“Son of a witch,” T. Laine cursed, in the way of the witchy women. “Son of a witch on a switch. You did it.”
Through the tunnel, light billowed. All the shades of topaz and pearl and the prism of quartz. All the shades of the rainbow, of sunlight, of shadow, and moonbeams, a nacre-lit brilliance of light and energy. A serpent face with curved, spiraled, spiked horns and bone white teeth and fangs blasted around the cave bend.Soul.Someone had freed her.
Or she had freed herself at last.
She stopped. Swiveled her head to the dog, her eyes the colors of moonlight on ice clouds, the tints of moonbows, focused. She noted he breathed, his blood pumped. He was still alive. Her massive maw opened. She scooped the dog up. Chompedthrough his legs, leaving his dog ankles and paws shackled with my vines.
She stared at me as she swallowed, her frills rippling. Her body undulated. She moved on, passing us. Over twenty feet long with massive back legs and claws like scythes, her entire body was covered in glistening scales and horns and spines. A blazing dragon of light and energy, of movement and intensity.
I fell over, into the dark. My last thought, before blackness could take me, was that if I had known Soul was coming, I’d have waited. I’d not have grown into the earth again. I wondered if I was a tree. And if the vampire who had tortured the Lost Boys into becoming Dogs of War had gotten away.
* * *
I woke on the surface, wrapped in a blanket, sitting in Lainie’s car in the dark, the engine running, the heater on, the seat temp turned up high. My body ached. My bones ached, a deep-down spirit ache. I was shivering, but not teeth-clacking cold as I often got when working with the land. I had experienced worse. My hands were bandaged again. I twisted in the seat, trying to find a comfortable position, moving the blanket so I could see some skin. My fingertips were leafless. Not rooty. They looked like human skin.
Occam spoke from behind me, and I jumped. “No visible damage,” he said, his words pointed, his voice a cat-scratchy purr-growl.
I turned in my seat to see behind. He was stretched out on the backseat, his legs at an angle that looked human uncomfortable but cat relaxed. However, his eyes were glowing the gold of his cat, the way they got when he was fighting a shape-shift. His scratchy voice told me he wasn’t okay. I decided his cat might interpret me meeting his gaze as a challenge, so I turned back around.
“You had to cut me free again,” I stated.
“I did. It was different this time.”
“Different how?”
“I thought you were going to bleed to death when I cut the roots next to your hands. The roots had grown from your flesh, through the ground, into the severed feet of thegwyllgi. Theroots were draining the feet of the dog. Feeding on the flesh. Rooting into the flesh because there was no soil to root in.”
I adjusted the blanket to make a tent over a heating vent at my feet, trapping the warm air, giving myself time to think about that. “I bet T. Laine thought that was…freaky,” I said, using a term she might choose.
“She started mumbling about the nature of magic and power and energy and mentioned the wordsquantum mechanics.”
“She’s been talking to Tandy, I assume.” When Occam didn’t reply, I went on with an explanation. “The vampire tree is slowly merging with Soulwood like some kind of symbiotic life-form, inside meandgrowing on the land. It works with Soulwood’s energies, with my energies. You know it eats meat to survive. I know that. I ain’t never hid it. Are you upset because I’m a cannibal?”
“No. Human meat is foul, but it will stave off starvation. I’m upset because when I cut you free, the roots in the dog died. And when they died, they…They spoke.”
I went very still. The vampire tree in the virtual reality we could share had finally started speaking. I thought a kind of hallucination, a onetime thing. Or, if I was honest with myself, I had hoped that was the case. Seems I had been wrong. There was no sound in the car except the whisper of the heated air and the quiet engine. Softly, I said, “What did they say?”
“They said, ‘No.’ ”
“Oh…That’s…” I stopped. That wasterrifying.
“Without a larynx,” he said. “Without lungs. Rubbing themselves across the rock to make a sound. They said, ‘No.’ ”
Just a sound. Just a vibration on stone that Occam interpreted as a word.
But I knew it was more than that.
“I carried you out of the cave,” he continued. “When we got back to the car, the potted tree had grown so large it took up the entire backseat. I had to cut it out in pieces.”
I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “Did it talk too?”
“Not right away.” He went silent for a while, the car a comforting drone, the heated air trapped beneath the blanket, warming me. He spoke again, his voice deeper, more catlike. “I carried the pieces and the pot to an old burn pit behind thehouse and lit it all on fire. It screamed, Nell. It screamed, ‘No,’ over and over. We all heard it.”
“The tree is sentient. It wants to reproduce. It wants to claim land and territory. It mutates every time it comes into contact with the blood of plant-people. It may mutate when it comes in contact with devil dog blood too, since that’s also church-bred blood. I don’t know. But burning anything is smart, the way I burn my leaves.”
“We need to destroy that be-damned tree.”
“How?” I asked. “The churchmen and I tried burning, herbicides, cutting, and, I think, explosives. It just comes up somewhere else and finds a spot to thrive. And it thinks. Not like a person, but it seeks survival and reproduction and mutation. I honestly don’t know if thereisany way to destroy it.”
