Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(110)

Mud placed her hand upon my form and said, “Nell, come back. I’m callin’ you’un back.” She pressed her fingernails into the wood that had once been my shoulder and said, “Come back. Come back now.” She shoved Rick out of the way and pressed herself onto the wooden shape that was all that was left of the human I had never been.

Mud’s strength. Her life. Her greenness reached out to me. Her life force was strong and dancing, the way buttercups danced in a summer wind. The way tree limbs beat against the sky in a spring storm. And she watered my wood.

“You’un need to come back,” she wailed. “You’un need to teach me. And you’un got to deal with the vampire tree. It’s growing to your’n land. It’s lookin’ for you’un, putting up sprouts everywhere, between the church’s gate and the cliff to Soulwood. If’n you don’t come back, Sam’s gonna set something he calls C-4 on the tree and explode it. Or poison the land to stop it. But I don’t want it to die. It’s special, or it can be, if’n you’un’ll finish what you started.” Softer, she said, “I need you, Nellie. I’m scared. And I’m alone. And I’m afeared they’s gonna give me away, no matter what I do.” Wetness fell upon my bark and my bare wood. She watered me. She watered my wood.

Tears. Mud was crying. For me. For herself.

Daddy had been sick. Daddy had been failing and growing close to death. Daddy might be dead . . . If he was gone, then no one stood between the churchmen and Mud. They would force her . . . force her to marry one of them.

I tore my arm, with its roots, out of the earth and reached around. Clasped Mud’s body to me. With my other hand, I reached up and tore my jaw free of the roots that bound me to the earth. “Cut me free,” I said, the words grinding as sand on stone. “Cut me free of the land. Take me to Soulwood.”

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.