by Faith Hunter
FireWind’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Please continue,” he said, “and address why a probationary employee should not be released for insubordination.”
“Last part first, then. This team’s got no one who can read the land. No one.” I let a little more church into my voice. “‘Acause whatever I am, I’m whatchu call a one-off. A one-of-a-kind.”
“Your sister scents of yinehi,” Ayatas said, eyes shrewd.
“My sister don’t grow leaves. She can’t read the land. She can’t do what what I do.” All true. Sorta. I mentally promised myself to keep my other siblings away from Ayatas’ yinehi sniffer and continued on my attack. “In fact, PsyLED can’t do its job thoroughly without me. PsyLED needs me more than I need it. Also”—I dropped a fraction of my church-speak and let my tone go hard—“I was the only special agent to get off a shot at Jason Ethier when you let him inside and he attacked HQ. So you don’t scare me when you huff and puff and blow the walls down by threatening my job. I got a job offer outside of law enforcement anytime I want, so I wouldn’t suffer financially if we parted ways. I ain’t insubordinate. None of this unit is. Jo and me was making a joke.”
“Job offer?” he asked.
The angst had begun to clear from his eyes as I talked. Start as you intend to go forward. Challenging him seemed to be effective. I said, “With Clan Yellowrock.”
There was no way to miss the shock that jolted through him.
“Yeah. Your sister’s … court, I guess you call it. As part of the Dark Queen’s retinue. I know my value. I ain’t got the big head, but I know who I am and what I got to offer. So don’t threaten me. You can ask nicely or you can fire me. Until such firing, PsyLED has my total, undivided loyalty. We’uns clear?”
“Perfectly. As clear as when you kicked Rick LaFleur in the crotch.”
“He had it coming,” I said, unrepentant. That had been early in our acquaintance, before I joined PsyLED.
“Hmmm.”
That hmmm was pretty good, but I’d been hmmmed by churchmen. FireWind was an amateur compared to that kind of censure. I leaned in even farther and smiled my sweetest churchwoman smile. “I done been threatened by burning at the stake since I was five years old. Being fired from a job ain’t nothing.” A small expression of surprise flashed across FireWind’s face. He hadn’t known that part of my history, which meant he hadn’t spent much time looking over my personnel papers. That was interesting. I eased back, resettling my weight on the table. “Now. You got a plan of action or you gonna waste our time testing us to see what we’re all made of, ’cause frankly I think you’d do better to wait till all this is settled.”
With a bite to his words, FireWind said, “PSY CSI is delayed. Before you stop for the morning, I’d like you and Kent to go back to the stockyard and see what you can find out by daylight. Wear Tyvek uniforms.”
“Good by me. I gotta drop my sister and her dog off at home first.” I stood and walked to the door. Put my hand on the handle and stopped. “I ain’t hard to work with. I’ll support you and your decisions to my last breath, even when you get your butt kicked. But”—I looked over my shoulder at him—“you and me got off on the wrong foot. In fact, you and the rest of the unit got off on the wrong foot. I’m betting you’re used to working with white male human teams. Unit Eighteen is composed predominantly of paras, not humans, a mixed male-female team, too. You can’t treat this team the way you treat others and still have a fully functioning unit. This team has a lateral organizational structure, not an old-timey vertical one. Going forward, I’d like to be polite and respectful. I’d like the same from you.” I started to open the door.
“Jane offered you a job?”
I stopped. Jane Yellowrock. “Yeah.” I opened the door and left the icy room that tried to melt my own magic in my bones. But … I noticed that the hunger, the bloodlust, was completely gone. Breathing was easier.
In the conference room, I told T. Laine our orders. “We’ll have to take your car because my truck is too small for the three of us and the dog.”
As we were walking down the hallway, I heard FireWind say to Rick, “You were a willing sacrifice when you were tattooed. Loriann used you, then also made you a slave to protect her brother and to track him. Would you be insulted if I asked you to stay near your cage for the duration of this case?”
“I’ve already addressed that,” Rick said. “And I’ve been bunking here.”
“I see. I think that was a wise move.”
I made a soft humph. Seemed FireWind could learn new tricks after all. I woke my sister and gathered her things and the dog, thinking about Rick and everything he had gone through. As we headed down the stairs, FireWind shouted to us, “Be back at four p.m. Full crew. We’re going to breach and contain the house where Jason and Godfrey and the vampires are lairing before the local Mithrans even wake up for the night.”
“Ten-four,” T. Laine said.
• • •
We left Mud at Sam’s house, outside, playing with her dog and trying to stay out of the way of the new baby and the mamas and away from the virus that had gripped the church. She was alone, but in line of sight of my brother, as safe as she could be with Larry Aden free from jail and a danger. It wasn’t safe on church grounds, but it was safer than with me for now, despite the future possibility of her growing leaves and being burned at the stake. And that was a distinctly uncomfortable thought for me, who wanted to get custody and take her away from the church. Mud was in danger no matter where she lived.
T. Laine was driving and I was resting. I was way more tired than I admitted, and when I was tired, I went quiet. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation seemed to have the opposite effect on the unit’s witch, and Lainie was running on thirty-six hours with little or no sleep. She finished off a thirty-three-ounce coffee on the way to the stockyard and talked my head off, asking questions about me and what I’d said to FireWind off the record, none of which I answered. That didn’t stop her chatter.
She looked wide awake when she braked the car in front of the crime scene tape and got out to speak to the deputy guarding the site. I followed more slowly, my feet kicking up puffs of dust. I could hear the flies and, in the heat, the stench of rotting meat and blood was already strong. My bloodlust was awake and eager, but more like a curious puppy than a slavering starving hellhound. So far.
T. Laine chatted with the lone deputy as we both dressed out in Tyvek uniforms, the onesies worn by evidence collecting teams. The two were gossiping, agreeing that guard duty was boring and we really needed rain and it was hotter than the opening to hades. Lainie had thought to bring cold Cokes and some ice, and that made them best friends. I showed my ID, signed in to the official record, and moved into the heated, reeking stockyard, my paper uniform stifling.
It was still and silent in a locale that was probably usually loud with animals and machinery and the occasional worker. A hot breeze blew through, sweeping up dust devils. Flies buzzed like a chorus of buzz saws. Turkey buzzards were everywhere. A kettle of them soared overhead. I had no idea why a flock was called that, but all the names of buzzard groupings were bizarre. A committee, a venue, or a volt, they were perched on the rooftop, with the braver members of the scavenger pack sitting on the outer pen walls of the covered areas. A flock of feeding buzzards was called a wake, and three of the most brave, or the most dominant, were having a wake at the carcasses. It wouldn’t be long before the stench drew multiple species of predators and scavengers from everywhere if the cleanup crew wasn’t allowed onto the site.
Flies dive-bombed me as I approached the pens and walked into the shade under the metal roof. Buzzards perched on fencing. Dead animals were everywhere: three goats in the first pen, a miniature horse in the next, a sow and piglets. The animals had bled out from every orifice.
I dug out a small spiral notepad and walked down the wide aisles, beginning a listing of the animals with roman numerals. That was when I saw the man. Like the animals, he had died horribl
y—blood down his face, across his chest, dried and crinkled on his clothing. He was Caucasian, bearded; his blue eyes were clouded over, his light brown hair caked with dried blood. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, and, like the animals, he had bled from every orifice. I backed a step away before I remembered that this was my job. I stopped, swallowed acidic bile that rose in my gullet. Quickly figured it out. The man was lying on a sleeping bag, barefoot, half-covered by straw. A pack rested beside him, with a bag of canned goods, a twelve-pack of cheap beer, and a bag of trash. He was homeless. He had made the unfortunate decision to bed down yesterday in a pile of straw. And now he was dead.
“Nell,” T. Laine called out.
“Here! We got a DB.” Dead body. Not a homeless man, not a person with a past and a name and hopes for a better tomorrow. But a DB, to keep our souls distant from the awful part of the job of a cop.
T. Laine strode into the shadows and the buzzing of flies, saying, “Glove up. Check for ID. Then back away. We’re still waiting on PsyLED crime scene investigators.”
The stench grew and the clouds of flies buzzed like a speeding engine as they laid eggs. We ascertained that there was only the one human body, hunted for ID, and anything arcane or black magic. There was nothing. and we left the stench of the pens for the witch circle, sweating like churchwomen.
Lainie had been reading arcane texts and had brought along a version of a seeing working. She wanted to see if she could re-create a vision of the spell at its inception, as it was drawn and cast, and then determine what the circle was doing now. I was more interested in the bodies we had left in place in the circles. Vampires were known to burst into flame in sunlight and we’d had a lot of sun already today.
“The vamp bodies are gone,” T. Laine said, “and the circles are still intact. No one has been here but us. I don’t even see a pile of ash.”
Not that I intended to tell Lainie, but when I fed the earth, the ash was eaten by the land. There was nothing left at all. Jason had found a way to do that. If there had been vampire ash, it had soaked into the earth. Which meant that Jason might have used vampires in other circles and the remains were gone by the time we got there. That would explain the maggoty feeling. Ming had her scions locked down, but some might have gone missing in the months before we knew about Jason’s circles. And … maybe the invading vamps had donated vamp prisoners for sacrifice.
“What do the vamps who are helping Jason get out of this?”
“Best guess? Jason’s such a blood junkie. They think they can control him and use the demon’s power vicariously, maybe even drinking the power down with Jason’s blood. All the power, none of side effects of being demon ridden.”
“Oh. That makes sense.”
“Stay back and take readings,” she said.
I retreated to the shade and leaned against a tree, calibrating the psy-meter 2.0 and testing the readings against T. Laine. She read pure witch. But the circle didn’t. It read witch and vampire and fluctuating levels of one and four.
I didn’t have my blanket, but I touched a pinkie finger to the earth and yanked it away. Nasty. Maggots. Death. I wanted to gag and promised myself to never, ever do that again at a scene filled with dead animals and filth of demon.
At the circle, T. Laine walked sunwise around the circle, pausing every few steps, her eyes on the center. When she finished one complete revolution, she stopped and studied it, put an amulet on a silver chain around her neck, and removed a plastic zipped bag from a pocket. It contained blue powder. She opened the baggie and tossed a few grains of the blue stuff over the edge of the circle. They fell slowly and … stopped. They hung in midair.
T. Laine called to me, “Keep measuring and film this on your cell. If I explode, see that my family never learns I was stupid enough to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Measure!” she demanded.
I set my cell on a tree limb and focused the video on the circle. I tapped the small button to film Lainie’s activities. Then I extended the psy-meter’s wand and hit record. “Go.”
T. Laine took a fistful of the blue dust and tossed it high. It went up and out and was caught by the breeze; it swirled and settled across … the hedge. Nothing happened. She tossed another. Then another. She finished by upending the baggie and shaking out the last of the blue dust. It didn’t spread out perfectly, but enough settled that I could make out the form of the hedge of thorns. It looked exactly as if someone had upended a massive, shallow, splotchy blue bowl.
T. Laine held out her arms and leaned down. Gingerly, she touched a patch of blue dust. I saw the magics as they were enacted. From the circle’s point at the south, a line of blue raced around and back to the beginning as the circle was cut and chalked into the earth. The energies sparkled for a moment, then moved down the spoke closest, to the center. They sparkled again, growing in intensity, and shot out the spokes to meet the outer circle. The vision dimmed.
A red circle rose inside it, concentric, smaller than the blue one. It too dimmed. A small smearing of blue energies at the north point led to the center of the circles. Another smearing. And two more. They faded. And then the red circle sprang into place, followed by the blue one. They stayed in place, visible to human eyes in the daylight, stable and unwavering. I understood that it was an image of what had been, created by Lainie’s working. It made no sense to me at all, but T. Laine was grinning like a cat with a bowl of cream.
She called to me, “The circles were two spells in one. The inner one called the vampires and a black cat, and imprisoned them in the center. The outer one—”
A black light burst from the ground. T. Laine jumped back. Something long and smoky and dark moved from the earth. Two more, then two more. They were … fingers and a thumb. An amorphous blue-ish hand reached out of the pit. It was wearing a ruby ring. It made a fist and withdrew into the land. The red circle winked out. The blue one blazed up high, sparkling in the sunlight.
T. Laine raced away from the edge of the outer circle. Dropped flat to the ground. As if—“Get down!” she screamed at me.
I dropped, clutching the psy-meter to me. The blue circle glared so bright I had to look away. I duck-walked behind the tree. The blue energies exploded. Brilliant. Silent. They evaporated. I peeked out from behind the tree to see a ring and spokes of bluish powder. There had been only light, nothing kinetic.
T. Laine rose from her crouch. She was breathing hard. Panicked. Sweat ran down her spine and dampened dark half circles beneath her arms. She backed away. Stumbled. Caught her balance and turned to me. Raced close. I looked down at the psy-meter 2.0. It was bouncing all over the place, all the levels, jumping up and down.
“Son of a witch on a switch,” she cursed. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m pretty sure no one has ever seen that before and lived to tell it. Except Jason.”
Uncertain, I said, “That was a demon’s hand, wasn’t it?”
“Holy hell and back again, yes.” T. Laine opened a bottle of water and poured it over her head, splashing us both with the icy contents. She gasped and shivered once and opened a Coke, which she drank down, crushing the plastic bottle to force it down her throat fast. She burped. Burped again as the Coke’s carbon dioxide bubbled in her stomach.
I saved the reading, turned the meter and the cell off. Carefully, I asked, “Did you free the demon?”
“No! I’m adventurous, not stupid. The blue powder is part of a … let’s call it review working. It lets me see recently executed spells. Once. It’s like a delayed reflection; it triggers nothing, the demon is still trapped. You get the video?”
“Whatever my cell managed to capture.” I walked to the edge of the circle and bent to look at the blue talc. A few grains had spilled to the side and I gathered them up, without touching the circle itself. The powder felt oily and coarse and rough all at once. I carried it back to the tree and put it in a paper evidence bag.
T. Laine said, “This spell drained the blood from every farm ani
mal on the property and a human and, if we guessed right, the vampires that were sacrificed in the circle.” She caught her breath and stared out over the stockyard. “Demons suck dill pickles. Come on. PsyCSI is working up a paranormal scene in New York. They won’t get here until tomorrow. Let’s get out of here before we further contaminate the crime scene.”
• • •
As she drove back to HQ, T. Laine talked as if her mouth had lost its brakes, the words pouring out nonstop. She needed to talk, the vocalization a result of what she had seen and the huge coffee she had downed on the way. And the Coke. I couldn’t forget the Coke. I was exhausted, thinking about the earth and communing with it, using a pinch of bluish powder. On the way I got a text from Sam.
Larry Aden’s first wife came to see my baby. She spotted Mindy and was caterwauling about how Mindy was supposed to be hers. I feared it might attract the Jackson crowd so I took Mindy and the dog to your place.
My sister and her dog were alone at Soulwood. Alone.
I needed to get there, but we had to tell FireWind what we had discovered and write up our end-of-day reports. The new boss met us at the top of the stairs. I touched my cell open and handed it to him. A video was worth a thousand words.
I cleaned up in the locker room and followed the sound of their voices to the break room.
FireWind and T. Laine were studying a drawing on the table. Lainie said, “This is Tandy’s rendition of Rick being spelled by Loriann when she tattooed the tat magic. Tandy was finally able to get him to talk about it some.”
The drawing was pencil on lined paper, depicting a barn and a straw-covered floor. There was a black marble square in the middle of the open floor and an iron ring, and shackles. There was a crack and a small broken place in the stone. Something about the shape of the broken place drew my attention and it took a bit to figure out why. When I did, my brain began to put things together.
To the side of the huge black stone crouched a female figure, her hands busy. And upon the black square stone a naked man was stretched, arms and legs spread. Rick. The tattoos unfinished, dark smudges.
