“She has a place in town. Small but adequate.” Yummy’s tone suggested Ming’s lair was very small and barely adequate and that she was amused at Ming being discomforted.
Feeling Cherry running across the lawn, I opened the door as she bounded up the stairs and back inside.
“Mind if I get my things? Since you’re up?” Yummy asked. “And then we should talk.”
That sounded ominous. “Sure.” Softer, I added, “Don’t laugh at the bunny slippers.”
“I’d never laugh at bunny slippers.”
As she gathered her things upstairs, I put tea on a tray and carried it to the front porch, Yummy behind me. I took a seat on the swing, one of the teacups in my hand. My eyes were on the dark southern sky as Yummy took a seat beside me, silent as the predator she truly was.
She sipped the tea. I grinned, waiting.
“It’s…different,” she said after she swallowed the first sip. “I remember the taste of lemonade from when I was human.”
She didn’t say she liked it. It was a carefully worded truth, without presenting insult to the offering. She set the mug aside and angled to me on the swing. “I’ll be here every night, patrolling, until Torquemada is stopped.”
“Why?” I asked. “I didn’t ask you for nothing. It isn’t like I’m the Master of the City.”
“I told you. You’re my friend. And it’s been a few decades since I had a real friend.”
Yummy didn’t wait for a reply. “I’ll be patrolling for as long as it takes.” Without making the swing move at all, which was unsettling, she was suddenly standing, her gear in her arms. She leaped over the handrail, dropped to ground level, climbed into her Ferrari, and, seconds later, disappeared slowly down the hill.
Troubled, chilled to the bone, I went inside to discuss decorating the tree with Mud. Like maybe throwing a small party. Or something. But Mud was sound asleep on the couch, so I covered her with a blanket and went to my room.
Trying to move as silently as Yummy had, I pulled gardening clothes out of the closet and dressed, knowing that my next visit would be no easier. But when I walked out of the bedroom, Mud was standing in the center of the room, wide-eyed, pale, her hair sticking out on one side. “We’uns need to go to Esther’s. I done had a bad dream.”
* * *
Esther’s Tulip Tree House was dark, so Mud (wearing her church dress over jeans and zipped into a heavy padded jacket) and I (wearing hogwashers, John’s old jacket from his truck, and boots) sat on my old ratty pink blanket—what was left of it—at the boundary of the land between Soulwood and Esther’s acreage. She would be up with the babies soon, for the five a.m. nursing, burping, changing, and soothing. All alone. When we finished reading the land and her lights came on, we’d go lend a hand.
All but Esther’s one acre of the one-hundred-fifty-acre farm John had left me in his will was technically Soulwood, but the night my sister’s water broke and she fed the earth, her influence over the land had spread. Elsewhere, the vampire tree wore thorns and looked dangerous, but here it had mutated to match Esther’s particular DNA, and though the tree still had thorns, they were hidden beneath leaves and, in warmer weather, fluffy blooms, a concealed weapon. The tree was pretty. I didn’t know whether to be amused or envious that my prickly sister got the pretty tree while I got the ornery warrior one.
I pulled off my gloves and placed my hands on the frozen ground. My plant-woman sister did the same. Together we worked our fingertips into the ground, the frozen layer on the surface thin, but hard. Beneath that, the warmth of the land flooded up to touch my flesh, crawled up my arms, and into my torso, alive, slumbrous.
Beside me, Mud sighed. “That’s nice.”
“Mmmm,” I agreed.
The land wasn’t angry or protective, wasn’t gathering power or building toward anything sudden or direct. Soulwood was lazy and stretching in its winter sleep. I let my thoughts flow through the land, not particularly deep, just enough to know that Soulwood was safe and was protecting Esther’s home.
Just at the edge of her land, I brushed across something new,yet ancient and aware. I reached out to stroke across it and knew instantly what it was. The American chestnut’s roots, the one I had sensed and seen when the vampires fed the land with their undead blood.
Letting my senses move upward from the root ball system to the new sprout/saplings, I experienced health and strength and a burgeoning life. I had been right when I first noticed them. This root system and the trees growing up from it were all completely healthy. The blight was gone. Gently, I pushed more life into the young trees, not enough to make them leaf out again, but enough to give them a boost to help them survive the cold of winter.
Beside me, Mud removed one hand from the ground and gripped my wrist. “Do you see the new tree?”
“Yes.” I told her about it in a few sentences, and together, her hand around my wrist, we watched the tree’s roots from underground, new roots spreading from the old root ball, all of them healthy and living.
I guess some would call it meditation, or communing with the land. To me it felt like coming home. I dropped my head and exhaled in peace.
At some point later, I was aware of movement. My other plant-sister was on her porch.
“You’uns gonna sit out there till sunrise,” she called, “or you’uns comin’ in to help me change diapers and wash a load of clothes? I got spit-up, pee, and stinky mama-milk on me and I need a hot shower and a break.”
Without opening my eyes, I called back, “You’un got tea?”
“ ’Course I got tea. I’m a Nicholson, ain’t I?”
