FIVE

I stood and set the rifle against my shoulder, opened the back door, aimed out into the dark, over their heads, and fired a warning shot. The biggest child, maybe the eldest, raised his weapon on the house, but with me standing inside the door, lights off, and with the sun rising on the front of the house, throwing the back into darker shadow, he was blinded. “What you’uns want?” I demanded in my best church accent.

“We’re looking for Brother Ephraim,” one of them shouted. “My daddy thinks you got him here. We’uns aim to set him free and then take you back to the church, where you’re supposed to be.”

“The Brother isn’t in my house,” I said. “And I’m not of a mind to go back to the church.” My comments seem to flummox them, because no one answered. I figured that they hadn’t thought much beyond telling me what they wanted and then expecting me to obey, like a good churchwoman did. But they forgot. I wasn’t part of the cult anymore. I didn’t obey anyone. At that thought, a fierce delight welled up in me and pulsed through my body, through the floor, and into the ground.

In the rising sunlight, the boys looked back and forth between each other in consternation. I studied their faces, thinking I spotted some family resemblances. There was a Cohen, two of the Purdy boys—Joshua’s cousins or half brothers—a Campbell, a boy I didn’t know but maybe a Stubbins, maybe a Lambert, and a McCormick. But the biggest kid was dressed differently from the others, wearing city-boy jeans and a T-shirt with something written on it in yellow and orange, the design shaped almost like a target over his heart. He wasn’t Aden family, though he had slanted, narrow eyes like the family patriarch, maybe a similar shade of blue. His rifle was different from the other boys’ guns too. It was one of the modern ones that fired off three-burst rounds and could be set to fully automatic with the right gear and know-how. Like an AR-15 or -17, something or other, a gun like I’d been lusting for and could never afford. Like the automatic rifles Priss had mentioned. This boy was clearly in charge, urging the others forward with his gun barrel, his face full of anger and hatred and devoid of fear, the kind of emotions learned at Daddy’s and Mama’s knees, family hatred shared along with prayers at the dinner table. That hatred and the AR-whatever would chew up this house in a heartbeat, and me along with it.

“Witch!” the unfamiliar kid shouted, stepping forward, into the light of dawn. “I call thee out, in the name of Jesus Christ, to face your punishment and the justice of the church.”

I thought a minute, not seeing any other way except to shoot him. My guts curdled. “I’m not a witch,” I shouted back, trying to buy some time, trying to figure out what to do, how to save these children and still keep me alive. “I’m a baptized Christian just like you, only I don’t try ’n kill people who are different from me.”

“You’re a woman. You gotta do what you’re told,” he said.

I took a breath to reply when I felt the change up through the floor. I might have felt it sooner if I’d still been barefoot, or had my boots in the dirt, but two factors were detrimental to my knowing what was happening until it was close: wearing boots in the house, and my attention on a more obvious threat.

A truck had pulled up the hill and turned into my drive, the headlights illuminating the boys with their guns. The boys froze like deer in the headlights and the sun peeked over the horizon, tinting them in the bright red and gold of morning. I heard a voice, a bull horn or loudspeaker from the truck. “You children get back to your own homes!”

I closed my eyes in relief so strong it sent acid up my throat. It was Thad Rankin, and he sounded mad as a hornet. “Git!” he shouted.

The boys turned as one and raced back into the trees, the outsider boy in the lead. He might have shouted to the others. I couldn’t hear, but I felt the remaining boys race toward him, back the way they came. I sprinted to the front, staring through the windows. I felt more than saw Thaddeus get out of his truck and slam the door, muttering under his breath about hooligans. And I laughed, the sound a panicked wheeze.

I dropped to the sofa, following the stranger boy and his comrades back to the Stubbins farmland. I felt the land rise up, as if aware, as if tracking them as a threat, as if it knew who they were and where they went. As if the woods had . . . learned something about the threat they posed to me. Something dark and wild raced through the ground, following the boys. It was more cohesive now than it had been. More complete, less divided, and that was unexpected. I wrenched my thoughts away from the land and the sick feeling that the dark thing brought me.

I went to the door, and opened it to my rescuer.

Thad Rankin asked, “Are you hurt?”

I shook my head and realized I was trembling. A sob burst out, as unfamiliar as the dark thing in my woods. I was crying. Again. I wrapped my arms around myself and shuddered, backing away to let Mr. Thad and Deus into my living room. “I didn’t know what to do,” I said. “I didn’t know what . . .” I trembled so violently my teeth rattled. “They were children. Just babies.” I sobbed again, the sound harsh. I hadn’t cried in front of people since Leah died. My knees hit the sofa, and I stopped moving. “Copying their daddies and the hateful men at the church. I couldn’t even defend myself. They were just children,” I said fiercely.

Mr. Rankin pointed at the sofa and I fell onto it, wiping my face.

“I heard a shot. Did they shoot at you?” he asked.

“No. I fired a warning shot over their heads.”

“What did they want?” he asked. His eyes were tight and dark with worry.

“They came looking for a churchman who went missing while hunting. They accused me of having him prisoner in my house.” Rankin’s eyebrows went up in surprise. I shrugged, feeling tired. “They said they were here to set him free and take me back, by force.”

Rankin said, “We’ll check the house. Do you want me to call the sheriff when I get into cell range?”

“No. I won’t send a bunch of children to juvenile detention for nothing. I put on coffee,” I said. “Help yourself.”

I went to the bath and splashed water on my face, which was white and bloodless, my eyes too big. I freshened up and felt a sight better when I came back out, and better still when I realized that Thaddeus and his son were checking the house and the woods out back.

When they came back in, I had a loaf of homemade sliced bread, plates, spoons, three cups of coffee, real cream and sugar, and a jar of peach-hot open on the table. My peach-hot (peach preserves made with hot peppers) was the best in the county. After exchanging a glance I couldn’t interpret, the two sat at my kitchen table and made up their coffee to suit them, Deus taking his with sugar and his daddy taking his black. We sat there, silent, and I realized that it was the first time they had ever sat at my table. Which was a shame.

“Thank you for being here,” I said, the coffee sitting uneasily on my stomach. I tore a slice of bread and chewed, hoping to settle it, which led to Deus taking a slice and smearing preserves on it. He was a young man, and young men were always hungry.

“Why did you leave the cult?” Thaddeus asked.

I understood his curiosity on all the levels—curiosity about the cult, curiosity about why someone would shoot up my house. I chewed, and drank my coffee, and said, “I stopped attending God’s Cloud for several reasons,” I said. “One, when I inherited this property I fell into ‘sin and disfavor.’” I made the words a quote with my fingers, and both men showed surprise. “This property, by church law, should have gone to the church upon John’s death, since he had no sons. But after Leah died, John and I were married by a judge, legally, under the laws of the state of Tennessee, instead of according to church law. And his will had been filed properly. I was his widow, and I inherited.

“The church objected, but they lost in court. They had to pay the legal and court expenses too.” I knew that the men heard my satisfaction. I’d been practically blissful when the judge had ruled that the church had to pay my lawyer and all costs.

“Reason two,” I said, “a proper churchwoman would have taken her deed to the land and gone right to the church and married according to her next male relative’s wishes or according to the will of the leader of the church.”

“What?” Deus said. “That’s not right.”

I smiled behind my cup at the statement, but it faded when his father said, “There’s lot a things wrong in this world, son. It’s important to remember that others have troubles we don’t always see.” He was right. My problems were small potatoes compared to the problems of others.

Deus slurped nosily. “Mama’d a killed them boys.”

Thaddeus laughed. “Your mama is a pistol, boy, but she wouldn’t have killed some foolish children.”

“Okay. She’d a made ’em wish they was dead.”

Thad laughed softly. “You got that right.” The men bumped fists. The coffee was strong and bitter, but they drank it anyway. “You were saying,” Mr. Thad said.

“After John died, I declined to do anything they thought I should. Mostly I declined to marry one of them,” I said, at last, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

“John and I attended services at the church on the occasional Sunday morning, in order to keep the peace, but when he got sick, and then passed, I stopped going altogether, even though that meant I had to sneak around to see my own sisters and Mama.”

“And that’s why schoolchildren came to shoot up your house?”

“Land and property, patriarchy and hierarchy, are all important to them. Women aren’t. I’m never going back to the God’s Cloud and their punishment.”

Deus looked puzzled. “Punishment?”

“I’ll explain later,” his father said, his tone grudging and sad. It seemed that Mr. Rankin knew something about the church and how things worked after all, likely from the time the compound was raided by the sheriff, social services, and the child welfare people. The media had released all sorts of information to the public then, including the existence of the punishment house. Which, now that I thought of it, was a good reason for Jackie to have turned it into a guest cottage.

“Thank you for the coffee, ma’am,” Mr. Thad said, standing. “Come on, son. We got work to do.” He left through the front door for the driveway, his son trailing.

I could hear them chatting as they unloaded equipment from the truck, voices low. I figured that Thaddeus was explaining church things to his son. I closed my eyes and thought about my land. They were the only two people on it. The boys were back on Stubbins’ property, nearing the farmhouse. Some things I shouldn’t be able to know this far away, this far from my property’s boundary.

On the Vaughn farm, the new nonhumans were back, but deep in the woods, tramping on the far side of the hillock. I was curious what they were doing, but not inquisitive enough to go ask. I was tired and sleepy and sad, but with all the workers here, I was safe.

My forest was changing fast, yet it hadn’t killed the boys, not even the boys who had bled all over it. I had the feeling that the woods could have stolen the life force even without my intervention, but . . . I hadn’t wanted to kill children, so the woods hadn’t killed.

I needed to find out the limitations and boundaries of my woods’ power, but I had no idea how to go about that, short of some deadly experimentation.

*   *   *

While keeping a close mental eye on the woods, I put a meal together and cleaned house and started some oregano tinctures and weeded the garden again and generally stayed out of the way as a variety of men and one woman came and went, repairing my house. Most of the work was done before supper, and when the trucks drove off and the dust had settled, I stepped out onto the front porch and made a megaphone of my hands. “I know you’re out there!” I shouted. “Come on in.”

I turned my back and went inside, watching through the front window as the snoops I had been feeling on the Vaughn farm slowly worked through the trees, onto the property, across the lawn, and up to my house. I had determined that there were three nonhumans and one human. The three nonhumans moved differently from the churchmen. They moved differently from the Rankins, differently from people at the market or at the produce stand, differently from the people I saw on the television shows I checked out of the library. They glided, slid, slinked their way to the house, all but the human, who tramped as if tired. The small group came slowly, out in the open, across the grassy lawn that would soon need to be cut, whether it wanted to or not. They looked watchful, scanning the house for attack, the woods for attack, and everywhere for danger. They gathered at my front steps in a thin semicircle, and there they waited. One of them had my mouser cats on his shoulders, much like Paka had carried them, and he was taller than the others, with long blondish hair and a whip-lean form.

Once I was satisfied that they had all come, I walked out of my front door, without a shotgun, the way I’d met Mr. Thad—in peace. “You’re Rick LaFleur’s people,” I said. “You’uns broke the deer stand into pieces and sent it flying.”

“Yes, ma’am, we are,” the blond male said in an accent. Texan, maybe, but then I knew next to nothing about accents. “Newly graduated from Spook School, on temporary assignment here in Knoxville for some advanced training, a little liaison work with the FBI, and a little light night work here in your hills.” His eyes roamed my bruises and his expression darkened. “I’m just sorry we weren’t here when the coward hit you, ma’am.”

I tilted my head uncertainly, not sure where this conversation was supposed to go or what they wanted. “Thank you,” I said, relying on manners.

“You knew when we broke it?” he asked, his head jerking in the general direction of the destroyed deer stand. His tone implied that he already knew the answer, but I nodded anyway.

The man glanced around the group and back to me. “I’m Occam, ma’am. Wereleopard,” he said, moving a hand down along his body like a carnie magician displaying himself, “from Texas, originally.” He pushed his pale hair from his long jaw, and I saw the hint of dimple in one cheek, low down.

“I’m T. Laine.” The woman smiled, showing straight and even pearly whites, the kind that came with a high price tag and a youth living with a metal mouth, or very good genes. “I’m a moon witch with strong earth element affinities and enough unfinished university degrees to satisfy the most OCD person on the planet. But that’s what made me attractive to PsyLED.”

“I’m JoJo. I’m the token human in the group.” JoJo was African-American, maybe mixed with something else, like Korean, and she was pretty, with tip-tilted eyes and a small bow of a mouth, but she also had piercings everywhere: nose, eyebrows, lips, all over her ears. She had tattoos too, the small tips of some picture peeking out of her shirt collar that must have gone down her chest. One side of her neck displayed the only tattoo that was completely visible—a small full moon with a spotted leopard stretched out on a limb, and below the leopard, a pool of water in which the leopard was reflected. It was delicate, fine work in oranges and reds and blues, with midnight outlining. I had never known anyone with tattoos, and all I could think was that they had to make it impossible to go undercover and not be recognized. Which was a very surprising thought for me.

“Tandy,” the other male said. He hadn’t taken his eyes from me the whole time they stood there, and both hands held on to the edge of the porch as if to keep him from falling or running off. “I’m an empath. I pick up on emotions and feelings and . . . I love your woods.” He smiled with his whole face and the skin at the corners of his glistening brownish-red eyes crinkled. His accent was different, and I didn’t know how to place it. American, but from somewhere else. “They whisper,” he said.

“They do,” I acknowledged, oddly pleased that someone besides me could tell that.

“Do they talk to you?” he asked, his peculiar eyes widening with delight and what might have been exhilaration, his hands clenching on the porch. “Is that how you know about the deer stand?”

“In a way. I guess,” I said.

Tandy had puzzling reddish tracings all over his exposed skin, as if a child had drawn on him with a red pen. There was no meaning to the erratic lines, which appeared at his hairline, as if they started on the top of his head, beneath his red-brown hair, and jerked their way down and across his body and limbs. They looked like lightning in scarlet miniature, traced across the very whitest flesh.

“Why were you watching my house?” I asked them.

“Rick said to keep an eye on you,” JoJo said. “Protection duty. We thought we were done until we heard a gunshot.”

I tilted my head, hearing the question in the words. “Vermin needing to be scared off.”

T. Laine said, “But we’re really still here because once we came close to your land to break the deer stand, we couldn’t keep Tandy away.”

“Your woods. They call to me,” Tandy said.

I gestured for them to come in. “I’m Nell. You’uns been out there all day. You thirsty? Hungry?”

They answered all at once with opposing responses. “No.” “Yes.” “I’m a vegetarian.” And the strangest response, from Occam, “I’d gladly pay you on Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

The other three laughed at the obscure statement. I frowned, not knowing why it was funny. “I don’t have hamburger. I have cubed venison steak thawing, bread in the oven, and a garden full of vegetables. Welcome to my home. Hospitality and safety while you’re here. As long as you act right,” I amended. “You act wrong and I’ll kick your butts to the curb.”

Subdued by my threat, but curiosity leaking off them like heat from a stove, they came in. Beneath my feet, the woods were aware and alert, but not upset or angry. From the trees came a low hum of what felt like contentment. I pulled my cardigan closer, uncertain at the changes taking place around me, the people—beings—with me. I closed the door on the dying day, and wished I had gotten more sleep.

*   *   *

They ate a mountain of food, much like John had when he was working the land, before he fell ill and had to be nursed like a baby. And they talked. And talked. And made jokes I didn’t understand. And referenced movies I hadn’t seen and books I hadn’t read. I might have felt as if I was being shunned in my own home, if they hadn’t worked so hard to include me, especially Tandy, whose reddish eyes followed me as I cooked and served and ate. It was a little unnerving having him around, knowing he was reading my emotions, but it wasn’t like I could kick him out. One did not kick out a guest after one had offered hospitality.

And the cats loved Occam as much as they had Paka. Seems they had a thing for werecats.

As soon as I politely could, I stood, began removing plates from the table, and started dishwater in the copper kitchen sink. As it scudded into the bottom, suds rising, I began washing and felt a jolt of shock when Occam joined me there. He picked up a dry rag and dried a plate. “What’re you doing?” I asked.

“Drying the dishes, ma’am,” he said simply.

“Why?” I demanded. “That’s women’s—” My words cut off abruptly.

“Women’s work, Miz Nell?” he asked mildly, his words Texan slow, his dark blond hair swinging forward to his jaw as he worked.

I looked down at my hands in the dishwater, suds up to my wrists. Women’s work. The foolishness the church taught.

As he dried another plate, Occam said, “I spent a lot of my life in unpleasant conditions, but back when I did have a mama, she taught me to clean our house, wash my own clothes, and cook, though I admit I’m a sad excuse for a chef. I can mop, sweep without stirring dust, and iron, if I don’t mind the risk of scorched britches. And I make a mean pot of chili, hot enough to burn out your gullet.”

“Totally,” JoJo said from the table. “If gullet means esophagus, stomach, all your small and large intestines, and the plumbing you empty that chili into. He served it to us at Spook School when we signed up for temporary duty with him. I thought we were going to have to call out the fire marshal.”

“I warned her,” Occam said, sliding me a crooked grin as he dried two forks, and a green glass so old the glass had bubbles in it, hand-blown early in the previous century. “She didn’t listen.”

He tilted the big stockpot I’d used to make enough pasta for them all and dried the inside, then the outside. “I even know how to work that mysterious device known as a vacuum cleaner.” He sent me that small, uneven grin again.

“I’ve seen men on films wash dishes,” I said reluctantly. But even when Leah was dying and I was so busy caring for her, John hadn’t washed dishes or cooked or done any of a hundred chores that needed doing with a sick woman in the house. He’d never done a lick of women’s work in his life.

“Culture shock,” Tandy said from behind me.

Occam said, “I had it when I got here from Texas. I’d spent twenty years in a cage there, a spectacle in a traveling carnival.”

“Twenty years?” I asked as shock spiked through me. I shot a look at Occam’s face to see if that was some kind of horrible joke, but he nodded in that slow, easy way of his.

“From the time I was ten until I was thirty,” Occam said, though he didn’t look a day over twenty. Maybe that seeming youth was part of being a werecat.

“You were kept in a cage?” I asked. “Like you were some kind of animal?” My next thought that the women in God’s Cloud were kept like animals too.

“I am an animal,” he said softly, “by most of humanity’s definition.”

“I’ve never been too impressed with humanity’s ability to use its noggin, when it’s so much easier to hate for no good reason. You are not an animal,” I said. But Occam just sent me that uneven grin and dried the next plate I handed him. I wasn’t sure what to do with a man who thought less of himself instead of more, and one who didn’t argue with me, to boot. And who washed dishes.

I let my eyes slide to Tandy’s face and the reddish lines that marked him, trailing down his cheeks and jaw and chin, dividing and redividing like the veins in a leaf, feathering along his neck into his collar. The empath looked distinctly uncomfortable, and I figured he was picking up my agitation. He had to be a walking, talking lie detector. I’d have to be careful what I thought and felt around him, which I didn’t like at all. I wasn’t good at playing games.

Occam, on the other hand, radiated calm, despite the direction of our conversation, placid as a cat sitting in the window staring out at the day.

“What’s your story?” I asked Tandy. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

His face lit with delight at my question, as if most people stared without asking, and being asked was a sort of a compliment. “Permanent Lichtenberg figures—broken capillaries after being struck by lightning. Three times in one summer.”

“Three times.”

“I’m serious. Three times. No one could explain it.” When I didn’t reply he said, “Statistically the chance of being struck by lightning is one in three thousand, but realistically, it’s much more like one in thirty or fifty thousand people are ever struck by lightning. That’s my number, not a statistician’s number, but it seems to fit.” He pointed to the plate I was rinsing. “You missed some spinach there. But there are people who get struck more than once,” he said as I rewashed the plate. “There’s a YouTube video of a guy getting struck three times in a row, but I think it’s fake. It takes a long time to get over being struck. You don’t just get up and walk away. But there is the case of a man in Colombia who was struck four times, and a man in North Carolina who was struck three times, like me. Roy Sullivan was struck seven times over the course of his life. None of them became empaths. Being struck by lightning.” Tandy looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. “Worst superpower ever.”

I giggled. It came out as a squeak, air bubbling through my lips, making them flap. My eyes went wide and Occam laughed with me, his eyes lighting up. Tandy stopped moving. He didn’t lift his eyes back to me. He just stood there, staring down. “You don’t laugh,” he said after a too-long moment. “Ever. You can actually remember the last time you laughed. It was months ago. And before that when you watched a movie.”

“Stop that,” I said, my tone sharp. “Get outta my head.”

“I’m not in your head,” Tandy said softly. “I’m an empath, not a mind reader. Normally.”

“What’s that mean? Normally.”

“I can feel your reactions, just as I can feel other people’s, but with you, after having spent the better part of the day hiking along your land, in your woods, I can . . . I can feel much more with you.” Tandy lifted his eyes from the floor to my face and he smiled, his reddish eyes bright. “I like you. But you think you’re too dangerous to be anyone’s friend. You think you’ll do damage to them, put them in danger from . . . your cult? No. That’s not it. But something. You also think that having friends will call attention to you in ways that will bring trouble down on you and them.”

“Stop that,” I whispered. “I got no friends. Women aren’t allowed to . . .” I stopped, horrified at what I had been about to say.

“Have men friends?” Tandy asked. “Only women friends, and then only women that their male authority figures approve of?” He held my gaze with his own. “Only friends that their husbands or fathers say they can have? Their own sister-wives or cousins or half sisters? Only people in the church?” I backed slowly away, until I felt the heat of the stove at my back.

“In your own way,” Occam said, drying the last clean dish, “you were just as caged as I was when you were a child. Still are, I’m thinking.”

“That’s not religion,” Tandy said. “That’s cult talk. Real religion is about love and redemption and healing, not putting people down, segregating them into smaller and smaller groups so they can be controlled. Controlling people is evil, real evil. Even God doesn’t control people. He gave us free will.”

I blinked at the words. At the truth in them. For years I’d been reading and studying about cults and how they affected people. How they squeezed them down into a small constricted place and kept them there. Controlled. That was it exactly. Converts had no free will, the cult taking away that one right given by God. To choose.

T. Laine brought over the last of the dirty dishes and set them in the sink. “You got a deck of cards?” she asked me. I shook my head. Cards?

Tandy plucked my washing cloth from my hands and wrung it out before he elbowed me aside and continued washing the dishes. Occam nudged me away from the kitchen, with a soft, “’Scuse me, ma’am. We got work to finish here.”

I stood at my kitchen table watching two men—men—washing my dishes. There was something practically obscene in the vision. Obscene and wonderful.

“Well,” I said. “How about that.”

Tandy turned around and winked at me and then went back to washing. Tandy’s clothes hung on him as if he was wearing a big brother’s hand-me-downs. Occam’s jeans and tee fitted to his form as if he’d been poured into them. Both men were barefooted, like me, and the sight was strange. John had never gone without shoes or slippers. Neither had Daddy.

Feeling odder than I had since I was twelve and first came to live here, I walked into the living room and curled up in John’s old recliner, watching as the witch and the human woman found a deck of cards in one of their backpacks and started a fast-paced game of cards. And I noted that the devil himself didn’t rise up out of the cards and set the place on fire.