Blood of the Earth (35 page)

“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 added 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
ding
ed, 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.

*   *   *

Instead of churchmen at the entrance to the church grounds, there was a double line of news vans and policemen guarding the road, two marked cars blocking access. One officer pulled his car out of the way so that Occam and I could motor through, cameras following us and reporters shouting questions that we ignored. Inside the fence, police squad cars and police were everywhere, from all different law enforcement branches, uniformed, men and women in business suits, along with crime scene vans and people in white jumpsuits, all so very busy.

Avoiding them all, Occam maneuvered toward my family’s home and braked beside my truck. Occam said, “You’ll be okay, Nell, sugar. You need me when you get inside, you call. I’ll be here faster than you can blink. And I’ll text you when I leave the compound.”

I tried to think how to reply.
You are too kind
was too close to the formal phrase used by a churchwoman. I settled on, “Thank you. I’ll be okay,” and hoped I wasn’t telling him a lie. I got out, placing my laptop and the potted geranium in my
truck cab for now, and checking to see my keys were still where I left them, under the seat. Mama opened the door before I could knock and grabbed me into a hug so tight it hurt my recently healed belly. Unaccustomed to the contact—a contact I had seemingly missed, as my vision misted again—I hugged back briefly, and then took her hands into mine as I stepped away, trying to find something to say that wouldn’t make my action a rejection. I blurted, “Daddy’s out of recovery, Mama. He’s doing okay so far.”

Mama whirled away and burst into tears. She bent over, to place one fist over her heart, and the other hand on the arm of her rocking chair before she let herself fall into the seat. Tears coursed down her face, scalding her pale flesh. Mama Grace all but flew from the kitchen and I repeated the news. And then again several more times as my full and half sibs clattered in from the children’s rooms and down the stairs, all talking and asking questions at once. I was hugged and patted and kissed on the cheek by children I didn’t know, before four of them, led by Mud, dragged me to a chair with a padded seat and pushed me into it. The din was improbably reassuring.

Mud, seeming to notice that I was reacting oddly to it all, spread a crocheted afghan over my legs and pulled a low stool to my chair, to sit beside me, holding my hand in her small one. A little boy was standing by my chair, telling me about the gunfight in the church, his words mostly unintelligible. A little girl stood beside him, and she might have been telling me the same story from her viewpoint, but I could make out only one word in three. Seemed I’d lost my affinity for understanding the speech of little’uns.

Before I was allowed to conduct any kind of business, I was plied with food—a thick slice of bread carved from one of the loaves I had brought before dawn, smeared with homemade cashew butter spiced with peppers and honey, a cup of hot tea, a sliced apple. There hadn’t been time for manners when I appeared at dawn, but there was time now, even if I didn’t want to take the time.

I ate and said my thanks and listened to the remembered babble of my childhood as I was introduced to my extended family. The little boy was Ethan and the girl was Idabel. The other names flew from my head as quickly as they were spoken.
I was treated to a hymn sung by a bunch of young’uns who were no more than three feet tall, was shown embroidered samplers and newly made aprons by the girls, a newly seeded egg carton of basil by Mud, and hand-turned bowls and newel posts turned on a lathe by the boys.

As soon as seemed politely feasible, without that possible rejection I had worried about with Mama, I cleared my throat and handed my empty plate back to a middle’un. In my best church-speak, I said, “I need to talk to your mamas now. You’uns go upstairs and give us some privacy, you hear?”

When no one moved, Mama Grace said, “You heard your sister. Get on up. We’uns’ll talk shortly about what she come to say.”

The sound of retreating feet was much less enthusiastic than when they had arrived, but Nicholson young’uns were well trained and obedient. Daddy’s belt had made certain of that. Except that Mud didn’t move, a familiar mulish expression on her face, familiar because I’d felt it on my face before. Mama Grace narrowed her eyes at Mud and said, “Don’t you start that.”

Mud glowered and crossed her arms, but she stood. “It’s not fair.”

“No, it isn’t. I don’t aim to be fair. I aim to be one of the mamas. Now git.”