by Faith Hunter
• • •
It was evening. I hadn’t slept enough to make it through my usual twelve-hour shift without nodding off. I had dropped Mud off at Daddy’s and went in to apologize for my anger and rudeness. Not that I took the threat to kill churchmen off the table. Any who came on my property were still at risk of death. I just phrased it with a smile, as if I was discussing tea and scones instead of self-defense by shotgun. Daddy accepted the apology and brought up the greenhouse. It was a nice visit, all in all, mainly because I wasn’t being judgmental or causing problems. This time. There was a time and place for that later, in what would be an ongoing, lifelong battle, I was sure. I left Mud in deep conversation with Mama Grace about how to make her special cheese biscuits.
As I walked to the door, Daddy looked up at me and then at my youngest true sib, in a sort of a promise. “You got child care worked out?” he asked.
I was nowhere near a solution, but I nodded. “Getting there.”
“She’ll be safe here tonight. I’ll keep an eye on her. And on Larry Aden.” Daddy might not make the best decisions all the time, and getting him to walk into the twenty-first century wasn’t easy, but Mud was safer with the Nicholson clan than with me tonight. Until she grew leaves and the churchmen burned her at the stake.
FOUR
I dropped my four-day gobag off in the locker room and took a few seconds to trim back stress-growth leaves at my hairline. Talking to Daddy hadn’t been horrible, but it hadn’t been easy, either. I’d been a tree for about six months after the last big case and that experience had left me leafy and viny and rooty. I didn’t so much indulge in personal hygiene as landscape myself. Half of the team was equally injured and had been in rehab of one kind or another. Unit Eighteen had been working a skeleton crew for months—paperwork, protocol, and research. Now that Occam was back from healing, and I wasn’t so rooty, we were a full crew. It felt good to be back to work.
When I was presentable, I went to my cubicle, stuck a finger into the soil and herbs at the window, and locked my one-day gobag and weapon in the drawer. The weapon wasn’t needed in HQ. The herbs were too dry, which severely limited the salad flavors I had planned on for supper. I fished an empty bottle from the recycles bin, filled it with tap water, and emptied it slowly over the herbs. “There you go, my pretties. Sorry about the chlorine. I promise not to clip you for a day or two to let you recover, and I’ll bring better water tomorrow.” Kissing the air over them, I picked up my laptop and two tablets and carried them to the conference room, where Tandy was bent over the unit’s main system, the one where orders and comms originated. I took my place at the conference table and logged in to the PsyLED system. “Hey,” I said.
“Evening, Nell. I brought salad fixings for supper,” our resident empath said. He wasn’t prescient, but because of his empathy gift, he sometimes seemed to be expecting things ahead of time, like what I wanted for supper. He’d explained that it was a part of knowing us so deeply, not a form of psychic mind control or prophecy.
“I can do salad,” I said, proud that I sounded like a modern city girl. I’d never be hip or cool or chic, but at least I fit in now, sharing a more common accent and language syntax. “I’m sending you my report on the black-magic circle from last night.”
Tandy nodded, the sharp overhead lights picking out the Lichtenberg lines that traced across his skin like scarlet lightning.
I read over the summation reports for the last few days and the latest on Rick’s black-cat-in-a-circle case. There wasn’t much. The focals—the bloody gauze, the knife, the golf ball and tee—from the circle had been sent to the lab, signed for, and placed into a queue for eventual testing. No date for actual analysis had been sent to us. T. Laine still wasn’t sure what the circles were for, but causality needed to be proved or disproved in law enforcement, and she was working on the “Rick being called by a black-magic spell” aspect to see if it was happenstance or deliberate.
Someone had asked Rick if he played golf and he’d said, “Not for years.” The tee and ball looked brand-new. No tie there.
Lainie had gone through the runes in the black-magic circle, trying to provide us with an interpretation. Tandy had chatted with the owners and managers of the businesses on Riverside Drive, the street near the circle. Two employers had recently fired several people, and one young woman had been fired for smoking marijuana and crack on the job. The woman was in her twenties, short and slight, and the manager had provided Tandy with her ID and address.
Tandy and T. Laine had run the ID. It was real, but the address on it turned out to be an empty lot behind the wastewater treatment plant off of Neyland Drive. They had tracked down her parents, who lived in Nashville, but they hadn’t seen their daughter since they kicked her out for stealing and pawning her grandmother’s silver. There had been no indication of witch genes in the lineage. No one had been able to find the woman and there was no way to determine if she had cast the circle.
The local witch coven had been asked to take a look at photos of the circle and they had no idea who had cast it. They also had no idea what it did except something bad. They had refused to go to the circle in person and had broken off contact. Which they had done before when bad magical things were taking place in Knoxville.
We were no closer to knowing if the witch circle had been a deliberate call to Rick or if he accidently answered it because of proximity and the black cat used as sacrifice. We had nothing except bloody gauze we couldn’t track to the blood source, a bunch of weird focals, and … Nothing. Except that someone was casting nasty curses with unknown magic. This alone had everyone worried, especially the werecats.
Tandy was in charge for the night and also handling comms, should we get a case. As long as no one took a day off or went on vacation we had enough people to staff the office twenty-four/seven. On nights when that wasn’t possible, calls were autorouted to Rick or JoJo and they called us in. Computers were grand things when they worked. Satisfied that I was caught up on everything, I went to work on my assignment, tracking grindylows and their kills and why grindys were indifferent about Rick. PsyLED’s mandate was to investigate paranormal crimes, keep paranormal records, track paranormal trends, and I had traced and amassed a lot of records in my time at Unit Eighteen.
On my first break, well after midnight, the waning moon was visible and the sky was black against the city lights as seen though the windows. I trimmed back dead leaves—on the herbs in the windowsill boxes, not on me—and enjoyed the novelty of air-conditioning. Novelty because I was still mentally stymied about going on the grid or adding to my solar array and solar batteries just for comfort. It was hard to turn away from a lifelong independence. I weighed it all as I worked on the plants.
“Nell,” Tandy called over the in-house speaker system. “Come to the conference room, please.” I put down my small watering can and went back to join him. “It’s probably nothing,” he said as I stepped in the doorway, “but Knoxville PD called in something and are asking for an agent to liaise.”
“You want me to go on a call? Alone?”
He didn’t look up at the obvious excitement, apprehension, and delight mixed together in my voice. “Sending coordinates and address to your cell. Meet Officer Holt at the scene. Convenience store robbery a little after midnight, on the heels of an earlier title loan shop robbery as the employees were closing. The businesses are within a mile of each other and the perpetrator in both cases was described as male, five-nine, black hair, pale skin, and ‘acting strangely.’ He stole cash and a gun and ammo from the pawn shop and food items and cash from the convenience store. Neither business’ security footage shows the unsub’s face, but both describe bloody clothing. The descriptions were similar enough for KPD to put them together. They want the place read for vampire.”
Unsub was cop-speak for unknown subject. “Species profiling because of blood and pale skin? Maybe he’s a butcher.”
Tandy didn’t look up, but the amusement was clear on his
face in the glare of his tablets. “You get to decide what species. If human, you can give the investigation back over to the local PD.”
So, no crime workup, just a reading. Scut work. I gave a long-suffering breath and gathered my gear—my weapon and Kevlar/antimagic vest, the psy-meter 2.0, and a comms set.
• • •
I didn’t push my old red truck, didn’t run lights and siren. The C10 wasn’t designed for the strain of pursuit or emergency driving, and since the delivery of my official vehicle had been delayed while I was a tree, I had to protect my only mode of transportation.
I reached the address to find a Pilot Gas and Convenience store just off Cumberland Avenue. Before I stopped, I drove around and found the title loan shop, an odd business for what was a midscale retail area. There was no crime scene tape, no indication of a crime committed, which was odd. I motored back to the gas and convenience store. The Pilot was newish, open twenty-four hours a day, with bright lights and a lot of traffic. It wasn’t the kind of place I’d expect a robbery during heavy business hours. After two a.m. maybe, but not before that. Again here, there was only a single strip of bright yellow crime scene tape around one entrance and one cash register, but no plethora of detectives.
I parked beside the KPD unit and pulled up the security footage of the Pilot robbery itself, which Tandy had sent as I drove. I watched on my tablet as the skinny unsub in jeans and a dark hooded jacket walked through the entrance and pointed his pocket at the cashier closest to the door. The pocket could have concealed a hand holding a weapon, but looked like the tip of a finger. It was hard to say. The cashier removed a handful of bills from the drawer and handed them to the subject, who reached out and accepted the bills, his hand narrow, thin, and shaking, as white as any vamp’s. He left the Pilot at a steady, slogging pace. Not running, not panicked, but not acting odd in any way I could see. No cameras caught his face, and he seemed to disappear into the shadows across University Commons Way toward the Walmart.
Something seemed odd and I watched the video again, realizing the male unsub could be a gangly female. The slender hand. The way he, or she, ran wasn’t suggestive of gender.
I read the rest of the report. The kid—estimated to be about seventeen by the cashier—had asked for four hundred dollars. Not everything in the register. Just four hundred dollars. That was weird. I looked up felonies and discovered that in Tennessee, a robbery involving less than five hundred dollars, and committed without a weapon, (fingers didn’t count) was a misdemeanor. That explained the lack of police presence here, just the one police car, Unit 102.
I accessed the surveillance cameras from the earlier title loan shop robbery. Same slim form, same white skin, same hand in pocket. A finger. He had stolen a gun and ammo as well as money. Here, the lanky thief stole less than a hundred dollars and the .32 Smith & Wesson. He—I chose male for convenience—had calculated the value of the gun and ammo, adding them to the cash. Stealing a gun carried heavier penalties. I was guessing he didn’t know that. But, if both robberies had been connitted by the same person, he or she had been in possession of a gun on the second robbery, and hadn’t used it. So why steal the gun?
I clipped my badge where it could be seen, adjusted my vest and weapon, and stacked my tablet on top of the psy-meter. The robberies hadn’t been violent, but the robber wasn’t in custody. He’d taken off on foot, was smart enough to dodge security cameras, and was armed. Better safe than sorry. I checked my comms unit and went inside, spotting the cop right away, leaning over the counter, chatting with the Pilot employee. I said, “Officer Holt?”
The cop turned and looked me over, a frown on his face. He muttered, “You gotta be kidding me,” just loud enough to make sure I heard. Holt didn’t like female special agents, especially ones who looked too young to have come up through the ranks and paid their dues, as he had. And based on the hint of fear in his eyes, he especially didn’t like paras, and I didn’t look quite human right now.
His attitude got all over me like deer ticks on a dog. “Not kidding at all, Officer Holt.” I looked him up and down just like he looked at me, my eyes alighting on his thinning hairline and his paunch, which he sucked in to make himself look in better shape. “You were hoping for a nice big former Green Beret with scars and wartime experience? You call PsyLED about a nonviolent, very questionable vamp robbery after midnight, and you get me. Special Agent Ingram. You got a problem with that, you can call your headquarters and see if they’ll let you run and hide from the big bad para.” I tapped my chest.
Holt flushed.
“Did you get all that, Special Agent Dyson?”
“Every word,” Tandy said into my ear. “Making friends, there, Ingram.”
“I got your report,” I said to Holt. “How about you stand outside and ask people to wait out there for five minutes while I read the premises.” I turned my back on him and set the psy-meter on the counter near the Slim Jims and Ho Hos. I heard the door open and close and I caught sight of Holt walking it off outside. I hadn’t done a very good job improving interagency relations. LaFleur would probably have a few things to say about that.
To the clerk I said, “Okay if I tape our interview?”
“Sure.” The cashier nodded. He was in his midthirties, with patchy facial hair and an old odor of alcohol and weed about him. Idly I wondered where he’d hid his stash when he’d had to call the police. His name tag read HANK.
“Okay, Hank. Speak into the tablet. Tell me your full legal name, the date, and the current time. Then tell me what happened.” I set the tablet to record and as he talked I calibrated and did QC on the psy-meter 2.0. His story was pretty much what I had seen in the security cameras. “Can you describe the alleged thief?”
“Kid. I’m saying male. I mean, chicks don’t rob stores, ya dig?” I nodded, encouraging him to talk. “Probably between seventeen and twenty. White skin, black greasy hair to his shoulders, skin was dirty, medium height. Skinny.” He added, “He was shaking like a junkie, but the thing that made me think vampire was the white skin and the blood on his clothes. And he talked funny, so I was thinking fangs.”
I was betting that this kid loved horror movies and read vamp porn. “But you never saw fangs?”
“No, ma’am. Just the blood on his clothes and the white skin. But I thought bloodsucker and the cop agreed.”
“Uh-huh. Right. Okay, with your permission, I’m going to read you, then take a reading everywhere the perpetrator stood.” I calibrated the four levels to zero and then scanned Hank, who was excited to be part of a PsyLED investigation and who read fully human. But his countertop read moderately low on psysitope one, slightly lower on two and four, and a rise on three, giving a nod to every para in the book. The Pilot store had a lot of traffic and the residue had accumulated. I frowned. Such an accretion of psysitopes didn’t make sense. I pulled up a map and compared the location to the Glass Clan Home and to the address of the leader of the local witch coven. The store was close enough to these social gathering places to be used for gas and late-night purchases, hence the readings. “What made you think the subject was male?”
“I only got a good look at the chin,” he admitted, “but it had a few hairs on it like a kid trying to grow his first beard. If it wasn’t a dude, then she was the ugliest chick I ever saw in my life.”
“Hmmm.” Mentally, I ran through the possibilities. Vamps were white skinned, and both robberies had been after dark, but vamps had mesmerism abilities and would blood-kiss-and-steal to get money, not rob. Juvenile Welsh devil dogs were skinny and apt to be unkempt, and it was possible that one had slipped by in the recent roundup of the horrid, foul shape-changers. Maybe a witch wearing a glamour to look like a male? Could be; a glamour would mess up my readings. Male witch? Not likely. Male witches succumbed to childhood cancers with a regularity that was scary. Because of the childhood mortality rate, male witches, sometimes called sorcerers, were once rarer than hen’s teeth. With modern medicine, more males had begun
to survive to adulthood, but the percentages were still low. If the pale unsub was a sorcerer, he might be sick. Even dying. There was a single report in the PsyLED databases that a sick sorcerer had thrown off strange psysitope readings. For now, I was betting on human junkie. I touched the counter and felt no maggots, but that meant nothing since the robber hadn’t touched the counter.
Reading the rest of the store took a full three minutes, and I saved my readings on my tablet before thanking the cashier and leaving the store. I went up to Holt and said, “It’s all yours.” I didn’t wait for his reply and got into my truck. I drove away, across the street toward the Walmart where the robber had seemed to be heading when he raced away on foot.
I drove around the Walmart, past big rigs parked in the shadows, a few RVs and travel trailers. Spotting the security guard, who was riding around in an orange vehicle with a flashing orange light on top, I followed and flashed my blue lights to get his attention. Unlike Holt, former KPD sergeant Wellborn was genial and chatty. We sat, driver-side door to driver-side door, and gossiped over the window edges for a while about the robbery and the homeless and drug problem in Knoxville.
He pointed to the back of the Walmart and said, “We try to keep them from bothering the shoppers and joggers. When there’s two of us working and when the numbers get too bad, we help the local boys flush them out of the greenery along the greenway back there.”
I assumed that local boys meant KPD and not armed yahoos looking for excitement.
“But they don’t need much more than a bush to sleep under in summer, and with Third Creek back there and nearby places to beg, they have everything they need to survive for six to nine months a year. Come winter, things’ll change up a bit, but for now, it’s homeless heaven.”
