The healing was the yellow of warm sun after an icy dream, the coolness of a mountain spring spilling down rocks, the touch of velvet moss along bare skin. It was the scent of pine in winter and the feel of roots reaching and spreading, seeking nutrients and water, and sharing life with me. I sighed and the breath didn’t hurt. I realized it had been painful to breathe only when the pain vanished.
The pain in my face and hands flowed away with my breath, like water flowed down a hill, and deep into the earth of Soulwood. Deep and deep and peacefully deep, around rock, broken and splintered, through layers of rounded stone from some ancient riverbed. Home. I was home. The pain fled and faded and failed, waning like the moon. Peace. Healing. Soulwood.
I don’t know how long I was there, but I knew the instant when Brother Ephraim awoke. I felt him stretch and twist and grumble. I focused on the place he had carved out of my home. It was as blackened as always, a place of death, of drought, of forest fire, but it coiled with scarlet snakes full of the poison of hatred and fury, and despite the absence of life as I knew it, despite the death layered atop death, it had life of its own—a life of twisted and bitter evil, sparking and sparkling and electric.
Ephraim stared at me, his charged hatred snapping like whips, hissing like snakes, but he didn’t move. There was something about that snapping heat and antilife that seemed important, something I needed to guard against. But before I figured it out, lightning struck at me, through the ground, through the deeps. Black light blasting at me.
I raised a wall between us, pulling on Soulwood. But the lightning was faster. It struck me, midchest. Midbrain. A blinding electric heat/light, boiling, roasting, tearing into me like the child of lightning and laser. I went blind, slammed away from my body, far, far, and far. Everything went black.
? ? ?
Minutes . . . hours . . . passed. I struggled awake, fighting the lethargy, the lifelessness, the penetrating and powerful fatigue. I was underground. I was . . . not in Soulwood.
I reached out, trying to find it. But I was lost, deep underground. Worse, I was blind. Disoriented. I flailed, trying to find up and down, trying to find my land. I called to it, but it didn’t answer.
Had Ephraim killed my land? Had he killed me, then stripped my soul away and tucked it into a pocket, like the pocket he had made for himself? I struggled harder, panic filling me.
Then I heard . . . something. I stopped. Holding my panic still. Forced calm into my spirit, breathing, though there was no air, resting though I had no body to calm. Okay, I thought. Okay.
“Neeeellll?” The voice was too slow, too distant. “Neeeellll?” it called again.
This time I found where it came from and angled my consciousness toward it.
“Neeell?”
I raced toward it, through the darkness, through the impossible distance, straining, struggling. Fearing I was losing parts of myself to the expanse of darkness. Struggling on nonetheless.
“Nell. Please come back.” T. Laine’s voice, calling me with her witch magic.
There. It was there. I slung my mind, my spirit, my very soul at the voice.
Back to headquarters where my body lay. And up into the soil of the potted plants.
I sucked in a breath, and my lungs made a now-familiar rubbing, flapping sound, as of air-deprived tires chafing against smooth asphalt. I coughed. Tried to force my eyes open. They were still sticky from the fire, gummed shut, the lashes sealed. Someone placed a warm, wet compress over them. I could hear the distant murmur of voices. Feel the softness of the blanket over me. An air mattress beneath me. I had been taken to the new sleeping room, my fingers still in the potted Soulwood soil that someone had wet down with fresh water. Cool air moved over my lower face and it didn’t hurt to the touch. I was healed. I was whole. Minutes passed as I mentally searched my body. Finding myself restored, recovered. Though rather more leafy than I might have wanted.
“How long have I been out?” I whispered. “How many of my plants did I kill?”
“Two hours, give or take. Ten plants. Two more that look a little wrinkled but will probably live. Another batch are fine. Are you . . . all here? Feeling better?” It was T. Laine, her voice calm and even-toned.
I pulled my fingers from one clay pot and clutched the edge of the compress, easing it off my face. My eyes opened and the first thing I saw was a hand, my hand, with green leaves curling out of the tips of my fingernails. From my thumb, a thin brown vine coiled and curled, tiny green leaves unfurling. “Grapevine,” I murmured. “I’m sprouting.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Lainie said.
I breathed out a laugh at the crudity. “I’m healed, though, I think.” And saved from Brother Ephraim’s assault. He had waited until I was already in some kind of danger to attack. I wondered what he had done to Soulwood but was too much a coward to drop back into the land and look.
“Yeah,” she said. “But things went to hell in a handbasket while you were growing leaves. You need to talk to Occam.” I didn’t respond, and she added, “When you first got hit, he went catty. We got shredded clothes and cat hair everywhere. Place is a mess.”
“No hairballs?” I managed.
T. Laine barked a surprised laugh. “God no.”
I chuckled with her, a breathless, strained sound. “Is Devin okay?”
“Yeah. Still asleep. The senator had flown to DC with his brother, Justin, and so we’re waiting on someone from the child protective services and the kid’s nanny to get here.”
“I hate not being human.” The words startled me.
“If you had been human, the blast might have killed you. Or disfigured you forever.”
“If I’d been human, I wouldn’t have been reading Devin.”
Lainie was silent for a few moments and I managed to focus on her face in the dim light. Pugnacious chin, dark brown eyes and hair. Her mouth wrinkled in a pursing frown, as if something tasted bad. “Okay,” she said. “I got nothing.”
I laughed again. “Help me sit up. Then water. Then you can debrief me about Occam’s problems.” T. Laine pulled me to my butt on the inflatable mattress. While I drank the room-temperature water that I remembered asking for earlier, she filled me in.
“You know the guy’s nuts for you, right?”
She meant Occam. I shrugged, an embarrassed noncommittal response that said, Yes, but . . .
“He lost it when you got hit. Shifted. Ruined a perfectly good pair of boots and a break room chair. Went at the kid. Pea came at him out of nowhere and cut his face up. Then Rick went catty, pulled into the shift by werecat magic. Talk about ruined clothes. And blood. Pea and Bean . . . well, all I can say is that those little things can freaking move.”
“And Soul?”
T. Laine hesitated. “Not as cool as a cucumber, but she kept it all together. She and the grindys kept the kid safe and threw the cats into the null room to deal with dominance issues in the only way their cats know how. They’re still alive, if a little bloody.”