“I’ll be home at nine p.m. I’ll pick her up.”
Esther looked pointedly at the door and back to me.
I laughed softly. “Right. I’ll be walking around, okay?”
“Doin’ cop stuff or plant-people stuff?”
“Plant-people stuff. I’ll be quiet.”
“Better be.” Esther opened the door and waited until Cherryand I were outside before shutting it firmly. She had never been real chatty even in the best of times. Tired and sleepless, taking care of twins mostly alone, she was crankier than usual.
I approached the saplings that had given me pause last night. I turned my flashlight on them. They were growing from an old root ball from an American chestnut tree. The root had never really died, and it put out tiny saplings every year, but the saplings never survived. The trees weren’t extinct, but no American chestnut tree had exactly survived either, dying off from a fungal blight calledCryphonectria parasitica, which had been brought to America from Japan in 1904. Between then and 1940, something like 3.5 billion of the trees, the giants of the Appalachian hardwood forest, considered the finest chestnut tree in the world, had died. Many of the root systems, underground and protected from the blight, were still alive, and tried to grow every year. This root system was over a hundred twenty years old.
And now, after last night, its saplings were twenty feet tall, and though its leaves were turning in the icy weather, the saplings looked unexpectedly healthy. They were growing up from every root for twenty feet around the old stump. Had the sacrifice of three vampires so close to its root system cured it? Or had the Green Knight? I wouldn’t know until spring, when they lived or died, but just seeing the trees sent electric delight all through me.
I clicked off the light, whistled Cherry to me, and walked up the road to the ditch where I had rolled the vampire I’d killed. There had been an acre of young scrub trees at the side of the road before. Now, after feeding the land with the life of the vampire that had tried to drag me away, there was a whole acre of healthy hardwoods looking to be a hundred years old, none growing in the roadway but crowding in close, and many of them carrying the reek of sourwood, and others I could identify by the bark and the shape of the trunks: white oak, a patch of red oak, poplar, some dogwood, and smaller trees here and there. The branches were bare, leaves heavy and fresh on the ground.
None of the trees should have been able to grow at this season. My land might be developing a taste for vampire blood. Which could be a good thing unless it started attacking the localvampires, and I had to claim them all to keep them safe. I didn’t want to have many more vampire friends.
I reached out to the land and found Aya and Margot. They had driven up together and were changing shape near Aya’s car, which was parked near the end of the road near my drive. Yummy was sitting in a tree nearby, watching me. I said softly, “I have coffee. Come sit on the porch.”
Overhead, cloud-to-cloud lightning flickered. I wondered if we’d have snow, and maybe a snow thunderstorm.
* * *
Dawn was a long time coming, the sky obscured by heavy clouds, only the barest hint of paleness graying the horizon when Yummy joined me on the front porch swing, sipping coffee while I sipped tea. “Is coffee enough?” I asked.
Yummy breathed out a laugh. “No. But I’ve gone longer without blood.”
“When will Ming send your blood-servants and scions? You know I don’t have room for ’em. They ain’t stayin’ in my house.”
Yummy, who had cleaned up and changed clothes at some point, pushed off with a toe, sending the swing into movement. “She released my servants immediately after you claimed your boon. There’s a house in Oliver Springs I’ve wanted for twenty years, and my people sent an offer to the owner, who happens to be a night owl.” She laughed, a sound of wonder in the tone. “She already answered. Can you believe it? The paperwork will take a bit, but because the building was empty and it was a cash offer, she already agreed.”
“That was quick.”
“Money talks. Lots of money talks fast. My people will begin repairs and painting and we’ll move in immediately.”
She pushed us again, and I waited, hearing something different in her voice, in her tone.
“They started work on my lair already. My very own lair,” she said, sounding wistful, as if she had dreamed of that for a long time. “It’s a large room with its own bath in the basement. They’ll seal off the basement’s exterior windows with steel shutters tomorrow and I should be able to move in at dusk and sleep there tomorrow—not today, if I can get you to invite me to stay another day.”
Mud was at the Nicholsons’ so I shrugged and said, “Sure.”
“But I do have a question. What duties will you require of me?”
“Huh?” Overly succinct, but it got the point across.
“When you used one of your boons from Ming of Glass, you asked for my scions, blood-servants to feed all three of us, including my personal blood-servants, demanded they all be kept safe until they could be delivered to a place of my choosing, alive, healthy, and not missing any blood.” She glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “Not an exact quote but close enough. And then you said, ‘Yummy is mine now. Not Ming’s.’ So what do you require of me?”
“Nothin’,” I said, a sense of horror flashing through me. “I was just giving you my protection so you would be free to do whatever you want. Barring abusing and killing humans, you’re free. I don’t own people.”
“I have a counterproposal. I don’t want to be free. I want what I already claimed, to be your Warlord. To have access to this land to run on at night. To dance on.” She smiled at me, that wonderment still on her face. “Your land makes me happy. I want the protection you offer, and to offer all my protection in return.”
Her lips drew down in what looked like wistfulness. “And I want our friendship.”
I didn’t have a lot of friends, almost none outside of work, and her simple statement lit a small flame of warmth in me. “Okay. With the stipulation that you owe me nothing and can stop coming anytime you want to.”
“So you would permit me to build a blood clan family in Oliver Springs? To make allies with other Mithrans?”
