Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)

? ? ?

I changed into overalls and work boots and rubbed some of my homemade bug-be-gone on my exposed skin and went out the back to work in the garden. Occam was there, his back to the house, looking over my split wood supply. It was under a blue tarp to keep it dry. John had been planning to build a shed for the wood, but he died before he could knock one together. The tarp worked fine for me. Occam stood there, framed by the blue of the tarp, one knee bent, that leg out to the side, his feet hidden in the grass. He was taller than me, rangy and lean, but broad across the shoulders. The faded jeans were tight across his backside and I flushed, shook my head, and dragged my eyes away from the vision as I squashed my imagination of what that backside would look like without the jeans. It was a bizarre thought and not one I had ever had about a man. I hooked my thumbs into the bib of my overalls and walked up next to him, knowing he would hear and smell me as I approached. Espccially as I was covered in bug gunk.

“What time of year do you start looking for firewood?” he asked.

“Been looking around already. There’s a couple of guys I can call. And I toss deadfall into my truck when I find it. Split it when I get it home.”

“You split your own wood?”

I didn’t hear censure in his tone. In the church it wasn’t considered womanly for the weaker sex to handle an ax. John had said he figured that was to keep a woman from knowing how to use a weapon and I’d agreed, but I’d kept that thought to myself. John might have saved me from become a concubine in God’s Cloud of Glory polygamist cult—not a church, not really—but he still had strong feelings about a woman’s place in the home and in society. “John taught me. The same week he found out he had cancer and it was … pretty much everywhere already. He was gone a few months later, but in between, he worked on my shooting, taught me how to clean all his weapons, hunt, field dress a deer. Showed me how to butcher and clean doves and pheasants and even small hogs. Taught me maintenance on the well pump and the windmill. He made sure I was self-sufficient so that if I married again it would be my choice and not because I was starving to death and needed a roof over my head.”

“He loved you.” Occam said the words softly.

“Yeah. He did.”

“Did you love him?” he asked, even softer.

“Much as I was able. I respected him. I was and am eternally grateful to him and to Leah for marrying me. For saving me from the Colonel.” The Colonel, Ernest Jackson, the leader of the church, had wanted me for a junior wife or concubine. Even though I’d led his enemies to him and I was pretty dang sure Yummy the vampire had killed him, the thought of him still had power. I shivered in the heat. “I’m grateful to John for leaving me the land and enough money to survive. And sometimes, a man’s kindness, a woman’s loneliness, and that kind of gratitude are enough to make it seem like love.” Occam didn’t respond, and we were both staring at the small pile of wood as if it was the most important thing in the world.

Occam said, still softly, “The churchmen who came courting you. They wanted your land.”

“Yep. In their eyes, I was useful, and as a woman, I would surely be stupid enough to fall into their arms and give away all John left me. But if I’d not had the land, none a them woulda come calling. It wasn’t me they wanted, it was my land, except the Colonel, and he was a filthy pedophile and a sexual predator both.”

“I like hunting on your land. But I’ll never try to take it.”

My face softened from a stiffness I hadn’t noticed. “That’s good to know, Occam. That buck. He made you work to catch him.”

Occam nodded, a smile lighting his eyes. I could see it from the corner of my eye, along with the fused fingers of his left hand. They looked a bit more fleshed out. Shifting on Soulwood was good for Occam’s healing, and he hadn’t done that much while I was a tree, and not enough since I’d been mostly human again. “He gave me a chase. He was big and a little mean. It was a good fight. He was tasty too.”

“Come fall, when I have the wood-burning stove going again, and you kill a big one, bring me what’s left after you eat the innards. I’ll make some venison jerky.” I tilted my head to Occam and whispered, “I got my own recipe of herbs. You’ll like it.”

“I am quite certain that I’ll like anything you cook, Nell, sugar. Anything at all.”

But the cat in him was thinking only of meat. My smile went wider. “Turnips? Collard greens? Pickled and fermented cabbage?”

“Now you’re jist being mean.”

I laughed.

“Let’s say I’ll be willing to try anything you cook. Always.”

“Deal. Now you got to git. I need to put my hands in the earth.”

“Okay, Nell, sugar.” But he didn’t move. His head swiveled to me. “Nell, sugar, would you consider it okay if I kissed you?”

My heart did a somersault and my lips seemed to grow tender at the thought. “A properly improper kiss?”

“That’s the only kind I can think of at the moment. My mouth on yours. My arms around you and yours around me.”

“I’d like that,” I managed. But I didn’t turn to him. I was frozen, staring at the stupid blue tarp. He eased my hand from my bib. Turned me around and stepped close to me, holding me, as if he knew I’d fall if I tried to move my own feet. He placed my arm around his waist, on his sweat-damp shirt where it was tucked into his jeans. My other went around on his other side all by itself. His arms came around me. And his lips met mine.

? ? ?

I thought about the kiss—all of those kisses, because they had gone on a long time before Occam pulled away, and brushed my face with his hands, and walked to his car—as I worked in the garden. Late heirloom tomatoes were ripe; herbs were ready to be picked. Fall seeds needed to be planted, the garden needed to be weeded, and I needed to sweat. I had discovered that working the land was good for the land and for me. The farm had seemingly figured out that if I was a tree, there would be no one to work the soil and it liked me around. Now, as I worked, the leaves on my neck and hands broke off and the vines fell free, a calming sacrifice to the land, not bloody and violent as other kinds. Getting my hands into Soulwood was beneficial to all of us.

I ripped weeds out like a machine—grab upper roots and stem, grip, angle hand down, yank out the roots, toss away. Over and over again. But. As I tore out weeds I found a root that didn’t belong in the garden. “Dagnabbit,” I cursed. I fell onto the worked soil, backside first, work boot soles flat, knees high. Resting my forearms on my knees I dropped my head and caught up on my breathing. When I was satisfied that I was calm and breathing normally, I put my fingers into the aerated earth and dug until I touched the tree root again. “You can’t be here,” I told it. “This is my garden. I get nourishment from this garden. You take too much and don’t give back enough. Now you’un get back to your’n spot and stay there.” Nothing happened. I pushed with my magics. The rootlet jerked away, back in the general direction of the vampire tree grove that had taken up residence—with my permission—on the church side of our properties. The tree was both many trees and one tree, all sharing one root system, but with many trunks. It—they?—seemed to have the ability to grow roots faster and farther than kudzu did. The vampire tree—I settled on singular—was getting restless and it liked the energies of my land, maybe a little too much.

I dragged my hands from the soil and yelled, “You stay outta my garden, offa my house, and away from my critters. You hear me?” I had no idea how much English the vampire tree understood, but it understood enough, and it was learning more. The fact that the tree was probably sentient was a secret I hadn’t shared with Unit Eighteen. “Pot, meet kettle,” I muttered to myself.

The roots didn’t reappear; new shoots didn’t surface.

I’d accidently forced the original oak tree to evolve and mutate when I used the tree’s life to heal myself after I’d been gut shot. Afterward, not knowing I had caused a mutation, I’d abandoned the tree to its own devices. It had developed a sort of sentience and a taste for blood, trapping and killing small animals and birds in the vines it grew, eating their bodies. Hence the name vampire tree. And it had learned how to grow thorns and send out rootlings over pretty far distances.

I went back to work extracting the last of the weeds and mulching the freshly worked soil, my sweat dripping onto the earth.

? ? ?