Cold Reign (Jane Yellowrock #11)(128)
With a hot pad, I moved the teapot to the side of the woodstove, where the hob was cooler, and removed the tea strainer. I could have made some coffee—the man looked like a coffee-drinking type—but I didn’t want to encourage them to stay. I poured the spice tea into the mugs, smelling cloves and allspice, with a hint of cinnamon and cardamom. It was my own recipe, made with a trace of real ground vanilla bean, precious and expensive. I put the mugs on an old carved oak tray, with cloth napkins and fresh cream and sugar. I added three spoons and placed the tea tray on the table in front of the sofa. I took my mug and backed away again, behind the long table, to where I could reach the shotgun.
“Welcome to my home,” I said, hearing the reluctance in my tone. “Hospitality and safety while you’re here.” It was an old God’s Cloud saying, and though the church and I had parted ways a long time ago, some things stayed with a woman. Guests should be safe so long as they acted right.
The nonhumans took the tea, the woman adding an inch of the real cream to the top and wrapping her hands around the mug as though she felt the chill of winter coming.
With a start, I realized my cats, Jezzie and Cello, were both on the woman’s lap. I tried not to let my guests see my reaction. My cats were mousers, working cats, not lap cats. They didn’t like people. Annoyed at the disloyal cats, I pulled out a chair and sat.
The man held his mug one-handed, shooting surreptitious glances at my stuff, concentrating on the twenty-eight-gauge, four-barreled, break-action Rombo shotgun hanging over the steps to the second floor. It was made by Famars in Italy and had been John’s prize position. I narrowed my eyes at him. “See something you want?” I asked, an edge in my voice.
Instead of answering, Rick asked a question again, as if that was a built-in response. “You cook and heat this whole place with a woodstove?”
I nodded once, sipping my tea. The man didn’t go on and for some reason I felt obliged to offer, “I can heat most of my water too, eight months of the year. Long as I don’t mind picking up branches, splitting wood, and cleaning the stove.”
“You are strong,” Paka said, Jezzie on her lap and Cello now climbing to her shoulders to curl around her neck. “You use an ax as my people use our claws, with ease and . . . what is the English word? Ah.” She smiled at Rick. “Ef-fort-less-ness. That is a good word.”
She sniffed the air, dainty and delicate. “Your magic is different from all others I have smelled. I like it.” Her lips curled up, she kicked off her heels, and shifted her feet up under her body, moving like a ballerina. She drank the tea in little sips—sip-sip-sip, her lips and throat moving fast.
I wasn’t sure what she might know about my magic, so I didn’t respond. Instead I watched the man as he looked around, holding his tea mug, one hand free to draw his weapon. He had noted the placement of the other guns at the windows, the worn rug in front of the sofa, the few electronic devices plugged into the main outlet at the big old desk. Upstairs on the south side of the house, farthest from the road and any sniper attack, was the inverter and batteries. Rick looked that way, as if he could see through the ceiling to the system that kept me self-sufficient. Or he could hear the hum of the inverter, maybe. I was so used to it that I seldom noticed unless I was up there working.
He looked to the window unit air conditioner, which was still in place for the last of the summer heat, and up to the ceiling fans, thinking. “The rest of the year, the solar panels on the dormer roofs meet all your needs, I guess,” he said. I didn’t reply. Few people knew about the solar panels, which were situated on the downslope, south side of the dormers. John had paid cash for them to keep anyone from knowing our plans. I didn’t like the government knowing my business and wondered if Rick had been looking at satellite maps or had a camera-mounted drone fly over. I didn’t usually ascribe to the churchmen’s paranoid conspiracy theories, but maybe they had a few facts right. I glared at the government cop and let my tone go gruff. “What’s your point?”
He said, almost as if musing, “Solar is great except in snowfall or prolonged cloudy days. They run the fans overhead?” He gestured with his mug to the ten-foot ceiling. “The refrigerator?”
It felt as if he was goading me about my lifestyle, and I didn’t know why. Maybe it was a police thing, the kind of things the churchmen said the law always did, trying to provoke an action that would allow them to make an arrest. But there were ways to combat that. I set my mug on the smooth wood table, the finish long gone and now kept in good repair with a coating of lemon oil. I spoke slowly, spacing my words. “What. Do. You. Want? Make it fast. I’m busy.”
“I understand you have good intel on God’s Cloud of Glory Church. We need your help.”
“No.”
“They killed your dogs, yes?” Paka said, her shining eyes piercing. To Rick, she said, “I smell dogs in the house; their scent”—she extended her thumb and index finger and brought them closer together, as if pinching something, making it smaller—“is doing this. And there were piles of stones at the edge of the front grass.” To me she said, “Graves?”
My lips went tight and my eyes went achy and dry. I’d come home from the Knoxville main library to find my two beagles and the old bird dog dead on my porch, like presents. They had been shot in the yard and dragged by their back legs to my front door. I still hadn’t gotten the blood out of the porch wood. I’d buried the dogs across the lawn and piled rocks on top of the graves. And I still grieved.