Blood of the Earth

  “Somebody turned in the auto repair shop outside of Oliver Springs,” I said. “The sheriff is still there. I wonder who turned that location in?” Me. It was me. “Your feeding places, your sanctuaries for your dog pack, have been raided today and tonight. You’re on the run until you can find a safe place again. The church grounds, the Stubbins farm, the locked room behind the winter storage cave, and the repair shop near Oliver Springs,” I said, almost musing, “all gone in one day. Who was it, I wonder?” It was me. Me. I wanted to say it so bad I could taste the words, but I kept them inside.

  Dawson growled again, the vibrations stronger than the engine, shaking through my chest. Jackie moved, a blur in the dark. Gunshots stole all sound from me. The van braked and lurched and swerved to a stop.

  The smell of metallic blood and gunfire burned the cold night air. Simon Dawson Jr. whined. Jackie raised the gun and shot Dawson three more times. Dawson fell silent. Even his breathing died away. Tears I hadn’t known I cried cooled and dried on my face. Not tears for Simon. Tears for . . . everything. This whole mess.

  Jackie lifted the cell to his ear again and said, “Roxy. Three things. They got Joshua. The local cops raided the gwyllgi saloon. And Simon attacked me and I had to take him out. Yeah. Silver shot.” He listened a long time. Then he said, “Yeah. They got the last of the HST members and the church families, not that we need the stupid males anymore, but they also got the pregnant females.” He listened again. “Yeah. If we had to lose them, this was good timing.” He added, “No. None of them know where you are.” He ended the call.

  Jackie looked back at me in the rearview and started making this choked, chuffing sound. I realized he was laughing. That couldn’t be good. Maybe I had played into his hands—paws. I thought about my cell again, and tried to remember if it was turned on or off, and wondered if the team could track me through it. I didn’t hear it vibrate or sing a tone, but it was a hope, no matter how faint. Or maybe they could track the van’s GPS. Assuming it had one. All I had was a flowerpot. Against a paranormal, shape-shifting dog.

  We drove through the night for a long time, first on 27, and later on the I-40 corridor, and the whole way, I tried to think of a way out of this. My brain felt like mush, which never happened to the women in the films I watched or books I read. I wasn’t making any headway on an escape plan, beyond ripping off the tape, opening the door, and rolling out into the road. I tried the tape, but that stuff was strong. A sharp blade might cut it. The most I did was break a nail. Up front, dog blood dripped slowly onto the floor of the van, with little splats, metallic and foul.

  I finally spotted my cell on the floor. If I could get the cell and call the PsyLED team . . . Yeah. Maybe I’d also grow wings and fly away. But it was the only chance I had, no matter how remote the possibility of success.

  I stretched out my leg and pointed my foot, slid as far down in the seat as the duct tape allowed, but even when the tape was near to ripping my skin off, the cell was too far away. I pulled my flowerpot close to me. As a weapon, it wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

  I was out of ideas. The thought of being in Jackie’s hands made my breath come fast, and sweat gathered, icy on my skin. That made Jackie turn his head, sniffing. He laughed that awful barking laughter. The blood dripped, slow and steady, metallic, almost caustic on the contained air.

  We passed exits for towns I knew of but have never been to, until Jackie turned off I-40, onto a two-lane road and slowed the van. Farms passed on either side, and then thinned out into forest, the elevation began to rise, and I recognized mountains on the horizon. We were headed southeast on a road that hadn’t been repaired in years, full of potholes and cracked pavement. It might be an old moonshiner’s road, taking us to the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina. Away from everything I knew.

  Jackie turned onto an unpaved road that was little more than a rutted drive. My fear spiked and I heard hissing sounds close by, steady and sharp, like the unrelieved spitting of snakes or maybe dragons. Fanciful fears from reading too many books. From a childhood in the church.

  The lane narrowed and trees leaned in close, as if looking into the van, branches scratching along the sides like the skinned and skeletal fingers of the dead. I loved trees, and they loved me, but there was something about this patch of land and these trees that was not lovely. They seemed menacing, though that had to be my own fear, as no tree was aware enough to menace anyone. Well, except for the vampire oak on church land.

  The headlights picked out shapes in the night: outbuildings, trucks on blocks, a tractor, the remains of an old commercial chicken coop, yards long, with a rusting metal roof. A dilapidated barn listing to the side as if ready to collapse, doors missing. A ranch-style house appeared, windows curtained off, with only slits of light showing that it was inhabited. The door opened and a man appeared, a shotgun in hand. The van jolted and pitched and rolled on past.

  The road curled again and went uphill, bumping and rough. And then we were back on a paved road, and I realized that we had taken some kind of shortcut. Minutes later, Jackie turned again, onto a well-kept tertiary road, and then onto a paved drive and up to a fancy house constructed of wood timbers, a log home that was a century and a half and a lot of high tech away from the log homes of the early settlers. This was a log mansion, with tall, vaulted ceilings, the windows in the peaks bright with light.

  Jackie braked and turned off the engine, which ticked and hissed as it cooled; white steam curled up around the hood, swirling, caught in the headlights. At least I knew there weren’t giant snakes or dragons nearby. The PsyLED van was about to blow a head gasket, if I was any kind of judge. Which meant it was not going to be a reliable way to get out of here, even if I got access to the keys.

  Jackie opened his door, and the night air was damp and cold. I heard the hiss of the engine, but also the hiss of a low waterfall, splashing, dropping, landing wetly. Jackie opened my door and, with one claw, he ripped through the overlapped duct tape and yanked it off me in a fast tear. It took a patch of skin as he threw it aside, the pain instant, intense, and impossibly sharp; I cried out. He wrenched me out and tossed me. The pot landed first and shattered. I landed on top of it, on the ground beyond the drive, the torn skin of my arm on the manicured lawn . . . and the soil. Bleeding atop the potted dirt of Soulwood.

  Face on the ground, my legs tangled in my skirts, I opened my hand on the ground, pressing the earth of home, to mix with the land beneath me and with my trickling blood. I dug my fingers into the mixed soils and curled them around a small fistful of dirt.

  The grass, the land its roots grew in, and I woke up fast, as if I’d ingested a pot of Rick’s coffee directly into my bloodstream. I reached into the ground. And I connected with . . . something. Not my land, not my woods, but something deep, something that rested in the dark, somnolent and content. I scratched my broken nails into the soil, mixing the dirt of here with Soulwood dirt, together with my blood. Jackie gripped my elbows behind me with his claws, piercing my skin, and I hissed, like the engine. Jackie laughed.

  He lifted me to my feet and shook me. “Be good.” With one hand, he pulled me after him toward the mansion, past upscale landscaping and an artificial pond with a waterfall. The door of the house opened. Roxy stood silhouetted in the light. A man. A man with clawed hands and hellfire eyes. Another gwyllgi. And I knew him. As a dozen children gathered around the dog in mostly human form, I put it all together. It had been there all along if I had just made the connections.

  Roxbury T. Benton had been his ancestor and an early member of the church, the name misspelled in the newspaper as Roxbury T. Bantin. Four generations later, R. Thomas Benton the fourth ran the Knoxville FBI. And he had somehow made friends with Jackie. Maybe through Dawson, who had come through the legal system. Dogs recognizing dogs . . . Dawson led Roxy to Jackie. And now Dawson was dead.

  More things fell into place, nearly clicking toge
ther as I comprehended each one.

  Dogs might have bred true in some of the churchmen. Maybe recessive genes in some who had come from the old country among the first church settlers, like Mama’s people. Out of multiple wives and so many children in each generation, there was a much greater chance of more dogs being bred.

  Vampire blood maybe made the trait stronger.

  Roxy might even have generated the relationship with HST. So he could know that the gwyllgi were safe from detection. That would explain why the HST had been trapped in the warehouse and drained dry. They hated paranormals. They would have hunted gwyllgi down and killed them, so Benton took the war to them first. That assumption in my sea of assumptions felt solid.

  Whatever his motives, Roxy was the lynchpin who tied it all together. My fear spiked, sweaty and cold.

  Benton smiled at me and I knew he was remembering my sassy talk in the FBI meeting when I had attempted to school him. Now I was at his feet. He said softly, “So much for your vaunted reasoning.”

  My lips wanted to quiver, but I clutched the dirt and blood in my fingers as more of my blood ran from my ripped flesh and pooled into my fist. I said, “I would have had to know that you and Jackie had two or more things in common in order to make an assumption that you would also have others in common. Had I known that Roxy was your nickname earlier, I might have made part of the connection. Had I checked to see who in the legal system Dawson had met, I might have made another part.”

  When the leader of the Knoxville FBI tilted his head, I continued. “I had no idea that your first ancestor to this area was a churchman, and therefore I could make no deductions or assumptions. Though now that I do know that, I can assume that the Dawsons, the Jacksons, and the Bentons are—or were—all in cahoots together. Gwyllgi. Dogs of darkness.”

  Benton stepped down the steps to the ground, his posture negligent, a big dog on his own hunting grounds, walking closer, studying me with unwavering eyes. He leaned in and sniffed. Like a dog. Coiled a hand in my hair and yanked me closer.

  He and Jackie half carried me around the house, through a basement door and a bright room filled with lawn equipment, through a door that was well hidden. It opened into an area under the house—bare rock floor, concrete block walls, no windows. The lights glared, bright and intense after the dark of the night. They landed on a vampire, chained to the wall. It was skin and bones, with ratty long reddish hair wearing the remains of denim pants and a once-white shirt. It looked like a scarecrow until the scent of my blood hit it, and its eyes opened wide. It inhaled fast, its fangs snapping down with a sharp click. But the sclera of its eyes weren’t red with blood-flush, rather they were a pale pink lined with darker veins, its pupils blacker than a moonless night. The gwyllgi had starved it and chained it to the wall with silver, hanging off the ground. Benton had done with the vampire what Jackie and his father had done.

  Humans who drank of vampires became blood-drunk, open to compulsion, addicted. Not gwyllgi. They were free of the compulsion, and the blood made them stronger.

  That would be the source of their power—to be able to drink vampire blood, to grow stronger and more powerful without becoming addicted, without becoming captive to the fanged ones. And they could also farm out the blood to the desperate, people who were hoping to drink vampire blood to remain young, to regain health, to survive when their own bodies turned against them. And if someone they sold or traded blood to became addicted, that just gave them more control.

  That was the final, real reason why the gwyllgi had joined with the HST. The CIA knew that the group had acquired the list. And added to it. Benton found that out. To get the names and personal information of the paranormals, he and his dogs had found a way into the organization. To get the information on which vampires might be easiest to take. Which women might be easy to breed with. I understood it all. And it was too late.

  They shackled me to a chair with handcuffs, which was plumb stupid, as it was nothing more than an old captain’s chair, the wood dry and long-dead. I know wood. They thought a chair and handcuffs would be enough to keep me cowed. But my shoes rested on the stone floor. They turned off the lights and left me there, in the dark, with a starving vampire, closing the door behind them.

  As my eyes futilely tried to adjust to total darkness, I kicked off my boots—which took some time because I’d tied them on tightly—and toed off my wool socks to place my bare feet on the cold rock. The vampire hadn’t been on this spot of rock, so there was no sensation of maggots and death. I sighed with relief. Behind me, my blood dripped off my fingers to pool into the seat and trail down the turned wooden legs to the rock.

  “I thirst,” the vampire whispered, the sssing sibilants bouncing through the underground room. “Feed me.”

  “No,” I said, pushing my consciousness into the stone beneath my feet, searching for contact with the dirt beneath it, or to the side of it. But instead of soil I found rock, rock, and more rock, a single massive, rounded boulder that extended far beneath the ground, probably the result of some geologic event so far in the past that even the earth itself had forgotten it. My consciousness spread out and around and down, searching for soil and moisture and life, looking for the strong sense of life that I had found in the front yard. Roxy had chosen his housing site well, and according to Biblical principles about building one’s house on rock, but . . . there was a small, hairline crack and the first grains of soil filled with moisture, just . . . there.

  I gasped with relief, following the moisture as it gathered in the narrow crack of boulder and moved slowly, my mind following it down through the stone and then up into dirt and rocks and decayed matter and . . . the roots of plants and grass. I knew where my awareness was—the backyard, just on the other side of the concrete block wall where the vamp hung.

  I recognized the sense of life I had felt in the front yard, old and sleeping and powerful.

  “What are you?” the vampire asked, its voice rasping like leather on bone. “You are not human.”

  I didn’t have time, breath, or energy to respond, too busy trying to think of a way to contact my woods from so far away. I didn’t know if the paltry bit of soil clenched in my fist and on the stone beneath me—Soulwood soil, from my busted pot—was enough. I dropped the bit of bloody Soulwood dirt onto the floor I reached . . .

  My belly heaved, not with nausea, but as if the rooty muscles were straining, as if I were trying to do sit-ups. Or as if the roots inside me were stretching through solid ground, seeking water. Seeking life. Seeking home. My hands itched. I felt as if I were falling, the world twirling around me. I reached. And reached.

  But it was too far. And I was too small. Too weak.

  Bright lights flashed before my eyes, like stars falling. Pain beat through my bloodstream.

  * * *

  When I came to myself, I was gasping, pouring with sweat, muscles trembling. The world of blackness around me tilted and spun, a sickening whirl. I breathed deeply, trying to find some sort of stability in the blackness.

  On the wall the vampire clanked its shackles. “Hungry . . . ,” it rasped.

  “Yes. I get that,” I whispered, the words a faint echo from the concrete walls. Maybe, instead of reaching Soulwood, there was a way to stimulate the ancient power beneath the ground. Maybe I could get it to . . . do what? I wasn’t sure, but I had few other options.

  Breathing deeply, slowly, I reached into the soil toward the slumbering sentience. I touched the consciousness beneath the ground, the way I might stick a toe into a great pool. It slept on, unmoved by the slight pressure of my mental tap, though something passed between us: a flare of energy, or perhaps of life force. I was suddenly able to take a breath without pain or exhaustion; the strength of the consciousness flowed into me, filling me, the way water flows into a pool: effortlessly.

  From far away, I felt something shift. Brighten. It was a feeling akin to the visual act
of seeing a candle lighted on a distant mountain peak on a moonless night. A vague, remote spark in the far darkness, seen best when looking away, to the side, and not directly on.

  “I smell your blood. I thirst.” The vampire sounded stronger, more alert, and it clanged its shackles, the metal loud.

  I reached toward the spark of light, the flicker of contact, a life force that was waking and stretching. The glow brightened on the distant mountain, suddenly familiar, oddly, unexpectedly aware of me. I realized that I was visualizing my actual home, not a virtual location in my own mind, but a place in time and reality; bouncing off contact with the sleeping sentience below me, I reached again through that life force. I touched the power of my woods. It latched onto me, wrapping itself around me, as if I was tied to it even more securely than I was tied to this old chair.

  I had known that Soulwood was my land, my wood. I belonged to it as surely as it belonged to me. Perhaps more than I imagined.

  My intestines twisted and writhed, rigid as wood within me. It hurt, the way a tree hurt after lightning hit, or when vines sent root tendrils into its bark. Attack. I felt as though I was responding to attack.

  Across the room, I heard metal squeal. “I thirssst.”

  I reached out to my land. And, through my land, to Paka. Here, I thought at her. I’m here.

  I felt her response. She was still in cat form, and her ears perked high, her whiskers shivered; she was aware of me. Paka nudged a warm, sleek body next to her and made a cat noise that was half scream, half challenge. She leaped out of a moving car’s window. Occam followed, landing and jumping from the ground into a tree all in one move, claws sinking deep, to race along a branch. They were close. Very close.

  How had they followed me?

  Ah. Right. The cell phone.

  Maggots followed the werecats, leaping, racing maggots. A vampire, two of them, on their trail, as fast as they were, perhaps faster.