Blood of the Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

responsible for the arrests and the removal of the children by the child protective services of the state of Tennessee and the loss of his daddy, both in his eyes and in my own. Jackie and I had history. I could only hope I’d live long enough to see Jackson Jr. dead and gone too.
    Brother Ephraim raised his shotgun and fired, but not at me. Into the back of the house. Two shots, a few seconds to reload, and two more shots, interspersed with the sounds of breaking glass and things shattering. When the sound died away, I heard him laughing as he again reloaded.
    From behind me, from along the southwest border of the property, down the mountain a goodly ways, I felt something race up the road and leap into my forest. A creature that didn’t belong here. Foreign. Wrong. The forest scratched the soles of my feet in warning. The grass shifted beneath me in alarm. The leaves thrashed overhead.
Wrongwrongwrong
thrummedup through my flesh. But I had more immediate problems—the three men hiding in the shadows.
    “Stop!” I shouted at my visitors. They halted, each man holding his ground and a shotgun, the weapon of choice for most hunters, for the churchmen, and for every redneck around here. “Say what you came to say,” I demanded, “and get off my land.”
    “You’re dressed as a man, Sister Nell,” Brother Ephraim called over the intervening distance. He was wearing camo greens and blended into the woods just beyond. “We would counsel you in womanly ways,” he said.
    Nothing new there.
    “We’uns jist seen you entertain a strange man in your home without the presence of a family man to protect your honor and virtue,” Jackie said. “You are now sullied in the eyes of the church and must submit to punishment to bring about repentance and atonement. It’s time to return to the arms of the church and the family of your God.”
    “You’re living alone, instead of as a helpmeet to a husband,” Brother Ephraim said. “Women are weak, and apt to fall into the clutches of evil men.”
    Again, nothing new.
    The new feeling of wrongness was growing closer, much closer, from the men before me and from the gorge behind me, from where the road curved around the property. My back tensed with apprehension, but there wasn’t time to look over my shoulder. There was no way I could turn from the churchmen. “There aren’t many men more evil than you, you perverts! Go away,” I shouted. “I don’t need to hurt you.”
    The men laughed at my words, and Joshua Purdy stepped from the shadows. He shook his oily hair back from his narrow face and said, “I’ve offered for you, time and again, to make you an honest woman, Nell. Accept my offer in the manner it was intended. Don’t make us do something we might regret.”
    “Regret this,” I muttered. I fired my shotgun. The boom was enough to damage my eardrums. The butt of the gun jerked down along the length of the flagpole, the barrel rising with the recoil. The men darted into cover as I steadied the weapon, tracking Jackie, who had ducked behind the vegetable garden not far from the side of the house and was crouching his way tothe house corner for better cover. I fired again, taking down a vine of second-crop string beans, in a haze of green leaf shrapnel. I was deaf from the concussion and my eyes were tearing from the blasts as I reloaded with practiced ease.
    All I needed to do was wing them. Just a single scratch by a shot pellet or vine thorn or anything, and I’d have the injured one’s life force in my hands. But according to what I felt through my feet, no blood had dripped onto the soil of my land, onto the soil of Soulwood.
    I blinked to clear my vision, catching sight of a flashing shadow, the shadow of wrongness that had been racing toward me, up the hill. From one side, a black shape leaped thirty feet and landed on the house roof, a leopard digging in with her claws as she raced over the roof ridge. A black leopard, dark as night, dappled with spots