T. Laine said, “You barf on my shoes and I swear I’ll make you pay.”
“You can barf on my shoes, Nell, sugar.”
“No one could tell,” T. Laine said.
“True,” Occam said.
And then I was lying down on the couch in the break room I hadn’t even seen yet, and someone closed the blinds. I felt my blanket being tucked around me as I tunneled down toward sleep and whispered, “Am I getting paid to sleep?”
“Yes,” Rick said, his heated hand on my forehead. “Yes, you are.”
The last thing I remembered was Paka stretching out beside me on the couch, her leopard warmth so wonderful and amazing that I rolled a little and rested against her.
* * *
It was quitting time when I woke, pink sunlight slanting through the side of the blinds. My headache had reduced from a roaring inferno to a campfire suitable for browning marshmallows and roasting hot dogs. Paka was gone, and I was alone on the couch beneath the blanket.
I managed to slit open my eyes and get a fuzzy vision of a table and chairs and two forms sitting there before I took refuge behind my lids again. I had known Occam was in the room. I couldn’t say how I had known, but I had. T. Laine sat with him, silent. I also knew they were both feeling bad about letting me scan the earth.
I cleared my voice and whispered, “I think I might live.”
“I was hoping you would say that, Nell, sugar. Hauling dead bodies isn’t in my job description.”
“I need to write the action report,” I said, my voice a mite stronger.
“You don’t remember much after that headache,” T. Laine said.
“I don’t?”
“No,” Occam said. “Lainie and I wrote reports based on what you told us at the scene. In the morning, if you remember something else, you can write your own report.”
From the doorway, outside my line of sight, had I even had my eyes open, Rick said, “I suggest that you read the reports and see if they’re accurate.” His wry tone said he knew they were covering for me.
“I promise,” I said, trying to force my eyes open some more. “I need to go home.”
“I’ll drive you,” Occam asked.
“It’s too far out of your way.”
Occam said, “Not in my new car. That thing loves an autumn ride in the country.”
I felt the tiny pull of muscles at my lips. “You got a government car too?”
He made a cat sound, kinda sneezy and snorty all at once. Derisive. “I am the proud owner of a previously owned 2015 Ford Mustang two-door Fastback GT. That baby purrs.”
My lips pulled wider. “I might barf if you take the corners too fast. I might barf if you hit the brakes or speed up too fast. I might barf just to barf, all over your newish car. And that is a terrible word. Barf. What’s wrong with the word vomit?”
“I’ll bring you a barf bag, Nell, sugar.”
“Whoopie. Okay. Thank you. Will you get my dirty clothes and shoes and laptop and whatever else I need? Oh. Keys. And how will I get back here in the morning?”
“Your friendly neighborhood taxi service. Me,” Occam said. “I got a place outside of Oliver Springs, not too far from the foot of your mountain, so don’t argue. Piece of cake to pick you up.”
I could guess why he had a place so close to my land and the wooded hills owned by the TVA. It allowed him to shift, slip out of his house on the full moon, hunt, and then shift back without needing a place to leave his car. Smart move. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure. Be right back.”
I heard him leave the room, and I knew I had to fix the other problem. “So,” I murmured to T. Laine, “what will it take to make you feel better? Make you stop feeling all awful about the backlash? A foot massage might feel good about now. Or you could wash my clothes. Or put in a couple of hours in my garden this weekend.”
“It’s not funny,” T. Laine muttered. “I could have killed you.”
“Could have. Didn’t. And I’m pretty sure I would be dead now if you hadn’t gotten me free. I was injured by friendly fire, to save me from sure death in the deeps. It happens. I learned something. You learned something. We’ll do better next time.”
After a moment, while I listened to Rick, Occam, and Tandy bantering down the hall, T. Laine asked, her voice soft, “What did you learn?”
“That when I do a scan, my brain is tied either physically or metaphysically with the ground. What I do doesn’t work like X-rays or sound waves, a reading where I might stay in my body and send out something that will take readings. It’s more of an out-of-body experience. My consciousness actually leaves my body and goes into the earth. It’s what I thought happened, but I could never be certain until now. It makes me wonder what would happen if someone moved my body while I was down there. Would I be able to find myself? Would I just die? Lost in the dark?”
T. Laine made a sound that said she was listening, and added, “Out-of-body experiences have been scientifically proven to be tied into specific brain cell activity, involving parts of the brain that deal with feelings of what brain scientists call ‘body ownership,’ as well as regions that are involved with spatial orientation. They call them GPS cells. So you really aren’t out of your body in an OBE. You just think you are.”
I managed a partial smile. “Not in my case. You proved that I’m actually in the ground. Break proved it. Had I been getting feedback from the earth and not been actually down there, Break wouldn’t have harmed me.”
“Hoooly . . .”
The word breathed into silence. I could almost feel her brain working on what I had said. “We know something that no one else knows,” I said, “about my species, whatever I am. We’ll have to experiment on how to use magic without killing me while I’m in the ground.”
I heard T. Laine close a laptop and shuffle around. It sounded like she was gathering her things. “Thank you,” she said. “For that. And I’m so sorry.”
“It isn’t a problem, Lainie,” I said. “We learned something brand-new. It makes us a better team.”
“Are you trying to say you’ll let me do a working near you again someday?”
“It’s part of the job.”
“Next time I’ll try not to kill you.”
“That would be nice,” I whispered, letting the smile curve up my lips and crinkle around my eyes.
“Come on. I’ll help you to Occam’s chick-magnet car. Did he tell you it’s red?”
“Chick magnet,” I said, letting her help me slowly into an upright position. “Six months ago I’d have been thinking about getting me some laying hens if you said that. Now I know it means Occam is using the car to get himself a varied sex life.”
“Are you two talking about my sexual prowess?” Occam said from the door.
“No,” T. Laine said with asperity. “We’re talking about how you don’t have a sex life without a hot car.”
“Ouch,” he said, laughing. “Come on, Nell, sugar. Let’s get you home and into bed.”
My eyes opened fully at that line and I put an I-beg-your-blessed-pardon expression on my face. It was Mama’s look when she was getting ready to go to battle.
Occam chuckled. So did T. Laine. And I realized that they were poking fun at me. “Ain’t she cute when she looks at us like that? All prim and proper and fulla spunk? Come on, Nell, sugar. Let’s get you home. Tomorrow starts early.”
* * *
It was after eight p.m. when I finished repacking the gobag, washing clothes, and laying them on wooden racks in front of the Waterford cookstove to dry. Finished eating dinner and feeding the cats, who were full of complaints about the fact that I hadn’t come home last night. Sleeping outside wasn’t a burden on them, but they didn’t like being locked out. Long before nine, I crawled between the sheets on my new bed, the cats curled up on top of the coverlet, and we all went to
sleep.
When I woke again, it was to cat whiskers tickling my jaw, a cold cat nose nuzzling mine. The night still pressed at the windows. Out back, a barred owl hooted; in the distance, another answered. I realized that I had spent most of the last two days sleeping. It was an unfamiliar feeling, to be so well rested. I hadn’t slept so much in—well, ever. I had been the early-to-bed, early (before the crack of dawn)-to-rise person for all of my life in the church and as John Ingram’s junior wife, in a life that meant hard physical labor and not much time off from anything. When I left for Spook School, that lifestyle had worked to my benefit, but the hours allotted for sleeping there had been closer to six, not eight, or the ten I sometimes got in winter on the farm. I stretched and checked the time on my cell. It was four a.m. Outside it would be cold and the ground would be hard, if not frozen. Perfect for a little machete work in the garden.
I eased out of bed to not disturb the cats, and dressed in long johns, my overalls, one of John’s old flannel shirts, and work boots. Setting a pot of coffee to brew, I got out pancake mixings and checked in on the cats. They slept on, likely thinking that I was insane to go out so early. They might be right. I lifted a big skillet from the warming tray and set it on the stove so it would be ready for use at any time. I took the machete and a pair of leather work gloves from the back porch, set the security light to stay on, and tromped to the garden. I didn’t usually wear heavy gloves, but the stitches were in bad places for possible further injury, especially for what I intended.
Entering the garden area, I closed off the rabbit-netting fence, laid out my few tools, and tested the heft of the machete with my uninjured arm. Then I started hacking and slashing with abandon, pulling up the dead stuff and creating a pile of dead, dry, withered vegetation. I also worked up a sweat. It was wonderful. And if I was avoiding doing what I knew I needed to do, well, that was okay. For the short hours until dawn.
When the sun was a faint gray haze in the east, I put away my tools and stared into the blackness of the woods. “Now or never,” I said. I went to the trees where I used to sit when John’s first wife, Leah, was dying and I was her sole caretaker. To the space between a sycamore and a poplar, where the roots of the two trees had reached out, searching for nutrients, and had intertwined in an interracial arboreal marriage of sorts.
There was nothing here to hurt me. And Soulwood was fine. I knew that. Really I did. Well, with the exception of Brother Ephraim’s dark soul polluting the far boundary. But I had seen damaged land, been hurt by something in the earth. I had to see that Soulwood was safe and happy, experience for myself that my woods were undamaged, that Brother Ephraim had done no harm to them. It was the way a mother might feel if she woke in the night with dreams of her child fallen ill or injured or near death. She would rise from bed and rush to her child, consumed by the need to touch and to know.
Dropping to my backside with my feet stretched out before me, I took off the leather gloves. Uncertain, needing this, yet fearing it too, I placed my hands, palms flat, on the ground at my sides, and reached down. And down.
The warmth of Soulwood reached back, a heated and lazy sense of welcoming, a drowsy contentment. The earth of my land was in winter shut-down mode, a time when the roots burrowed deep, the twigs and limbs hibernating, the trees storing starch in their trunks and roots, starches that would be converted to sugar that rises in the sap, sugars in the bark and living wood that brought life to the forest. But it was still active enough to know me, and I blew out a breath of relief. I didn’t search for Brother Ephraim, but he wasn’t in the heart of the land, so I was satisfied.
I let the land heal the last of my headache, ease the ache in my joints, and finish the healing of my lacerations. I would need to remove the stitches this morning or the flesh would start growing over them.
When I pulled myself up from the deep of the land, I was chilled, as inflexible as my maw-maw, and she was in her eighties. The sky was pink, and I knew Occam would be here soon. I raced inside and hurried through a hot shower, dressing in the pants that had dried in front of the woodstove overnight, layering on a T-shirt and a clean plaid flannel shirt under a jacket. The lowering clouds said it was going to get cold tonight, so I put warm boots at the door and wore wool socks around the house.
I put on the scant amount of makeup I allowed myself to wear. You can take the churchwoman out of the church but can’t take the church out of the churchwoman, at least not overnight. I dried my bobbed hair and gooped it up again. Not churchwoman-ish at all. I liked the look. It was funky. That’s what LaLa, my mentor at Spook School, had called it. Funky. Once I figured out it wasn’t a bad word, I went with it too. Mama was likely to have a hissy fit when she saw it. But that was a battle for another day.
Once I was presentable, breakfast fixings were out and warming, and the skillet had been moved to the hottest part of the stove, I got a pair of sharp scissors from my sewing kit and started removing the stitches from my arm and hand. As each one popped, a sensation of electric comfort zipped through me, and I caught myself sighing with pleasure by the time I finished. I stretched my fingers and relaxed fully for the first time in nearly two days.
The moment I felt a car on my road, I added oil to the heated fry pan and whisked the pancake batter. By the time Occam knocked on the door, I was dishing up the first stack of pancakes, and I shouted, “The door’s open!”
“Nell,” he said as he entered, censure in his tone, “I coulda been anybody. One’a your churchmen here to rape and kill. Most anything!”
“Nope,” I said, not letting him see my face as I poured more batter into the hot skillet. “I knew when your cute car started up the mountain. If you hadn’ta been you when you stepped onto the ground out front, I had plenty of time to get my gun and shoot you.” I put down the spatula and picked up the handgun on the cabinet, set it down again, and carried a pancake-laden plate to the table with a cup of strong coffee.
His eyebrows went up, his lips tightened, and he closed the door behind him. “You really know when someone drives onto your road?”
“Pretty much. Drives, walks, or slithers.” Ever since I fed Brother Ephraim to the wood, I had known with a far greater certainty. A small silver lining to the big black cloud of Ephraim.
“What’s that?” He nodded to the plate I had set on the table.
“Pancakes,” I said, as if he was stupid. “Have a seat.”
“You made me pancakes for my breakfast,” he said, his voice oddly toneless.
“Seemed a mite unhospitable to feed myself while you watched.” I flipped the second batch of pancakes over, and brought butter and syrup to the table.
Occam grabbed my hand, turning it over. His flesh was warm, like a fire burned directly beneath the surface. “You healed up right fast, Nell, sugar. Who took out your stitches?”
“I did,” I said, surprised. “Who else?”
“A doctor?” He said it like it should have been obvious.
I pulled my hand away and placed the syrup on the table. “Now, that would be a waste of time. Try the syrup.” I went back to the stove. “It’s real maple. I traded for it. Been thinking I could make my maple trees sap up on really cold winters. I’m kinda hoping we’ll have a cold one so’s I can try.”
Occam scowled at me. “You’re gonna make syrup? I hate to remind you, Nell, sugar, but you got yourself a job now. You have to work for a living, and time off is precious and scant.”
“I aim to try,” I said over my shoulder. “Old Man Hodgins on the church compound makes syrup after really cold winters. I thought I might apprentice out to him. The time is less than you might think. Mostly tapping the trees, then cooking the syrup, and both activities are done on Saturdays.” I flipped the pancakes out onto my plate and added more batter to the hot skillet.
I joined Occam at the long table. “You like?” Not that I really needed to ask the question. Occam’s plate was half-
empty.
“I love.”
“Good.” I flashed him a smile and was startled to see his eyes on me, golden hints of his cat in them. I returned my gaze to my plate, suddenly uncomfortable at the presence of a man in my widder-woman house. It wasn’t appropriate or proper.
But Occam was a coworker and a friend. And I’d offered him hospitality.
I shut off the judgmental, condemning part of me, and continued. “You can’t tap a tree until it’s twelve inches in diameter, and you need in the neighborhood of thirty to fifty gallons of sap to evaporate down to one gallon of syrup. That’s why the real stuff is so expensive. I have plenty of maple trees bigger in diameter than twelve inches, and they could take a number of taps. Old Man Hodgins has a large-sized evaporator. The weather isn’t cold enough here to get really good sap, but this winter might be cold enough. It happens from time to time.” I stopped. I was babbling. Suddenly not wanting to look up into Occam’s eyes. So I ate.
When Occam’s plate was empty, I got up and brought the last batch of pancakes to him and finished off my own. Then I washed the dishes, cleaned the fry pan, and coated it with a layer of oil so it wouldn’t rust. I set the stove to cool burn with summer wood, refilled the water heater—a never-ending process—let the cats into the garden, and gathered my gear.
I felt Occam watching me with every move, and without knowing why, I never let myself look his way even after I gathered up my keys. Not knowing why I was so uncomfortable, I followed Occam to his car. I sat silent all the way into Knoxville, to PsyLED HQ.
When we got to HQ, we were met with an uproar. Our investigation into psysitopes had morphed overnight into something new. As of dawn, humans were now involved.