by Faith Hunter
The null room at HQ made me feel a little nauseated. This portable one was less powerful but more . . . spikey? It felt a little like the way my arms had felt the day I insulated the upstairs bedroom walls with rolls of pink stuff. The room also was affecting my ears and I caught myself on the back of a chair.
“Nell?” Worried tone.
I waved at her and sat. “Sick at the stomach,” I said. “A little dizzy.”
“Okay. Good to know. You need to hurl, I’ll push you outside. And we’ll get barf bags for the next batch. You get any other symptoms, tell me.”
“Batch?”
“Half an hour seems to be enough time in the null room to clear most humans, but five still read as contaminated, even after two stints in here.”
“Oh. Right.” I swallowed down the sick feeling and sat.
“You want to talk about it? About what made you look so terrified a few minutes ago?”
I firmed my mouth, thinking through how much of my childhood I wanted to share. “My mama . . .” I stopped. “My mama had me tested to see if I was a witch when I was little. Because I could make things grow so well in the communal greenhouse. There’d been . . . talk.” I gripped my arms again, holding myself. “You know that part. I remembered standing in a circle. I was nine? Ten?”
“Okay.” T. Laine looked calm, compassionate. Ordinary. And in spite of her exhaustion, strong. As if I could tell her anything and she wouldn’t bow under the weight.
“That memory brought up some others. The sound of Colonel Ernest Jackson’s voice in front of the whole church, when he stated his intent to take me as his concubine.”
Lainie’s eyes narrowed again. It was her “going to battle” look.
“I had just started my menses. To a churchman, that meant I was a woman grown. That was the first time he demanded me for his bed. The second time I was in the greenhouse, encouraging the basils to grow. I was good at growing basil.” I flapped a hand to show I knew I was vacillating. “I was working one afternoon and he grabbed my arm. Tried to pull me away.” I rubbed my arm where his hand had gripped it so hard it had bruised purple and black. “Mama Grace stepped in and talked his ear off about the church social coming up. He left. The mamas all came and we walked home together. Then that night . . .” The rich sweet scent came to me. “Mama Grace had made me a blueberry pie and we had just cut it, when the Colonel walked in. Didn’t knock. Just walked in like he owned the place. I ducked behind the counter and curled up in a ball. The Colonel informed Daddy for the third time that I was ‘ripe’ and he wanted me for his wife or concubine. He didn’t care so long as I ended up in his bed. My father said he would think about it.” I met T. Laine’s eyes again, hers black and stormy. “I was twelve. The next Sunday in church, I told him off in front of the entire congregation and that’s when I left with John and Leah Ingram. Went to live with them. Married into their family.”
She said, “I’d burn that church to the ground and every man on the premises if I could, and take the jail sentence as worth it.”
“I thought my family had abandoned me. But they went in secret to the Ingrams and negotiated me a safe haven, living off church grounds, but still within the church membership. If I’d left the membership, the men might have found me and taken me back. Daddy and the mamas? They kept me safe as best they could, as best they knew how.”
“Sure.” Her tone said she didn’t believe it.
Years later, I had killed someone who attacked me on the farm. I had never known who it was, never seen his face in the twilight. And then, even later, and much more recently, I had killed one of the worst churchmen. He was dying. I could have healed him. But I killed him and I fed him to the land, every scrap of clothes, shoe leather, skin cells, and eyebrow hair. Maybe it was the null forces beating into my brain, but for some reason I wanted, needed, to say the words, to confess my crime. But I didn’t. My need to unburden would, in turn, burden my friend with my sin and evil. And then she would have the additional burden of turning me in for a crime that could never be proved. So for now, I kept it to myself.
She grinned at me. “You ever need help going after the churchmen, I’ll help you bury the bodies.”
“Bury,” I murmured. “I have no need to bury bodies.” The land itself took care of that.
T. Laine looked at me oddly.
“Change of subject,” I said. “Have you asked for help from the national witch covens or whatever they’re called?”
T. Laine snorted in derision. “Bunch a pansy asses. They wouldn’t even take my call.” She scowled and said, “I mighta burned some bridges recently, when we were trying to locate the Blood Tarot.”
T. Laine had a temper. I had heard that it could sometimes be spectacular, though I hadn’t seen evidence of it yet. Innocently, I said, “Oh?”
She laughed. “Yeah. Well. Okay, so a few weeks ago I called the acting leader of the United States Council of Witches for help with closing the hellmouth and shutting the demon away permanently. She refused. I reminded her that spells used against humans fell under witch council purview. She refused again. I might have used some colorful language. She hung up on me.”
I tried not laugh, but I couldn’t hold it in.
“Right. Yuck it up,” she said ruefully. “Ten minutes are up. Let’s go be read again.” She stood and rapped on the door. It opened in a slit of blinding red sunset, shockingly bright after the dim lighting of the windowless room. Squinting, I followed, one hand on the wall and then on the less-than-sturdy railing to keep from falling and tumbling to the ground.
T. Laine and I stood together in the center of the circle and the coven pronounced us clean. I went back to the laptop and stood over it, my hand on the cover, thinking. Recently, after the Blood Tarot case, I had confessed most everything to Rick LaFleur, Soul, and FireWind. Everything except that I had a sentient tree and sentient land and that I’d killed people. And had bloodlust. If I revealed all that, I could go to jail. It was getting hard to keep track of who knew what.
I opened the laptop, signed in, and converted paper notes to files, then went back to interviewing victims of the death whatever energies, talking to them through tent walls, fleshing out the timeline, tracking the band’s movements and gigs—which meant music shows and events—on their tour. And not thinking about the fact that so many people knew various parts of my secrets.
THREE
Over the next hour, the sunlight failed and the landscape and security lights came on. Mosquitoes appeared. Unit Eighteen made progress and learned things, not all of them good.
The not-so-wonderful part had started when the driver of the vehicle transporting Stella’s housekeeper—the one in the cooler with the null pen—started feeling sick outside of Farragut. The vehicle itself broke down minutes later on I-40. The rubber parts of the engine and tires disintegrated all at once in a massive failure that nearly resulted in an accident. Within minutes of the near accident, the cooler cracked and dissolved, slopping the contaminated human remains all over the back of the vehicle, which was now on the shoulder of the interstate, surrounded by caution cones and Highway Patrol officers and a biohazard vehicle, all keeping way back.
T. Laine feared it would start breaking down the interstate there and the foundation of the house here, and then the energies might begin to leak into the ground beneath. That situation tied up T. Laine and the witches, trying to figure out how to contain or neutralize the energies that were destroying everything they came into contact with. There was no way to safely transport dead bodies, not without time spent in the null room and we needed it for the living.
To figure out how to fix the death whatever energies, T. Laine requested a visit inside the house by the entire coven of the Nashville witches. This would use up almost all of the unis, until the delivery in the morning, but Lainie convinced everyone it was necessary. I would be joining them in the basement studio to video a
nd photograph everything, though my presence was more along the lines of an order, not a request.
As darkness fell upon the low hills of the horse farm, I wove a recharged null pen through my bra strap, dressed out in a clean blue uni, stuffed the handkerchief coated with mentholated gel into my mask, and put a mint into my mouth. Not that anything helped. Trooping inside and down the stairs, trying not to breathe the death stench of the house, I carried three cameras in my pockets: a mechanical 35mm autofocus camera that used real film, an old video camera, and a sturdy digital camera. “My mama had one of these,” I grumbled, holding up the film-based Canon.
“Which is why you’re down here with us,” T. Laine said cheerfully. “Among your many talents is the ability to use old-fashioned equipment. Competency comes with repercussions.”
“Do not ask me to milk a cow or darn your socks.”
“You know how to do that?”
“No,” I lied, stern faced. T. Laine laughed as if she knew I was lying. I hadn’t spent a lot of time lying, so she probably knew. I took a breath and the stench was horrible; it was all I could do not to gag even with the air-conditioning turned on high. The stench was also a problem for the witches. They were showing signs of eye-watering gastric distress, which made me feel better if only because I wasn’t alone in my misery. Working hard at not vomiting, I grumbled, “Can’t you cast an antiscent working down here?”
From the bottom of the stairs T. Laine answered, “Not with powerful energies already on-site. And the null pens make it impossible to use personal wards against the smell. So in case you think I’m holding out, no. I’m not dealing with this reek any better than anyone else.”
Feeling as green as the witches looked, I joined T. Laine in the basement. I wondered how much face I’d lose if I upchucked in the corner. I wondered if zombies stank like this, not that zombies existed. So far as I knew.
Stella Mae was no zombie. She was greenish mush and brittle bones and horror. The carpet under Stella had dusted and slimed away and the concrete slab beneath was cracked. I took photos as the witches set a protective circle around the body in preparation for a magical wyrd that they would speak once the null pens were gone. They were talking the arcane math of spell casting, which had never made any sense to me beyond the basics I had learned in Spook School. Geometry. Math. Not my forte. Astrid suggested a shield to contain the energies, until they could learn how to take them apart.
A shield sounded like a good idea to me.
As they worked, a guitar snapped and fell down the wall with a discordant twanging, leaving the instrument in pieces. The piano looked as if its legs had been attacked by termites and would collapse at any moment.
Unlike the witches, I had a specific job and didn’t have to stay down here once the photos were taken, so I worked fast. My fingers clumsy through the null nitrile gloves, I took pics of everything with the old Canon, changed out the film, and took more. Then I videoed everything. And then I took digital photos, sending the digital shots to JoJo at PsyLED HQ every few minutes. Jo would compare the timed shots with similar shots from when the first LEOs arrived and with those taken by the early arrivals of Unit Eighteen. If the cameras worked. If the energies didn’t degrade the digital shots. If Wi-Fi still worked down here.
In the room for swag, the racks that once held hats, MP3 players, and small speakers were now rickety, rusted metal. The swag on the racks was rotten, riven, plastic cracking. The empty shipping boxes were crumbled, except for the plasticized labels, which were, so far, merely curled and yellowed. The T-shirt box in the middle of the floor was decaying into crumbled rot, but the T-shirts inside were decaying more slowly, which seemed odd.
But worse was the DB. I concentrated my cameras on Monica Belcher’s body. She was mostly dissolved, except for the smell, into thin brownish bones and minuscule green soap bubbles that sludged across the floor. I took shallow breaths through the mask. It didn’t help. As fast as humanly possible, I finished my photography and raced away, up the stairs. Gagging.
T. Laine didn’t try to keep me in the basement, thank goodness.
On the upper landing, I stripped off the uni, put it in the bio container, and made my way outside. The fresh air was such a relief that I nearly threw up anyway, just getting out of the reek. Crunching my mint, I made my way to a camp stove one of the sheriff’s deputies had set up and poured coffee from an old metal percolator into a foam cup. It wasn’t the thick black sludge for which cop-shops were known, but strong, aromatic coffee. I breathed the steam and scent.
Holding my cup under my nose, cameras in the crook of an arm, I retired to my car to write up reports, package the film for mailing to the lab, and send the last photos to JoJo. Too sick to actually drink the coffee, I popped another of the super-strong mints and sucked on it for a while to take the stench out of my mouth and calm the nausea. When I could hold down the brew, I sipped, studying the photos. I was halfway through the cup when I noticed some odd things, small incongruities, but any peculiarity could be important. Cases were often solved by small observations and irregularities.
I went back and forth, comparing the digital photos submitted by the first LEOs on the scene to the ones I had just taken. There were opened boxes of swag in the room, one of them T-shirts. It was the only full box. Why full? Why not half-full? Or nearly empty? Did that matter? Was it important? And . . . all the empty boxes in the corner were marked with plasticized shipping labels. But in the original photo, the box beside Monica Belcher had no label. I went through dozens of cop-photos from every angle, to make sure. No shipping label, not even fallen on the floor. Had the label been torn off when the box was opened? Or maybe it was on the bottom. That made sense.
In one photo taken by a cop of the inside of the box, there was a second oddity. Resting on top of the shirts was a green glass bottle holding a length of wire, like coat hanger wire. In the bottom was a skim of what looked like pale green liquid. The shirts were not folded or neat, but crushed and wrinkled, shoved into one corner as if to hold the bottle upright.
I compared that photo to mine. Sitting amid the T-shirts, upside down in mine, was a bottle, but in my photo the glass was blackened, the color hidden among the black shirts. The wire was a corroded black twig. The clear, pale green liquid was gone.
I edited out a section of the pic to show only the T-shirts and went to find a band member. Instead, I found Etain. The witch was draped across the four-board fence, her head resting on her arms, breathing through her mouth, carefully not moving. Horses’ hooves pounded in the darkness, moving upwind and away from the stench of death we both carried.
“This helped for me.” I held out one of the extra-strong breath mints. I wished I had candied ginger, but hindsight was useless.
She pushed herself slowly away from the fence, took the small package, and opened it, the plastic crinkling. Gingerly, she put the mint on her tongue as if she feared even that much might make her vomit. “How d’ya stand such a sight an’ stink wit’out puking up your guts?”
“I don’t stand it very well. Hence my ignominious rush from the basement and a pocketful of mints.”
“Och.” She met my eyes, hers rueful. “I vomit teilgthe all over the garden,” she said, the words clearly Irish. “Probably killed whatever I puked on. Have you another mint?”
“Crunch it,” I advised, holding out more.
Etain took several, her teeth crunching the first. She lifted a water bottle from the third fence rail, swished her mouth with water, swallowed, then crunched again, and swished some more. “Brilliant,” she said.
“Your sister is with the band, right?” I asked.
“Aye. Besides her lovely voice, Catriona’s a whiz with traditional Irish instruments. Stella Mae hired her for some sessions last fall and she fit in with the band like a hand in a glove. Stella asked her to join the band for the whole tour. Cattie was ecstatic. I’ve never seen her so ha
ppy.” She opened a new mint and put it on her tongue, this time sucking slowly.
“What does she play?”
“Both kinds of Celtic harp, tin whistles, the bodhran, which is like a wide, flat drum. The Irish bouzouki, which is a bit like a mandolin, but not. Fiddle, a-course. Banjer and guitar. She can also play piano, organ, most anything. Cattie’s got all Da’s musical talent and only a little of Ma’s magical. I got none at all of the musical and the greatest part of ma mum’s magical.” She looked at me, her expression droll. “I was always jealous that she got the gift of music and I didn’t. And she was jealous that I had more magic than she did. Fought like two cats in a sack, we did, when we were young.” Her amusement fell away. “And now she’s in the hands of a cop with a heart full of witch hatred. I could zap him. She’s at his mercy.”
“We’ll do our best to keep her safe.”
“I’ll owe you.”
“Just part of the job. But I do have a question.” I held out the tablet with the pic of the T-shirts. “Are these T-shirts the tour tees? Like the one you’re wearing?”
Etain studied the pic, which was grainy and out of focus. “Looks to be. Why do you ask?”
I sighed and shrugged, putting the tablet into my pocket. “I was hoping they might be something else. Something unexpected.”
“Like a clue. Evidence pointing to a murdering death-practitioner.”
“Something like that. Since it isn’t witch magics, I don’t know what to look for.”
“It doesna match anything I ever felt either, but I know it’s death.”
The side door opened and three witches raced from the house, two of them falling to the ground and gagging. Three more witches followed but simply sat on the narrow side porch, heads in hands. T. Laine came out last and she looked as green as I had felt. Her misery made me feel better, which likely made me a bad person.
“How about this?” I showed Etain the photos of the green glass bottle and the later ones, where the glass was blackened.
