up. She was wearing a pretty, purple scarf around her crown, adornment approved by the church, but I knew it was really worn to hide leaves. She was also wearing bright purple sneakers with lime green ties, which was not church approved, though I had seen other Nicholson women wearing brightly colored shoes and I approved. Esther turned around, revealing a wood tray with two coffee cups, a white porcelain coffee carafe, and an entire breakfast on a heavy white plate. She placed the tray in front of me, across the arms of the rocking chair. The smell of morning-fresh eggs and bacon and coffee woke me up fast.
“Holy moly, that smells good,” I breathed.
Esther smacked me on the shoulder. “You’un don’t be cussing at my house, and you’un best say a proper thanks.”
“Ow.” I rubbed my shoulder, saying, “Lord, I thank you for this amazing meal and my wonderful sister. And brother,” I amended. “Amen.” I dove in.
“Good enough,” Esther said and returned to her house. For all her recalcitrant ways, my sister could cook a mean breakfast and her coffee was strong enough to stand a fork up in it. I wolfed the meal down as I reread the reports and studied the map. The street view I wanted was nonexistent, the road too unimportant for Google to have driven down it, but from the satellite view, I spotted the address. It was an old farmhouse surrounded by oak trees, with a dirt drive and two trucks parked out front. Behind the house a good ways, maybe half a mile along that same dirt drive, was a trailer, and around a curving hill, an outbuilding smothered in kudzu. Back on the road in front of the address, I finger-leaped along the road back to Highway 62, spotting cleared fields, a postharvest view of farmland, farmland, and more farmland, with houses perched here and there, silos, barns, mobile homes. Near 62 I saw what looked like long, narrow foundation systems, probably the remains of an old chicken farm, with ancient farm vehicles and a house that was caving in. I knew where to turn in now, and I plugged the route into my phone system, wondering how I’d stay awake to reach the address.
As I was reading, a third update appeared on-screen with a soft notification ding. Sam looked over his shoulder at me. “Everything okay, Nellie?”
I grinned tiredly at him. “Except for exhaustion, I’m good. I got me a job, brother mine. The dings are case stuff.”
Sam shook his head and stretched out his legs, crossing his feet at the ankles. “That incessant dinging would drive me right into the loony bin.”
“Roosters crowing all night would drive me there.”
My brother grinned. “Different strokes.”
“For different folks,” I finished. And opened the new report.
As the wrecked vehicle was leaving under the auspices of the military, FBI Senior Special Agent Macauley Smythe and his partner Gerry Stapp had shown up and Smythe had demanded to know why FBI wasn’t called to the scene. FireWind and Smythe had words, most of them not particularly polite, but I managed not to laugh out loud at the record of FireWind’s formal and heavily applied politeness. Especially when he noticed that Macauley Smythe’s fingertips were green. The FBI chief had somehow come into contact with death and decay. The hazmat team had immediately placed him in quarantine, suited him up, and taken him with them when they left, transporting him to a null room. He’d been screaming about witches and evil magic users being burned at the stake as he was driven away in the back of the military van.
Gerry Stapp was currently on the way to FBI headquarters to begin paperwork to set Catriona free and to dismiss all the trumped-up charges his senior agent had brought against her.
I was sorry I had missed out on that confrontation. It sounded like fun, way more fun than an armed showdown with churchmen. Or maybe not. I had won, with a little help from my brother and his friend. And I hadn’t developed bloodlust. That was . . . that was pretty wonderful.
The caffeine was waking me up. The food was filling me with fats and protein and carbs. The flapjacks were fluffy bites of heaven. When I was done, I looked from the plate and the reports to see Sam grinning at me. “What?” I asked, suspicious. It was the same look he had given me when I was a kid and he was planning