“That would be Pea,” Occam said.
“Why would Pea let a wereleopard outta his cage?”
“He needs to eat?” Occam suggested.
JoJo said, “Before she took off and left Rick high and dry, Paka had a long chat with Pea, at the end of Pea’s claws. Pea seems to be of the opinion that you can fix Rick.”
I laughed, but her expression said she was dead serious. “Pea talks?”
“Not to humans. Not to witches. Not even to whatever you might be,” JoJo said, staring at a third bottle of wine in the glass-fronted cabinets along the back wall of the dining area. “But she talks to the werecats. Pea indicated to Occam that you had claimed Paka for your land, and through her you claimed Rick.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. Truth was truth. “Paka took off, so I didn’t too good of a job claiming her. Besides. I have no idea how to fix a werecat stuck in cat form, any more than I know how to fix a werecat stuck in human form.”
“You know how to encourage a seed to sprout,” T. Laine said. “You know how to make a tree grow fast and tall and straight. Maybe it’s like that. Tell Rick to be what he already is.”
JoJo got up and pulled the bottle from the cabinet. I was now down to four bottles of the rare sweet wine. I’d have to ask Sister Erasmus to trade me for more. Her sister-wife, Mary, had the gout. Maybe I could trade her some herbal tea for the wine.
“Nell?” T. Laine said.
I frowned and shrugged as JoJo opened the wine and poured us all more. “I’m willing to try, but who’s gonna keep him from eating me while I’m working?”
“That, Nell, sugar, is my job,” Occam said, toeing off his boots. “Let’s get you outside and healed and then we’ll see about helping Rick.”
***
My hands ached, even after all the wine. Far more than I usually drank. The world spun, and I pressed down with my swollenhands, holding myself upright in a sitting position, on the roots of the married trees. I had never had a hangover, but I feared that would change come morning. I promised myself I’d drink a gallon of water before I turned in. But for now...
I took a calming breath and let my consciousness flow down into the ground, through the topsoil and the twined and twisted roots, past the rocks, broken and shattered. Into the deeps of Soulwood.
The wood was slumbering, the sleep of winter making it slow and lazy and peaceful. But it knew me, reached out to me, and coiled itself around me, making space beneath the ground for me. Around my body, the trees moved in the soughing breeze. The chill air wisped across my flesh, a swirling icy breath, stealing my body heat. I felt that part of me start to shiver.
As if it knew I needed something, the woods gathered warmth from deep and deep, from the center of the Earth’s crust, and curled a tendril of that heat up. Up through the ground, into me. I sighed and relaxed.
My fingertips, frozen only moments before, warmed and dug into the wood of the exposed roots. Fingernails pressing in. Skin tightening on the stitches. Releasing micro-amounts of cells and serous fluid and blood to fall on the land. The earth saw my injury, knew the wounds. It sent tiny tendrils of vines up through the warm ground. The vines coming awake at the false spring of the ground heat. They feathered over my hands. Rootlets pressed against the unhealed wounds. Gently pushing into me. The invasion of the vines wasn’t painful, just pressure, a persistent tingling, itching on my skin and inside, deeper, on my bones.
In my belly, the rooty scars moved. Coiled tight. Insistent and tenacious as they expanded their claim on me. After long minutes, the vines and roots inside me stilled. Healing me. A tightness I hadn’t been aware of eased. I took a breath and let it out.
And remembered what I was supposed to be doing.Rick. And other things I had neglected to do. Rick was a thorny problem, one I had no idea how to handle. But the other things... those I could address.
I sent my consciousness back to the sapling I had killed, and the earth I had salted. The ground there was barren, hard as stone. It felt like an infection that had been encapsulated fromthe rest of the body by a membrane. Like a pocket of pus, one that had hardened and died. There was no indication of Brother Ephraim at the salted earth. No bloody darkness. Nothing of life or growth or goodness.
I left the salted earth and let my consciousness travel to Brother Ephraim, curled against the outer wall of Soulwood. Unlike Soulwood, Brother Ephraim wasn’t sleeping. He was coiled like a venomous snake, rattles clattering, trembling with hate. The thread of himself to the salted earth had been cut. Severed. The wound on his side looking like a burn scar, keloid, puckered, and misshapen. I let the sense of satisfaction ripple off me and to him. A warning. I got the impression of a hissing reply, all anger and no words. I slipped beneath the space he occupied on Soulwood land and looked up, at the wall where he cowered, studying the trail of his essence, the one leading to the church compound and the tree there. The tree’s energies were stronger than before, a reddish light of energies pulsing palely back and forth to the soil at the gate where I had splashed some of my blood. It almost felt as if the energies were considering a move there. I should go see the tree. Soon. And consider the opposite of a curse. I should consider blessing it and the ground where I wanted it to move.
I turned my attention to the coiled snake of Brother Ephraim’s hate, and I imagined the border of Soulwood, envisioning it growing in thickness, in density, like stone beneath the ground. Stone that choked off all life and energy.
Ephraim’s thread of power to the tree darkened, the pulse slowing to a trickle. I imagined enormous boulders crushing together, squeezing the power off. The thread had been there for so long that it had carved a pathway through the land, claiming part of it, but I tightened my hold on the land, and was gratified to see the energies slow, pale, and die. Ephraim howled in fury. I’d have to find a way to kill Ephraim. For now the narrow passageway to church land had been tightened, dammed, squeezed, and strangled. Ephraim was isolated.
Satisfied, I reached for the two big-cats on Soulwood, Occam and Rick. They were eating a deer, the fresh kill stretched out over a massive root system, the woods taking in the blood, drinking it down. The moon was no longer full, but it was only hours past, and the cats were contented in their cat fur. One of the two was mine, belonging to the land, to Soulwood.Rick.
I reached out and stroked the life force that was mine, much like I might stroke one of the mousers. A long mental swipe from forehead to tail tip. Rick purred. Occam went still. His claws squeezed out and scraped on a broken limb nearby.
I stroked again. Rick rolled over and lay with his head on the ground, his bloody paws out in front of him. He stretched.
I remembered what it had felt like to read a human, the incredible heat and wetness and noise and blood of the woman. The sight of the slime molds that had eaten into her, a darkness that didn’t belong. I reached out and into Rick, reading him as I had the land, as I had the human woman. I sank into the heat, blood rushing like myriad streams. Thunder and wind, regular and even, filled my ears—the purring of a cat, so loud it hurt me, even so far away. The metronome of a resting, contented heartbeat,thu-thump,thu-thump. And lights like fireworks everywhere.
Magic. Rick had no slime-mold-damaged darkness; rather, he had magic, bright and sparkling, heated and steamy as a jungle night. Magic as strong as theInfinitio,the curse captured in the containment vessel. But this magic was claw and fang and blood and breath, each element that made him werecat glowing and pounding with life. With need. With hunger for the hunt, yearning for blood, and for the powerful desire to rend flesh and eat. And with a disdain for the human beneath.Werecat.
Hidden within and beneath the cat, was the human, much less dazzling, less violent in nature, but intense and sparkling, with a piercing, cutting energy. Fierce. Furious. Bitter at what his life had become. The things and people he had hurt and lost. By his mistakes. And by the magic that had snared him. Self-loathing so acute it was nearly incapacitating. The loss of lovers, friends, family, taken from him, first by the witch who had tattooed him with magic, then by the cat that had ensnared and ensorcelled him. And last, by the cat he had become.
