Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4 )- Faith Hunter Page 0,158

out of bed in the mornings. “Did you see the hand in the video? Did you see the ring it wore?”

FireWind started. Almost in unison he and T. Laine said, “Ring?”

I leaned in to my cell and tapped it on. Hit the play button. FireWind moved to face the computer system and the video appeared on the overhead screen, much larger, though pixelated and grainy. It wasn’t easy to see, but the ring was there, a brownish gold (though gold wasn’t supposed to tarnish) and in the center a brownish red stone was mounted. I didn’t know much about stones. There were shapes incised into the stone, but they were impossible to make out, even with a little computer sleight of hand to enhance it.

FireWind said, “Soul is calling the Vatican. She’s sending their lead investigator all we have on the demon. We hope someone there will know something.”

T. Laine made a sound of breathy laughter. “And I called my experts, the U.S. Council of Witches. Between the two opposing sides, we should learn something. Hopefully not things in total conflict with each other.”

I nodded, feeling like a bobble-head doll, and looked around. Occam wasn’t here, either off for a few hours of rest or away doing things for the investigation. Rick and Margot Racer were in the sleep room, talking softly. I was tired and worried and I had too much to do before I could rest. There was a Shakespeare quote, something about exhaustion, but I was too tired to remember it. I downloaded the video to the main system and left.

• • •

My sister was setting up an agility course in the backyard using found objects. A length of rope, some pointed wooden stakes from the woodpile, a stack of cement bricks, a few two-by-ten boards, and two shovels. Mud and Cherry were racing to and fro in the heat, the silly little dog wearing herself out.

I waved to Mud and carried my pink blanket into the woods, back from the house, deep under the heavy foliage. There was a spring back here and a rill of water. It was dark and cool and silent. I hadn’t been here recently, though I remembered walking here when I was coming back from being a tree.

The rocks were a tumbled mass in the near-vertical hillside and the pool was deeper than I remembered, the bottom clay, lined with a layer of leaves from last fall. The trees around the pool weren’t old growth, though they looked like it. Until I first fed the land with the body and soul of the faceless man who had attacked me, right here, they had been only twenty-five years old. Now it would take several tall people to hold hands around the trunks. The boles were massive. This was home as no other place on the face of the earth would ever be home. This was the heart of Soulwood.

I dropped the blanket to the surface of a flat rock and sank down on it. I laid out the things I had stolen and secreted away. The bits of tissue, stained with Jason’s blood. The gauze, brown with Loriann’s blood. The grains of blue talc. There was also a bit of Rick’s blood that had splattered in his office. No one had seen me take it, either.

I wasn’t a witch. But my magic was, and always had been, blood magic.

By every definition I had ever learned, I was a black-magic practitioner. It was time to test out that theory.

EIGHTEEN

Anywhere else, and I would have been cautious reading the earth. I had learned the hard way not to dive into the land, but to touch it with a fingertip and ease into the ground. But this was Soulwood. This was home. I toed off my shoes and placed my bare feet on the ground. The soil against my soles was dark and rich, composed of organic compounds and minerals; this close to the rill of water and the broken stone of the hillside, it had rock chips throughout in dozens of browns and tans and blacks. I leaned against a boulder, cool and sturdy at my back, and let down my hair. It was sweaty and thick as a tangled ball of tree roots; it curled around my face and shoulders. I worked my fingertips into the soil, scratching with my nails until fingers and palms were below the surface of the earth.

Rootlets coiled up to my flesh as if inspecting me, but they