“Can’t burn it. Can’t poison it. All you can do is cut it and hope it doesn’t kill you.” Sam.
Why was Sam here?
“Can you get to her?” Lainie. Worried.
Something furry rubbed against my shoulder and chittered. A grindylow. How... odd.
I felt the vines and the roots give way. Felt the tree give me up. Felt my body lifted and held against Occam’s chest. He was purring. I wrapped my arms around him and remembered to breathe.
“Got you, Nell, sugar. I got you.”
EPILOGUE
I pushed off with my bare toes against the wood decking of my front porch. My silky skirt brushed my calves as I toed the swing slowly back and forth. What with the heat and being a tree and the ways my life had changed, it had been almost a year since I sat in my swing. I had missed it.
The night air blew through the covered porch, cooler since the weather front had come through, a comfortable seventy-something. The temps wouldn’t last in summer in Knoxville. They never did. But for now it was pleasant in the aftermath of the slow-moving storm.
Mud and the new dog, Cherry, were staying with Esther and her husband tonight, as she would all three nights of future full moons. Jedidiah would drive her to school when the full moon fell on a weekday, and take her to church services when the full moon fell on weekends. I had refused when Jed first asked me to let Mud stay with them, but I’d changed my mind for several reasons.
The first was that Larry hadn’t been seen since the night of the dark of the moon. He had disappeared on the way home from devotionals. There was no sign of foul play except a bloody patch of disturbed earth found near the original trunk of the vampire tree. I figured the tree had gotten hungry and good riddance.
The second reason I relented was that Esther was growing leaves, possibly due to the burst of Green Knight magic. Or possibly because she was pregnant and hormones had caused her to sprout. She needed help, and Esther was still afraid of me and my inhumanness—though that reticence was thawing now, thanks to her leaves. Jed, on the other hand, was havingtrouble with his wife being nonhuman. I hadn’t expected that, but being a churchman ran deep in his blood. I didn’t mind Mud helping Esther and keeping an eye on Jed a few days out of the month. I was enjoying the privacy and would enjoy not having to get up as early to drive my sister to school before I went in to work.
The boxes on my porch were blocky shadows, stacked out of the blowing rain, and they would be gone soon. Brother Thad had given me an estimate on the installation and construction that I couldn’t say no to, and with the court date for Mud’s custody hearing moved up, the porch would be cleared by the end of the coming week. My sister and I would have more than double the air-conditioning I was used to, more than triple my previous solar panels, a bathroom upstairs, remodeling in the old bath, and upgrades here and there, and at a cost I could afford. With a line of credit on my house and land. There was always that.
Brother Thad assured me he wasn’t losing money on the deal, but I figured he wasn’t making any either.
I was no longer living completely off the grid and my feelings were mixed about joining the twenty-first century.
I toed the swing harder, staring at the full moon dropping into the tops of the trees in a lacy veil of cloud. It was the last night of the full moon, some two weeks after the hellmouth—Tandy’s name for the witch circle—had been ripped apart by Soulwood and sealed by the makeshift coven put together by a few of the local coven members and T. Laine. Despite the refusals of the coven leader, Rivera Cornwall, Theresa Anderson-Kentner, Suzanne Richardson-White, and Barbara Traywick Hasebe had responded to T. Laine’s plea for help and were now being touted by the local law enforcement and national media as heroes. And they were. T. Laine had kept her name out of the papers and gave all the praise to the local coven.
No one had seen the Blood Tarot deck. If it had been in the house with Jason, it was ashes now. If not, then it would turn up. Black-magic items always turned up.
It had been a busy two weeks, and I had lain low, hiding in the office or at the house. Not that anyone except Unit Eighteen and Ming of Glass associated the sudden growth of treeswith me. The rest of the world, from the governor to Gonzales of SWAT to the FBI and the CIA, had been assured that Jason Ethier, an insane blood-witch, had made all the changes. The public had begun to associate the use of magic with old growth forests, and since both Ethier siblings were dead, and the demon had been safely sealed in his prison, all was good.
Except it wasn’t.
Unit Eighteen was quietly dealing with the fact that our enemies had been turned into ashes and dust. And that I had done it. Again. Or Soulwood had. Or the Green Knight had. Either way the result was the same. Just like when I destroyed the salamanders.
The debriefing had taken place between Rick, Soul, FireWind, and me. Behind closed doors. With no recording devices. I had told them a lot, but not everything. It wasn’t like I had a choice. I had killed people. Or the land had. My superiors accepted that the land was responsible but there was no doubt that the land had only acted because of me. At my behest. That was the term FireWind had used. Behest.
The reports they wrote up were carefully neutral, but they knew more than they reported and they suspected much more than that. Internal Affairs was sniffing around and that had made things tense at the office. With the exception of my work life, I was satisfied.
Yummy had knocked on my door at two a.m. the third night I spent at home, which was a perfectly acceptable time of visitation in vamp terms. Not so much in human terms. But Yummy assured me that this was a ceremonial visit and that to refuse was a gross breach of etiquette. Yummy had brought a gift from the Master of the City of Knoxville. So I had let a vampire into my home while my sister slept upstairs. If the court system ever found out, I might be denied custody, but I was between a rock and a hard place. Yummy was flawlessly polite throughout the visit. So were the blood-servant guards that kept watch on my front porch.
She had stayed in my home for an hour, chatting and drinking tea. I was assured by Yummy that Ming now owed me two boons. The MOC had sent me some very nice, very expensive, loose-leaf oolong called Tieguanyin tea. I was told by Yummy that the tea sold on the market for three thousand dollars perkilo and was named in honor of Guan Yin. Guan Yin was the Buddhist goddess known as the goddess of mercy. The tea was accompanied by a small card inscribed in Ming’s own hand, thanking me for the bodies and blood of her enemies. Yummy and the vampires somehow knew that I was responsible for the dead vampires.
Through Yummy, I learned vampire gossip. Lincoln Shaddock had retaken his clan home and hunting lands with a minimum of bloodshed. Or so he had reported to Ming. I interpreted the statement as meaning that he had drank down his enemies and thrown out the drained husks, but I might have been wrong.
Cai had survived as a human, though he was now both dreadfully scarred and particularly powerful.
Ming was upgrading her clan home’s security systems, and had discovered cameras in the walls. Alex Younger’s backdoor into the vampire’s lair had been compromised. Yummy seemed to think I would know all about it, and I managed not to lie in any meaningful way, or in any way she could smell.
It had been strange to have a vampire in my home, especially considering that she and Occam had dated before I joined Unit Eighteen.Datedmeaning sex and blood. But Yummy assured me that she had no claim on the wereleopard and she begged my forgiveness for trying to “poach your lover on your land,” as she put it, when she was injured and bleeding to death. It was a very strange conversation. Even stranger that I liked her.
Occam had been healed in the burst of magic. Not totally, of course, but vastly improved, and while I never did learn why he had been so shy about his scars, he had a full head of hair growing in, his ear had grown back, his smile was no longer twisted, and his fingers were no longer fused. They didn’t bend. He still had scars, but as he said, “I don’t scare small children on the streets.” He looked pretty good to me.
I was different too. I had scarlet hair. Flame bright. My eyes were the deep, vibrant green of emeralds. I had a full line of leaves around my hairline. My fingernails and toenails had turned to wood—polished, beautifully grained wood, and one woman who noticed them at the grocery store wanted to know how I achieved the look. I had to pluck my leaves everymorning and sand back my nails at night. I could still pass for human if I worked at it, though I hoped the effects would pass with time and I’d look more human. I was just glad I hadn’t grown thorns.
