settled, I glanced down and saw dead brown leaves at my fingertips. Occam’s body was between the big boss and me, and I watched as he plucked withered leaves out of my hairline and off my fingertips. He didn’t look me in the eyes. He was mad that I had done something stupid, mad enough that his eyes were glowing the gold of his cat. But he didn’t say anything. He just finished grooming me and put a bottle of tepid water in my hand. I drank. I could feel more dried leaves in the toes of my field boots. They’d be crinkled and squished. I drank some more. “Well, there’s the tree I made.”
“The one you call the vampire tree,” FireWind stated. “I have observed the tree on your property line eating, or perhaps digesting would be the better term, a field mouse. I assumed that was why you called it a vampire tree. However, there has been no discussion of you making the tree. What do you mean by this?”
“I was on church land. I was shot. I fell on an oak tree. I called on Soulwood to heal me. Soulwood used the oak, shoved its roots into me. They grew into me and healed me.”
“The tree near your land, eating the mouse, was not an oak.”
“Right. Well. What I didn’t know when I was trying to stay alive, was that when my blood and the tree mixed, and Soulwood was healing me—” I stopped and breathed, forcing down nausea. The words felt odd in my mouth, on my tongue. “The tree mutated. Into a tree that eats meat. And . . . it’s sentient.”
“Sentient. You created a sentient plant.” There was disbelief in his tone.
I wasn’t looking at him, didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to see derision on his face. “Yep,” I said softly. “Not that I knew right away it was sentient, and a separate sentience from Soulwood itself. But I figured it out. It calls itself the Green Knight. It fights for me.”
“Did you know of this?” he said accusingly to Occam.
“No,” I said, before Occam could answer. “I mean yes. Sorta.” Occam knew. So did Tandy and Rick. But we hadn’t put that into a report. And I was now aware that I probably should have. “I can’t prove it. It might not even be true. My body’s changing, so my brain is probably changing too. I might be learning to think in a different way, with my evolving, mutating brain. Or I might jist be insane. Or hallucinating.”
“When were you going to report this?”
Never? I thought. “I pretty much only figured all this stuff out in the last few days.” A few weeks ago, maybe a few months ago, but I wasn’t offering that unless he cornered me.
“The little tree you have carried around is more than simply a container of Soulwood soil that allows you to commune with your land?” he asked, his tone colder. “Have you endangered the unit and the integrity of the mission with a stunt that uses wild magic?”
I got my eyes open again to see the big boss towering over me, one hand on the car door, the other on the car roof. Something heated and pure flared in me, some part of me that had survived the church, its menfolk, its followers, its traditions. “You want to tell us how,” I said, dragging out the last word. I slid away from the warm blanket. Swung my legs over and got to my feet. FireWind didn’t move so I straight-armed him away from me. He didn’t stumble back, but his braid flew, so it had been a good shove. I lowered my voice into a growl that might have come from Occam and started over. “You gonna tell us all about being a skinwalker dog and how you get stuck in nose-suck? How you get lost in the tracking and the chase? Is that in your personnel files? Might that cause problems with this case?”
The flesh at the corners of FireWind’s yellow eyes tightened.
“Yeah. I figured not,” I said, taking a step closer to him, feeling fresh green leaves twitch at the back of my hairline. “Tell you what, boss. You report how being in the skin and the brain of an animal affects your brain and I’ll do the same with my tree being self-aware. Until then, this is need-to-know and that means you and me and Occam. Now get outta my way