“I like that.”
“Mmmm,” I said.
“You didn’t sleep much,” he said. “I’m taking you back to bed.”
“Is that an invitation?” A small smile curved my mouth.
Occam breathed out a laugh as he lifted me in a baby-carry and walked to the bedroom. “You got terrible timing. I gotta go into HQ early for a few hours, since Rick and Aya will be late getting in. I’ll be off early unless we catch a case.” He placed me on the bed and said, “Sleep a bit.”
“Okay. You want venison stew for supper?” I said as my eyes closed. “I got the fixin’s.”
“Sounds tasty.”
I knew, even in my dreams, when Occam drove off the mountain.
* * *
I was up and dressed by eight thirty, my weapon and harness in my gobag, me sitting on my sofa reading progress reports on the case. The PM had started at eight a.m., with the PsyCSI team on hand to remove trace evidence like hair and fibers that might have been missed when they took the body in. They also werepresent to take swabs from each wound, and watch the proceedings—because the scientific types were always curious and always learning. Saliva, blood, and urine had been collected and sent for testing. So far, the pathologist had three types of hair, which had been given to the lead tech of the PsyCSI lab: three hairs that were short, coarse, and brown with a black tip; five that were short, coarse, and totally black; and two that were fine and silky white.
The first two had been preliminarily identified as animal, likely canid. The white one had been determined to be animal, not human, but class, order, and family had not yet been determined.
The cutting and measuring and weighing of organs would be done by eleven. Maybe. So far, beyond the things FireWind and LaFleur had determined, we knew the unknown DB had been in good health until recently, and appeared to be of a lower socioeconomic background because he’d had multiple untreated dental caries—cavities. He was uncircumcised. The ME had ruled out torture of a sexual nature.
By nine a.m., that was all we had. And because I had no reason to go into work early, sadly I had no excuse when Esther sent a text inviting me to Bible reading and coffee with Mama. Feeling grumpy, I walked down the road to her house, letting my awareness pass along the ground beneath my boots, into the roadway, lightly out to both sides, skimming with my mind to the neighbor’s property on one side and to my house on the other. Both plots of land were mine in the sense that my power had claimed them. My land. The Green Knight’s land. No matter what the deeds and plots filed in the county offices said.
I didn’t actively reach out to the tree for contact with the Green Knight. I kept my steps light. The sound of traffic was gone, rush hour slowing, and the only sound was the breeze in the limbs, a rushing like water, a clack of branches hitting. The breeze was cold and I tucked my hands into my pockets.
The vampire tree had been cut along the road to build Esther’s house. Weeks later, trees lined both sides of the road again, fast-growing saplings, trees with thorns, the bark rough with vine-like things falling from the limbs to the ground, vines that had the capability of fast movement, vines with thorns to catch and kill prey. Meat it needed as much as it needed sunlightand water and nutrients to sustain it. Meat: like birds, deer, even humans and paranormal creatures, though so far it hadn’t tried to attack anyone but Yummy.
I hadn’t allowed the tree to root anywhere else. Currently it was all one massive tree with a single origin point and a single sprawling root system. I hadn’t allowed myself to think about the tree if it tried to take over the world. It could. It was faster growing than kudzu, filling in open spaces between trees, with the means to defend itself.
The tree was a menace. That it was also a protector wasn’t lost on me. Along the long drive, the new vampire saplings rustled with the cold wind. The warmth of the land rose into me. The tree had woken as well, aware of me and welcoming.
The division between Esther’s land and mine was both hard as stone and tangled like roots, a place she had claimed, once with her blood and later when her water broke and poured through the porch floorboards to the ground below.
The Green Knight appeared different to her, but because she was afraid of her power, she didn’t look at her land often, didn’t interact with it the way I did mine. That made her protection more passive and therefore potentially less useful and more dangerous.
I rounded the curve in the road and spotted the trucks at Esther’s. I stopped in the middle of the rutted street. I hadn’t reached out to her land and hadn’t sensed them, but I knew all of the trucks and all of the drivers. Knew they had driven over to “visit with the babies,” knew why I had been invited to devotionals and coffee. The mamas were here. All three at once. And with them was my mawmaw, the family matriarch, Maude Hamilton Vaughn, Mama’s mother. The mamas had brought out the big guns.
This was a wedding ambush.
Though it was dark as pitch, the bus had already picked Mud up for school. I was on my own.
I’d rather face down a dozen armed bank robbers wearing clown masks and armed with bazookas than the mamas working together.
Reluctance weighing me down, I walked toward the house, Esther’s magical Tulip Tree House. The night the twins were born, the pinkish horizontal logs that had been sawn fromwilling vampire trees had put out roots, long, sinuous roots, trailing and draping to the ground, thickening into trunks. They had also grown upward and out, tall, strong, like living siding, with branches sprouting leaves. Not the dark green leaves with red petioles of my vampire tree, but burgundy five-pointed leaves like serrated maple leaves. When the trees first grew, the leaves were shades of green, growing in pairs, one pair one way, the next pair the other, so they shaped a round fan or funnel that captured rainwater and let it glide down to the roots. The leaves at the bottom were larger than my two hands spread side by side; near the tops of the new trees, they were smaller, and the treetops curled, rising above the roof to touch before they spread out, forming what looked like an unopened-tulip-blossom-shaped framework. A second roof of living wood.
Vines with the same leaf positioning had grown all around the trim on the windows and around the doorway like decorations. Saplings had sprouted around the acre of land Esther had claimed, while leaving lawn and garden space that would eventually become a playground for the kids. Earlier in the season, between two icy spells, every branch and twig had flowered in bunches of tiny white flowers, like a fairy house. Now, in early winter, the flowers were gone, but the trees still bore leaves the colorful reds and golds of different varieties of maples.
The trees made it appear a joyful place, suggesting that a happy person lived there, totally unlike its owner. Esther was a dour woman, demanding and complaining.
I walked from my land onto Esther’s and felt the welcome. Climbed the stairs, my hand on the handrail, the pinkish wood smooth. A faint tingle of power acknowledged my presence. The sensation was like and yet unlike the power of the Green Knight as it presented itself to me.
I lifted my hand and knocked on the door.
FIVE
Mama Grace opened the door, gave me a version of the church blessing, “Hospitality and safety, sweet girl,” and in the same breath called out, “Our Nellie is here.” She enfolded me in her arms. Mama Grace was the youngest of Daddy’s three wives, soft and rounded, and her hugs were pillowy, offering a sense of safety and peace. Though she was the youngest, and was usually surrounded by toddlers, most of them hers, Mama Grace, when she wasn’t in the midst of child care, was the peacemaker in the family, a kind and sweet-tempered soul.
