“I’m fine.” I came to a stop and peeled off the uni, stuffing it into the biohaz bin.
“What about them?” he asked, tilting his head to the Chevy.
“Those are crows,” I said, deliberately obtuse. I opened the truck door and got in. Closed it. One crow walked to the windshield and leaned in, toward me. He pecked there gently. Three times. Three times. Three times, with pauses between each set of three. Like in the Poe story,“Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore.”Then he flew off, and the others followed, back, I presumed, to their telephone line. I drove away, watching them in the rearview.
***
It was after midnight when I finally took the road’s last rising curve to home. It had been a long day and I needed rest, my brain needed sleep. But as I pulled into the drive, all I could think was how bedraggled my garden looked in the truck lights. Weedy, even after the attack by machete. The soil had not yet been turned over. The mulch that had been delivered while I was away at school was still in a pile. My garden had suffered from neglect. I was exhausted, but I promised my garden that I’d get up early and work in the land for a few hours in the morning.
So tired my body felt as if it had tripled its weight, I made it to the cold, empty house, turned on lights, added wood to the stove and coaxed it alight, poured kibble into the cat bowls and onto the floor and didn’t care that I made a mess. I showered in the tepid water left after the long day with no fresh wood to heat it, added water for morning, crawled into pajamas, and fell into bed, a zombie for sure. But just as I was falling to sleep, I remembered something someone had said about a self-perpetuating energy spell. Which the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense would fight over like angry wolves, an alphabet soup of battles. Fortunately I was able to shove the errant thought aside and slide into dreams.
***
A scream slashed rents in dreams and sleep. The mouser cats leaped from slumber into acrobatics, including one backflip, off the bed and underneath it. I slapped my hand onto my Glock and racked a round into the chamber, wondering when that muscle memory had formed. Silent, I rolled from the bed to the floor, bare feet on the cold wood, and reached into the earth. Deep and deep, into the warmth and contentment that was Soulwood. There was nothing on Soulwood that didn’t belong, except two pools of blood and two carcasses of deer, one in a tree, one in a holler, near the clay-bottomed pool in back. “Ohhh,” I whispered.
The cry screamed again, echoing down the hills and through the hollers. Enraged wereleopards. Or... a wereleopard in trouble? Hurt? Needing my help? I slid into a pair of slippers, walked through the lightless house, and outside. There were twowereleopards lying on the grass near the quietly turning windmill. And a naked man in my backyard, near the clothesline.
Rick.
Standing in a pool of moonlight, he saw me, or heard me, or maybe even scented me, when I left the back door for the porch. He crouched, his olive skin silvered pale, black hair over his legs and lower arms, much thicker than what seemed normal. The hair on his chest was clearly defined, a mat that covered his pecs and upper abs, and then tapered down into shadows. On one shoulder, four gold circles shone. I knew they were the eyes of the magical spell of binding, the only things still recognizable from the black-magic tattooed spell that kept him from shifting.
He sniffed, his nostrils quivering, and a low growl came from his throat, guttural and rasping. He wasn’t wearing his moon music, the music spell that helped him to survive the pain of the full moon, a time when the lunar tides called his body to shift into his cat form, but his tattoos wouldn’t let his human body go, trapping him in insanity-inducing agony. I had the music on my tablet. Which I had left in the truck. Which was stupid.
When I didn’t attack or shoot him, Rick stood upright and glided, catlike, a few feet closer. The pale light softened the harsh lines of pain on his face. His expression was shaded with brushstrokes of the night. His hair hung in a black tangled mass, nearly to his waist, far longer than normal. He was clawed like a leopard, retractile claws on fingers and toes. The eyes of his cat glowed, greenish and bright in the gloom. The four golden spheres glowed on his shoulder, the eyes of the cats in his tattoo, the scar tissue knotting them into an unrecognizable mass of blues and greens and reds. Silver moonlight caressed his shoulders and stomach and thighs, shadowing darkly, brushing each muscle, each fissure, with harsh blackness, his body chiseled and slicked with the sweat of a long, hard run. And he was erect.
I had never seen a real, live naked man. “Ohhh,” I said again.
I had been married. I had submitted to my wifely duties with John. But that was all under covers, in the night, a sweaty, groping unpleasantness that left me more empty than satisfied. But this... this was lean and muscular, raw and somehow fierce, despite the stillness of the night, and Rick’s unmoving form.
I stepped to the porch door and pushed it open, calling, “Rick?”
He growled again, and snarled at me, hissing, as if showing me cat canines he didn’t actually have. He raised his head and words came from his lips. “Bloody tree,” he growled, the syllables garbled and slow but recognizable. Cold shivers raced from my spine out through my limbs. As if remembering how to speak he said, faster, “Bloody, bloody, sick tree.”
My breath unsteady, I said, “Rick?” I walked out the door, onto the winter-stunted grass, icy on my soles.
The two watching cats rose to their feet. Slowly they paced to me. Hunting stance, eyes on prey. “Um... Occam? Paka?”
Both werecats showed me their killing teeth in matching snarls.
“Bloody, bloody,” Rick growled. “Bloody dead man sick tree.”
“Okay,” I said. “You sense the dark thing over there?” I pointed to Brother Ephraim’s little niche and back to the place in the woods where he’d died. “And there? Underground?”
Rick grunted. Hunched his shoulders. Raced at me. Inhumanly fast.
In the same instant, the two wereleopards leaped. The black shadow arched for Rick. The spotted leopard leaped at me.
The impact slammed me down. My elbow hit the ground first. My back. Head.
Breath grunted out. Pain shuttered through me, lights flashing in my brain. My weapon spun into the shadows from nerveless fingers. The spotted leopard landed over me. I struggled, but the leopard held me still, front paws on my upper arms, one back paw on my abdomen. I managed to take a single breath and focus on the werecat.
From only a few feet away I heard a catfight. Yowls and grunts and curses. But I didn’t look away from the cat on top of me.
His claws were sheathed. Body held off mine, but hunched over me. His eyes glowed a brownish, bright golden yellow. His mouth was slightly open, the glint of teeth in the moonlight. We were nose to nose. I breathed. He breathed. On his breath I smelled the fresh blood and meat of his kill. I wanted to curse, but I had too little air in my lungs to do so. Seconds passed. His whiskers tickled my face. A vibration rumbled through him and into me.
Pea peeked over his shoulder. She had been clutching the pelt on his back and shoulders, hidden in the shadows. The odd little green thing chittered at me and leaped away, into the night. Her lack of interest in what Occam was doing had to mean he wasn’t about to bite me, chew me, or snack down on me.
Occam lowered his head and nuzzled my jaw. Rubbing the silky soft pelt that covered the bones of his skull and his coarse whiskers over my face. Rubbing hard against my cheeks and jaws, neck and collarbones.
