I felt the blade cutting me free, hacking me from the earth, tearing me out of the soil. The air felt strange on my roots and limbs, and my bark shivered and ached as I was moved. And then I was resting on Soulwood, on the land behind my house. I dug my fingers into the earth and slept. Days passed.
But every day there were the humans and a predator cat, talking, talking, talking, making me listen. Making me care for them, for the things they had to say. And every day, more of my bark slipped from me, fewer leaves grew upon me. And I stood from the earth and walked upon my land.
The humans and a predator cat came and went and fed my mouser cats and brought me food and water. I woke and I ate and I drank. I listened to the noises of the humans as they spoke and told me tales. With them and alone, I walked around Soulwood, silent, touching my trees, knowing the earth. I slept in the woods, sinking deep, communing with the resting power beneath the ground.
And finally, one day I looked at the predator cat and I said, “Occam?” He chuffed and shifted to human and held me in his arms. He was scarred, missing part of his hand, most of his roots. Not roots. His hair. I closed my eyes and wrapped my limbs about him, sad that he was still so damaged.
• • •
Three weeks after I was cut from the earth, I woke in my bed. The sheets felt strange beneath me. The mouser cats felt strange beside me. The house was too enclosed, too empty, and too full. I crawled out of bed and pulled on clothes. My sister Mud slept on the couch. I didn’t understand why, but she was safe so it didn’t really matter. When the sun rose I was sitting on the front porch, my face to the east and the pale dawn sun. And I realized that I was nearly human again. Or could be, if I chose.
Like a flowering plant, a morning glory trying to bloom, new leaves and some kind of odd, tight blooms were all over me, trying to open. I ripped the flowers away and watched them disintegrate into ash and vanish into the land below me. I sat on the porch swing, unsettled and despondent as the sun rose, before I went back inside and sat on the couch, where Mud directed me, to sit and to think. To decide what I needed to do. I hadn’t gotten very far in my plans, beyond some amorphous ideas and visual images. Words were still hard.
I was still sitting on my couch, a blanket over my knees and cats prowling across the furniture. Mud had been banging around in the kitchen for two hours now. The scent of fresh bread was warm on the air. And I felt a car pulling slowly up the hill to Soulwood. No. Not a car. A van. Familiar. This was the first time I had felt and understood sensations that I once took for granted. Unit Eighteen was on the way up. I looked out the front window, wondering what this might mean.
Birds were fighting in the oaks out front. Deer were pawing and eating the grass in the lower part of the yard. Squirrels were picking out nesting sites. The ground in the three acres of yard was warming, the grasses and herbs reaching for the surface and the pallid heat of the sun; the cold temps were gone. Spring had arrived.
And people were coming up my hill. I thought it might be okay for them to come.
Inside, the woodstove had heated the house. The dust that had accumulated while I worked the case was gone. The dishes were washed and put away. The house was neat as a pin. I felt a small measure of pleasure at being able to remember that saying, one of Mama’s, though I’d never understood how a pin might be considered neat.
I had been home for weeks, Mud staying with me, taking care of me. I had no idea why Mud had been allowed to stay with me for so long. She assured me that T. Laine had handled it and Mama and Daddy hadn’t seen me, which was a good thing, as I had changed a lot.
Mud had been busy with more than housecleaning. She had caught up the winter chores in the garden and it felt hopeful and ready for spring. She had also scraped much of the bark off of me, down to the skin below it. Had hacked my roots away. Clipped and cut my leaves. Except for the pale white blooms this morning, and the leaves I sprouted here and there when I slept, I looked almost human again, though my joints were still dark brown with bark-like flesh on elbows, knees, feet, and knuckles. But that was fading, softening, vanishing as Mud rubbed them down with my winter emollient every morning and evening. Overall, my skin was browner. Not tanned, but nut-brown all over, though paler skin was visible at my underarms and in blotches on my torso. My eyes were the glittering green of spring leaves and emeralds. My hair was rougher, curlier, redder and browner in streaks. Most mornings when I woke, it reached the middle of my back and wild curls sprang out around my hairline like rootlets or vines about to burst into leaf. Mud kept the plant parts clipped and I hadn’t told her about the flowers this morning, thinking—hoping—they were just an anomaly.
I believed that in a week or so I would look and sound human to the casual observer. I’d look human, but I was different.
For the last week, as she groomed me like a topiary animal, I had begun to talk with Mud, to understand her words. To remember my human life. My pasts, all of them. My youth. My family. My marriage. Unit Eighteen. And with each memory that returned, Mud and I celebrated. Today, Mud had invited people over. That was why the van was climbing the hill. Company was coming. Ahhh . . . I remembered.
I felt the car stop. Felt people, sentient beings, get out and walk to the porch. Rick. T. Laine. Tandy. JoJo. Not Occam. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Rick knocked on my door.
“They’re here,” Mud sang out, racing in from cleaning the bathroom, which often meant carrying leaf trimmings to the yard. I smiled at the thought. She sped to the front of the house and threw the door open. Let them in. Chattered at them. I studied their faces, which were carefully neutral and noncommittal. JoJo’s head was wrapped in twisted vines—no, they were braids—adorned with beads that sparkled like sun on water. She wore green and black, the color of leaves and dark wood. I liked it. T. Laine was wearing black pants and a thin jacket with a white shirt. She had cut her foliage—her hair. Tandy was wearing browns. Good tree colors. Rick was wearing the same colors as T. Laine, even in his foliage, which was white and black in ribbons of color. It didn’t mean anything that they were dressed alike. And Rick’s leaves— No. His hair. His hair had new white streaks in it. Accomplishment shot through me at the thoughts.
They said hellos, to which I said nothing. They sat. They stared at me as if waiting for me to speak, but I had nothing to say.
Mud had made tea and coffee and now placed a bread plate on the coffee table along with a jar of my homemade jelly. On the plate was a loaf of bread she had made herself and sliced. A stack of plates and forks were nearby. I remembered that Leah had traded a townie for the plates when she was first married to John. She had been proud of the barter and told me about it every time we used them.
Mud went to the kitchen and my eyes followed her. She brought back a cup of coffee and gave it to Rick as if she was his personal servant. Repeated the trip and gave Tandy a cup. But she offered nothing to the women. Church training. I hated it. I felt a spark of disgust and fury, though it fizzled and disappeared. Fury and disgust were human emotions. I hadn’t felt them in a long time.
Rick started talking. “We’re here to debrief. You know what I’m saying?”
A debrief was a summation. I remembered. Mostly. Though it seemed a long time in the past. I nodded again, silent. The front door opened and Soul walked in. She hadn’t been in the van. Soul was a light dragon, an arcenciel. She had flown. I remembered that too and felt a momentary satisfaction that the memory was still inside me somewhere. She took a seat in the rocking chair, watching me, her gray clothing floating with her movements.
Abruptly, Soul said, “The flames at the home of Senator Tolliver were abnormally hot. Yet they went out all by themselves after you dropped into the earth. The fire department did its job, but the houses and the fir trees were mostly smoking ruins by the time they got there. Smoking. Not flaming.”
I continued to stare at her. She had the most amazing eyes, black with faint tints of
purple and green and blue that caught the light at odd moments.
T. Laine said, “The body in the limo, the one that should have been Sonya? You remember?”
I nodded once, remembering.
“It hadn’t been cremated. The FBI held it at the morgue pending further testing. It was fully human and turned out to be the body of a missing local woman. Mother of three. PhD in nursing. She had been drugged and placed in the limo to burn to death in Sonya’s place. They murdered her to carry on their bloodlines and the transfer of real property.”
JoJo said, “We captured four salamanders: the female who had played the part of Sonya, the nanny, and two other females who were hiding inside the smoking walls of the house. We also caught four baby salamanders who had stayed in the pool and not attacked you. The others disappeared, presumed burned in the fire.”
I tilted my head, not disagreeing. I had killed all the ones I could find.
Soul said, “We put them in the null room. Then we transported them to PsyLED, where they died. The null room stripped them of their magic. It was . . . tragic.” Her tone said otherwise.
I frowned. Or thought I did. I wasn’t sure. Soul had wanted all the salamanders dead. So had I, and I had finished the battle for her. I had fed dozens to the land. I had murdered even those not yet guilty of a crime. Even so, the human law would call it self-defense if they ever thought to try me for a crime. But . . . all the salamanders were killers. They poisoned the earth and the trees and the land. They killed the plants that I loved, that I was here to protect. PsyLED’s job was to police paranormals who couldn’t be kept in check by any other means. And that too, I had done. And perhaps Soul had done by placing the salamanders in a null room. Again ending her war.
Tandy said, “Once we knew what to look for, the explanation was all there in the family’s financial papers. Jefferson/Healy/Devin wanted the family money back in his hands and under the control of him and his bloodline—his mates and progeny. All the shootings and fires were about money and the transfer of property out of the hands of humans and into the hands of the salamanders. They had been living below the human law enforcement radar for decades. They took each other’s places as needed for the last two centuries.”
Rick said, “We still don’t know if the nanny was actually trying to kill Abrams.”
“Worst shot in the history of serial killers,” JoJo said. They made a noise. It was laughter.
My eyes tracked the speakers, but I still had no desire to say anything. I just listened and thought. Mud poured me a cup of super-sweet lemon ginger tea, which I had developed a deep desire for, though it didn’t taste exactly the way it had before. I accepted the cup and sipped, instantly soothed by the tart sweetness. No one spoke. I realized that I really needed to say something; most anything would do. I thought back over the days of the case, and one thing seemed important. Occam hadn’t come. Occam wasn’t here. But I couldn’t say that. I said instead, “Did you bring Krispy Kremes?”
Tandy laughed, his odd reddish brown eyes on me, the sound of his laughter relieved and excited and joyful. JoJo put a hand on his arm and he quieted. None of that made sense to me.
Rick looked down and I realized he might be upset. Part of me wanted to water his roots and I smiled at the urge. Tandy smiled with me.
JoJo took up the narrative again. “The raid on the DNAKeys compound didn’t reveal what we thought or feared. There were vamps and witches and weres there, just like we thought, living and working on the campus. That’s what they called it. The campus.”
Rick glowered and said, “They were on-site by choice. The were-creatures were hoping that someone at DNAKeys would find a cure for were-taint, and the researchers claim to have been making some progress on it.”
“Prions cause were-taint. Prions can’t be killed,” I said at last. “Not by fire, heat, radiation, freezing. They never, ever die.”
Bitterly, Rick said, “No, they can’t be killed. The claims were false.”
JoJo pulled at her earrings, a nervous tic, one I remembered. She said, “The witches were on contract. The vamps were there on contract too, to provide blood as needed for experiments on diseases that cause bleeding—coagulation diseases, from the new form of Ebola to platelet problems to one called DIC. Don’t ask me what it stands for. It’s a bunch of syllables.”
“Disseminated intravascular coagulation,” T. Laine added. “And that part of the claims was true. They found some new treatments that are amazing.” I remembered that Lainie had a lot of degrees and partial degrees and her breadth of knowledge had made her attractive to PsyLED.
With that thought, all sorts of memories, full and partials, came back to me, piles of images and smells and sounds, landing on me like a kaleidoscopic avalanche. My lips stretched into a smile and Tandy rose, crossed the room, and sat beside me on the couch. He put his head on my shoulder, which felt peculiar and comfortable all at once. “She’s remembering,” he said. I was pretty sure Tandy was watering me. Like Mud had watered me in the woods. No. He was crying on my shoulder. That was it.
I lifted a hand and patted his shoulder. I said, “You stopped eating. You lost weight.”
“I’ve been worried about you turning into a cord of firewood,” he said, his voice shaking. “I’ve been worried that Occam wouldn’t heal from his scars. It’s hard to eat when I’m worried.”
That was interesting. “Mud, make Tandy some of this tea”—I lifted the mug—“and fix him a jelly sandwich.”
Mud stood, heading for the kitchen, saying, “Okay. Can I hold a gun on him if he tells me he ain’t hungry?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” Rick said to Mud. “You are way too much like your sister for my comfort level.”
“Thank you,” Mud said.
“Occam?” I asked. “He’s . . .”
“Scarred,” Rick said, something odd in his voice. “PsyLED sent him to Gabon, twice now, to a colony of were-leopards to heal.” I said nothing and Rick added, so very gently, “He came back from the first visit to make sure we moved you safely from your . . . your rooted state to Soulwood. Then he had to go back.”
“Oh,” I said, my fingers picking at my skirt. I wondered if he’d ever come back here. To have dinner with me. But I didn’t ask.
My sister ended up fixing them all jelly and bread and making them eat it, though not at the end of a gun. My baby sister was quite forceful, all without the need for weapons. I liked her. And I had things I needed to do for her. If I could remember what they were.
The members of Unit Eighteen stayed for an hour, talking. Memories opened like the blooms of flowers and what might have been feelings began to unfurl inside me as they talked and shared and ate Mud’s bread. It was pleasant. Confusing but valuable. The memories were settling inside me. Enough for me to know that Occam’s not being here made me very sad. I remembered the disfigurement and the scars. Perhaps I hadn’t healed him well enough after all.
EIGHTEEN
Within forty-eight hours after the visit by Unit Eighteen, I had regained the last of my human form, though I had to trim my leaves and the vines in my hair several times a day. My hair was still growing awfully fast, needing to be trimmed every morning to keep it near my shoulders. The reddish tresses were riotously curly.
My returning memory had suggested that I had let some things go too long unresolved, undealt with, unfinished. Before I went back to work, in a week or so, I had a lot of relationship housekeeping to catch up on. With that in mind, Mud and I were heading to the church in my old Chevy C10. I was driving for the first time, taking the roads slow and cautiously.
“I think this’n’s a stupid idea.”
“I heard you the first time. And the fourth,” I said mildly.
“I done asked.” She stuck a finger in the air, shaking it with each statement. “Mama and Daddy ain’t gonna let me live with you’un.” Shake fing
er. “They ain’t gonna let me go to no public school to learn the lies of evolution and science.” Shake. “They ain’t gonna let me wear no pants or cut my hair. They ain’t—”
“I didn’t trim my leaves,” I said.
Mud stopped. Her raised hand shot out and she lifted my hair. Green leaves sprouted in my hairline at my nape. A few small vines tickled there. “Why?”
“Because if you don’t get taught, if you don’t learn how to use your gifts, you’ll likely make the same mistake I did and grow leaves and vines and take root. You can live with me and not make the same mistakes because I’ll teach you.”
“Mama will never, ever in a million, billion years agree.”
“We’re invited to have tea with all the mamas and Daddy.”
“All of ’em?”
“All of them.”
“His surgery’s tomorrow. The surgeon made him wait until his liver was in better shape and his blood was built up enough to cut him open. And he wanted to wait till you were back from undercover.”
Undercover. That was the lie PsyLED had told my family about my absence. “I know. That’s why this is the perfect time to hit them with the truth.”
“Why now?”
“Because when Daddy was shot, I wanted him alive. I might have . . . accidentally . . . told the land to keep him alive.”
“Did he grow roots?”
The laugh that escaped me had a gurgle, but it was the first that came close to my own, previous, human laugh. It sounded strangled, but it gave me hope. “Not that I saw,” I said, “but he needs to be aware and unsurprised if they pull a passel of leaves and roots out of his belly.”
Mud giggled.
I showed my ID and, together with my true sib, drove through the gate onto the grounds of God’s Cloud of Glory Church. We slowed as we passed the barbed and vicious-looking trees on the inside of the twelve-foot fence. It looked like something out of Snow White, a cursed world that turned on itself and its humans, spindly saplings with long thorns, pulpy deep green leaves with red petioles and leaf veins, dark, wet-looking bark that looked as if blood seeped out. On one of the spikes of thorns a squirrel squirmed, making piteous noises. A vine was wrapped around it like a snake, contracting, constricting, squeezing. The tree was killing it.