Circle of the Moon

by Faith Hunter

“I was on Soulwood. I was safe.” But even I could hear the defiance in my voice.

  “When I’m hunting on Soulwood, you’re there to protect me,” Occam said. “I’m not trying to protect the little woman. I’m watching my partner’s back, not trying to keep you from doing your job. When an evil is in the land and you read the land, you need backup.”

  Stubbornness welled up in me, not wanting to give in so easily, but . . . but, Occam wasn’t talking about being dominant over me. He was talking about being my equal, about mutual dependence. Feeling guilty, I said, “Yes. I did it alone.” I scowled up at him. “I promise not to do it again.” Occam raised his mismatched eyebrows in disbelief. I turned away and stomped off through the brush. It grew thick and green right up to the road, which I crossed to trees on the far side. The shade was deep here and the soil loamy enough for there to be a springhead nearby. I was on the same side of the road as the house where Jason was supposed to be, assuming he was still with the vampires. “Stupid man,” I grumbled.

  “Say again, Ingram?” he said to my back, a hint of laughter in his voice. Ingram. Not Nell, sugar. He had heard me perfectly with his cat hearing.

  I positioned the pink blanket on the slightly damp soil and sat on it. Touched a single fingertip to the ground, glanced once at Occam, and dropped deep and fast, like plunging a knife blade into the dirt. I was mad at my partner but still trusted him to have my back.

  I didn’t look for the demon or the circle, but I knew they were both there. I could feel the filth in the earth at the livestock center, like used motor oil mixed with clotted blood and grains of rotted wood and rat feces. It was a nauseating sensation and I stayed away.

  Closer to me, partially overwhelmed by the sensation of the demon, maybe three hundred feet ahead, I felt . . . maggots. Thousands and thousands of maggots. They were all over the property but mostly on the left side of the house, in the basement. Avoiding the hedges, using the smallest hint of power, I eased my attention up through the gravel and the concrete of the slab foundation, trying to see how many vampires there were. I couldn’t get close enough, but I hesitated, feeling something familiar. I pressed up just a bit. And touched wood in the walls. Local wood. The house had been built with local wood and I could feel through it, into the house. And I felt maggots. True-dead vampires. Undead vampires. Vamps in cages. Blood. Lots of blood. Rotting flesh.

  Gagging, I heaved my mind away from the house. Accidently dragged myself through a mound of freshly turned earth. More rotting flesh. Human. I yanked away from the fresh graves. Seven of them. I wrenched myself out of the land and wriggled my cell from my pocket with shaking fingers. Called JoJo.

  She answered with, “Ingram. Where are you? You and Occam aren’t with the others.”

  “Looking for Jason. How many humans lived at the lair?”

  “Five family members and two full-time help. The estate is forty acres of horse pasture and timber. The Blounts are a quiet, unassuming millionaire family who made their fortune in railroads and coal.”

  “Were.”

  “Huh? Were what?”

  I said, “I just found seven graves.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “Drink some water, Nell, sugar. You don’t breathe enough when you’re underground, and you might not know it, but you ain’t exactly yourself for a while after you read the earth.”

  “What kinda ‘not myself’?”

  He put a bottle of water in my hand and bent over me as if to speak quietly. Instead I felt him clip the leaves in my hairline. No need to advertise I wasn’t human to the local LEOs.

  Chagrined, I said, “Oh. The leafy kind.”

  Occam chuckled quietly, as he worked to slice through a vine on my thumb. “And the grouchy kind. And the bossy kind.”

  “If I was a man, it would be called taking charge or alpha male or something else good.”

  Occam tossed my leaves to the ground and squatted down beside me, his throat exposed in what might look like submission, but I knew better. His eyes were laughing. “You trying to lecture me about women’s rights and misogyny, sugar?”

  “No. I’m trying to say being bossy or an alpha isn’t a problem if I’m right. I needed to be on that side of the road to read the house properly.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause tar tastes bad.” I drank down the water, crushing the bottle.

  His eyebrows went up again, his burned one a little lower than the other. “Oh. I didn’t know that. And maybe I should have.”

  “Yeah. Let’s go find Rick and tell him.”

  “You’re in charge.”

  “Now you’un jist messin’ with me.”

  “Pretty much,” he agreed.

  Rick wasn’t surprised when Occam and I showed up, all hot and sweaty and covered in beggar-lice. I told him about the vamps and the graves. The sheriff’s department had shown up and launched an RVAC, a remote-viewing aircraft, one with advanced cameras and sensors, and had seen the turned earth. They had also skimmed around the house and acquired infrared images through all the windows, giving them a head count of the living humans—fifteen. He and FireWind put their heads together, muttering, and wandered away, toward a group in front of the abandoned house.

  The brass were standing around a makeshift table covered with house plans (which were on file with the county) and the security system (which had been provided by the company once a warrant had been delivered). They included the sheriff, the chief of the Highway Patrol, a TBI investigatory agent wearing suit pants and a jacket, and six SWAT team members in camo and laden with gear, most of it lethal. All of them were sweating in the heat.

  The SWAT captain—Gonzales—was former military and opened the discussion with the words, “Listen up, people.” He held up four fingers. “Ends, ways, means, risk. Strategy is like a three-legged stool, with ends, ways, and means balancing a plane of varying degrees of risk. We create strategy based on known variables and face risk depending on how we use our resources and what the enemy does. We have weapons, we have tools, we have floor plans, we have personnel. What we will not have is military backup before sundown. This is on us. Gather around!”

  I yawned and ate an apple. SWAT and local LEO brass discussed ingress and egress and potential barriers and the proper times and places to use flashbangs, which were the perfect weapon against vampires, affecting their light-sensitive eyes and their better-than-human hearing. A well-timed flashbang was enough to knock an ordinary vamp on his butt for several minutes.

  They also covered strategic choices such as bait and bleed, which would have meant letting Ming’s people attack and the vamps fight it out among themselves. This would have let the demon loose and maybe killed Rick. They decided to keep the local vamps out of the picture and go in before sunset, which was a good thing, as I’d have gotten myself fired warning Yummy. To no one’s surprise they decided on a blitzkrieg offensive with SWAT as the sole offensive wave.

  Despite the fact that this was a paranormal crime scene, SWAT determined that PsyLED wouldn’t be going in until the scene was contained and the house was cleared, because the hallways were too narrow and the chance of getting in the way of people with lethal weapons was too great. I listened long enough before I shouted, “What about sleep spells?”

  The SWAT captain looked my way and saw a skinny female in jeans and a T-shirt, with a pink blanket over her shoulder. He grinned, one of the patronizing expressions a big man sometimes gives a woman who he perceives as a lesser being.

  I didn’t like his grin at all, and maybe I was feeling a little too prickly, but I scowled at him and said, “Kent, how many combatants did you take down last week with one spoken wyrd?”

  T. Laine said, “I think it was twelve.” That got Gonzales’ attention. The captain looked from me to T. Laine and back, his grin fading.

  “Magic keeps our side from getting hurt,�
�� I said. “You walk into a magically protected site with mundane weapons and you may not come out again.”

  T. Laine moved through the crowd, saying, “I’m Kent, a PsyLED witch. My intel says the vamps lairing in the basement have at least one very powerful sorcerer with magical protections and one daywalking vamp with superior mesmeric capability. Wyrd workings like the sleep spell are not the only offensive or defensive weapons in my arsenal.”

  Gonzales asked, “How long for my men to develop proper techniques with your arsenal?”

  “Tell me, Cap,” T. Laine said, halting in front of the group. “You go to an operation and turn your weapons over to someone with less training and experience?” Gonzales scowled. “I didn’t think so. I’m a witch. I’m not giving you my weapons.”

  I glanced at Rick and FireWind, their faces carefully blank, observing.

  “Your whole, entire plan,” she said, “is mundane weapons against paras. You want a dynamic entry, rush in, fire a few silver rounds, round up everybody, and toss Jason to us. You have no contingencies except Unit Eighteen to deal with paranormal defenses and combatants. What if there are magical workings protecting the entry to the basement? What if they’re prepared to repel boarders with any and all magical means? Godfrey de Bullion is a daywalker capable of clouding human minds. What happens if he stops your men cold? You guys ready to be munched on? What if the demon gets free ahead of schedule?”

  Every eye was on T. Laine. Her head was back, shoulders back, her nearly black hair catching the light. “FireWind? You got something to say? You just came from an interagency confab to discuss exactly these types of problems.”

  The SAC East moved smoothly to the front of the group. “SWAT-Knox are top-notch against humans. But our evaluation suggests there’s a blind spot in your training. All your previous military experience was in the Middle East, where there are very few witches due to ethnic cleansing of anyone with the trait.” FireWind stopped about ten feet out from the SWAT team, his business casual clothes contrasting with the single long braid down his back, and with the military-style uniforms on the SWAT team. “All your paramilitary training since has been directed toward human targets and human situations. Here you have a mixture of human and para and you need Kent and the rest of us to meet your objectives.”

  “So what’s your strategy?” Gonzales asked.

  “Limited incursion from front and back doors. Take it slow. Clear the humans in the upper part of the house before entering the basement. Let Kent detect any magical defenses. Take it slow. We have the time.”

  Gonzales asked, “Former military?”

  “In another lifetime.” That was code for classified.

  Occam hummed under his breath, then said, “New boss man’s got him some style.”

  “Listen to FireWind and Kent,” Margot said, loud enough to be heard across the grassy clearing. “Special Agent Margot Racer, FBI,” she said, still speaking loud. Margot sauntered to, and then past, Rick. Margot was wearing long sleeves in the heat, covering up her flesh wound, the one that might turn her into a wereleopard. She was trailed by four feebs, one of them my cousin.

  Surprise slapped through me. I hadn’t seen Chadworth Sanders Hamilton, my third cousin from the townie side of the family, since before I was a tree. He looked different, but I didn’t have time to figure out how exactly because Gonzales was staring at Margot as she walked into the mix of the big boys. They stepped back. The . . . maybe I’d call it the “balance of power” shifted fast and hard. I had to wonder who Margot Racer really was in FBI lore.

  Again drawing the attention of the group, T. Laine stepped up with Rick, Margot, and FireWind, the four making a neat row of authority. “Considering your plans and the flashbangs, I suggest we add three offensive weapons. A unidirectional null spell, to proactively knock out magical defenses and any wyrd spells he might throw, a sleep spell to put any humans to sleep, and, if we have to retreat for any reason, I have one omnidirectional spell in a grenade-shaped device that makes sentient beings dizzy in a radius of twenty feet from point of impact.”

  “Do they work?” Gonzales asked our witch.

  T. Laine shook her head, not saying no, but saying with body language that he was stupid. She put her fists on her hips and looked up a good twelve inches into the man’s face. “Your weapons ever jam, bubba? Equipment ever malfunction?”

  Bubba, aka Gonzales, grinned, and his shoulders dropped, tension easing. “From time to time. It’s a pain in the ass.”

  Occam snorted under his breath and repeated, “Bubba.”

  “My weapons are just as likely as yours to fail when I need them the most. That’s why PsyLED Unit Eighteen has a wide variety of both mundane and magical weapons at our disposal. Against mixed paranormal and human enemy combatants, a combination of weapons and techniques is your best shot.”

  “What about the dizzy weapon?” Bubba asked. “Omnidirectional means it hits us too, right?”

  “Yes, if you’re stupid enough to detonate it while inside the twenty-foot radius. And it works on dolphins, whales, dogs, pigs, humans, witches, and vampires. And if you ask really nice, the local coven might make you a few. For a price.”

  “It always comes down to money with women,” a voice called out. The group laughed.

  T. Laine said, “No one’s paying me one silver dime extra to back up your sorry asses, though, are they?” That shut them up for just long enough for FireWind to step forward and introduce himself. Once again the dynamics of the group changed, bringing the meeting down to bureaucratic, political mode and police protocols.

  By the time sunset was ninety minutes away, and the new, dark moon was beginning to drop over the horizon, the plan of attack was all worked out, with T. Laine joining SWAT in the first wave. Occam, Racer, and the feds were in the second offensive wave. The RVAC had done another flyover, a sniper in the trees reported no movement, and we needed to hit the place before the vamps died to power the demon spell. I made a bathroom break in the trees and picked another tick off of me. Nasty little buggers.

  I ate another apple and geared up, adjusted my comms unit, and signed onto the para freq, utilized in this multiagency operation. I also untied my field boots. For me and the job I had in the offensive, shoes would be in the way.

  The first wave of the assault team moved out on foot, into position.

  Roseberry Road had been barricaded against all traffic. The nearest neighbors had been evacuated.

  Occam and I got into my truck and downed bottles of water. The air-conditioning was like a blessing from heaven, not that I expected much of those these days. When the leaders’ vehicles moved out, we followed. Rick and Loriann were with FireWind, in the car ahead of us. A few clouds on the horizon were sunset golden.

  Over the comms channel there was little chatter. I glanced at my gas gauge and wished I had filled up. Occam said into my earbud, “I have the vest cams live. Thanks, Jones.”

  He held his tablet to me, and I tried to see on the screen, which was divided into small squares, one for each camera. I made out a man’s hand, part of an assault rifle, someone’s back, and what had to be T. Laine’s hand holding the null charm. It was a copper-colored ink pen, but the ink in the chamber was antimagic.

  The words blasted in my ear. “Gogogogogogogo!”

  I revved the truck and smashed the pedal to the floor. Along with the others who would be holding the perimeter, I raced down the road and into the Blounts’ yard, adding my C10 to the row of vehicles surrounding the property. Gonzales and his team were already inside.

  NINETEEN

  I leaped from the truck, grabbing my blanket and the pot of Soulwood soil with the sprig of the vampire tree. Heard shouting over the para freq. Heard the null pen go off. Felt it through my feet. I dropped to the ground behind the truck, half on the blanket, and touched a single finger to the earth. My other fingers were in the clay pot. Rick walk
ed toward me and leaped to the truck bed. He crawled inside his cage and slammed the door, clearly fearing the surge of magic. We were running about six minutes late and the moon was dropping below the horizon as dusk settled on the land. The curse/summoning was waking.

  Through the ground, I still felt the tidal forces of the new moon, its glow turned away from the earth. I felt maggots wriggling. I felt the power of the smoky fist, of B.K.L., in the stockyard. And I felt Loriann step onto the lawn. Her magic shot out like an electric charge, a wyrd that broke her shackles, sending them to the ground, along with splatters of her blood.

  Blood on the earth. She was mine. It would be so easy.

  But she didn’t rush for the house and her brother. She walked to us. I heard the soft sound of Occam drawing his weapon. He whispered, “Jones. You seeing this?”

  “Copy,” JoJo said into my earbud. “Ethier is moving. Help is on the way. Hold tight.” In the cage, Rick began gasping with pain. He mewled like a small child or a lost kitten. I felt Occam’s cat stir and reached for him. I sent as much of Soulwood as I could to them, but my land wanted blood and violence; calm wasn’t abundant.

  In the field behind the stockyard, the fist began to open, drawing power from the deeps of the earth, hot and glowing. Magma. Soulwood turned its attention to the new energies, intrigued. From deep and deep in the earth, the somnolent power that resided, motionless and waiting, stirred. If it woke, there would be earthquakes. Flooding. Destruction. If the demon got free as Jason died, there would be earthquakes, flooding, and destruction. Those six minutes might have cost us everything.

  Loriann stopped beside the bed of the truck. I could feel Occam as he moved to block her access to the back of the truck, to Rick’s cage, and to me. Gunfire rattled from inside the house and through our comms. Blood splattered on the walls and concrete floor. I felt it. Soulwood snapped its attention to the blood. Hungry.

  Bloodlust, that simmering need, woke. And grew. I was tied to the land. I began to retreat, but the smell/feel/sense of the blood in the house was growing. Bloodlust reached toward it.