•••
I woke blind, cramped, my arm under me, twisted and dead-feeling. My head was throbbing and white sparks were going off behind my eyes. Bumping. Moving. I rammed into the thing behind me. More sparks. I dry-heaved, and the smell of vomit let me know it wasn’t the first time. Something wet and cold trickled from my scalp along my face. I had a head injury. Concussion. Arms and ankles bound. Hands numb and tingling painfully. Not gagged. In a trunk of a car. The car bumped over something. I heard voices and I managed to kick the side of the trunk and shout, but the car cruised on.
At Spook School I’d taken a course on how to escape from various places including the trunk of a car, but the course instructors hadn’t included having bound and useless arms and legs. The main thing they shared was to get away before the kidnappers reached their destination, their own home ground. I tried to position to kick out the taillight but just managed to bang my booted ankle bones on the sidewall. I gagged again and groaned. My only hope was that Tandy had seen my abduction on the parking lot cameras.
The car slowed. I heard a rooster crow. I knew that rooster. It had once belonged to Daddy and Mama and I had sorta managed to free him.
I was on the grounds of God’s Cloud of Glory Church. Fear and fury slammed through me in equal measure. My head exploded with pain in reaction. The blinding stars behind my eyes grew and fell like snow. I retched again.
The car stopped. The engine died. Everything happened fast.
The trunk opened. Daylight seared my eyes and skull. I tried to scream.
Larry Aden snarled at me. Reached in, grabbed my hair in one hand, and stretched around me to grab my bound hands. He yanked me up from the trunk.
I bit him. I caught his wrist in my jaws, biting down withall my might. I tasted blood. He shook me like a dog shakes prey. I bit harder. Ripping skin. Sucking his blood into my mouth. Bloodlust rose in me like desire, like addiction, a need so strong I whimpered and shuddered. Iwantedhim. Wanted his death. Wanted his body and blood for the land. I spat his blood to the ground. He wasmine.
I could take him,right now.
Kill him. Feed him to the earth.
Devourhim body and soul.Neeeeedslithered through me.
Instead, I whipped my body, bucking. My scalp tore. His flesh ripped. He cursed and dropped me.
I called on Soulwood.
The vampire tree’s root system answered faster.
Vines erupted through the ground and wrapped around Larry’s booted ankles. Slithered up his legs. Constricting. Thorns rammed into him. Pierced through his clothing, into his legs and thighs, securing him in place. He screamed.
Need quivered through me.
Thick dark leaves unfurled beneath me. The vines lifted me and, rustling, carried me several feet away before the tender shoots whipped up over me. Creating a mattress below me and a cage of thorns over me, a bower and a prison. Protecting me, ensnaring me.
Near me, Larry screamed and thrashed. His voice was abruptly cut off. He gurgled. Joy shot through me. My enemy was now my prey.Mine.I reached for his body and blood.
Voices sounded. Shouting. I came back to myself, just a fraction. Just enough. I gripped my bloodlust in tight reins. I owned it. My bloodlust did not own me.
Soulwood reached for me through the ground. I could feel its agitation, its desperation. More of my blood dripped on the ground from my scalp. My land responded, frantic. The leaves were keeping me from touching the ground. “I need to touch the ground. Let me down,” I whispered to the vampire tree. “Let me down,now!”
The leaves parted and my face landed on the dirt and gravel of a parking area. Scraping. But there was enough soil. “I’m okay,” I whispered to my land. “Calm. Calm.”
Both the tree and Soulwood slowed, reassured, appeased, though still worried, still ready to attack. It was strange tohave both Soulwood and the tree respond to me, separate but working together. I had a single blazing image of a knight on a pale green horse, carrying a tall pole that bore a flag. On it was a living tree. Something to think about when I wasn’t in so much trouble.
“What happened?” Sam’s voice interrupted.
“I thought you’un said that tree was done rooting up everywhere and killing,” another voice said. I shifted my eyes that way and spotted Ben Aden through the leaves, the man who had wanted to marry me not so long ago. He was standing in a group of men, young and old, maybe eight or ten of them.
“We’re not dead,” I managed to say. “The tree didn’t kill anyone. Sam, it’s me. Nell. Under one of the... mounds of leaves.”
“Nell, what the Sam Hill?”
I chuckled at Sam’s choice of cursing. “Larry attacked me in the parking lot of PsyLED.” I tried to turn over using only my heels and backside and shoulders, but my arms were a raging sea of needles and stabbing pain. I had to give up. “I’m tied up. He hit me over the head. Put me in the trunk. Brought me to the church.”
“She deserves to be punished,” Larry gurgled, hoarse. “She’s living in sin, working with a man, alone, in an office all night. A Jezebel! And that devil tree attacked us!”
“Nell?” Sam asked, wary. “I’m not sure what to do.”
