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  My throat hurt, but I managed wryly, “It’s immoral, and against the law, even in Alabama, to marry a five-year-old child.”

  “If you shift into a child, then I’ll wait until you grow up. I’ll wait as long as it takes.”

  Aya closed my fingers over the bone and teeth. “I can’t promise anything,” I said. “But I’ll try to heal my body.”

  “And you’ll marry me?”

  “I will. But not until we see if this thing works,” I said. Bruiser’s face fell. I tucked the teeth and bone back into the medicine bag. Closed it up in the white box.

  “So what now?” I asked them. “I’m heading to the mountains, to Robbinsville, North Carolina. I’d planned to shift there and let my Beast wander the mountains.” And maybe track down Uni Lisi, Sixmankiller, the evil woman who had set me on this blood path, and kill her. Didn’t say that.

  “We have a Bell Huey waiting in the parking lot,” Bruiser said. “Room enough for us three. And the bikes. Mine is in there already, waiting for Bitsa. You can get to the mountains in style. And fast.”

  I nodded, thinking, feeling the paper of the white box in my fingers, the hope inside.

  Hate helo-copter, Beast said.

  I know, I thought back. But Beast is best hunter. Beast can hunt for a way for me to live.

  She thought back at me, The I/we of Beast is not prey. We can find a trail through dense brush that is Jane’s sickness. We can defeat timewalking death.

  Yeah. We are. We can. We can do this.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s make this happen.”

  Read on for an excerpt of the first book in Faith Hunter’s Soulwood series,

  BLOOD OF THE EARTH

  Available now in paperback!

  Edgy and not sure why, I carried the basket of laundry off the back porch. I hung my T-shirts and overalls on the front line of my old-fashioned solar clothes dryer, two long skirts on the outer line, and what my mama called my intimate attire on the line between, where no one could see them from the driveway. I didn’t want another visit by Brother Ephraim or Elder Ebenezer about my wanton ways. Or even another courting attempt from Joshua Purdy. Or worse, a visit from Ernest Jackson Jr., the preacher. So far I’d kept him out of my house, but there would come a time when he’d bring help and try to force his way in. It was getting tiresome having to chase churchmen off my land at the business end of a shotgun, and at some point God’s Cloud of Glory Church would bring enough reinforcements that I couldn’t stand against them. It was a battle I was preparing for, one I knew I’d likely lose, but I would go down fighting, one way or another.

  The breeze freshened, sending my wet skirts rippling as if alive on the line where they hung. Red, gold, and brown leaves skittered across the three acres of newly cut grass. Branches overhead cracked, clacked, and groaned with the wind, leaves rustling as if whispering some dread tiding. The chill fall air had been perfect for birdsong; squirrels had been racing up and down the trees, stealing nuts and hiding them for the coming winter. I’d seen a big black bear this morning chewing on acorns halfway up the hill.

  Standing in the cool breeze, I studied my woods, listening, feeling, tasting the unease that had prickled at my flesh for the last few months, ever since Jane Yellowrock had come visiting and turned my life upside down. She was the one responsible for the recent repeated visits by the churchmen. The Cherokee vampire hunter was the one who had brought all the changes, even if it hadn’t been intentional. She had come hunting a missing vampire, and because she was good at her job—maybe the best ever—she had succeeded. She had also managed to save over a hundred children from God’s Cloud.

  Maybe it had been worth it all—helping all the children—but I was the one paying the price, not her. She was long gone and I was alone in the fight for my life. Even the woods knew things were different.

  Sunlight dappled the earth; cabbages, gourds, pumpkins, and winter squash were bursting with color in the garden. A muscadine vine running up the nearest tree, tangling in the branches, was dropping the last of the ripe fruit. I smelled my wood fire on the air and hints of that apple-crisp chill that meant a change of seasons, the sliding toward a hard, cold autumn. I tilted my head, listening to the wind, smelling the breeze, feeling the forest through the soles of my bare feet. There was no one on my property except the wild critters—creatures who belonged on Soulwood land—and nothing else that I could sense. But the hundred fifty acres of woods bordering the flatland around the house, up the steep hill and down into the gorge, had been whispering all day. Something was not right.

  In the distance, I heard a crow call a warning, sharp with distress. The squirrels ducked into hiding, suddenly invisible. The feral cat I had been feeding darted under the shrubs, her black head and multicolored body fading into the shadows. The trees murmured restlessly.

  I didn’t know what it meant, but I listened anyway. I always listened to my woods, and the gnawing, whispering sense of danger, injury, and damage was like sandpaper abrading my skin, making me jumpy, disturbing my sleep, even if I didn’t know what it was.

  I reached out to it, to the woods, reached with my mind, with my magic. Silently, I asked it, What? What is it?

  There was no answer. There never was. But as if the forest knew that it had my attention, the wind died and the whispering leaves fell still. I caught my breath at the strange hush, not even daring to blink. But nothing happened. No sound, no movement. After an uncomfortable length of time, I lifted the empty wash basket and stepped away from the clotheslines, turning and turning, my feet on the cool grass, my gaze cast up and inward, but I could sense no direct threat despite the chill bumps rising on my skin. What? I asked. An eerie fear grew in me, racing up my spine like spiders with sharp tiny feet. Something was coming. Something that reminded me of Jane, but subtly different. Something was coming that might hurt me. Again. My woods knew.

  From down the hill I heard the sound of a vehicle climbing the mountain’s narrow, single-lane, rutted road. It wasn’t the clang of Ebenezer’s rattletrap Ford truck, or the steady drone of Joshua’s newer Toyota long bed. It wasn’t the high-pitched motor of a hunter’s all-terrain vehicle. It was a car, straining up the twisty Deer Creek mountain.

  My house was the last one, just below the crest of the hill. The wind whooshed down again, icy and cutting, a downdraft that bowed the trees. They swayed in the wind, branches scrubbing. Sighing. Muttering, too low to hear.

  It could be a customer making the drive to Soulwood for my teas or veggies or herbal mixes. Or it could be some kind of conflict. The woods said it was the latter. I trusted my woods.

  I raced back inside my cabin, dropping the empty basket, placing John’s old single-shot bolt-action shotgun near the refrigerator under a pile of folded blankets. His lever-action carbine .30–30 Winchester went near the front window. I shoved the small Smith & Wesson .32 into the bib of my coveralls, hoping I didn’t shoot myself if I had to draw it fast. I picked up the double-barrel break-action shotgun and checked the ammo. Both barrels held three-inch shells. The contact area of the latch was worn and needed to be replaced, but at close range I wasn’t going to miss. I might dislocate my shoulder, but if I hit them, the trespassers would be a while in healing too.

  I debated for a second on switching out the standard shot shells for salt or birdshot, but the woods’ disharmony seemed to be growing, a particular and abrasive itch under my skin. I snapped the gun closed and pulled back my long hair into an elastic to keep it out of my way.

  Peeking out the blinds, I saw a four-door sedan coming to a stop beside John’s old Chevy C10 truck. Two people inside, a man and a woman.

  Strangers, I thought. Not from God’s Cloud of Glory, the church I’d grown up in. Not a local vehicle. And no dogs anymore to check them out for me with noses and senses humans no longer had. Just three small graves at the edge of the woods and a month of grief buried with them.
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  A man stepped out of the driver’s side, black haired, dark eyed. Maybe Cherokee or Creek if he was a mountain native, though his features didn’t seem tribal. I’d never seen a Frenchman or a Spaniard, so maybe one of those Mediterranean countries. He was tall, maybe six feet, but not dressed like a farmer. More citified, in black pants, starched shirt, tie, and jacket. He had a cell phone in his pocket, sticking out just a little. Western boots, old and well cared for. There was something about the way he moved, feline and graceful. Not a farmer or a God’s Cloud preacher. Not enough bulk for the first one, not enough righteous determination in his expression or bearing for the other. But something said he wasn’t a customer here to buy my herbal teas or fresh vegetables.

  He opened the passenger door for the other occupant and a woman stepped out. Petite, with black skin and wildly curly, long black hair. Her clothes billowed in the cool breeze and she put her face into the wind as if sniffing. Like the man, her movements were nimble, like a dancer’s, and somehow feral, as if she had never been tamed, though I couldn’t have said why I got that impression.

  Around the house, my woods moaned in the sharp wind, branches clattering like old bones, anxious, but I could see nothing about the couple that would say danger. They looked like any other city folk who might come looking for Soulwood Farm, and yet . . . not. Different. As they approached the house, they passed the tall length of flagpole in the middle of the raised beds of the front yard and started up the seven steps to the porch. And then I realized why they moved and felt all wrong. There was a weapon bulge at the man’s shoulder, beneath his jacket. In a single smooth motion, I braced the bolt-action shotgun against my shoulder, rammed open the door, and pointed the business end of the gun at the trespassers.

  “Whaddya want?” I demanded, drawing on my childhood God’s Cloud dialect. They came to a halt at the third step, too close for me to miss, too far away for them to disarm me safely. The man raised his hands like he was asking for peace, but the little woman hissed. She drew back her lips in a snarl and growled at me. I knew cats. This was a cat. A cat in human form—a werecat of some kind. A devil, according to the Church. I trained the barrel on her, midcenter, just like John had showed me the first time he’d put the gun in my hands. As I aimed, I took a single step so my back was against the doorjamb to keep me from getting bowled over or from breaking a shoulder when I fired.

  “Paka, no,” the man said. The words were gentle, the touch to her arm tender. I had never seen a man touch a woman like that, and my hands jiggled the shotgun in surprise before I caught myself. The woman’s snarl subsided and she leaned into the man, just like one of my cats might. His arm went around her, and he smoothed her hair back, watching me as I watched them. Alert, taking in everything about me and my home, the man lifted his nose in the air to sniff the scents of my land, his delicate nasal folds widening and contracting. Alien. So alien, these two.

  “What do you want?” I asked again, this time with no Church accent, and with the grammar I’d learned from the city-folk customers at the vegetable stand and from reading my once-forbidden and much-loved library books.

  “I’m Special Agent Rick LaFleur, with PsyLED, and this is Paka. Jane Yellowrock sent us to you, Ms. Ingram,” the man said.

  Of course this new problem was related to Jane. Nothing in my whole life had gone right since she darkened my door.

  Faith Hunter is the New York Times bestselling author of the Jane Yellowrock series, including Shadow Rites, Dark Heir, Broken Soul, and the Soulwood series, set in the world of Jane Yellowrock, and the Rogue Mage series.

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