Blood of the Earth Read Online Free PDF

distance like some kinda cheat? Maybe you think you’uns is all like some kinda assassins, but you ain’t! You’re chicken!” I shouted. “Each and every one of the churchmen is all chickens! Come out and face me, ya chickens!” Schoolyard taunts. They worked.
    No one spoke loud enough for me to hear over the distance, but I felt them start slowly toward me, widening into a triangle shape, which was unfortunate, the man in the middle hanging back, the ones on the sides coming forward faster. The man in the center stumbled, the muscadine vine catching his foot. His hand touched the ground, bare skin to the earth, and I felt a tremble through the woods. A wrongness I couldn’t place, deeper and darker than the wrongness of Rick and Paka. But there was no time to dissect that feeling. He righted himself and moved faster. The trees around the clearing began to sough, branches swaying back and forth slowly, like a sensation of breathing, though I felt no wind in the lowered paths of the raised beds. The grass beneath me shifted and bent beneath my weight, scratchy between my toes.
    Smoke from my woodstove swirled and twisted around the house, smelling of warmth and false reassurance. The man on my right moved out of the woods and I saw his face. It was Brother Ephraim, my personal nemesis, a small man, but one who carried a big hate. He thought all women were evil and needed to be put in their places, beneath his boot, starting at an early age. Brother Ephraim hated me for lots of reasons, all of them related to my disobedience. I hadn’t done as the church decreed and married the former leader, the old pervert better known as Colonel Ernest Jackson Sr., at age twelve. I hadn’t been punished for my infraction either. Instead I’d accepted a proposal from John and Leah Ingram, and gone off church land with them, away from the men who wanted to either marry me off to the highest bidder or burn me at the stake for being a witch—because even then I’d had magic enough for the churchmen to notice. My leaving had been as much a taunt as my words just now.
    From that day over a decade ago, Brother Ephraim wanted me in the punishment house, my punishment left in his hands.
    I’d die first.
    The man on my left stepped out of the trees—Joshua Purdy. No surprise. Joshua had tried to court me starting the week John died, the moment it was discovered that he’d left me his land, instead of leaving it to the church, like any self-respecting churchman should have. The land gave me value in the church’s eyes, and Joshua was determined to claim me and the property both.
    I’d die—second
. I almost smiled.
    The man in the center walked free of the trees and the shadows starting to stretch with early evening. Ernest Jackson Jr., called “Jackie,” had become the head preacher and had taken over running the church. The colonel’s son and heir was the meanest human being on the face of the Earth. I’d looked up what men like him were called. Misogynists. Sociopaths. Maybe even psychopaths. Dangerous, no matter what they were called. If the others hated me, then Jackie hated me with a burning passion, like coals of hatred piled up and waiting for the smallest inflammatory incident to flame up and roar, destroying everything his path. The thoughts were too poetic for the little turd. The hatred was mutual. And Jackie had drunk vampire blood long ago, to help cure him of a childhood cancer. Drinking blood of the damned had to have contributed to changes in his brain. Likely made him crazier than he woulda been in the first place.
    Maybe that was why his touch had spooked my woods. Hatred was like fire, capable of destroying everything in its path. Woods feared fire. Perhaps hate made them feel the same sort of terror.
    Jackie’s hatred had gotten much worse when he discovered that I had allowed Jane Yellowrock’s raiding party through my property to church land, the night his daddy went missing. It made me partially