“Shoulda. Most folks around here is good God-fearing Christians. The Ameseses,” she said, adding syllables, “are different.” She hesitated and dug in a pocket. Occam and T. Laine nearly drew their weapons before Ethel pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She had trouble getting a cigarette out of the pack and took her time lighting it from the smoking butt of the other one, squinting at the smoke curling up to one eye and tangling in the strands of her red wig.
She puffed several times, coughed hard, a wet, racking sound, and seemed to enjoy making us wait, standing in the sun. Her voice went bitter. “Witches is what everyone figgers. The Ameses had money back in the day, before the Great Depression. The Ames women hadstonesin the backyard.” She leaned in and whispered, “In a circle.” She grinned at whatever she saw on T. Laine’s face. “Ask anyone. The old Ames farm.” Ethel turned and went back inside, the screen door banging behind her.
“And why didn’t the sheriff tell us that?” T. Laine asked softly.
From inside the house Ethel shouted, “He’s young. And he’s aman.” The last word was caustic and bitter. “The young don’t know nothing and men stick together when it comes to banging a woman. Men and their secrets.”
We trudged back to our cars and motored down the street, driving slowly as JoJo worked back at HQ, widening her search into the Ames witch family, tracking down the family line through county land records and birth and death records for the last hundred years, and giving us the address of the old Ames farm, which had passed from Ames to Ames, mother to daughter. JoJo was brilliant.
“Check it out,” FireWind instructed needlessly.
***
The property was an abandoned, heavily overgrown fifty-acre farm, the closest neighbors out of sight in the trees, the house itself long gone in a fire that had left two soot-blackened chimneys standing in hip-high brown weeds and twenty-year-old saplings. Away from the house the trees were older, larger, as if they hadn’t been cut in seventy years. Maybe longer. We got out and T. Laine and Occam waded in where the house once stood, searching among the trees. I carried my gear away from the chimneys, until I found a small open space between the trees. I placed my faded blanket on the ground, sat with the cabbage in my lap, and touched the earth.
The grass wasn’t a lawn. It didn’t have that snooty feel of cultivators or sod. The land had been fallow for decades and the plants had begun to breathe in wildness and freedom and to spread their roots, making communities. Instead of reading down, I stretched out across the land in a widening circle around me, the earth sparking with life. In the first few inches of soil, there were the roots of dozens of species of grasses and wildflowers and fungi; there were seedlings just getting started. The larvae of bugs. Colonies of ants. There was a large rabbit community living on the property, bird nests in the grass and trees, and snakes basking in the sun. Feral cats. Homeless dogs in a small den. Opossums and foxes and raccoons. A dry streambed flowed through the property, underground water following similar contours. No graveyards. No battlegrounds. As I read broader and deeper, I found the older deep roots of mature trees. A true forest in the making, some hardwoods over a hundred years old, far older than those found on most farms, which were cut every forty years for wood.
I could take this land and make it thrive, could bring the water back to the surface, encourage the trees to full forest and health.
If I was willing to kill and spill blood and claim it.
But it was doing well enough without me and neither it nor my bloodlust called to me.
And... there had to be another way. There had to be a way to heal the earth—and the Earth—without death and bloodshed.
I read deeper and found a layer of limestone containing awater table with clean happy water. To the east was broken granite and a near-vertical shelf of marble, hard and jutting, that had once reached the surface. To the north was an ancient dump and several buried foundations, the remains of a small community. Miles away, but still close enough to feel it, was Soulwood, basking under the fall sun, soaking up energy and sunlight. I didn’t call on it, and eased away, back toward my body.
Closer to me were foundations of outbuildings, animal bones from where farmers had slaughtered their meat. Three small dumps were filled with broken glass and pottery and rusting tin cans, a coil of rusting barbed wire, rusting chicken wire, corroding farm implements. I pulled into myself and pushed out again, concentrating on the house and the young woods.
I found the stone circle and wrapped around it, staying outside, tasting and testing the ancient magics within. The circle was composed of rough-shaped oval stones standing upright, each about two feet above the surface and one below. Twelve of them had been set in place, in a nearly perfect circle but not equidistant apart, not clock-like. Four stones were at the primal compass points; others were in odd positions, maybe to match the stars or the moon or the equinoxes. Something witchy. All the stones were the same marble that I had felt below the ground, as if part of the jutting slab had once been exposed and chiseled out and used by the landowners. I marked the location of T. Laine and Occam, who were pacing widdershins outside the stones. There was something within the circle, something warm and sleeping but not dangerous. I would come back to it.
I eased away from the stone circle and found more of the marble. The buried foundations of the burned house were made of the stone, along with the buried hearthstones, cracked and hidden in the tall grass. The long-gone barn had stood on marble stones at the four corners, now buried beneath the ground. The beautiful stone had been removed from the earth and then been reclaimed by it. It seemed fitting. I found more marble near the dry creek, a single large rounded stone that had fallen over.
Near the boundary of the property, I found another circle. This one was newer, perhaps only ten years old, located near a narrow gravel road. Like the others, the circle was overgrown.Or it had been. Now it was laced withdeath and decay. A thin trail of the energies led off beneath the ground.
I pulled back to my body, wrapped a tendril of Soulwood around my wrist, and followed the trail. It didn’t lead far. The connection circled back to the land near Crossville, where Cale Nowell had lived, where the kettles had been kept, and where the dissolved bodies had been poured. There was a third circle there, buried beneath almost two feet of... graveyard dirt and lye chemicals, stones I hadn’t been able to discern when reading from the site itself, due to the intensity ofdeath and decaythere. I’d nearly died, trying to read there. Now I was coming from underground, and the circle near Cale’s was obvious, two feet beyond the shed.
Someone had dug out the soil within the circle and filled it in with graveyard dirt. Liquefied bodies had been poured into it, several of them. Three? Five? More? The liquefied bodies and magic had created a strange, dark place. A place of shadows and sparking power, black and deep and murky. I studied it and realized that the place where the potted vampire tree had died was a place to store power. Power that felt a lot likedeath and decay.A lot like, but not exact. Not quite. The energies had been gathered there, stored there, for years. Perhaps as long as a decade.
I circled around the... power sink was as good a term as any. A place where unused power had been sent to... what? Do nothing? And then it hit me.
This was more than storage for dark energies. It was a battery for power that could be used to kill.
A vibration thrummed through my connection to Soulwood, and I allowed it to draw me back and back to the small circle on the far edge of the Ames property and then farther, back to my body near the house. I took a breath. Another. Before I allowed myself to stop, I reached out and felt the warm magics inside the stone circle that was so close. I circled the twelve stones. Placed my awareness against the stone at the north point, and pressed. Nothing hit me, nothing grabbed me.
A stone witch had lived here. Considering the placement of the stones, also maybe a moon witch. I slipped inside the circle.
Shock spiraled through me. Whatever I had expected, it wasn’t this. In the center of the circle were bones. Buried. Wrapped in roots from long-dead trees. Or... No. Not exactly.
Her bones held old magic. Old energies. I reached for them. They tasted faintly ofdeath and decay, or something very like it. Something very like the power in the energy sink I had just left behind.
And also, something very like my own energies. Familiar.
A frisson of shock quivered through me.
I studied the bones wrapped in wood roots and buried in the circle. The roots looked odd. And I realized the bones were not wrapped in the roots. The boneswereroots.
Like me, she had put down roots and become part tree. She had died, a long time ago. Seventy-five years? Longer ago than that? I had no way to tell.
