“I know she was,” I said. “But not one of us knows if she grew leaves. It’s possible that she and Jedidiah Whisnut are hiding it.” The mamas looked at one another fast, and back to their mugs. “Jedidiah loves Esther to the moon and back. He’d hide most anything to protect her.” I didn’t add, And she hadn’t been on the ground when she was attacked. She hadn’t scratched the attacker and found his blood on her hands. She hadn’t fought back. She was too well trained to fight. She had taken whatever was dished out. I didn’t know what kind of woman Esther had turned into since the attack. This conversation made me want to find out.
I said, “I don’t know enough about genetics to figure out how it might work. But Mud—Mindy—is the same kind of creature I am. And she’s at risk.” I took a big breath and said all at once, “I want her to come live with me. I want you to give me custody.”
Mama burst into tears.
Daddy patted her shoulder.
Through her tears, Mama demanded, “You’un think it’s my blood that’s bad, don’t you’un?”
I scowled at her. “You stop that right now, Mama.” At my tone Mama’s head jerked up and her eyes went wide. So did Daddy’s. “Being whatever I am isn’t bad or good. It just is. And no. I really think it’s a combination of you and Daddy together.” I looked at his middle. “It’s possible that’s what is wrong with his belly. He might know tomorrow. After the surgery.”
“Who all knows this?”
I scowled. If Daddy was thinking to control the information he was being foolish. “I told Sam.”
Daddy scowled back. “That tree in the compound. That part of this mess with you growing leaves?”
The man was entirely too smart. “Maybe,” I said. “Probably.”
“You’un gonna be fixing that tree?”
“I’ll be trying as soon as I leave here. Now. You all talk it over and decide. I need to get Mud moved into my place soon so she can start public school.”
“Public—” Mama’s words cut off sharply.
“Public school,” I emphasized. “Mud will need a proper education to fit in the human world. In the townie world.”
“What about church services?” Daddy asked.
And I knew I had won, because this was Daddy’s negotiation tone. Some of the tension left my shoulders, though I didn’t let that show.
I pretended to think about his words for a while, trying to decide what I could give up and what I wouldn’t. I tapped my fingertips on the table and then clenched my fist, knowing I had given something away to the master negotiator. I scowled and glared at him. “We’ll both come to Sunday services once each Sunday. We’ll come to weekday morning devotions or evening devotions once a week. The exception to this rule is if I’m on a difficult case, or Mud has exams, in which situation we’ll make up for half of missed services.”
“Exams?” Mud said, startled. I kicked her under the table.
“Twice a week to devotions,” Daddy bargained.
“Twice a week,” I agreed. “But we only make up one missed service per week if we have to miss due to a case.”
“You’ll bring a note from your boss.”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
Daddy squinted at me and my bossy tone.
“I’m your child. I don’t lie.”
Daddy nodded slowly. I noticed he was rubbing his belly, where the medical problem was, the one that might show him to be nonhuman in tomorrow’s surgery. “No note. Clothing?” he asked. “I insist on my daughter being properly and demurely dressed.”
“Dresses to below her knees or pants. No bare legs and nothing tight-fitting until she’s eighteen.”
“Who sits with her when you’rn on a case?”
“She comes to headquarters with me. Plus, I take off and do computer work at home. I already spoke to my bosses. They’ll work with me on this.”
A silence thick with tension filled the space between us. Daddy drummed his fingertips on the table and I realized where I got the nervous habit. He stopped instantly and shot me a look. I stared back at him with a Gotcha look.
“The mamas and I’ll talk it over. You’uns get on outta here.” Mud and I stood. “And Nell? You’un take care a your sister.”
“Yes, sir. Always.”
“I want her to have a dowry, or whatever townie women get when they don’t marry. I want all my girls protected.”
“I’ll see that she’s protected. I’ll see that she gets land. And education. And money. And while we’re negotiating, I need a rooster.”
“A what?” Daddy asked.
“A rooster. A big one.”
Daddy shook his head at the vagaries of womenfolk. “Mud, you know which one to give your sister.” He dropped his chin and pointed a single finger to the door. Mud and I took off, stopping by the chicken coop on the way down the road. “You sure it’s the one?” I asked, watching the huge rooster strut around.
“That rooster ain’t nothing but trouble. He starts yelling at three in the morning and he pecks the feathers offa the small hens. Mama’s been threatening to feed it to us in a stew pot for weeks now. I’m surprised it’s still struttin’ and still has its head.”
Good enough. I put my hand on the earth and reached. Small vines stretched up and snared the rooster’s ankles. Mud gasped and then laughed. “I need to learn how to do that.”
I held out my fingers to show her the leaves that were already sprouting from my fingernail beds. This was a demonstration, and worth any long-term effects of working or reading the land. “I can teach you, and you can grow leaves. Or you can not learn and stay human.”
Mud’s expression fell and she said, “Ohhh.”
I opened the door of the chicken coop and slipped a bit of cloth over the rooster’s head like a hood, wrapping the ties loosely. Then I tied off the rooster’s feet, tore away the vines that had imprisoned him, and carried the huge bird to the back of my truck. It musta weighed twenty pounds.
Guilt swept through me. I wasn’t sure about any of this. I was feeling my way through it all. I had talked it over with Jane Yellowrock and she called it flying by the seat of her pants, which made no sense to me at all. But . . . now I had a plan. And a rooster.
? ? ?
“What we’uns doin’?” Mud asked. “It might kill us, just sittin’ here.”
“It might try.” I got out of the truck and picked up the rooster. Carried it closer to the tree, watching it. Feeling the tree through the ground. It was aware. It was angry. And it was my fault.
From behind me Mud said, “That ol’ tree’s mean as a snake.”
“You feel that?”
“I feel it.”
“I feel it too,” a soft voice said.
I smiled without turning. “Tandy. Thank you for coming. You know my sister.”
“I do,” the empath said. “What is my job, precisely?”
“This is the vampire tree. It’s sentient. It needs a place to grow, a way to reproduce, and a job. I tried to make that happen and it didn’t listen because of . . . well, because of an interference problem. That problem has been resolved, but the tree has taken over a good two acres of the compound and it’s started killing pets.”
“That will never do,” Tandy said.
“I want you to help me tell it to behave.”
“I see.” Tandy’s tone suggested that he didn’t see at all and didn’t know how to go about talking to a vampire tree.
“You think you can get close to the tree?”
“It likes me,” Tandy said. “So yes.”
“Okay. You get close. I’ll sit right here. With your keeping it calm and my hands in the earth, I’ll tell it the facts of life, survival, and death. Then we’ll sacrifice a rooster.”
Tandy was silent a moment. He said, “We’ll do what?”