The call ended.
Rick smiled, looking bemused, and said, “That would have been helpful information to have before the visit to Ming.”
Jo said, “I’ll look into the sedition part.”
Margot said, “I’ll type up the phone call’s focal points.”
“Thank you, Jo, Racer,” FireWind said. “Meeting adjourned. Ingram and LaFleur, you’ve both been on the clock since eight a.m. LaFleur, come in late tomorrow. Ingram, you’re off shift. Go home. Have you decided that you’re comfortable with Colstrip sleeping in your home? If not, we need to find a place for her to lair in the daylight.”
“Can she fit in the trunk of her Ferrari?” I asked, not able to hide the snide note.
“It’s less than two cubic feet of space,” Aya said with the faintest twitch of his lips. “So no.”
“I’ll figure something out,” I said, thinking of the closets upstairs. “What about food?”
“Ming promised she would send some of my humans at dusk to feed me.” Yummy was standing at the door again. Whatever she saw on my face made her add, “I’ll meet them at the bottom of the hill. I won’t feed on your property.” Her voice was expressionless, empty. Maybe a little lost.
Her expression made me a bad host, which I had been brought up to believe was one of the ultimate sins. Guilt bloomed in me. But guilt didn’t mean I would let a vampire drink from her blood dinners in the house.
Yummy laughed, her change of expression mercurial. “Don’t look so upset. I’m not insulted enough to drink you down. Not without an invitation.”
FOUR
When we arrived at home, Occam’s fancy car was parked in front and my cat-man was stretched out on the top step in cat form, my three cats and Cherry snuggled up against his warmth. Cherry thumped her tail hello but didn’t get up to meet me. My critters liked my cat-man better than they did me. I wasn’t resentful, exactly, but I did, from time to time, remind them who fed them and cared for them. I looked around my land, bright in the moonlight. The fog from the river valley, if it had ever reached this elevation, had blown away.
Yummy’s Ferrari LaFerrari pulled in and parked to the side. I was sorta surprised to see that it made it up the hill. The gravel street got semiregular maintenance, but it was awfully bumpy and her car was made for street speed, not climbing unpaved hills. Yummy got out, carried her bags to the stairs, and dropped them on the bottom one. “Occam,” she said, her tone neutral.
“Wait here,” I said.
I dropped my things by hers and walked to the raised beds where herbs and flowers grew in summer, beds I had constructed by the sweat of my brow, with low narrow pathways between them. Though I had laid them out to be a pretty entrance to the house, they had another purpose. The lower pathways provided me cover, where I could duck down behind the beds and fire over them at churchmen who had once wanted me and my land. That was back before my bonding with the land grew so strong and the Green Knight showed up to help protect me.
I sat on a raised bed and put my hands to the earth. Soulwood, already awake, welcomed me with warmth and what felt like joy—if trees and roots and grass and dirt could feel joy. I was just about to tell Soulwood and the vampire tree aboutYummy visiting, but I wasn’t fast enough. A surge of energy swept through the earth like lightning.
All around the vampire, vines with thorns sprouted, growing at hyperspeed. Before she realized she was trapped, each foot had been penetrated by a thorn, as the vampire tree tasted her blood.
She screamed, inarticulate, sharp. “What is this magic?” she demanded.
“It’s my land.”
“Make it stop, damn it. It’s painful.”
“Working on it.” I hadn’t read my land deeply in a week, and the tree was always rooting in closer, trying to keep me, and now my sister and her babies, safe. I sent my awareness through the earth and touched a nice-sized root I hadn’t noticed. I thought at the tree,You back off. We’ns got rules.
The Green Knight appeared in my mind, in the vision world of green light he had created for us, standing at the fence that separated us. Usually he was sitting astride a pale green horse and carried a white halberd propped over a shoulder, trailing vines and bursting with green leaves. In the other hand he often carried a long lance the dark green of fir needles, the entire length trailing more vines, green leaves fluttering in an unseen wind. Green. All green. His skin was the palest green of spring leaves, his hair lighter today, and while he almost always wore pale green armor, this time he was helmetless, his gauntlets and his horse not in the image. Behind him a pasture stretched into the green sky, so many shades of green. A dark forest grew far behind his pasture. His green eyes were on mine. A long strand of grass with seeds on the end rested in the corner of his mouth, like he was a farmer tasting his land. On the end of the grass, thorns sprouted.Stop it,I thought.She’s a guest.
He cocked his head at my words.
The tree, the physical embodiment of the Green Knight, had to be fed occasionally, and it wasn’t a vegetarian. It wanted living creatures—mice, squirrels, birds—and now maybe vampires. It was a fast-growing, pretty pinkish hardwood, once an oak, now a meat-eating monster I had created in a burst of accidental magic while I was dying. I had no way to control it except by negotiation, and though it was learning English, it didn’t communicate well except through images.
I sent a memory of Yummy in my house, my hand on hers, trying to say, to imagine a scene, that said to him,She’s mine. Not yours.
In the background, I heard Yummy scream, that high-pitched ululation of death.
I felt Occam, standing beside me, changing form, transforming to human. His magic sparkled through the land where his paws touched it, and then where his hands and knees touched it. I felt him stand. Naked, he said, “Tell the tree if Yummy tries anything on you, Esther, Mud, or the babies, I’ll rip her arms off.”
I passed the information to the tree in a bloody visual. The Green Knight seemed to consider. Seconds later Yummy stopped screaming and began crying. I felt her move off direct contact with the land as she dragged herself up the stairs to the porch.
The Green Knight held out his hand, which had been empty only moments before, and poured out the green stuff he now carried. It was an image he had sent before, and which I didn’t fully understand except maybe it was the green of life.
