Flame in the Dark Read online

  Tandy paused near the desk and the recording device centered on it. I stopped to the side of Ming, carefully not between Yummy and her charge. Tandy said, “It’s standard operating procedure for us to record this conversation. Do you have objections, Ming of Glass?”

  Ming waved a hand, the motion languid. “I have no objection.”

  Tandy pushed a button and stated the day and time, the address, and the location in the house. He said, “Special Agents Thom Andrew Dyson and Nell Nicholson Ingram, with Ming of Glass and one member of her security. Would you state your name, miss?” he asked.

  “No,” Yummy said.

  Tandy went red. I wanted to giggle, and all the fear drained out of me. The vamps were playing games with PsyLED. I decided it was not the right time to engage or I’d be playing the game they wanted to play, not one of my own. There are things a girl learns listening to the squabbles of an extended family. Timing is one of them. “Ming of Glass,” I said. “I’m honored to speak with you. I’m Special Agent Nell Ingram of PsyLED.”

  As if to remind her, Yummy said, “Maggots, my master.”

  “This is the one, then?” She turned black eyes on me and it was like being hit with a paralysis spell. I froze. Like a rabbit in the gaze of a hawk, I didn’t want to move. At all. Ming was Asian and old, even as vampires go. Vampires tended to show less expression as they aged, and the term inscrutable fit them all. With Ming it was inscrutable, unfathomable, and indecipherable times three. Usually. Right now, her tone held a warning of some kind, and I broke into a sweat. Which I knew she could smell. Nervous sweat, even the giggly kind, was a foolish thing in the presence of an apex predator. It spoke of prey, and I knew I had lost face already.

  I stepped behind the desk. Sat. Sighed. “I ask forgiveness for all insult, Ming of Glass. None was intended.” I opened the folder. It was supposed to be a sign that the topic of maggots was ended. “I’d like to ask—”

  “Do you feel maggots in our presence at this time?” Ming interrupted.

  I thought about timing and vampire games. I’d studied some in Spook School. Sometimes letting them swim on the line worked. Or truth. I was better with truth. And wood. I gripped the wood desktop and sank my fingernails into it, shoving past the finished surface into the grain, damaging the fine furniture, but touching bare wood. It was soothing. The tree had been large, old, and beautiful. Teak. Even dead, it was full of power I could use. I drew on the remembered life in the dead tree and I stared her straight in the eyes. Mithrans aren’t used to humans doing that, especially humans who had dealt with them before. Like law enforcement. Vamps mesmerize with their eyes. Instead, Ming blinked. “Not exactly, ma’am,” I said. “Only when I walk where Mithrans have walked for a long time, on wood or on the earth, and with my bare feet, do I feel the presence of their undeath.”

  Ming stared back at me. Hard. Nothing happened. “And are your feet bare now?” she asked.

  “They are not,” I said, knowing that when this line of questioning was turned from speech to text and entered into the official record, I’d be teased about it. Which Ming surely knew.

  “And the maggots?” she pressed, her tone arch.

  Ming of Glass was pushing me, testing me the way a cat did a mouse she might eat, except she was bored and the mouse was a game. My voice hardened and I let a little church into my words. “I stepped in a dead possum when I was a child, barefooted, in the woods. It was cold and slick and crawling with maggots. That sensation stayed with me. I insulted Mithrans when I mentioned that at a time when I was rattled, insecure, and unwise. Again, I offer apologies.”

  “Accepted. But before we continue, did you feel maggots in the yard where the shooter stood?”

  She was asking if the shooter was a blood-sucker. I took in a breath, putting the questions together with the events of tonight. She was asking if there might be a strange vampire in town gunning for her. Or someone in her ranks trying to take her out, outside of vampire protocols. Or trying to stir up trouble for the head vampire in Knoxville. I had heard of vampire wars. That would not be happening. PsyLED was putting together a protocol for dealing with that sort of situation—blood-suckers rampaging in the streets—and rumor suggested that the protocol involved killing vamps on sight. Which I was sure Ming did not know. “There were no Mithrans in the yard. May we proceed?” I asked, keeping my expression wooden and my scent pattern muted.

  “Of course,” Ming said, no hint of amusement in her tone now, and her eyes hard as steel.

  I released the wood of the desk and handed the paper that was traced with the floor plan of the game room to Tandy and indicated Ming. He carried it to her. I said, “Would you both please show Special Agent Dyson where you were standing at the time of the shooting?”

  I set the other sketch, the one with the positions of the people already in place, on the desktop and scanned the list of questions. Tandy handed the sketch back to me, with two fingers marking spots near where the first round had come through. I compared them to the locations given by the other guests. It matched the locations where someone else had placed them both. It also suggested that the shooter had been aiming at them and missed.

  “Mithrans have much better eyesight than humans,” I said, “and a much better sense of smell and hearing. Did you see, smell, or hear anyone outside the window prior to the onset of shooting?”

  “Nothing,” Ming said. There was something pleased in her tone, as if she liked either the question I asked or the exchange we’d just had. Maybe she was less inscrutable than I thought.

  Yummy shook her head. “Me neither. I was watching the people inside the room. We didn’t bring outside security, depending on the team hired by the Holloways. That won’t happen again.”

  Ming said, “We will not insult a host with such actions.”

  “With all due respect, my mistress, Cai has already said otherwise. You and your primo will have this discussion, not you and me.”

  “You are cheeky,” Ming said, but she didn’t sound upset about that. Maybe Ming liked cheeky. I filed that away for future reference.

  I said, “And to whom were you speaking at the time of the first shots?”

  “The party was a fund-raiser for Senator Abrams Tolliver and also an opportunity to make business deals. I was speaking to Senator Tolliver himself when the first shots were fired, though my body was between him and the window.” Which again insinuated that she was a target.

  “Would you walk me through the sequence of events from just before the first shot until the police came?” I asked.

  “I was speaking to the senator. I heard a shot. I moved. My security did not deem me as moving fast enough nor far enough away from the violence. She lifted me and moved me faster.” Again there was a wry tone in Ming’s voice. In ordinary circumstances, ones without emotional components, Ming’s voice gave away more than her expressions. “She deposited me in the butler’s pantry. On the floor.” Ming turned her gaze to Yummy.

  Yummy looked back at her and, without emotion, said, “You are welcome, my mistress.”

  This meant that Yummy could move faster than a master vampire. That was interesting. I wished I could remember Yummy’s real name. Yummy was the nickname given to her by Jane Yellowrock, the vampire hunter who worked for the vampires in New Orleans. I couldn’t remember anything else about Yummy, except that she had been part of Jane’s team the night Jane raided the compound of God’s Cloud of Glory Church to find and save a kidnapped vampire.

  Yummy continued, almost as implacable as Ming herself, “There was a fire, my mistress. Mithrans are flammable.”

  I nearly choked on the “flammable” comment. Yummy went on.

  “You were safe where I placed you. Cai is pleased.” From Yummy’s tone, that subject was now closed. Cai, Ming’s primo blood-servant, was the ultimate authority and Yummy reported to Cai, not Ming. More interesting.

 
Ming met my eyes again and said, “I remained on the floor until I was helped to my feet by a properly deferential human. I do not know his name but he was wearing a black shirt with brown pants. A name tag hung from his shirt. He assisted me into the kitchen and inquired after my health. He informed me that my scion was injured and was in the dining room. I proceeded there, fed her, and healed her.” She looked at Yummy again. “She is insufferable.”

  “I am,” Yummy agreed. “I am also your hero tonight.”

  There were a lot of subtexts in this conversation. I pulled it back to the line of questioning and addressed my next question to Yummy. “Is that your blood in the entrance to the dining room?”

  “It is,” Yummy said, her eyes on her mistress. “The shots were still striking the house. I shielded two women with my body and got them to safety. I was injured during that time.”

  “You could have been killed,” Ming said.

  “There was no silver in the bullets. I am strong, healthy, and well fed by my generous and kind mistress,” Yummy drawled, locking eyes with Ming. “I healed well enough to bring others into safety and have them call the cops.”

  “How many others?” I asked.

  “Ming, the first two women, three men, and two more women. Then the shooting stopped.”

  “Did you, at any time, see anyone who might have assisted the shooter?” I asked.

  “No,” they both said, more or less in unison.

  “Did you hear anything that might suggest that someone inside was part of the attack?”

  “No,” they said again.

  “Did you smell anything non-human or peculiar before, during, or after the shooting?”

  Both hesitated but didn’t glance at each other. “Possibly peculiar,” Ming said, after a moment that stretched too long. “But the river and cove are heavy with scent. Human partygoers wear a disgusting amount of perfume. The fire was odorous.”

  Yummy said, “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Have there been any threats against you or the Mithrans of Knoxville?” I asked.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” Yummy repeated. Ming said nothing.

  “Will you provide documentation about any of the ordinary threats to PsyLED?”

  “Yes,” Yummy said, turning away from her mistress’ eyes.

  I finished with my final question. “Ming of Glass. Are you aware that you were standing beside the senator and directly in front of the woman who died? That the first shot is believed to have missed everyone, deflected by the window glass? That you moved in the fraction of a second before the second shot? And that it struck the victim?”

  Ming turned her gaze to me, pinning me to the chair. I felt like a bug on some collector’s insect board. Holding this gaze was a lot harder than holding her ordinary gaze. This one made my skin want to crawl. “She died because of me?” Ming asked. “Because I moved? I was the target?”

  “We haven’t ruled that out.” I scanned several pages and looked back up, having learned case details for the first time. “Her name was Margaret Clayton Simpson. Did you know her?”

  “I knew her grandmother. My clan does business with her husband, with his son, and with a Clayton uncle. I have a scion by the name of Clayton, whom you have met. I did not know Margaret personally except by name and to shake her hand. She feared Mithrans. I do not force my presence on such humans.”

  Yummy said, “I knew her name. That’s it. We’re leaving. I have to get my mistress home before dawn, and we’ll just make it.” They both stood and I followed only a half beat behind them.

  “Will you contact us if you think of anything more?” I pulled a card from my pocket and handed it to Yummy, who leaned in and accepted it. “Thank you for your time, Ming of Glass.”

  “You are welcome, Special Agent Ingram.”

  They turned to leave and Yummy said over her shoulder, “Later, Maggots.”

  Tandy smothered a laugh. I said, “Ditto, Yummy.”

  The blond woman flinched just the tiniest bit.

  “Yummy?” Ming asked.

  “I’ll explain later, my mistress.” Yummy tossed a glare my way and preceded her blood-sucker master out of the room and down the stairs.

  Tandy turned off the recorder and fell into the chair vacated by Ming, laughing. I gave him the same glare Yummy had given me.

  “Don’t,” he said, holding his hands in a gesture of surrender. I could hardly believe this was the same man I had first met, when he was fresh out of Spook School and fighting to stay sane in the presence of multiple people with conflicting emotions.

  I huffed out a breath. “Okay. Were they telling the truth?”

  “More or less. They have a very complicated relationship.”

  I gathered up the papers and stacked them neatly in the folder. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “You’re hungry and sleep deprived and grieving. People died here, but I don’t think you knew them. Who are you grieving for, Nellie?”

  Tears welled up in my eyes. I walked from behind the desk and toward the door, which Yummy had left open. “An oak sapling. Never mind. I’m making my report to Rick and going home.” Which I did.

  • • •

  I walked into my cold, dark house just after dawn.

  Moving on muscle memory alone, I put winter wood into the firebox of the wood-burning cookstove that also heated my house and my water, topped off the hot water heater mounted on the back, and turned the mousers out into the cold with orders to catch mice and rats. They stalked off, ignoring me except to give me dirty looks. Clearly I was a bad mama. The water was tepid, but I showered off the long night, redressed in the flannel pajamas, wool socks, and slippers I had thrown off when the call came in about the shooting, and wrapped up in my faded pink blanket before joining the cats in the icy morning air outside.

  I sat on the intertwined roots of the sycamore and the poplar, roots that looked as if the trees were holding hands, fingers interlocked. I called them the married trees and sitting here, upon their clasped hands, was the first place where I had communed with the land of Soulwood, my land, long before I knew what I was doing.

  Eleven years ago, I had come to this farm, escaping the leader of God’s Cloud, who wanted me as his junior wife or concubine. To get away from Colonel Ernest Jackson, a pedophile and sexual predator, I had accepted a marriage proposal as junior wife, from John Ingram and his only remaining wife, Leah, and moved away from the church compound, away from my family, away from all I knew, to nurse Leah as she died. It had been a good bargain. I was twelve years old. A few years later I legally married John. Our arrangement was completely without romance, a business proposition that had left me with the land after John sickened and passed away. Thought of in such bald terms it was a horrible thing to have to do, but at the time, it had been like salvation shining down from heaven.

  When I agreed to marry into the Ingram household, I hadn’t known I would inherit anything, and this small patch of land and these two trees was all I felt I could claim. It was where I’d gone when nursing duties for Leah had gotten to be too much, where I came even now when I wanted solace. I tucked my blanket around me, placed my palms flat on the frozen ground, and breathed out, letting the tension flow away.

  I could hear the faint click and hum of the windmill that powered my pump and sent water into the cistern. Could smell smoke from my fire. The faint and faraway stench of polecat or skunk. Both should be sleeping but perhaps a hungry hunting fox had risked the scent-weapons for a chance to eat.

  I sank down, through the bare ground, into the roots of the trees. They were sleeping, the whole woods, all hundred fifty acres that bordered the flatland around the house, up the steep hill, and down into the gorge. All of it was in winter sleep, dormant. Perhaps dreaming, if the Earth and her plants dreamed. It was warm, deep in the darkness of the land. And the soul of t
he woods reached up to me, as if taking me by the hand. The woods embraced me. And I sighed out my misery, putting one hand to my belly to rub away the anxious feeling, the rooty scars deep inside, hard and unyielding. The woods didn’t understand why I was sad, but they didn’t care either. They wrapped me in their calm and peace and I let the long night go.

  Much later, when the sky had grayed and whitened and blued, and the sun had risen over the hills, I pulled back from the sleeping land and turned my attention to Soulwood’s problems. I nursed a failing patch of muscadine vine, and told the land it was a good thing to send water up to the spring above the house. I searched out and checked on the pregnant bear that was hibernating in a split in the rock not far from the spring. Bolstered the health of the asparagus I had planted above the windmill two years past. I had forgotten it, knowing that when it was ready to put forth enough shoots to eat, I’d remember. But now some kind of grubs had been chewing on its roots. I sent a pulse of energy to make them trundle away from the easy food source.

  When I had done all I could to nourish the land, and I couldn’t put it off any longer, I turned my attention to the boundary between Soulwood and the church compound, to the dark, hollow place where the foreign entity once known as Brother Ephraim had carved out a space for his soul. It was still there. A little larger. A little more vile. A little more entrenched than before. The place he had carved out beneath the ground of Soulwood was dark and virulent, like a pocket of pus growing beneath perfect flesh, preparing to attack the entire organism.

  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.