Flame in the Dark Read online

  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.

  While gooping up my hair I caught a glimpse of my eyes in the mirror. They were greener. I had noticed a color change a few weeks past and it seemed to be accelerating. I wasn’t sure I liked the color, and it too creeped out some people, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

  I dressed in one of five mix-and-match outfits that worked for the office and the field, refilled my one-day gobag, and checked my messages, an act that had become SOP—standard operating procedure—since Unit Eighteen became part of my life and the cell tower went up at the highest point of my land. There were six e-mails and double that many texts, one that had come while I was sleeping and informed me of a meeting at headquarters. I was likely to be late for that unit briefing. I had somehow slept through the group text, slumber claiming my brain and not letting go.

  As a probationary agent, I wasn’t supposed to miss meetings, so I tossed some of my homemade granola into a plastic sealable bag and grabbed a carton of milk—which had horrified my mama the last time she was here. Good churchgoers drank only milk they took fresh out of the cow or goat, but I didn’t have time to care for animals or barter for essentials, so packaged and processed foods had entered my diet.

  I was out the door roaring down the mountain in my Chevy pickup in minutes and was only a bit late to the meeting, even without turning on the new lights and siren mounted inside the cab and up on the roof. Rick had barely introduced the case, and was giving a summary of the particulars, when I thrust myself into my chair.

  “Thank you for joining us, probie,” Rick said.

  I didn’t much like apologizing for things I didn’t do on purpose. Traffic and sleeping and horrible work hours seemed good reasons to be late, but I wouldn’t say that unless pushed. And telling him I was late because I had to clip my leaves seemed . . . unnecessarily comedic. I held in a grin and nodded.

  “Something amusing to you, probie?” he asked.

  “Not a thing. You’uns was sayin’? ’Acause I’m alistenin’ with all my ears,” I said in church-speak.

  T. Laine coughed into her hand, covering an aggressive jaw, as if trying to hide a laugh. She said, “Our Nell’s learned snark.” Her dark eyes sparkled, a sure sign I was going to bear the brunt of her wicked sense of humor.


  “Nothing to learn, Tammie Laine,” I said, knowing she hated her first name. “All churchwomen learn how to speak the truth in ways that keeps them from getting the back of some man’s hand.”

  “Ouch,” she said.

  “Mmm,” I said back.

  “To continue,” Rick said, “we have three dead and three injured from a shooting at the home of Conrath and Carolyn Holloway. The party was a fund-raiser for the political VIPs of East Tennessee . . .”

  I tuned him out except to listen for anything I didn’t already know. I’d learned early on that repetition and more repetition was a big part of any investigation. There were good reasons for that, but it was still boring.

  Occam’s head dipped; his hair swung forward. He was watching me with hooded eyes, unblinking, concentrated. He didn’t have to say a word for me to know what he was thinking. He’d sink his claws into any man who gave me the back of his hand. It warmed me all over, but it was a bit intense and I dropped my gaze. It settled on the coffee urn on the table and the metal travel mug in front of me. Someone had painted green leaves all over it. T. Laine? Tandy? Somehow it felt like Tandy’s work. That warmth inside me spiked. I knew a gift when I saw it. And then I realized that all our mugs had been artistically enhanced. Occam’s had a stylized spotted leopard on it. Rick’s, a black leopard and the letters SAC. JoJo’s showed a caricature of her, wearing a red turban and dozens of earrings of every sort. T. Laine’s showed a hand holding a gray stone with a full moon behind it, for her moon gift magics. Tandy’s showed clouds and huge lightning bursts, which was kinda mean, as being struck by lightning had given his skin the red tracery and his gift of empathy. Soul’s mug was undecorated except for the letters AD for assistant director of PsyLED. But then, not everyone knew that Soul was an arcenciel, a rainbow dragon shape-shifter. That intel was need-to-know.

  “Nell?” Rick asked. “Woolgathering?”

  I thought back to what he had been saying.

  I said, “There was nothing in the land that I recognized. I included in my report about the dead plants and the sapling. Ming of Glass and Yum—her assistant—asked if the shooter was a vampire. It wasn’t. I have no idea what species it was except that it—he—I’m going with he—wasn’t human.”

  “So you were listening,” he said.

  “Not actively. I was hearing but not listening. There’s a difference.”

  Rick shook his head. He looked tired, like he needed protein. Or like I made him tired. That was actually a possibility, since I had claimed him for Soulwood as part of healing the curse on his soul and body. His olive skin was paler than usual and his black hair seemed streaked with more silver each time I saw him. Oddly, his white shirt needed ironing and his pants looked like the same pair he had worn at the Holloways’ the night before, which meant he hadn’t been home to sleep or shower or anything. I got up and found a protein bar in the drawer by the sink. Tossed it to him. He caught it, looking from me to the bar, and dropped into his chair with a soft, drawn-out sigh. “T. Laine?” he asked, opening the package, taking a bite.

  T. Laine said, “I hung around the feds as much as I could. There was no sign of magical use in the house or on the investigators. All human, all the way. The feds didn’t want to talk around me, so I put in earbuds and pretended to play with my phone. But in reality I was wearing the new MMs.”

  Rick looked interested. MMs were micro mics, a device dreamed up by JoJo. They looked just like earbuds but amplified noise like mega hearing aids. When hooked to a cell with the proper app, the ambient noise could be filtered out, so that the wearer could hear and record any conversation the wearer wanted. Sometimes. Sometimes not. JoJo was still working out technical problems. MMs were likely illegal. They were certainly not something that could be used for evidence gathering, but they were handy when you wanted to be sneaky. JoJo had made two sets of the MMs, and T. Laine had one, Rick had the other, though he probably already had better than human hearing, being werecat. “And?” he asked.

  “Nothing from the feds. There’s some kind of ambient hum at the Holloways’. Maybe part of the security system. But I did get something from the security team when I went by the master suite. The hum disappeared there, and the guy in charge of the team? He has a drug problem, a gambling problem, and two girlfriends. And a wife. I gave the info to JoJo.”

  We all turned to Jo, who said, “Deep background in process. Peter Simon is a former Green Beret, injured in a nonmilitary exercise, I guess you’d call it, while on leave. He was jumping out of a plane and his parachute didn’t open correctly. He survived the landing and made it through rehab, but he was on Oxy for about six months and it looks like he never kicked the habit. The addiction is what drove him out of the service, put his marriage into trouble, and gave him two ladies on the side. One may be his dealer. The other is pregnant with his baby.”

  “Making him a target for coercion or blackmail,” Rick said. “What about the gambling problem?”

  “Occam has that one,” JoJo said.

  “Tennessee’s gambling laws are some of the toughest in the country, and so Simon has no legal way to indulge. We got a warrant for his electronic history and he has a bookie named T.J., just the initials, and nothing in the system on that name or any correlating name with those initials. It’s gonna take time and more time to do an electronic probe and analysis on all the particulars. I’m willing, but the feds have the people and the system in place to do a full electronic forensics workup. And they don’t know about this angle yet.”

  “He’s human. Giving this to the right federal agent, in the right way, could give us some negotiation room if we need it later,” Rick mused. “Clean up the file and send it to me. I’ll make a call.”

  Occam nodded and started tapping on his tablet.

  “Tandy?” Rick asked.

  “Everyone has secrets,” Tandy said slowly. “It’s not hard to read past the natural protective emotional barriers of most humans and paranormals, but unless the interviewer asks the right questions”—he looked around the table—“the emotional reactions are not exactly easy to interpret. Everyone we interviewed at the party had secrets. That said, I didn’t pick up on guilt that might be related to the shooting.”

  I had tuned in to Tandy’s report as he spoke. Only weeks past, the empath had been a bundle of nerves and emotional pain. The not-so-secret affair with JoJo was doing him a world of good.

  “But you did pick up on other guilt?” Rick asked.

  “Several who were currently having affairs, one who was feeling guilty about something at his job, maybe embezzling. Several with substance abuse problems. Three with anger issues. One couple with domestic abuse issues. I amended the reports on each of them and Jo is checking them out.”

  “Jo, dig deeper into all the things Tandy picked up. If you can substantiate it, then make sure the domestic abuse is turned over to whatever agency can best address it,” Rick said. “If the embezzlement is likely, see it goes to the DA for consideration of further investigation. The affairs, substance abuse, and anger issues are out of our bailiwick unless they indicate a tie to the shooting. That all, people?” When no one spoke up Rick said, “You all know your assignments. Go. Stir the nests. Keep your eyes open.”

  • • •

  Once the meeting was over, the others took off into the field to continue follow-up interviews, visits to the city morgue, and higher-level meetings with the FBI and ATF and assorted law enforcement organizations. The probie had no such fun assignments, and JoJo was too important at IT operations to be wasted on basic field drudgery, so the two of us were relegated to the office.

  I spent the late afternoon in my little cubicle reading over the speech-to-text interviews and correcting mistakes. JoJo continued digging through a surface background check of all the partygoers tapped by Tandy, to see if anything pointed to problems that might have resulted in a crime of passion or crime of pro
fit. And once those exciting and dangerous (not at all) assignments were done, JoJo and I began to create a working, searchable bible of the crime, the people who had been injured, the party guests, the caterers, and the security personnel, with strong concentration on Peter Simon, the head security guy, the one with the substance abuse problems, woman problems, baby problems, and problem problems.

  It was boring and tiresome, but listening on earbuds while reading the transcripts on an electronic reader did give me time to water all the plants I had started in the office and stick my fingers into their soil, giving them a little boost to make them thrive. In front of each window I had planted a mixed assortment of plants, and we now had access to spinach and three varieties of lettuce, a dozen varieties of basils, mints, chives, thymes, and other edible herbs. Rick had grumbled that I was using the office as a greenhouse, and since he was right, I hadn’t argued. But I needed the fresh greens to offset the impact of fast foods on my system, and the others had quickly learned how to augment their own meals with the fresh stuff, and asked for tomatoes, cukes, and squash. I wasn’t sure how I’d grow all that with the limited light in HQ, but the fresh food sounded wonderful.

  An hour after sundown, I made black China tea with lemon mint and brought mugs and the carafe to JoJo with my notes. She didn’t look up but sipped her tea, which was made to her specifications with lots of sugar and no cream. “Mmmm,” she said on an exhale. “I wondered if you were going to stop farming and start working today, you lazy girl.”

  She was teasing me. It had taken a bit of time to learn that insults and what the team called snark were actually bonding friendship rituals. I still wasn’t good at responding to it, but now I knew what it was and my feelings didn’t get tangled up in the repartee. “I was checking the reports. I found only a few errors so far and most of them are mine. Clementine doesn’t like my accent.” Clementine was the name given to the new voice-to-text software, which was much easier to say than CLMT2207.