by Faith Hunter
“True,” Tandy said. “But you still haven’t addressed the rest of it.”
She took off the necklace and slammed it on the table. “I called Rick to ask about the circles.” She leaned in and glared at us all. “He answered from Bistro at the Bijou, where he was replacing the band’s sax player. Last-minute gig. It sounded like fun, so my date and I decided to eat there and take in the show.”
Rick played saxophone? Had I known that? “Date?” I said.
“I ditched him when Rick took off like a cat with his tail on fire. I followed and talked Rick down from driving away and from shifting. I put his music on despite the fact that it was awful to listen to.” She swallowed and forced back what looked like fury and helplessness. “I helped him stay human, per his request, but he was in a lot of pain. Pain caused by illegal and immoral use of magic.” She stopped and took a deep breath, running a hand over her nearly bald head. It was a strangely masculine gesture and it looked exasperated and confused. She was giving a lot away. Or she was becoming an empath, which I had once thought about her. Or she was a really good actor. “He was being spelled.” Her glare deepened. “Not. On. My. Watch. No one suffers from black magic on my watch. You understand?” she demanded. “I drove him here. In pain. And now I’m responsible for helping him through the rest of it.”
“What happened to the date?” I asked, because while it made sense, it was also too coincidental to be real.
“Gah!” she screamed in frustration, throwing back her head. “You people! My date came after me and found me sitting in the car with LaFleur, holding his hand, talking him down. Stupid man got pissed and took off without me. I have a feeling that relationship is over before it ever got started.”
T. Laine frowned but backed down the hallway with Margot following, as if the feeb was about to attack her. Margot glanced at the door behind me as she passed, seeing the words Null Room on it. “Damn,” she cussed again. “That’s why he wanted to come here.”
In the conference room T. Laine opened a mic into the null room. “Rick. Talk to me. You still human?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice gravelly. “But, God. It’s bad.”
Her hand hovered over the camera controls, but she left them off. “There’s an amulet in there, sent by the local coven. Hold it. Better?”
“Maybe … a little. Yeah. Turn up the music.”
T. Laine turned off the antishift music in the rest of HQ but increased the volume in the null room. “How can a summoning spell reach him through the null room?”
No one replied.
“Put your hand on the speaker,” she directed Rick. “The music magic should work on you even there.”
We heard stumbling through the system, perhaps the sound of a chair turning over. Then Rick groaned out a note of relief.
Margot cocked her head and muttered, “That’s why he was playing that awful music.” She leaned over the table and said into the mic, “Hey, LaFleur. Stop being such a pussy.”
I stepped back in surprise at the crudity. Rick laughed, the sound shocked but less pained and more human.
“Don’t ask me to feel sorry for you,” she said into the mic, as she took a seat. “Injuries are part of the job.”
“True dat,” Rick said, a New Orleans cadence strong in his pain.
“But since I have you as a captive—pardon the pun—audience, I’ll finish the update and debrief your unit. I’ve been going over NCIC files looking for spell/animal-sacrifice sites and crimes and tracking them back for twenty-four months. You were right. Some found in Louisiana eighteen to twenty-four months ago.”
“Year and a half?” T. Laine said. “Two years? Rick was in NOLA then.”
“Yes. And the circles look odd,” Margot said. “I sent photos of the Louisiana ones to the coven leader of NOLA, Lachish Dutillet. She says that some of the early ones look like summoning workings, the kind lonely women do to call a man to their side, except more. More intricate and more vicious, a summoning combined with a curse. It’s peculiar.”
“You know Lachish?” T. Laine asked.
“Not personally,” Margot said. “But her grandmother knew my grandmother. She’s been helpful. So I know stuff. Like despite the fact that Lachish is scared spitless of this circle, not that she said so. You still with us, LaFleur?”
“Yeah. Tell me more,” Rick said, his voice breathy and harsh. “Cuss a lot. Be callous. I’ll try not to be such a wimp.”
“Good. Nothing worse than a whiny-ass man. Survive childbirth and then tell me about pain.”
“You had a baby?” Rick asked.
“Yeah. I was sixteen. Baby didn’t make it.”
“That’s terrible.” Rick stopped. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too. So, if someone will get my laptop out of Rick’s car, I can sync my system with yours and we can update data.” Which would give Margot Racer complete access to all our files. Not what we had planned.
Rick, sounding more like himself, asked, “Why did the FBI want a liaison on this case? A case with no crime and no victim except me? And that might be accidental.”
“I don’t think it’s accidental,” Margot said. “The bureau wanted what I wanted—to get me on the inside of PsyLED. Except they want info on the paras you keep track of. I want access to your people to keep paras safe.” Like her witchy family.
No one spoke or moved, and finally Tandy said, “I’ll get the laptop.” Which meant the empath had just approved of Margot Racer and her motivations for liaising with PsyLED.
And just that fast, Special Agent Racer’s transition to a provisional part of the team was complete. We wouldn’t trust her with everything, but we wouldn’t treat her like a potential enemy either.
“What about demon summoning as the motivation for the circles?” Rick asked. “I’ve seen two demons, one that was willingly working with a black-witch and eating her friends, and one that had been summoned in concentric hedge of thorns workings, trapped in a reversed hedge, and was eating the sacrifices.”
“That had to suck. None of the circles I’ve seen have centered, reversed hedge of thorns,” Margot said, “and no halfway competent witch would summon a demon into a circle with her. The demon would eat her, use her blood and body to disrupt the circle and get free. Waste of time and good protein.”
Rick made a chuffing cat sound of laughter, probably at the waste-of-protein comment.
T. Laine said, “I’m going to try and scry for a witch circle or a magical working. See if I can spot the calling. I’ll be outside.”
“Take your weapon,” Tandy said. “Keep comms open.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, waving the words at us. “Roger that.”
I had heard only bits and pieces about the cases Rick described and went back to my cubicle to research it all, still not satisfied. But Tandy was the motivational and emotional gatekeeper of the unit and he approved of the special agent, so my misgivings weren’t significant.
I pulled up the reports Margot had compiled and studied the witch circles in Louisiana as well as here. Some of the early circles overlapped with Rick’s travel itinerary. Margot hypothesized that the caster had been tracking and calling Rick specifically. Rick had been the PsyLED special agent in charge of the Southeast region—five states—for less than a year, with Knoxville as his home base. Before that he was working as a detective with NOPD, and even before that, he’d been undercover with NOPD. His itinerary up on my laptop, I compared the circles with Rick’s whereabouts. Some matched. Some didn’t. But something had happened to Rick tonight. It was the waning moon. If someone was trying to call Rick—specifically call Rick, not a coincidence—to use him in a sacrifice or to harm him, that made this a crime against a federal agent. That made this an investigation, not just an inquiry.
I added Margot’s research to mine and, using her search parameters and language, broadened my own search pattern much further back. I found a witch circle in New York State, near a small town called Aurora, on the bank of Cayuga
Lake. This one was from over five years ago, and though it had no runes, it had an odd, six-sectioned wheel-spoke form, no dead animal in the center. In a report from six months later, I found another circle documented on the same lake but farther south, close to Ithaca, centered with a single rune. Nauthiz. In Arizona, where Margot had found one witch circle in the desert, I discovered another one on the bank of the Salt River, near Apache Lake Marina and Resort. It was the oldest one yet, the circle smaller, no runes at all, and only a cross pattern instead of the twelve spaced spokes. But there was a dead rattlesnake coiled in the center.
Rick had been nowhere near New York or Arizona on the dates the circles were found. He had never worked or lived in either state.
I thought it unlikely that Nauthiz and the odd circles would be coincidental with the circles found here, though I couldn’t prove it, and the distance between all the places suggested it was different witches or witch factions. Maybe several witches, all members of different covens. Or isolated witches with no covens nearby. Or outcasts, banned from their covens for doing evil, who met on the Internet. That sounded possible. Likely even. Did covens have Internet gossip boards or pages? Would word of outcasts have made it out of the covens and into witch gossip? What if a cadre of black-magic witches, keeping in touch over the Internet, were trying to refine a spell of some kind? That made even better sense. There was nothing to tie the early circles to Rick. He wasn’t summoned then. Everything about this summoning seemed coincidental. But I kept working on the case/inquiry, just in case. I sent a note to T. Laine asking all my spell-type, coven-type questions and turned my attention to more mundane possibilities.
Over the years, Rick had arrested or been involved with the arrests of seventy-four people. Of that number, some were witches, one was a vampire down in New Orleans. Then there were the werewolves who had died or who were in permanent custody in silver cages because of him. Large numbers of gwyllgi—devil dogs—had died here in Knoxville, and the rest had been shipped out. Maybe we had missed some? All the recent cases involving paranormals had been high profile, and Rick was quickly becoming a high-profile para in Knoxville law enforcement. He had enemies who might pay a witch for revenge. Maybe a witch had honed a curse spell and was selling it?
I expanded my criteria. On the personal side, Unit Eighteen needed to talk to old girlfriends, like Jane Yellowrock and Paka, and recent enemies, like members of the Party of African Weres and the president of the International Association of Weres, Raymond Micheika. Rick and Jane Yellowrock had made a lot of people mad while I was busy being a tree, and Jane had instigated legal action to keep Raymond out of the United States. The Dark Queen had taken possession of some African were-lion cubs when the pride alphas died. She hadn’t given them back to Micheika.
Rick was, in effect, the second-ranking were-creature in the country, both as Jane’s beta and by being a part of Clan Yellowrock. He had come to that position in the Party of African Weres through some arcane machinations by Jane. What any of us knew about that situation was limited, and there was nothing in the databases detailing how his promotion came about. Rick was also chief cat over a leap of black wereleopards somewhere in Africa. Rick was, or could be, politically powerful. His cat was cat-dominance-powerful.
But …
I stopped. My thoughts were treading off in a dangerous direction. I had an in with Jane’s business partners. Admittedly, I hadn’t talked to them in a long time, seeing as how trees were seldom verbal. Instead of a phone call, I sent a text to Yellowrock Securities. That seemed easier, though it may have been social reluctance, aka cowardice.
I hauled my thoughts back to things I could delve into tonight—all those situations and cases. They made Rick a target to bad guys and government spooks alike. In one criminal investigation recently, there had been indications that someone in the CIA had been passing along classified info to a para-hating homegrown terrorist group. He or she had to be high up, maybe an overseer, as no busywork agent would have had access to all the info. The responsible person or people at the CIA had never been identified, and so they were still out there, and they might still be unhappy with Rick and other paras guarding Secret City. But since hunting federal agents would require a higher security clearance than a probie had, I passed the overseer concept up to JoJo, who could use her hacking skills to find out more than I could. I’d have to concentrate on criminals.
A short time later I had lists for all the people Rick had arrested, human and otherwise: either out on bail, on parole, still incarcerated, or having served their full sentences and released from incarceration. Most were easy to locate and I started a search to verify the location of each one. I made a call to find that the witches were still being held in witch jail—null rooms run by witches. They were accounted for. I made a note for JoJo to check out the vampire. A significant number of the case notes on the Mithran were redacted, showing that even this was over my pay grade.
I needed to also consider any NOLA and local vampires Rick might have irritated.
There were hints that Rick was related to a very important vampire Blood Master, perhaps Katie Fonteneau, the Master of the City of Atlanta. Katie’s enemies might be Rick’s enemies, and if the circles were indeed targeting Rick, that would go a long way to explaining the maggoty feeling at the circles. But all I had so far were questions and not very good questions either. I kept coming back to Tandy’s suggestion that I talk to Rick.
I tracked the waning arc of the moon on a lunar calendar on the Internet. It wouldn’t set until afternoon but Rick was no longer in pain, and back in his office. Margot was in the break room. It was as if the episode in the dark of the night had never happened. But I still remembered the pained moans of my boss as a spell reached him. In the null room. Where no spell should reach. Ever.
I was finished at five, before sunrise, and I could have left, but I didn’t, pecking out my summation report, blaming my dawdling on not wanting to wake Mud. But I knew that I was waiting for the day shift to arrive. Occam in particular, since I was determined to be honest with myself. I didn’t have anything to tell him, but I just wanted to … see him. It was an attitude I’d noted in the church while growing up, women or men loitering in a place they had no real reason to be, until someone else showed up. It was courting behavior. I wasn’t sure I liked seeing that emotionally needy part of myself, but there it was. I was waiting on Occam.
Minutes ticked by, the sky graying. I watched as Margot and Rick left. Together. Of course, Margot didn’t have a car here, having arrived with Rick, so maybe that made sense. A grindy sat on Rick’s shoulder, the neon green cute-as-a-button killer nuzzling his shoulder. The boss looked tired, dark circles under his eyes, sweat stains on his shirt, and his hair hanging lank. Fighting turning had been hard on him. Being in the null room was hard too, the antimagic in the walls twisting all other magic into knots and making it unworkable—except for the summoning that had been trying to force him into his cat. If not for the music spell, Rick would have gone catty and fled.
T. Laine leaned out and watched as they left, coming to my cubicle as they disappeared and the door to the stairway closed. “What do you think, Nell?” she asked. “Can Rick restrain himself with a woman? I’d hate to be called to a scene to find my boss naked and dead at the claws of a grindylow and Margot bitten.”
“He never bit Jane and they dated for a while even after he was turned.”
Occam walked up the stairs and closed the door. “Somebody want to tell me what’s going on? I just passed Rick and he stank of moon magic. And Margot is all over him.” He was holding two paper cups of gourmet coffee from Coffee’s On, the scent strong, and he placed one on my desk. It had my name on it. “Your usual,” he muttered, his eyes on Rick and Margot on the parking lot camera screen. T. Laine looked at me with a You go, girl expression and I ducked my head.
Occam’s cell dinged and he glanced at the screen. His face blanched and he walked away, fast. T. Laine said, “That was rude. And weird
.”
Yes. It was. It almost looked like guilt. “See you later,” I said and slipped past our witch and down the hallway to the sleeping room. I woke my sister and drove us home. Mud never truly woke, and I was tired down to my bones. But as we bumped over the entrance of the drive, I spotted a stack of very large boxes on the front porch. Boxes that hadn’t been there when we left. “Stay here,” I said to Mud. She woke up fast, reaching for the door handle. “No. Stay here. Keep down.”
I slid from the truck cab and drew my weapon. Moved around the house to check the back door, which was secure, and the small locked shed, also secure. Carefully I eased back around front and climbed the steps, halfway to the porch. The front door was still secure, no indication of breaking and entering. The windows were all intact. The boxes appeared to have packing slips on them and were securely taped shut. But I had felt no one walk onto my land.
I moved down and back to the truck, holstered my weapon, and grabbed my one-day gobag from the truck cab. Searched through it.
“What is it?” Mud asked. “Is it a body in a box? Is there blood all over it?” Curiosity and desire to take part in whatever was happening practically vibrated the air around her.
“No body. No blood, Mud. Stay put a bit longer, though.”
“But—”
“Stay put.” I climbed the steps. Removed the pocket-sized psy-meter 1.0 from my gobag. I hadn’t looked at it in forever, but it still had a charge. I crouched, so I could inspect the boxes.
Now that I was close enough, I saw that two of the large boxes were clearly marked as solar panels. A smaller one was marked as a battery, one designed to make the best use of captured but unused solar energy. The markings on the other boxes were less obvious, except for the one marked as an 18,000 BTU window-unit air conditioner and heater, suitable for a thousand square feet of space. Strangely, they were all brands I used and was familiar with, but I hadn’t ordered them.
