Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(13)

Brother Ephraim watched, silent. He had been my enemy and the enemy of my family for years. He had been an evil, cruel, horrible man who used religion as an excuse to hurt women. When he came on my land to hurt me, and had bled on Soulwood, I had fed him to the earth. That was my own special gift, to take the body and soul of humans and feed them to the land, to nourish it, to support it.

I had fed Soulwood twice, the first time when a man had tackled me in the woods and tried to have his way with me, to get both my body and the land that came with it. I hadn’t known the first man’s name, had never even seen his face. But he had died fast and his essence had fed my land, making my trees grow strong and swiftly, so much that the forest now looked like old-growth trees.

I had thought taking Ephraim would be the same. But either my land had rejected him or Brother Ephraim had found a way to keep his consciousness intact, because the old pedophile and sexual predator was still here, an infection that I hadn’t yet figured out how to kill.

The last time I had studied him this intently, he had attacked me, a psychic attack that had been enough to kill me, had my land not deflected the hit. Soulwood had fought back, had protected me. This time, as I watched him, Ephraim did nothing, though I knew he was aware of me, aware and watching me back, planning something horrible and violent, some way to kill me or, worse, some way to trap me with him in his tiny cell.

More thoroughly, more minutely, I examined the cave-like place he had carved out of my land. It was separated from Soulwood by a membrane that was much thicker than before, soil that he had compacted, soil that he had sterilized. I feared that he’d learned how to do that from me. His one physical assault against my land, I had sealed off by salting the earth at the point of entry. The land there looked a lot like the land now around his hidey-hole. It made it hard to see what was happening on the far boundary, shoved up against the church lands. But I slid my consciousness around to the side and pressed to the very edge of Soulwood.

The membrane on the far side was thinner, less structured than the membrane on my side. The membrane near the church was stretched out, sending long tendrils through the land, deep, and down the cliff face onto the church grounds.

Well, well, well, I thought. You’uns is trying again, ain’tcha. Trying to reach that vampire tree. Trying to do something evil. I know it. I just don’t know what you’re planning yet. I reinforced the cell walls that encapsulated Brother Ephraim on that side, thickening them, hardening them, making them as impervious as I could. Studying their construction.

Because I was lying to myself. I knew what Ephraim wanted. He wanted to contact the tree in the middle of the church grounds. The tree was part of his plan to bring harm to me. And the tree might actually have the ability to hurt me and to help Brother Ephraim.

The tree had once been an oak, but thanks to contact with my blood, it was now a devil tree, a vampire tree, growing vines and thorns and erupting rootlets from the ground, roots that tried to grab little girls’ and boys’ feet and pull them in. Tried to stab any adult who intervened. It killed pets—puppies and kittens. It wanted blood, had, ever since it tasted mine. It acted like a depraved and evil tree, but I had the feeling that the vampire tree had a purpose, needs, and desires. I had tried to give the tree a job, thinking that was all it wanted, but instead of doing what I encouraged it to do, the tree was still growing wild and acting out, killing or trying to.

The last time I’d been on church grounds, the tree was nearly twenty feet around, with serpentine roots like bark-covered boa constrictors petrified in place, leaves like some prehistoric succulent, and four-inch thorns. It had eaten a bulldozer. Had destroyed a concrete block fence. Had resisted burning, chain saws, explosives, and herbicides. I needed to figure out what it wanted and how to contain it. It and Brother Ephraim. Until I figured all that out, I once again choked off Ephraim’s little tendrils with my reinforced wall. No way was I letting the tree that had once had access to my blood merge with my enemy.

Satisfied that I had done all I could to contain Brother Ephraim, I pulled away from the boundaries of Soulwood and back into myself to discover that I had become a daybed for the cats. Torquil was in my lap, curled between the blanket and me in a warm nest. Jezzie was stretched across my shoulders. Cello had made a hammock of the blanket at my elbow and stretched out and twisted like melted taffy in what looked like an anatomically impossible position.

I shooed them away, gathered up my blanket, and went inside. The house had warmed and I turned on the slow-moving overhead fans to move the air around. The cats streaked ahead of me and ignored me when I told them they had a job to do outside. They leaped onto the bed and burrowed under the covers. I did not want to sleep with cats, but I was too tired to make them obey me and put them back outside. I turned on my brand-new electric blanket and crawled in.

And really, with three cats warm and purring, my new bed had never felt so good.





THREE




I was up at noon to let the cats out, add wood to the stove, and tumble back into bed. And I was up again at three, the sunlight peeking through the blinds. I wasn’t sure what species I was, but my kind didn’t do well with lack of sleep, unless that lack of sleep was spent in the woods communing with the trees—and even that had its own consequences. I started coffee in the new Bunn coffeemaker, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and checked my . . . well, they weren’t fingernails. Not anymore. My nails were slightly green, thicker at the nail beds than they had been, thinner at the tips, where they flattened out and spread into leaves—green leaves with distinct veins and curling tips. As part of my morning—afternoon?—ritual, I clipped my leaves. It had become part of my daily grooming habits, one that was even more necessary after time spent communing with the woods. I also clipped the leaves that tended to appear at my hairline at the nape of my neck. I liked the way they felt against my skin, but they tended to creep people out—a new phrase for me. Had I left my hair long, they wouldn’t show, teaching me that some seemingly simple decisions often had long-term consequences.