by Faith Hunter
T. Laine slammed her ID, badge, and vest cam into the trunk of her car, where they clattered. She raised her arms and gripped the trunk lid over her head, her face hidden by her arms. Her clothes were fresh and clean, but her skin was sallow and tired; exhaustion molded every line of her body. I could hear her breathing, anger in each breath until they slowed into a controlled pattern. She dropped her arms and went back to work. To us, she said, “Put all electronics aside, no jackets, badges, or IDs. Dress out in spelled unis, goggles, masks, gloves, no comms equipment. Vests are our only protective gear. And, God help me, no weapons.”
Over comms FireWind asked, “Why no weapons?”
“Accidental discharge,” she snarled, “as they and the ammo fall apart. Our suspect was at work yesterday. Alive. I didn’t think about it at the horse farm, but weapons might be affected by the energies. And the chance of there being anyone alive enough to shoot at us is nil so we don’t need weapons anyway.”
Occam said, “I’m carrying a knife, but it won’t do jack against a dead body guided by a necromancer.”
There was an odd silence over the earbuds. “Copy,” our boss said. “Keep me advised.”
Moments later, every bit of our skin was covered; null pens were in our pockets. Eyes visible above the masks but behind goggles, we exchanged fast, silent looks of . . . that odd expression law enforcement and military exchange before potential trouble. It was part determination, part mental preparedness, part encouragement, saying things without speech, the way a good team could. Warnings, reminders, and promises to make it out okay.
T. Laine said, “This will be a deliberate clearing, victim rescue but no retrieval, non-suspect-based only. Touch nothing. Get in and get out. Fast.”
Occam and I nodded and followed our witch to the door to raid the house, though it was more like a slow, steady advance, up several brick stairs that shifted with our weight. The mortar was dusty and crumbling. T. Laine knocked. Called out, “PsyLED! Open—”
The door dropped. Toward us.
We jumped back. The door landed with a clatter and splintered into a pile.
A blast of fetid air swept out.
Moving slowly, stepping over the busted door, we entered. Staggered positions. Careful to keep a safe distance between us for two reasons: so our weight didn’t bring down the floor, and so an ambush shooter would be unlikely to hit us all at once. My breath came fast, my fingers tingling. I had no weapon. No weapon except the earth, and I couldn’t touch it even if I had wanted to, not with death and decay everywhere.
It was hot, stuffy, and dark. Shadows wavered through the goggles like the tattered remains of ghosts. The ceiling had partially caved in. Wallboard was sifting down, onto the carpet, which was dusting away. Everything was disintegrating.
Hugo Ames, or so I assumed, was sitting in a recliner in the front room, facing a TV that had fallen off the wall. He was a slimy bubbling decaying thing, left fingers on the floor near his chair, right fingers in his lap, all detached from his hands. His eyes were slimed, his mouth open, jaw tilted to the side, rotten teeth visible. His ears were drooping, the lobes hanging like so much melted wax. As I watched, a green bubble extended from his mouth as if he were breathing. It popped. Another expanded in the cavity behind it. My stomach heaved.
As my daddy often said, he was dead dead, as if certain kinds of death made people more dead than others. Hugo was very dead and appeared to have been dead for a while, though the curse would keep us from establishing an estimated time of death.
“Get out as fast as you can,” T. Laine reminded, her voice tight.
Moving carefully to keep from crashing through the floor, which was dissolving as fast as Hugo, we cleared the house in record time, Occam taking photographs on a cheap disposable camera that no one would miss if it was destroyed by the death energies. There were no more bodies, either alive to rescue, or dead to not retrieve. We eased out, staggered egress to prevent us falling through, and rushed back to our cars. “Clear,” T. Laine said, her voice too loud and stressed. “Accessing comms.”
The stench clung to my uni, to my mask, and even when I yanked off the P3E, the reek was still a part of me. I felt as if I’d never be clean again. I put in my earbud and heard FireWind speaking over the freq channel. “—have just spoken to the newly elected leader of the Witch Council of the United States of America. She has agreed that this death and decay, though not a witch working, is a type of spell against humans, and therefore falls under the category of workings which they do and will police. They have agreed to assist in capturing and punishing the magic practitioner who set death and decay in motion. They have null room prisons in New Orleans that are better equipped to handle such a magic user than anything we have here.”
“How did you get them to cooperate?” T. Laine asked.
“That is a story for another time,” he said. “For now, I want you all away from the house until we determine the next course of action. Come back to the city PD and sit in the portable null room.”
“Copy,” T. Laine said. “But we need to get a coven to sit a circle around Hugo Ames’ house pronto and put a shield around the death and decay. It’s already spread and it’s working faster than the others. I can’t promise that it can be contained. If it reaches bedrock or a water table, we’re screwed.”
“Noted,” FireWind said. “I’ll make some calls.”
* * *
* * *
The null room was boring, but there was a box of donuts and three sandwiches on the table inside and the chairs were more comfortable than my previous experience. We also had Wi-Fi and chargers for our electronics so we could write our reports, work, eat, and get nullified all at once. Nullify. A good word for the process.
While we were in the portable null room trailer, Rick sent us a group text. I had missed my boss, or at least missed his input to cases. He didn’t go around with a stick up his backside like some bosses. His text said, County records: Hugo’s landlady lives near his house. When you get nullified, go talk to her.
“No rest for the wicked,” T. Laine said. She stretched her shoulders as if she wanted her shoulder blades to touch. She looked more and more tired. Yet there was a softness there that I hadn’t noticed while we were facing danger. And she was wearing a thin gold bracelet that was new. “Pretty bracelet,” I said.
T. Laine blushed and, attempting to sound offhand and casual, said, “Gonzales got it for me.” She held it out and I saw the five small green stones.
“Emeralds?” Emeralds were expensive.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice and expression going soft. “The card said, ‘Emeralds are called the Stones of Successful Love.’” She looked from the bracelet to me. “And flowers. Every week, he sends me flowers. I never had a man send me flowers before. He sent me a gift certificate for a massage. Can you believe it? A massage! What kind of guy thinks about that?”
A second text came through, this one from FireWind. LaFleur and Racer’s raid on Merry Promotions discovered that all boxes of T-shirts ordered for the tour were shipped before the tour. No one knows about a box delivered later, though one employee thinks there were overruns, none of which can be found. It is still feasible that Hugo applied magical energies to a box of shirts, delivered them after the start of the music tour, and set up the trigger when he positioned them in the swag room, then accidentally contaminated himself. However, all records indicate he never displayed the faintest hint of magic, and the figure delivering the shirts appears much smaller than Hugo’s records indicate.
All of which meant that Hugo, despite blackmailing one of Stella Mae’s lovers, was looking less likely to be Stella’s killer. We were back to square one.
* * *
* * *
An hour, a lot of paperwork, and a delicious sandwich later, we met briefly with FireWind and Racer, who had taken off her business jacket. Without the extra padding, she
looked as if she had lost weight. She was razor-thin, a long, lean, muscular woman. I knew I didn’t need to join a gym to work out, but seeing her made me want to plow the garden or cut some wood. It was a quick meeting and we headed out to Hugo’s landlady’s house.
I strapped into my vehicle and reached for the start button. Occam, his long legs in tight black denim, got in beside me and placed the potted cabbage on his lap. “You okay, Nell, sugar?”
I tapped the car on and fiddled with the mirrors, thinking. “I know we’ve talked about this, but how did you adapt to becoming and being a wereleopard? Emotionally.”
Occam shrugged. “Children are adaptable. I was a rowdy boy one day and then I was a cat in a cage in a traveling carnival. I didn’t shift back, so I didn’t have a human brain or human grief patterns for twenty years or so. I know you’re still worried about Margot, but she smells fine. She’s adjusting to the effects the moon has on were-creature minds and bodies and spirits. And she isn’t alone.” He didn’t add, “Like I was.” He wouldn’t appreciate my pity, any more than Margot would.
“Have you three adapted to being a . . . a mini leap of leopards?”
Occam chuffed, much like his cat might. “We drew a little less blood last full moon. Our cats will work it out.” He glanced at me and said, “Don’t you worry your purdy li’l head about all that.”
“Worry my—humph. Put on your seat belt, cat-man,” I said, my voice a little too gruff. “I know you could survive a car crash by shifting into your leopard form, but there would still be blood all over my new upholstery.”
Giving me a scar-twisted grin, Occam strapped in. I started the car and pulled in behind T. Laine, following her to a house near Hugo’s place, a cute stone cottage that, from the outside, looked like four rooms, a front porch with stone arches, and a screened porch on one side.
A woman came out on the front porch and watched as we parked and walked to her. She was smoking, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “I reckon you folks are here about the roadblock. What’s ol’ Hugo done now? Pissed off the sheriff? Run his mouth to the judge about paying alimony? Shouldn’ta been banging that li’l college girl, her and them dang horses.”
College girl? Horses?
The old woman laughed, her little belly bouncing. She looked to be in her mideighties, with skinny legs and ankles, a neck that was all tendons pulling up her chest and shoulders as she breathed. She was wearing a cotton dress in a tiny green plaid and a red wig that looked as if rats had nested in it. White curls stuck out at the back of the wig as if trying to escape. Her skin had a yellowed look, as did the whites of her eyes, and she had a belly shape that I thought might come from drinking. The reek of cigarettes and strong liquor wafted to us on the air. “Man can’t keep it in his pants, he deserves to pay alimony for a couple years. Right?”
We didn’t answer, just slowed our steps as we reached the porch.
“Honest to God,” she went on, “that man can be sweet as pie, but when he gets something in his teeth it’s either dangerous or stupid. And boinking that girl was stupid.”
T. Laine said, “I’m Special Agent T. Laine Kent, PsyLED. These are Special Agents Ingram and Occam. Are you Ethel Myer, landlady to Hugo Ames?”
“No foreplay? Yeah. I’m Ethel. And before you ask, no, you can’t come in unless you got a paper. So talk.”
“Fine,” T. Laine said. “What can you tell us about Hugo?”
“Only what the whole county knows. Everything he says is a lie. His wife kicked his ass out four months ago for diddling around. He rents month by month. He likes sports twenty-four/seven and Bud Lite by the case. Whole city knows he’ll screw anything that walks on two legs, but I wouldn’t limit it to that criteria. He owns that business that makes bowling trophies. He was born and raised in the county.” She smiled widely, showing surprisingly healthy teeth. “His mother is Tina Ames.”
The way she said Ames suggested something different and derogatory. T. Laine’s body tightened, almost imperceptibly. “We’ve heard things about the family,” she said.
“Shoulda. Most folks around here is good God-fearing Christians. The Ameseses,” she said, adding syllables, “are different.” She hesitated and dug in a pocket. Occam and T. Laine nearly drew their weapons before Ethel pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She had trouble getting a cigarette out of the pack and took her time lighting it from the smoking butt of the other one, squinting at the smoke curling up to one eye and tangling in the strands of her red wig.
She puffed several times, coughed hard, a wet, racking sound, and seemed to enjoy making us wait, standing in the sun. Her voice went bitter. “Witches is what everyone figgers. The Ameses had money back in the day, before the Great Depression. The Ames women had stones in the backyard.” She leaned in and whispered, “In a circle.” She grinned at whatever she saw on T. Laine’s face. “Ask anyone. The old Ames farm.” Ethel turned and went back inside, the screen door banging behind her.
“And why didn’t the sheriff tell us that?” T. Laine asked softly.
From inside the house Ethel shouted, “He’s young. And he’s a man.” The last word was caustic and bitter. “The young don’t know nothing and men stick together when it comes to banging a woman. Men and their secrets.”
We trudged back to our cars and motored down the street, driving slowly as JoJo worked back at HQ, widening her search into the Ames witch family, tracking down the family line through county land records and birth and death records for the last hundred years, and giving us the address of the old Ames farm, which had passed from Ames to Ames, mother to daughter. JoJo was brilliant.
“Check it out,” FireWind instructed needlessly.
* * *
* * *
The property was an abandoned, heavily overgrown fifty-acre farm, the closest neighbors out of sight in the trees, the house itself long gone in a fire that had left two soot-blackened chimneys standing in hip-high brown weeds and twenty-year-old saplings. Away from the house the trees were older, larger, as if they hadn’t been cut in seventy years. Maybe longer. We got out and T. Laine and Occam waded in where the house once stood, searching among the trees. I carried my gear away from the chimneys, until I found a small open space between the trees. I placed my faded blanket on the ground, sat with the cabbage in my lap, and touched the earth.
The grass wasn’t a lawn. It didn’t have that snooty feel of cultivators or sod. The land had been fallow for decades and the plants had begun to breathe in wildness and freedom and to spread their roots, making communities. Instead of reading down, I stretched out across the land in a widening circle around me, the earth sparking with life. In the first few inches of soil, there were the roots of dozens of species of grasses and wildflowers and fungi; there were seedlings just getting started. The larvae of bugs. Colonies of ants. There was a large rabbit community living on the property, bird nests in the grass and trees, and snakes basking in the sun. Feral cats. Homeless dogs in a small den. Opossums and foxes and raccoons. A dry streambed flowed through the property, underground water following similar contours. No graveyards. No battlegrounds. As I read broader and deeper, I found the older deep roots of mature trees. A true forest in the making, some hardwoods over a hundred years old, far older than those found on most farms, which were cut every forty years for wood.
I could take this land and make it thrive, could bring the water back to the surface, encourage the trees to full forest and health.
If I was willing to kill and spill blood and claim it.
But it was doing well enough without me and neither it nor my bloodlust called to me.
And . . . there had to be another way. There had to be a way to heal the earth—and the Earth—without death and bloodshed.
I read deeper and found a layer of limestone containing a water table with clean happy water. To the east was broken granite and a near-vertical shelf of marble, hard and ju
tting, that had once reached the surface. To the north was an ancient dump and several buried foundations, the remains of a small community. Miles away, but still close enough to feel it, was Soulwood, basking under the fall sun, soaking up energy and sunlight. I didn’t call on it, and eased away, back toward my body.
Closer to me were foundations of outbuildings, animal bones from where farmers had slaughtered their meat. Three small dumps were filled with broken glass and pottery and rusting tin cans, a coil of rusting barbed wire, rusting chicken wire, corroding farm implements. I pulled into myself and pushed out again, concentrating on the house and the young woods.
I found the stone circle and wrapped around it, staying outside, tasting and testing the ancient magics within. The circle was composed of rough-shaped oval stones standing upright, each about two feet above the surface and one below. Twelve of them had been set in place, in a nearly perfect circle but not equidistant apart, not clock-like. Four stones were at the primal compass points; others were in odd positions, maybe to match the stars or the moon or the equinoxes. Something witchy. All the stones were the same marble that I had felt below the ground, as if part of the jutting slab had once been exposed and chiseled out and used by the landowners. I marked the location of T. Laine and Occam, who were pacing widdershins outside the stones. There was something within the circle, something warm and sleeping but not dangerous. I would come back to it.
I eased away from the stone circle and found more of the marble. The buried foundations of the burned house were made of the stone, along with the buried hearthstones, cracked and hidden in the tall grass. The long-gone barn had stood on marble stones at the four corners, now buried beneath the ground. The beautiful stone had been removed from the earth and then been reclaimed by it. It seemed fitting. I found more marble near the dry creek, a single large rounded stone that had fallen over.
