man was supposed to either be evil or not. How were you
supposed to love your father and at the same time, despise him for his choices?

There
was no easy answer, Cam admitted as she and Diana clambered down the tree and
set off across the lawn. They made a quick stop behind the kitchen, where Caro
had left two bundles containing the items on Mattie’s list. There was also an
unlit lantern, which the sisters didn’t dare to light until they were deep into
the forest. 

While
Cam was relatively relaxed in the forest by day, at night it was an entirely
different place. There were different animals out and their calls were
unfamiliar, even frightening. The lantern cast a small, faint circle of light,
hardly a match for the great sweep of blackness that surrounded them. From time
to time something moved in that darkness, just beyond the farthest reach of the
light, and Cam jumped, convinced that it was a person and that they were
caught.