TWO

Moving methodically but with practiced speed, I grabbed up my guns, extra ammo, and raced to the front porch, down the steps of the house, to the ground, where my bare feet touched the earth. Power I had banked away flared up in me again, through me, out my palms, which itched and burned in reaction, my fingertips tingling. I ducked into the depression between the raised beds in the front yard, a series of narrow, twisting pathways about three feet deeper than the beds and marked with large flat stepping-stones. Places to stand and fire, paths to get away through if necessary. Paths made by the sweat of my brow and lots of broken blisters.

The walls of the beds had been made of poured concrete that came to my waist, and bloomed with medicinal plantings: spotted touch-me-not jewelweed, a dozen varieties of thyme, and some other medicinal herbs in pots that were pretty to look at, like lamb’s ears, mullein, monarda, and graybeard. They were all mixed in with the ornamental impatiens and geraniums—some in clay pots—for the pretty flowers. I placed the guns on the raised beds, except the shotgun. Holding it beneath one arm, I scratched my palms one at a time until they were red from the pressure of my nails, trying to ease the pain of drawing on the forest’s energies. That power still boiled inside me, hot and potent but useless at a distance and without blood. But if they bled onto my land, they were mine.

I rolled my shoulders and knelt, most of my body now protected by the concrete and the earth the beds contained, placing my back against the flagpole I’d had installed in the center of the four beds, all designed for just this purpose. The flagpole was little more than a twelve-foot-tall angle iron, and it had never flown a flag. Most people never consciously saw it. I braced my body against the concrete and settled into a comfortable, if not relaxed, firing position, raising the loaded shotgun, and placing the back of the weapon against the flat side of the flagpole. It was an unorthodox method of firing a shotgun, but I wasn’t a large woman. I had fired an unbraced one once, and the recoil had tossed me back. I’d landed flat on my backside, with a shoulder so bruised I couldn’t use the arm for two weeks. I wanted to buy an automatic rifle, a weapon much better suited to a woman’s physiology than a shotgun, but they were expensive, and I wasn’t exactly rolling in money.

I dug my toes into the cool grass of early autumn, blew out my breath, just like John had taught me, and shouted, “Stop!” I waited a moment as the word echoed and faded away, surprised when my invaders actually came to a halt in the shadows of the woods.

“State your piece,” I yelled.

“Put down your weapons, woman!” one of the men called. They were too far away for me to make out their faces yet. But they’d be coming closer.

“Don’t make me hurt you!” I yelled.

No one answered. I couldn’t see them well enough to identify them, but I felt them through the dirt and placed the three men in a tight grouping about a hundred fifty feet away, in the cover of the forest. At least they hadn’t split up. That would make it more difficult to bring them down. They were too far away, however, for a shotgun to protect me, and plenty close enough to take me down with a rifle, providing they found a higher vantage point to fire down at me, hidden in the low paths between the beds. For the first time in my life, I wished I were a real witch, as the church had once accused, one who could bring up a protective circle or send fire shooting outta my eyes or whatever witches did to people who wanted to hurt them. Not having better options, I decided to goad them.

“You’uns come outta the woods,” I shouted in church-speak. No one moved. “Cowards! Afraid to face a woman on equal terms? Whatchu gonna do, huh? Shoot me from a distance like some kinda cheat? Maybe you think you’uns is all like some kinda assassins, but you ain’t! You’re chicken!” I shouted. “Each and every one of the churchmen is all chickens! Come out and face me, ya chickens!” Schoolyard taunts. They worked.

No one spoke loud enough for me to hear over the distance, but I felt them start slowly toward me, widening into a triangle shape, which was unfortunate, the man in the middle hanging back, the ones on the sides coming forward faster. The man in the center stumbled, the muscadine vine catching his foot. His hand touched the ground, bare skin to the earth, and I felt a tremble through the woods. A wrongness I couldn’t place, deeper and darker than the wrongness of Rick and Paka. But there was no time to dissect that feeling. He righted himself and moved faster. The trees around the clearing began to sough, branches swaying back and forth slowly, like a sensation of breathing, though I felt no wind in the lowered paths of the raised beds. The grass beneath me shifted and bent beneath my weight, scratchy between my toes.

Smoke from my woodstove swirled and twisted around the house, smelling of warmth and false reassurance. The man on my right moved out of the woods and I saw his face. It was Brother Ephraim, my personal nemesis, a small man, but one who carried a big hate. He thought all women were evil and needed to be put in their places, beneath his boot, starting at an early age. Brother Ephraim hated me for lots of reasons, all of them related to my disobedience. I hadn’t done as the church decreed and married the former leader, the old pervert better known as Colonel Ernest Jackson Sr., at age twelve. I hadn’t been punished for my infraction either. Instead I’d accepted a proposal from John and Leah Ingram, and gone off church land with them, away from the men who wanted to either marry me off to the highest bidder or burn me at the stake for being a witch—because even then I’d had magic enough for the churchmen to notice. My leaving had been as much a taunt as my words just now.

From that day over a decade ago, Brother Ephraim wanted me in the punishment house, my punishment left in his hands.

I’d die first.

The man on my left stepped out of the trees—Joshua Purdy. No surprise. Joshua had tried to court me starting the week John died, the moment it was discovered that he’d left me his land, instead of leaving it to the church, like any self-respecting churchman should have. The land gave me value in the church’s eyes, and Joshua was determined to claim me and the property both.

I’d die—second. I almost smiled.

The man in the center walked free of the trees and the shadows starting to stretch with early evening. Ernest Jackson Jr., called “Jackie,” had become the head preacher and had taken over running the church. The colonel’s son and heir was the meanest human being on the face of the Earth. I’d looked up what men like him were called. Misogynists. Sociopaths. Maybe even psychopaths. Dangerous, no matter what they were called. If the others hated me, then Jackie hated me with a burning passion, like coals of hatred piled up and waiting for the smallest inflammatory incident to flame up and roar, destroying everything his path. The thoughts were too poetic for the little turd. The hatred was mutual. And Jackie had drunk vampire blood long ago, to help cure him of a childhood cancer. Drinking blood of the damned had to have contributed to changes in his brain. Likely made him crazier than he woulda been in the first place.

Maybe that was why his touch had spooked my woods. Hatred was like fire, capable of destroying everything in its path. Woods feared fire. Perhaps hate made them feel the same sort of terror.

Jackie’s hatred had gotten much worse when he discovered that I had allowed Jane Yellowrock’s raiding party through my property to church land, the night his daddy went missing. It made me partially responsible for the arrests and the removal of the children by the child protective services of the state of Tennessee and the loss of his daddy, both in his eyes and in my own. Jackie and I had history. I could only hope I’d live long enough to see Jackson Jr. dead and gone too.

Brother Ephraim raised his shotgun and fired, but not at me. Into the back of the house. Two shots, a few seconds to reload, and two more shots, interspersed with the sounds of breaking glass and things shattering. When the sound died away, I heard him laughing as he again reloaded.

From behind me, from along the southwest border of the property, down the mountain a goodly ways, I felt something race up the road and leap into my forest. A creature that didn’t belong here. Foreign. Wrong. The forest scratched the soles of my feet in warning. The grass shifted beneath me in alarm. The leaves thrashed overhead. Wrongwrongwrong thrummed up through my flesh. But I had more immediate problems—the three men hiding in the shadows.

“Stop!” I shouted at my visitors. They halted, each man holding his ground and a shotgun, the weapon of choice for most hunters, for the churchmen, and for every redneck around here. “Say what you came to say,” I demanded, “and get off my land.”

“You’re dressed as a man, Sister Nell,” Brother Ephraim called over the intervening distance. He was wearing camo greens and blended into the woods just beyond. “We would counsel you in womanly ways,” he said.

Nothing new there.

“We’uns jist seen you entertain a strange man in your home without the presence of a family man to protect your honor and virtue,” Jackie said. “You are now sullied in the eyes of the church and must submit to punishment to bring about repentance and atonement. It’s time to return to the arms of the church and the family of your God.”

“You’re living alone, instead of as a helpmeet to a husband,” Brother Ephraim said. “Women are weak, and apt to fall into the clutches of evil men.”

Again, nothing new.

The new feeling of wrongness was growing closer, much closer, from the men before me and from the gorge behind me, from where the road curved around the property. My back tensed with apprehension, but there wasn’t time to look over my shoulder. There was no way I could turn from the churchmen. “There aren’t many men more evil than you, you perverts! Go away,” I shouted. “I don’t need to hurt you.”

The men laughed at my words, and Joshua Purdy stepped from the shadows. He shook his oily hair back from his narrow face and said, “I’ve offered for you, time and again, to make you an honest woman, Nell. Accept my offer in the manner it was intended. Don’t make us do something we might regret.”

“Regret this,” I muttered. I fired my shotgun. The boom was enough to damage my eardrums. The butt of the gun jerked down along the length of the flagpole, the barrel rising with the recoil. The men darted into cover as I steadied the weapon, tracking Jackie, who had ducked behind the vegetable garden not far from the side of the house and was crouching his way to the house corner for better cover. I fired again, taking down a vine of second-crop string beans, in a haze of green leaf shrapnel. I was deaf from the concussion and my eyes were tearing from the blasts as I reloaded with practiced ease.

All I needed to do was wing them. Just a single scratch by a shot pellet or vine thorn or anything, and I’d have the injured one’s life force in my hands. But according to what I felt through my feet, no blood had dripped onto the soil of my land, onto the soil of Soulwood.

I blinked to clear my vision, catching sight of a flashing shadow, the shadow of wrongness that had been racing toward me, up the hill. From one side, a black shape leaped thirty feet and landed on the house roof, a leopard digging in with her claws as she raced over the roof ridge. A black leopard, dark as night, dappled with spots like moon shadows on the forest floor. Shock sliced through me as if I’d slipped a knife blade along my flesh.

An instant later I heard a shotgun blast and Brother Ephraim’s high-pitched wail. His blood splattered in a sharp arc across the trailing muscadine vine and the dirt at its roots. The hunger for that blood roared up like wildfire. The soil sucked at the blood, the attention of the forest awakening and turning to the fight, eager. A tremor like electricity zapped through the trees and through me. Brother Ephraim was mine. This was part of my magic, my singular powers. To take the life of anyone who bled onto my land. To feed that life to the woods.

Jackie, hiding behind the beans, swiveled his shotgun toward the commotion and Ephraim’s scream. He stood, raising his gun into firing position. I took careful aim at him, my finger on the trigger. Without firing, so fast I didn’t have time to blink, Jackie pivoted his body, shifted his aim to me, and fired.

But he aimed too low. I felt the shot as it peppered into the soil of the raised beds. A terra-cotta pot busted, shards flying. Two impatiens plants took balls of hot shot to the roots and died.

Which made me mad.

I steadied my gun and squeezed the trigger. The gun boomed, plant parts flew inside the garden. I reloaded. Fast. So far as I could tell, I hadn’t done anything except make a salad. I tightened my finger on the trigger.

The blast shocked through my hands and arms as the gun slipped off the flagpole. The world tumbled around me, recoil sending me rolling across the yard. A fractured shiver came from the ground, one that felt heated, like fire burning the grass, ripped, like fescue torn and killed by sheep. This was fear and danger as grass understood them.

I saw Joshua Purdy as I rolled. Unbloodied. I tried to right myself. Tried to pull my shotgun into place. Tried to pull the power of the land around me and hit him with it, not even knowing if that might actually work. The last thing I saw was Joshua’s fist, coming at me.

*   *   *

I woke choking, drowning, shivering. I coughed and spluttered, pushing up from the water. I shook my head like a dog, my hair slinging water. By the feel of the earth beneath me, I knew where I was, about two hundred feet from the house, still on my land, where a spring cascaded from the rocks high behind the house, dropping to form a crick that ran most months out of the year. The water was still, unmoving in this natural bowl of earth, a shallow pool about a foot deep atop the clay depression. I rolled, dropping my backside into the chilled water, my knees up and arms locked, holding me in a sitting position. I coughed, expelling the water from my chest, the sound ragged before it finally eased. When I could breathe, I took in myself and my surroundings.

My coveralls’ straps were cut, my shirt torn away. My upper chest was exposed. Joshua was sitting above me on a rounded boulder, his shotgun resting on his knees, watching me. I couldn’t tell much from his expression, but I knew that he had tried to hurt me before he threw me in the pool, while I was unconscious. Tried to hurt me and couldn’t. Not in my forest.

My hands felt odd, as if I had held them too long against a heating pot, slightly burned. The power of the woods tingled on the air, up through the clay and the water, full of fury and fear, the same feeling in my hands. I had a feeling that my woods had zapped Joshua. It hadn’t been enough to kill him, but enough to stop him, make him rethink, giving me a chance to pick and choose my response. But now I was drained. I had nothing left inside me, unless he was bleeding, and I felt no blood where he sat.

I worked my jaw, feeling bruises and strained jaw joints, tender eye, swollen nose. He’d beaten me and taken me to a private place to do evil things to me, if not for the eerie woods that cast long, murky shadows and burned him with their anger.

Dark was coming. The trees of the woods raised above us, massive, big enough that three men couldn’t have held hands and circled the trunks with their arms, trees as big as those in an old-growth forest. My woods. Eight years ago, the trees had had less than a third their current circumference, only twenty-five to fifty years old, and showing the girth of all such trees. My magic had made them stronger, bigger, tying them to me in some way I didn’t understand. My magic had made the woods something else. Something other than just trees.

Years ago, I had killed a man who attacked me, much as Joshua had and for similar reasons. In fear and terror and panic, fighting for my life, I had fed him to the forest. I hadn’t even known for sure who he was. I still didn’t know. But that was my secret, never shared, not with anyone.

I was still slightly deaf, ears ringing, but I saw the branches move in their artificial wind, a breeze of the trees’ making. My woods were alert and eager, had been since they tasted the blood earlier. They were full of power, waiting to be used. Waiting to be fed. I hadn’t fed Soulwood but the once. Eight years ago. But the forest remembered.

The woods felt . . . hungry.

I dug my hands deeper into the bottom of the small pond, the reek of decay strong. The clay held the surface water in place, and a layer of leaves, dead and decaying from last winter, coated the bottom of the hollow. I shoved my hands through the muck and the soft clay, pushing back with my weight, forcing my hands deeper. My fingers found a thin strand of a root, not much bigger than a hair, but alive and pulsing with the forest’s life. I pulled on its energies and it released its life into my skin, the root instantly shriveling, dying. I’d pulled too much and I released the life force back into it quickly, rattled and surprised.

Breathing out, I was not aware until then that I’d been holding my breath. More carefully, I pulled on the energies in the soil, knowing this was dangerous, but needing what Soulwood could give me. Joshua had made a mistake leaving me here on my land, in contact with the soil and water, roots and plants, that were the surface of its soul. Now all I needed was for him to come close enough for me to scratch him. “Joshua,” I said, acknowledging his presence after a too-long silence.

His face didn’t change; he didn’t blink; I couldn’t tell if he was breathing, until eventually he said, “I’ll tell ’em I had my way with you.” His voice was toneless. “They’ll believe me. And they’ll marry us in the church to protect the reputation of a widder-woman.” I didn’t reply, just sat there, exposed, cold and wet with the chill of early autumn, night falling, watching him watch me. Feeling the weight of the snub-nosed .32 still in the bib’s pocket, weighing it down, remembering that I had more than one way out of this—though how he had missed the gun in his destruction of my clothes, I couldn’t know. I’d have pulled the gun and shot him now if I thought I could hit the side of a barn from this distance, with that gun. The .32 was for close-up work, not target shooting. I needed him closer. Much closer. Gun and magic both required me to be up close and personal with my opponent. Shifting my body weight back onto my hands, I pushed farther down into the clay and sludge.

Joshua kept talking. “They’ll marry us in front of witnesses. And I’ll have your land and you. The way it was supposed to be.”

Joshua, John’s nephew, had been my husband’s heir, until I came along. Joshua had believed that everything his uncle owned was going to be his, me included, and according to church law that would have happened, eventually. But Joshua didn’t want to wait. He never had.

Joshua, his brother, Jackie, and a couple of friends cornered me at the door to the ladies’ restroom, alone, after church services one day. I’d been almost fourteen and, though married to John in the eyes of the church, still a virgin.

John had caught his nephew and Joshua’s friends, all older than me by five years or more, pawing me, and the vengeance he had administered with his fists were images I carried with me still. My husband had changed his last will and testament soon after that. And for all intents and purposes, we left the church a year later. Everything had begun to change after that event outside the ladies’ room. And now here I was, with Joshua again, my virtue and life in danger.

“You hear me, woman?” he asked, his voice rising, a thrum of anger in it.

I quoted the Bible. “‘But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die.’”

“Take off your clothes, woman,” Joshua said, his voice vibrating with threat.

In the distance I heard a sound, rhythmic, a kind of throbbing resonance that might result if a music producer combined the rumble of a powerful engine with the purr of a house cat. In, out. In, out. Purring on the inhale and the exhale both. Paka. The black wereleopard in her animal form was close by.

Deep in the clay, my frigid fingers touched something solid and springy, and I wrapped them around the larger root, careful this time to take only a little, not what my panic screamed I would need. Holding on to the life of the forest, I tracked the purring, chuffing sound to a point of wrongness just to my right and slightly downhill, but . . . high, high in the trees. Below the leopard’s paw, hanging on the branch beside her, was a body, mostly dead. I could feel his blood on the tree bark, his breath slight and fast in the shadows, his heart fluttering. This blood felt wrong as well, but a wrongness I couldn’t explain. The wrongness was Brother Ephraim, and he was dying, dragged along an enormous tree branch by the powerful jaws of the black leopard. Blood poured from him onto the tree, as if deep gouges scored his flesh. The pumping of his heart was speeding, but the circulation itself was slowing as he bled out. Paka had wounded him most grievously while saving me, and he was dying. Dying fast. Blood loss and shock would kill her victim in minutes.

Joshua shifted on his pile of boulders. “Jackie said you’d let the devil into your house. A she devil and her devil man. And we had to take you back or you’d lose your soul. So . . . you’re mine. Jackie said so.” When I didn’t reply he said, “Put aside the Taser you used on me. I won’t have my wife with a weapon.”

Fear welled up in me. This . . . this was what I’d feared all my life. Punishment at the hands of a churchman. “No,” I said, so softly it was more a vibration in my chest. “No. I won’t.”

Joshua heard me and his face twisted in hate. “Take off your clothes. Submit. And I won’t hurt you.”

There was no cell signal on my land, and as best as I could tell, Jackson Jr. hadn’t gone down the road, to a place where he could call for help. He was tracking the leopard, his footfalls steady and determined. Reckless. Arrogant. But not stupid. Cunning evil on two legs. If Jackie got here first, he’d shoot Paka and help his pal Joshua rape me, while his other friend died in the trees. They’d rape me just like they’d tried to outside the ladies’ room when I was a kid. I’d kneed him in the groin then and tried to run, leaving him in the dirt. The boys still standing had grabbed me, hands up my dress. Until John found me. If John hadn’t come . . .

But I wasn’t a kid this time. I wasn’t helpless, even without a man to protect me. Even without Paka in the trees above.

“No,” I said, louder. “I won’t have you.” I shook my head. “And I won’t let you hurt me.”

Joshua’s fury beat through the ground, hot and cold all at once. I felt him gather himself, ready to attack.

I didn’t have a choice. I pushed my hands deeper into the clay, trapping myself if I had to move fast, the suction pulling at me, the cold stealing my life’s warmth, but burying me in the earth of my woods. I found a second root with my other hand, this one larger. A poplar tree root as big around as my lower arm, tiny rootlets feathering off into the soil. This one pulsed with life like a fire hose, full and potent.

With the two roots in hand, I could follow every life source in the forest, every bird, rat, snake, beaver, red deer, lynx in a distant tree, watching prey, and the wrongness that stalked my land. Jackie. Joshua. Brother Ephraim, dying overhead, all wrong. Paka, Wrong. And Rick LaFleur. He was still human-shaped, moving among the trees, silent and stealthy, more so than any human I’d ever known. He was closing on Jackie. He had the churchman’s scent. With him, on his shoulder, was a large rodent or small cat, another life force not seen here before, its energies wrapped around Rick’s. Cat on the dash of the car. Such wasted thoughts amid everything wrong that was poised to erupt into some new thing, something so very dangerous.

Above, Paka left the body of Brother Ephraim in the limbs and began moving through the trees, leaping from huge limb to huge limb, from tree to tree, silent, except for that double purr growing closer. It reverberated through the trunks of the poplar grove and into my bones. Paka was a wrongness here in the Appalachian Mountains, the trees resisting her. I feared that my woods might hurt her like they’d hurt Joshua. Instinctively I reached out to her through the trees, accepting her, pulling her in close to me, making her part of the land. It was the same thing I did when I put seeds or a plant’s roots into the soil; I claimed them for the land. In the same way I claimed Paka, giving her access to every part of the woods, making her part of them. Like the trees and plants, I could use her to help me as I desired. But I knew that by claiming her, I was also accepting responsibility for her actions. This was the good and the bad of living in Soulwood.

Joshua pulled his legs up under his body, in preparation to stand. “I said, take off your clothes, woman.”

From all around came a sound that had never belonged in this forest, a sound that was powerful and terrifying. Not a roar like an African lion, but like the dark of a moonless night, half scream, half rumble, a hacking, growling roar that spoke of death and menace. Joshua cringed and looked around. Paka had moved fast through the canopy of trees.

Overhead I caught a glimpse of a soaring hawk as it dove, hurtling through the limbs, half closing his wings. He tilted his body up, his claws opening, reaching. He caught a squirrel in his talons, the prey silent, swiftly crushed to death. The hawk spread his wings and flapped past me, to settle on a branch above Joshua. It ripped into the still warm body of the rodent and tore off a strip of bloody meat, the raptor staring down at Joshua as it ate. The squirrel’s blood splattered as it died. I knew it because of the roots I clutched, because they knew it, because the forest knew it all. Almost a whisper, Joshua demanded a third time, “Take. Off. Your. Clothes.”

I lifted my face and smiled at him, eyes only half-open, lips closed, demure, like the womenfolk were trained. “Nooo,” I said, drawing out the word.

Overhead the hawk paused, seeing the movement of a black shadow in the tall branches. Paka. Stealthy. Just above me. Her paws padding along a limb, about twenty feet away from Joshua. I had seen her leap onto my house. Joshua was well within Paka’s range. I wasn’t gonna have to kill this man, or not alone, at any rate. I laughed, the tone low and mocking. Slowly I added, “And if you touch me again, I’ll make you shit your britches, boy.”

Joshua stood, the shotgun gripped so tightly in his hands that his knuckles went white. A drop of something fell from above and hit him, square on his head. Joshua flinched and raised one hand, letting go, holding the gun by the barrel only. With the other hand, he touched the crown of his head. When he drew back his palm, it was smeared with blood. His eyes went wide; he tilted up his head, eyes darting through the branches. But Paka had already leaped. Flying through the air, silent as the shadow of death in the valley of evil.

Joshua saw. Movements jerky, he tried to raise his gun. Too late. Paka crashed into him and rode him to the earth, her claws embedded in his face, the long retractable claws holding his skull and jaw. Her back feet slammed into his middle, crushing out his breath in a strangled scream as they landed.

“Paka! No!” Rick darted into the opening between the trees and waded through the small pond, his boots sinking in the clay and splashing me with icy water.

Paka roared again, a hacking, growling scream that sent shivers through the forest and into my cold flesh. She turned greenish-gold eyes to me and hacked, asking me what I wanted to do. Rick came to a stop at the edge of the pool and looked from her to me, his eyes wide and uncertain, watching.

On his shoulder something moved, the other life force I’d noted earlier. It chittered and bounced up and down to see in the gloaming dark. When I didn’t react, it leaped ahead and landed, racing from Rick, fast as a flying bird, bounding as if winged, toward Paka. More wrongness rocked through the earth, shocking the breath from me.

“Pea! No!” Rick screamed. And I knew something horrible was about to happen. The thing drew in its body to leap. Steel glinted at its feet. Wrong, so very wrong.

“No,” I whispered. In response to my thoughts, the ground seemed to close over its back feet. The critter whiplashed and rolled, its body stuck, as if on flypaper. It squealed, the sound catlike and mad. The small creature rippled and went still. Like the others, it looked at me. It wasn’t a rodent. Not a cat. Something else. Something with dark steel claws the size of good butcher knives, longer than it should be able to use, small as it was. Neon green, shaped like a small cat, claws out. Steel claws. An animal with steel claws longer than my hand. It was so foreign that the forest would have rejected it and spit it out, sending the thing rolling, had I not clenched my mind around its feet. Yet, even through the ground, I couldn’t get a feel for what the creature was.

Rick stared at his mate, his face and eyes fierce and angry and hurting. I had no idea what the expressions and emotions meant, but they were deep and intense, an agony of the soul. “Paka. No. Please, Pea. She was trying to save the woman, Nell.”

The thing on the forest floor hissed, its claws flashing. I didn’t know what it was, but I had a feeling what it intended. “Why does it want to kill Paka?” I asked.

Paka, sitting atop Joshua, growled low, the sound vibrating through the air and the earth. Her claws had pricked him, making him bleed, and I could sense that blood seeping into the ground, Joshua’s blood and Ephraim’s blood, strange and metallic. The earth was thirsty, so eager for sustenance that it made my mouth go desert dry and my stomach cramp with need. Eight years since I had fed it. Eight long years. Distantly I heard Joshua whimper.

“That’s what its species does,” Rick said, his voice empty of everything but dread. “They live with us, like pets and friends, but they’re here for one reason, as a deterrent, to keep us from spreading the were-taint or killing humans. For a were-creature to kill a human or to bite and transmit the were-taint, the punishment is death. Always.”

And Brother Ephraim hung on the tree limb, not far from us. Pea knew what had happened to him. Somehow. And for the weres, Pea was justice and vengeance and death. “And though Paka hurt Brother Ephraim saving me, there’s no hint of mercy?”

“No. None,” Rick whispered, his eyes on his mate. Tortured. But oddly I didn’t see love as I understood it, or even love as the library books suggested it might be. It wasn’t a happy love. It was addled. Addicted.

I remembered my sense of Paka as a tamer of cats. Paka had magic, and her magic was . . . I shook my head slightly, trying to figure it out in time to avoid whatever was primed to happen here, hovering over us like the sword of death.

“I smell her victim’s blood,” Rick said dully. “His bowels have opened. His bladder gave way.” Rick took a shaking breath, the sound broken. He looked up into the trees, as if trying to locate Ephraim. “The stench of death rides the breeze.” His tone made me think of poetry, as if he were quoting something.

“But if Paka hurt a human and he didn’t die at her fangs,” I said, “and he didn’t turn into a werecat, then what?” At my words, Joshua whimpered, as if the claws at his neck and face tightened.

“The only way that could happen would be if someone else killed him before he died at Paka’s fangs.” And then Rick’s eyes tightened and I knew his thoughts had taken a turn, hopefully to follow mine.

I closed my eyes and wrapped my fingers tighter around the roots, letting them speak to me about the body so high overhead. Brother Ephraim was near death, his heart racing, his breath so light and thin that scarcely any air moved through his lungs. So much blood drenching the tree branch, falling onto the ground in quiet splatters, the forest soaking it up, waiting for me to feed it fully. “Brother Ephraim is nearly dead,” I said, “but not quite.”

“Pea . . . ,” Rick said, his voice clotted with emotion, his face showing conflict and pain. He didn’t love Paka. But he was tied to her. Magic, I thought.

I shivered, my hands still buried in the clay, my fingers still gripping the roots, the power of the forest still flowing through me. “My choice,” I said to them, my eyes on Pea. At the words, a foreign emotion flooded me, engulfing me. I gasped once, like a drowning victim thrown into an icy stream. The sensation flashed through me, a raging flood, steeling my breath. Something powerful, primeval, elusive. Far more than I could grasp. It washed over and through me and away, a flash flood, too much, too potent, to really comprehend. And it trickled away, leaving nothing.

They were looking at me strangely and, not sure what had happened, I finished the thought, “My land,” I said, the words ringing strangely. “My enemies. My judgment.” I knew something had happened, but it was gone, fleeting and intense.

The little green thing chittered at me, as if waiting for me to say something more, so I did, drawing on the ancient emotion that had washed through me. “He’s dying. There’s no way to get him to a hospital in time. But this is my land, my woods. And he’s my enemy, who came to do evil to me, just like Joshua Purdy”—I inclined my head to the pile of rock—“came to do evil to me.

“Paka’s fangs haven’t spilled his blood, just her claws, so he’s safe from weretaint, right?”

Rick nodded, the movement jerky.

“So it’s just Brother Ephraim, who’s dying.” But the biggest problem wasn’t Ephraim or Joshua. Jackie was in my woods, drawing close. I didn’t have long to save Paka, who had saved me. To do so, I’d have use my strongest magic for the second time in my life. I didn’t know if I could stem the flow, once I set it free.

And Joshua had bled on the land too.