The cold of thenullworkings impregnated into the plywood walls of the six-by-twelve windowless trailer sent sharp shafts of ice into my veins. “I get that witches know I’m not human,” I said. “They gotseeingworkings. But it seems odd to use me as a test subject, as I’m the only one of my species on-site.”
“Null rooms are easier on us than on Occam, and they already tested it on the humans, reading them, trying to find a safe minimum time to erase the energies clinging to their skin. Sit.”
The null room at HQ made me feel a little nauseated. This portable one was less powerful but more... spikey? It felt a little like the way my arms had felt the day I insulated the upstairs bedroom walls with rolls of pink stuff. The room also was affecting my ears and I caught myself on the back of a chair.
“Nell?” Worried tone.
I waved at her and sat. “Sick at the stomach,” I said. “A little dizzy.”
“Okay. Good to know. You need to hurl, I’ll push you outside. And we’ll get barf bags for the next batch. You get any other symptoms, tell me.”
“Batch?”
“Half an hour seems to be enough time in the null room to clear most humans, but five still read as contaminated, even after two stints in here.”
“Oh. Right.” I swallowed down the sick feeling and sat.
“You want to talk about it? About what made you look so terrified a few minutes ago?”
I firmed my mouth, thinking through how much of my childhood I wanted to share. “My mama...” I stopped. “My mamahad me tested to see if I was a witch when I was little. Because I could make things grow so well in the communal greenhouse. There’d been... talk.” I gripped my arms again, holding myself. “You know that part. I remembered standing in a circle. I was nine? Ten?”
“Okay.” T. Laine looked calm, compassionate. Ordinary. And in spite of her exhaustion, strong. As if I could tell her anything and she wouldn’t bow under the weight.
“That memory brought up some others. The sound of Colonel Ernest Jackson’s voice in front of the whole church, when he stated his intent to take me as his concubine.”
Lainie’s eyes narrowed again. It was her “going to battle” look.
“I had just started my menses. To a churchman, that meant I was a woman grown. That was the first time he demanded me for his bed. The second time I was in the greenhouse, encouraging the basils to grow. I was good at growing basil.” I flapped a hand to show I knew I was vacillating. “I was working one afternoon and he grabbed my arm. Tried to pull me away.” I rubbed my arm where his hand had gripped it so hard it had bruised purple and black. “Mama Grace stepped in and talked his ear off about the church social coming up. He left. The mamas all came and we walked home together. Then that night...” The rich sweet scent came to me. “Mama Grace had made me a blueberry pie and we had just cut it, when the Colonel walked in. Didn’t knock. Just walked in like he owned the place. I ducked behind the counter and curled up in a ball. The Colonel informed Daddy for the third time that I was ‘ripe’ and he wanted me for his wife or concubine. He didn’t care so long as I ended up in his bed. My father said he would think about it.” I met T. Laine’s eyes again, hers black and stormy. “I was twelve. The next Sunday in church, I told him off in front of the entire congregation and that’s when I left with John and Leah Ingram. Went to live with them. Married into their family.”
She said, “I’d burn that church to the ground and every man on the premises if I could, and take the jail sentence as worth it.”
“I thought my family had abandoned me. But they went in secret to the Ingrams and negotiated me a safe haven, living off church grounds, but still within the church membership. If I’dleft the membership, the men might have found me and taken me back. Daddy and the mamas? They kept me safe as best they could, as best they knew how.”
“Sure.” Her tone said she didn’t believe it.
Years later, I had killed someone who attacked me on the farm. I had never known who it was, never seen his face in the twilight. And then, even later, and much more recently, I had killed one of the worst churchmen. He was dying. I could have healed him. But I killed him and I fed him to the land, every scrap of clothes, shoe leather, skin cells, and eyebrow hair. Maybe it was the null forces beating into my brain, but for some reason I wanted, needed, to say the words, to confess my crime. But I didn’t. My need to unburden would, in turn, burden my friend with my sin and evil. And then she would have the additional burden of turning me in for a crime that could never be proved. So for now, I kept it to myself.
She grinned at me. “You ever need help going after the churchmen, I’ll help you bury the bodies.”
“Bury,” I murmured. “I have no need to bury bodies.” The land itself took care of that.
T. Laine looked at me oddly.
“Change of subject,” I said. “Have you asked for help from the national witch covens or whatever they’re called?”
T. Laine snorted in derision. “Bunch a pansy asses. They wouldn’t even take my call.” She scowled and said, “I mighta burned some bridges recently, when we were trying to locate the Blood Tarot.”
T. Laine had a temper. I had heard that it could sometimes be spectacular, though I hadn’t seen evidence of it yet. Innocently, I said, “Oh?”
She laughed. “Yeah. Well. Okay, so a few weeks ago I called the acting leader of the United States Council of Witches for help with closing the hellmouth and shutting the demon away permanently. She refused. I reminded her that spells used against humans fell under witch council purview. She refused again. I might have used some colorful language. She hung up on me.”
I tried not laugh, but I couldn’t hold it in.
“Right. Yuck it up,” she said ruefully. “Ten minutes are up. Let’s go be read again.” She stood and rapped on the door. Itopened in a slit of blinding red sunset, shockingly bright after the dim lighting of the windowless room. Squinting, I followed, one hand on the wall and then on the less-than-sturdy railing to keep from falling and tumbling to the ground.
T. Laine and I stood together in the center of the circle and the coven pronounced us clean. I went back to the laptop and stood over it, my hand on the cover, thinking. Recently, after the Blood Tarot case, I had confessed most everything to Rick LaFleur, Soul, and FireWind. Everything except that I had a sentient tree and sentient land and that I’d killed people. And had bloodlust. If I revealed all that, I could go to jail. It was getting hard to keep track of who knew what.
I opened the laptop, signed in, and converted paper notes to files, then went back to interviewing victims of thedeathwhateverenergies, talking to them through tent walls, fleshing out the timeline, tracking the band’s movements and gigs—which meant music shows and events—on their tour. Andnotthinking about the fact that so many people knew various parts of my secrets.
