Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(12)

They turned to leave and Yummy said over her shoulder, “Later, Maggots.”

Tandy smothered a laugh. I said, “Ditto, Yummy.”

The blond woman flinched just the tiniest bit.

“Yummy?” Ming asked.

“I’ll explain later, my mistress.” Yummy tossed a glare my way and preceded her blood-sucker master out of the room and down the stairs.

Tandy turned off the recorder and fell into the chair vacated by Ming, laughing. I gave him the same glare Yummy had given me.

“Don’t,” he said, holding his hands in a gesture of surrender. I could hardly believe this was the same man I had first met, when he was fresh out of Spook School and fighting to stay sane in the presence of multiple people with conflicting emotions.

I huffed out a breath. “Okay. Were they telling the truth?”

“More or less. They have a very complicated relationship.”

I gathered up the papers and stacked them neatly in the folder. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“You’re hungry and sleep deprived and grieving. People died here, but I don’t think you knew them. Who are you grieving for, Nellie?”

Tears welled up in my eyes. I walked from behind the desk and toward the door, which Yummy had left open. “An oak sapling. Never mind. I’m making my report to Rick and going home.” Which I did.

? ? ?

I walked into my cold, dark house just after dawn.

Moving on muscle memory alone, I put winter wood into the firebox of the wood-burning cookstove that also heated my house and my water, topped off the hot water heater mounted on the back, and turned the mousers out into the cold with orders to catch mice and rats. They stalked off, ignoring me except to give me dirty looks. Clearly I was a bad mama. The water was tepid, but I showered off the long night, redressed in the flannel pajamas, wool socks, and slippers I had thrown off when the call came in about the shooting, and wrapped up in my faded pink blanket before joining the cats in the icy morning air outside.

I sat on the intertwined roots of the sycamore and the poplar, roots that looked as if the trees were holding hands, fingers interlocked. I called them the married trees and sitting here, upon their clasped hands, was the first place where I had communed with the land of Soulwood, my land, long before I knew what I was doing.

Eleven years ago, I had come to this farm, escaping the leader of God’s Cloud, who wanted me as his junior wife or concubine. To get away from Colonel Ernest Jackson, a pedophile and sexual predator, I had accepted a marriage proposal as junior wife, from John Ingram and his only remaining wife, Leah, and moved away from the church compound, away from my family, away from all I knew, to nurse Leah as she died. It had been a good bargain. I was twelve years old. A few years later I legally married John. Our arrangement was completely without romance, a business proposition that had left me with the land after John sickened and passed away. Thought of in such bald terms it was a horrible thing to have to do, but at the time, it had been like salvation shining down from heaven.

When I agreed to marry into the Ingram household, I hadn’t known I would inherit anything, and this small patch of land and these two trees was all I felt I could claim. It was where I’d gone when nursing duties for Leah had gotten to be too much, where I came even now when I wanted solace. I tucked my blanket around me, placed my palms flat on the frozen ground, and breathed out, letting the tension flow away.

I could hear the faint click and hum of the windmill that powered my pump and sent water into the cistern. Could smell smoke from my fire. The faint and faraway stench of polecat or skunk. Both should be sleeping but perhaps a hungry hunting fox had risked the scent-weapons for a chance to eat.

I sank down, through the bare ground, into the roots of the trees. They were sleeping, the whole woods, all hundred fifty acres that bordered the flatland around the house, up the steep hill, and down into the gorge. All of it was in winter sleep, dormant. Perhaps dreaming, if the Earth and her plants dreamed. It was warm, deep in the darkness of the land. And the soul of the woods reached up to me, as if taking me by the hand. The woods embraced me. And I sighed out my misery, putting one hand to my belly to rub away the anxious feeling, the rooty scars deep inside, hard and unyielding. The woods didn’t understand why I was sad, but they didn’t care either. They wrapped me in their calm and peace and I let the long night go.

Much later, when the sky had grayed and whitened and blued, and the sun had risen over the hills, I pulled back from the sleeping land and turned my attention to Soulwood’s problems. I nursed a failing patch of muscadine vine, and told the land it was a good thing to send water up to the spring above the house. I searched out and checked on the pregnant bear that was hibernating in a split in the rock not far from the spring. Bolstered the health of the asparagus I had planted above the windmill two years past. I had forgotten it, knowing that when it was ready to put forth enough shoots to eat, I’d remember. But now some kind of grubs had been chewing on its roots. I sent a pulse of energy to make them trundle away from the easy food source.

When I had done all I could to nourish the land, and I couldn’t put it off any longer, I turned my attention to the boundary between Soulwood and the church compound, to the dark, hollow place where the foreign entity once known as Brother Ephraim had carved out a space for his soul. It was still there. A little larger. A little more vile. A little more entrenched than before. The place he had carved out beneath the ground of Soulwood was dark and virulent, like a pocket of pus growing beneath perfect flesh, preparing to attack the entire organism.