“I’ll handle the food.” Mawmaw looked at me. “I assume you’re using your own flowers?”
“Yes,” I said again, fighting to sound normal and not as if my throat was closing up in teary gratitude. I held the baby closer and breathed in the smell of baby: milk, formula, a fainter scent of baby pee, and the indistinct scent of fast-growing plants. “Winter greenery in my bouquet.”
Noah released my finger and reached up with his free arm. He managed to close his fist on a coil of my hair. He waved it around and pulled it to his mouth, making little sounds like he might be hungry. I eased my hair away and handed my nephew to Esther. She unhooked her dress top, positioned a clean cloth diaper so it would cover her breast and the baby’s head, and snuggled him close, letting him nurse.
“So,” I said. “I’m getting married two days before Christmas. Thank you, Mawmaw.”
My grandmother hugged me and reverted to church-speak, pointing at the mamas. “You’uns got work to do on that dress.” She sent that finger to me. “Nellie, you scoot on home and send your mama a picture.”
* * *
I hadn’t expected an attack in daylight. I hadn’t expected an attack at all.
It was five to eleven and I was eating an early lunch. I had a sandwich a half inch from my mouth when I felt the first footfall on my land. Dropping the sandwich, I grabbed my shotgun, my PsyLED service weapon, and my cell phone and raced outsidebeneath cloudy skies. I moved so fast Cherry didn’t even have time to try to get outside with me.
I laid the weapons and my upper body across a raised bed facing south, dialed Esther and told her to stay inside. Before she could demand more information I ended that call and dialed PsyLED. I shoved one hand into the soil. Tandy answered.
“PsyLED Eighteen. Dyson.”
“Tandy. This is Nell. Not asking for help yet, but reporting a stranger on my land, entering from the highway on foot.”
“Can you tell if they’re armed?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Liaising with local law enforcement. Sending a car by, no lights, no sirens.”
Yummy was asleep in the closet. Mud was at school. Occam was on a case forty miles to the west. I was on my own.
I closed my eyes and concentrated. Felt the footsteps move up the hill, purposeful but not in a direct line, through the old woods of Soulwood in my general direction. Not toward Esther. The footfalls followed an animal path, a deer path. The footsteps felt the way a hunter walks, careful but not stalking, not predatory like a cat. And it was daylight, not dark. So, not a vampire.
I relaxed, letting my awareness gather around the intruder.
The birds in the trees around it called out alarms. From the land I got the sensation of boots. The feeling of human male. No rifle. A steel blade in one hand. Slashing. The awareness of trees shouting, screaming. He was hacking his way through the undergrowth. Harming oaks, black walnuts, and a few tight stands of poplar saplings. Striking in long diagonal cuts, high on one side, to his knees on the other. Some of the saplings would never recover, cut too low, damaging the trunks.
“Machete,” I said. “He’s too far from the road for a LEO to see him. Have the unit go directly to my sister’s house.”
“Roger that,” Tandy said.
“Do you feel anything?” I asked him. Tandy was the member of the unit most closely tied to Soulwood. His gift of empathy had allowed him a deeper connection.
“No. Nothing. Yet.”
In the background I heard him giving my address and a description of Esther’s house: “It looks like a hobbit built it.” Thedescription was way off, but I let it slide, my own thoughts concentrating on the man slashing his way through the property. I was fairly certain he was a hunter ignoring private property, looking for a good place to build or raise a deer stand.
But just in case…
I envisioned the Green Knight, showing him the invader’s position, but the tree already knew about him. I felt vines erupting from the ground in front of the trespasser.
In our shared reality, the knight was fully helmeted, his visor down, gauntlets in place, a sword in one hand and a shield on his left arm. He was sitting astride his green horse. The massive beast stamped its front hoof and snorted, breath a white cloud, its breastplate a golden green with an iridescent shimmer.
All through the ground I felt the earth awaken. Soulwood,hungry.
“Tandy,” I whispered. “Tell the deputy to stay in his car. Do not, I repeat, donotstep out of the car. Tell him I have security cameras tracking the trespasser.”
“Copy.” I heard a faint click as he took me off the recording. “Nell. Is your land…moving?”
He was feeling the land awaken. Tandy loved the land like it was family.
