sipped. My innards found their places. My nausea faded. As I sat and drank, the warmth of Melody Horse Farm rose in me, rich and content. Alive. So very alive. I could come to love this land.
Softly, something else rose in me. A yearning. A quiet craving, something like desire. Desire to claim the earth beneath me. All I would need was blood. I opened my eyes, not even aware that I had closed them until now. There was a small vine tendril curled around my ankle. This land wanted to be claimed. Wanted to be fed. A battle had been fought near here in the war, blood spilled in violence and fear and hatred. The bodies had been buried in an unmarked grave. The land had accepted the sacrifice, but no one had claimed it. And that was so long ago. And now death threatened to wipe the land clean of all life. The land wanted . . .
I peeled the vine off my ankle. I couldn’t feed this place and clearly the death and decay bodies had not been acceptable sacrifices. This wasn’t my land. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t care for it. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
When I could stand, I pulled my PsyLED persona back around me like a cloak, shook my clothes in the faint wind to remove some of the stink trapped in the fibers, yanked five leaves out of my hairline and tucked them into a pocket. Satisfied that I was at least partially presentable, I went looking for Pacillo. The breeder/trainer was awake and drinking coffee from the contaminated coffeemaker. I didn’t bother to tell him he was being stupid. He had removed my note about the contamination and made coffee anyway. Occam often said, “You can’t fix stupid,” and in this case, I figured he was right. Pacillo stank of liquor, sweat, and coffee, and his hair stood up at odd angles like a punk rocker I had seen on TV. I had a feeling he didn’t even remember being in the null room.
I sat across from him and pulled up a pic of Cale on my laptop. I asked, “You know him?”
He blinked several times, as if trying to focus on the screen. “Cale Nowell. One of Stella’s old friends. She made him part of the roadie crew and then a backup guitarist. Haven’t seen him around much.”
“Really? He’s been on the property.”
Pacillo looked at up me, bleary-eyed. “Okay. So?”
I shook my head and left the barn office. Sitting in my car, I left a message for Nowell’s probation officer, A. K. Montgomery, but it was the middle of the night and I didn’t expect him or her to get back to me right away. Shortly after that, FireWind called it a night. I found my car and followed the other cars back to Cookeville and the hotel there. We needed sleep.
As I drove, I kept myself awake thinking about the case. For lots of reasons—mostly because it was likely he had done prison time for Stella—I had a feeling Cale Nowell might be involved, but feelings weren’t evidence and guesswork wasn’t a case. And my feelings didn’t address why a man who had given years of his life to save a lover would hire a witch to make a trigger to kill that same woman.
And then.
A single thought lit up my brain like a torch.
Unless that same man came back from prison expecting that woman to be waiting for him. And she had moved on. Taken other lovers. And left him behind. Killing her by dissolving her entire body was the kind of thing a churchman might do to a wife who strayed.
If, and that was a huge if, that man also had some kind of previously unknown magical power, would he use his power to kill that betraying woman and all her friends and lovers to get back at her?
Oh yes. He surely might.
Except there were two bad guys working together. And I had no idea how that fit into any scenario.
* * *
* * *
The hotel room phone rang at five a.m., waking T. Laine and me. “Gaaah,” she moaned, arms flinging until she woke up enough to answer it. She said, “What. Okay. We’ll be ready in five.” She hung up the phone and said, “Get up, plant-woman, and pluck your leaves. We got a body.”
“Of course we have a body,” I grumbled. “We always have a body.” But I rolled out of my hotel bed