“You’re awake?” she returned.
“Hey, I was night shift for almost three years. This is my prime time.”
“Yes, and since you got the cushy desk job the end-times themselves wouldn’t rouse you before eight. What do you need, Luna?”
“Well, to make sure you’re all right, for starters,” I said, defensive without my coffee.
“Turn off the light,” said a male voice from Sunny’s end. “It’s too goddamn early.”
“Sorry,” Sunny said sweetly. “It’s my cousin.”
“Who else would it be at six in the freaking morning?” Mac grumbled. “She always did have great Hexed timing.”
I put my forehead on my desk and fought the urge to bang it repeatedly into the wood. “Sunny, I need your help with something. Can you come down to the office?”
“What sort of help?” she said. “I’ll be honest, it’s feeling like a lazy day at casa Swann.”
“Okay, I’m going to ignore the fact that you go stupid the minute you have a little sex, and just say that I think we may be dealing with a blood witch artifact and I’d like to have some idea of what it is before any more of your dates get ended by an attack of man-eating lizard people.”
“Crap,” Sunny said. “Give me an hour. I need to shower and get dressed.”
“Fine by me,” I said.
“Good-bye, Luna,” Mac said into the speaker, and the line went dead.
“That’s just gross and unnatural,” I told my empty office. Kelly appeared again, and slammed down a paper cup full of coffee at my elbow. “Don’t get emotional on me, now,” I told him as he stalked back to his desk; then I picked up the phone and called Batista, Annemarie, Zacharias, Pete, and Bryson.
After assorted grumbling and some colorful cursing on Bryson’s part, I got them all to come in at the same time as Sunny.
My office closet held a few pairs of jeans and spare blouses for days when the weather turned while I was in the field. Or days when I got blood spatter on me. I pulled the shades and changed out of my sadly wrinkled dress, shoving it into a dry-cleaning bag for later, and downed my coffee while I waited for the team.
I took one last look at the photo from Commandant Ivanović’s fax as Norris and Annemarie came in, laughing and talking like grandfather and granddaughter. Annemarie just had that effect on people. I wished for a second that it was that easy for me.
“Hey.” I stuck my head out. “Just be a minute.”
“Hey yourself, lady,” said Annemarie. “You look rode hard and put up wet. Long night?”
“Nothing a spa day and about fifty hours of sleep wouldn’t fix,” I said. “Can you get everyone into the briefing room when they show up?”
“Sure thing,” said Annemarie. Norris just looked at my tangled hair and the circles under my eyes and gave a small snort.
Sunny came from the elevator, looking refreshed and wholesome as a milk ad. I growled under my breath. “Where’s the artifact?” she demanded, slinging her purse into my spare office chair. “I brought some things to cast a protective working.”
“See, that’s a problem,” I said. “I don’t know exactly where it is. Hell, I don’t know what it is.” I held out the photo to her. Sunny squinted at it, chewing on her lip.
“This is it?” she said.
“Yeah, that was faxed to us direct from the customs office that cleared it,” I said. “And thanks to a certain anchorman, we have no idea where it went once it came into the country.”
“This is bad,” Sunny said, and she wasn’t looking quite so refreshed anymore.
“On a scale of one to Armageddon … ?”
“Well, I wouldn’t start any long-term home renovation projects,” Sunny said. Annemarie appeared in the door and gestured to the conference room. I touched Sunny on the arm.
“I need you to brief the team. Let’s go.” I followed her in, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in my gut that said we were all Hexed.
“Everyone knows my cousin, I take it,” I said to the assembled cops. They were in various states of alertness, from bright-eyed Annemarie to Andy hiding his yawns behind his hand. Bryson was outright nodding in the corner chair that Kelly usually took. I picked up a dry eraser and threw it at Bryson. He came awake with a start.
“I put the trash out, Annie!”
Kelly and Batista snickered, and even Annemarie bit the inside of her cheek. Bryson flushed and smoothed his tie down. “What, like your wife never gets on your case, Javier?”
“Yeah, but she ain’t my ex-wife yet,” Batista said with an easy smile.
“Enough,” I said. Most mornings I’d be happy to let them go at it—happy cops are snarky cops, after all—but my sense of humor had fled somewhere between the basilisks and sleeping at my desk. “We have a picture of what was shipped to Brad Morgan’s warehouse, went to one Grace Hartley, and from there … we have no idea.”
I gestured at Sunny.
“I was wondering what all that scribbling was,” Zacharias said. “Looks important. You think the Hartley broad is involved in this?”
Hearing Andy use the word “broad” without irony was almost enough to restore my sense of humor, but Sunny spoke up.
“What we’re looking for is known as a heartstone.” She worried the picture in her hands. “It’s an archaic blood witch artifact, predating later advances in workings that allowed for only a circle and blood to be used to call down power.”
“ ‘Heartstone’ doesn’t sound real worrisome, you want my honest opinion,” said Annemarie.
“Ditto,” said Andy.
“What mojo does this thing work?” Batista said.
“While they’re not used much any longer, they’re still very bad news,” Sunny said. She stood up. “Imagine five personal computers wired together. More powerful than an individual, but limited. That’s a blood witch cast—the limit on their energy draw is their own bodies. Now …” she bit her lip, “imagine those same five computers hardwired into a mainframe that could single-handedly run this entire city.”
“Dios mío,” said Batista. Andy looked pale, and Annemarie muttered something, stroking the Saint Michael’s medal she wore at her throat.
“The heartstone is capable of channeling five hundred times the power of an individual witch’s body,” said Sunny. “And the results have ended in disaster before. We weren’t meant to control that much magick. No one was.”
“And now this thing is somewhere, loose?” Kelly spoke up for the first time. His big face was furrowed, shadows of anger hiding the color of his eyes as he glared. “There’s not a fucking thing we can do about that, I take it?”
“Sunny,” I said, pointedly ignoring Kelly. “What can these be used for?”
“That’s just it,” she said. “They were phased out by new casting methods—easier, safer methods—but they can be used for any sort of working.”
“This is enough for a warrant for Grace Hartley,” I said, tapping my finger on my chin. “Bryson, get that worked up. And while you’re at it, get one for Brad Morgan’s house and car as well.”
Bryson blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“Whatever his reasons were, he let this thing into the city,” I said. “And he’s a weak link. I need something to lean on him with and hope he snaps before whatever dastardly black plan these freaks have is put in motion.”
“What should we do?” Zacharias asked.
“Get ready to serve the warrants and find out everything you can about heartstones,” I said. “Sunny, thank you. Sorry I had to drag you down here.”
She stopped me as we were filing out of the conference room. “That other thing you asked me about, the Maiden? I’m still working on it. ‘Maiden’ is endemic to Gardnerian Wicca and hundreds of older sects before it, so the exact context of the term would be helpful.”
I remember how unconcerned Talon had seemed when I’d been lying there under her not-so-tender mercy. “It was definitely a person,” I said. “And somebody who was
a hell of a lot scarier than me, in Talon’s mind.” The calm on her face was the same type I’d seen on mob hit men confident their bosses would bail them out of a jam with the police. The ease of the untouchable.
“I’ll ask Grandma,” said Sunny. “She won’t like that I’m helping you, especially after what happened last night.”
I leaned against the wall. My arm was itching as it healed and I didn’t want to add more problems with our intractable, disapproving grandmother to the mix. “This is getting so big,” I said aloud.
Sunny gave me a wan smile. “This world was always big, Luna,” she said. “Blood witches and caster witches aren’t the only things out there. There’s a lot more waiting—back in the shadows where they’re hard to see—but the visible magick of the world is only the tip of something much larger.”
I’d never cared to know much about magick before I discovered I was a Path, and I cared even less after I found out I was a were, but the part of the darker world that Sunny walked in terrified me. Every experience with witches I’d had firsthand had ended in blood, pain, and terror. I didn’t care how many sects and types and factions there were. All that mattered was that most were bad news and held no love for weres.
Since I don’t like admitting when something scares me, I let out a growl instead. Sunny wasn’t fooled, but at least she didn’t say anything except, “Take care of yourself, Luna.”
Bryson waved at me from his desk. “I got Judge Spencer to sign off on those warrants, Chief. Which one you wanna hit first?”
“Let’s go see Brad Morgan and kick his tires a bit,” I said. “Annemarie, you come with me. Bryson, have the rest of the squad standing by to serve the search warrant on Grace Hartley once I’m done with Morgan.”
Sunny was gone when I looked back, and I was glad. I didn’t need someone who knew me that well around right then.
Annemarie checked her gun and shoved it into its holster. She wore it on her hip, cowboy style, her one nod to the fact that she was a petite, attractive woman in a dangerous job. I preferred to wear mine in the small of my back. Easier to surprise somebody that way.
“We ready to rock and roll, Chief?” she asked me, slipping on her trim dark blue jacket.
“One thing first,” I said, after a moment of internal debate. It wasn’t his case, but knowing him, he’d show up anyway, and it was better if I invited him. It was a control game with Fagin, and I needed this round to go to me.
I picked up Annemarie’s desk phone and told him to meet us at the Morgan residence.
Thirteen
He was idling in the driveway when Annemarie and I pulled up, his head tilted back, fingers tapping his steering wheel in time with the car radio. I glared at him from the curb.
“Sure is a cutie,” Annemarie said, under her breath. “What do you think, Lieutenant?”
“I think the cuteness is offset by the attitude,” I told her.
The Morgan residence was not small, the broad front steps designed to make anyone mounting them feel insignificant. I don’t like people who put on an offensive front and I jabbed the doorbell harder than necessary.
“If Morgan isn’t a player in the gun case, why am I here?” Fagin said, leaning against the frame and peering in the opaque glass panes in the door.
“You’re here to flash your fed badge and act scary,” I told him. “I think Brad Morgan knows more than he’s telling us about Manners getting hacked and I’m through playing around.”
“Fair enough,” said Fagin. I rang the bell again.
“Door’s open,” Annemarie said, pushing on it with the flat of her hand. It swung inward, showing a darkened hallway.
“Mr. Morgan?” I called, pushing my jacket aside to touch the grip of my Sig. The plastic was cold under my hand, as was the air breathing in my face from the interior of the house.
Annemarie put herself out of my fire zone, slightly back and to the left, and motioned me forward. Her own gun, a ladylike Heckler & Koch nine millimeter, was down at her side in a stance straight out of the police academy. She gave me a thumbs-up to show she had me covered. Fagin had drawn his weapon, too, his mouth set.
“Go ahead,” he told me, barely more than a rumble in his chest.
Wishing mightily that I’d put on Kevlar, I put a foot over the threshold, my footstep muffled in the thick entry runner. No one likes making primary entry. The first person through the door always takes the bullet, or trips the bomb, or—
Stop it, Wilder. Get your head in the game.
“Brad Morgan,” I called out again. “It’s the police.”
Like that ever stopped anyone with a gun bent on using it. The inside of the Morgan house was expensive and sleek, but airless, like a museum where no one actually lived. Tiny cracks in the façade were showing, though—a picture on the wood and glass entry table was facedown, a snowfall of glass trailing across the carpet like spent, frozen tears.
I picked it up. It was a family portrait—Brad Morgan, his stiffly smiling wife, and a grinning brunette kid in a Spider-Man shirt. The glass pricked my palm and I dropped the frame.
“Oh, that’s not a bad sign,” Fagin murmured. “Not at all.”
“Brad?” I called, taking my penlight out of my pocket.
All of the shades were drawn in the room we entered, a sitting room frozen in shop-window perfection. Static fizzed on the expansive plasma-screen TV mounted to the wall. The remote was crushed at my feet, as if some giant had attempted to change the channel.
The cold was worse here, and I saw a small hallway leading us toward the back of the house, the carpet runner wrinkled and a smear of something dark on the wall.
“Oh, good lord,” Annemarie whispered. “Is that what I think it is?”
I drew a deep sniff of the biting cold air. Pungent, dead, but not human. “It’s animal blood.” Thank the gods. The blood was arranged in smears that looked random at first, but I saw the squares and shapes of a crude cuneiform writing trailing along the pale yellow paint, probably a color named Harvest Sun or Lemon Fantasy.
“If this is some Satanic shit, you can count me out right now,” Fagin said from behind me. “I’m not with that whole cat-sacrificing, goat-worshiping gig.”
“Shut up,” I hissed. “There are things a whole hell of a lot worse than Satanism, trust me.”
“This isn’t right,” Annemarie murmured. “We shouldn’t be here.”
Just what I needed—my team cracking up the minute they saw a little haunted-house action. “Brad?” I shouted, coming around the corner and finding myself in a laundry room.
“Go away,” Brad Morgan whispered. He was naked, squeezed into the space between his clothes dryer and the wall. The blood writing spilled down the wall and formed a shield around him, one that breathed ice and magick across my face.
“Brad,” I said. “Whatever it is, we can talk about it.”
He let out a sob, pulling himself tighter against the wall. “I tried to send her away, but I can’t. I tried to call it for protection, but …” He started to shiver uncontrollably.
“Who?” I said, crouching near him. “Who did you send away? Who is here with us?”
“I should never have come to you,” he sobbed. “I hear her inside my head every minute, every second, since I betrayed her. She’s traveling, along that black plain and coming right for me. I just wanted it to stop, and now …”
His palms were streaked with drying blood and he began to claw at his face, swatting as if ants were crawling out of his skin.
“Brad. Brad!” I reached out to stop him, and something cold and black latched itself onto my arm. I saw a swirl of magick come out of the blood on the floor, like choking carbon fog with teeth, and wrap itself around my hand, covering my skin and sending row upon row of pain, like the magick was run through barbed wire.
I let out a scream, jerking backward and into Fagin, who had stepped in to cover Morgan. We both fell against the laundry sink, the thing attached to me snarling and growing, more and
more of it pouring from the blood.
“What the Hex is it?” Fagin bellowed in my ear. Through the pain in my arm I started to see details—eyes, flaring nostrils, and teeth, long and curved like a prehistoric beast. The eyes locked onto mine, and red flames danced in their depths.
“I don’t know,” I ground back. “But I’m going to get rid of it. Stand back.”
“Kinda hard when you’re sitting on me,” Fagin grunted.
“Fagin,” I gritted. “It’s not the time to be picky.” I shut my eyes and opened myself, Pathing the magick of the thing that had sprung from Brad’s blood ritual. I braced myself for pain ten times worse than the thing currently sunk into my aura.
Nothing happened. The shadow dog gave a snarl and shook my arm, trying to wrench it from the socket. It was latched onto me physically, but that wasn’t what hurt. I saw a blossoming of silver and white from around its jaws, a slow-motion aural blood spray as it disrupted the magick that clung to my spirit, what made me a were, what made me me.
I snarled back and put my foot into it, meeting something solid in the mass of writhing energy. It gave a yelp, and its grip on me loosened a fraction. Behind me, Fagin grunted as I slammed into him again from the impact.
“Morgan, call it off!” I bellowed. “I’m trying to help your sorry ass!”
“I … I can’t,” he quavered. “I called it and it … got away from me. But it’s no worse than what she’ll do to me, if she gets through …”
He thrashed, convulsing with a scream as the dog redoubled its size and leapt at me, taking me to ground. It was real now, had paws and claws and obsidian teeth that grazed my shoulder as it went for the throat. Brad Morgan gave a sigh and a shudder, limbs twitching uselessly as his magick chewed him up and spit him out.
Watching a witch lose control of a working is never pretty, but I had more pressing things on my mind. I grabbed a box of fabric softener and shoved it between the beast’s wide jaws, cuffing it in the side of the head with my closed fist. It spit out the box in a shower of powder and lunged at me again.
Witch Craft Page 11
