I dropped my four-day gobag off in the locker room and took a few seconds to trim back stress-growth leaves at my hairline. Talking to Daddy hadn’t been horrible, but it hadn’t been easy, either. I’d been a tree for about six months after the last big case and that experience had left me leafy and viny and rooty. I didn’t so much indulge in personal hygiene as landscape myself. Half of the team was equally injured and had been in rehab of one kind or another. Unit Eighteen had been working a skeleton crew for months—paperwork, protocol, and research. Now that Occam was back from healing, and I wasn’t so rooty, we were a full crew. It felt good to be back to work.
When I was presentable, I went to my cubicle, stuck a finger into the soil and herbs at the window, and locked my one-day gobag and weapon in the drawer. The weapon wasn’t needed in HQ. The herbs were too dry, which severely limited the salad flavors I had planned on for supper. I fished an empty bottle from the recycles bin, filled it with tap water, and emptied it slowly over the herbs. “There you go, my pretties. Sorry about the chlorine. I promise not to clip you for a day or two to let you recover, and I’ll bring better water tomorrow.” Kissing the air over them, I picked up my laptop and two tablets and carried them to the conference room, where Tandy was bent over the unit’s main system, the one where orders and comms originated. I took my place at the conference table and logged in to the PsyLED system. “Hey,” I said.
“Evening, Nell. I brought salad fixings for supper,” our resident empath said. He wasn’t prescient, but because of his empathy gift, he sometimes seemed to be expecting things ahead of time, like what I wanted for supper. He’d explained that it was a part of knowing us so deeply, not a form of psychic mind control or prophecy.
“I can do salad,” I said, proud that I sounded like a modern city girl. I’d never be hip or cool or chic, but at least I fit in now, sharing a more common accent and language syntax. “I’m sending you my report on the black-magic circle from last night.”
Tandy nodded, the sharp overhead lights picking out the Lichtenberg lines that traced across his skin like scarlet lightning.
I read over the summation reports for the last few days and the latest on Rick’s black-cat-in-a-circle case. There wasn’t much. The focals—the bloody gauze, the knife, the golf ball and tee—from the circle had been sent to the lab, signed for, and placed into a queue for eventual testing. No date for actual analysis had been sent to us. T. Laine still wasn’t sure what the circles were for, but causality needed to be proved or disproved in law enforcement, and she was working on the “Rick being called by a black-magic spell” aspect to see if it was happenstance or deliberate.
Someone had asked Rick if he played golf and he’d said, “Not for years.” The tee and ball looked brand-new. No tie there.
Lainie had gone through the runes in the black-magic circle, trying to provide us with an interpretation. Tandy had chatted with the owners and managers of the businesses on Riverside Drive, the street near the circle. Two employers had recently fired several people, and one young woman had been fired for smoking marijuana and crack on the job. The woman was in her twenties, short and slight, and the manager had provided Tandy with her ID and address.
Tandy and T. Laine had run the ID. It was real, but the address on it turned out to be an empty lot behind the wastewater treatment plant off of Neyland Drive. They had tracked down her parents, who lived in Nashville, but they hadn’t seen their daughter since they kicked her out for stealing and pawning her grandmother’s silver. There had been no indication of witch genes in the lineage. No one had been able to find the woman and there was no way to determine if she had cast the circle.
The local witch coven had been asked to take a look at photos of the circle and they had no idea who had cast it. They also had no idea what it did except something bad. They had refused to go to the circle in person and had broken off contact. Which they had done before when bad magical things were taking place in Knoxville.
We were no closer to knowing if the witch circle had been a deliberate call to Rick or if he accidently answered it because of proximity and the black cat used as sacrifice. We had nothing except bloody gauze we couldn’t track to the blood source, a bunch of weird focals, and . . . Nothing. Except that someone was casting nasty curses with unknown magic. This alone had everyone worried, especially the werecats.
Tandy was in charge for the night and also handling comms, should we get a case. As long as no one took a day off or went on vacation we had enough people to staff the office twenty-four/seven. On nights when that wasn’t possible, calls were autorouted to Rick or JoJo and they called us in. Computers were grand things when they worked. Satisfied that I was caught up on everything, I went to work on my assignment, tracking grindylows and their kills and why grindys were indifferent about Rick. PsyLED’s mandate was to investigate paranormal crimes, keep paranormal records, track paranormal trends, and I had traced and amassed a lot of records in my time at Unit Eighteen.
On my first break, well after midnight, the waning moon was visible and the sky was black against the city lights as seen though the windows. I trimmed back dead leaves—on the herbs in the windowsill boxes, not on me—and enjoyed the novelty of air-conditioning. Novelty because I was still mentally stymied about going on the grid or adding to my solar array and solar batteries just for comfort. It was hard to turn away from a lifelong independence. I weighed it all as I worked on the plants.
“Nell,” Tandy called over the in-house speaker system. “Come to the conference room, please.” I put down my small watering can and went back to join him. “It’s probably nothing,” he said as I stepped in the doorway, “but Knoxville PD called in something and are asking for an agent to liaise.”
“You want me to go on a call? Alone?”
He didn’t look up at the obvious excitement, apprehension, and delight mixed together in my voice. “Sending coordinates and address to your cell. Meet Officer Holt at the scene. Convenience store robbery a little after midnight, on the heels of an earlier title loan shop robbery as the employees were closing. The businesses are within a mile of each other and the perpetrator in both cases was described as male, five-nine, black hair, pale skin, and ‘acting strangely.’ He stole cash and a gun and ammo from the pawn shop and food items and cash from the convenience store. Neither business’ security footage shows the unsub’s face, but both describe bloody clothing. The descriptions were similar enough for KPD to put them together. They want the place read for vampire.”
Unsub was cop-speak for unknown subject. “Species profiling because of blood and pale skin? Maybe he’s a butcher.”
Tandy didn’t look up, but the amusement was clear on his face in the glare of his tablets. “You get to decide what species. If human, you can give the investigation back over to the local PD.”
So, no crime workup, just a reading. Scut work. I gave a long-suffering breath and gathered my gear—my weapon and Kevlar/antimagic vest, the psy-meter 2.0, and a comms set.
I didn’t push my old red truck, didn’t run lights and siren. The C10 wasn’t designed for the strain of pursuit or emergency driving, and since the delivery of my official vehicle had been delayed while I was a tree, I had to protect my only mode of transportation.
I reached the address to find a Pilot Gas and Convenience store just off Cumberland Avenue. Before I stopped, I drove around and found the title loan shop, an odd business for what was a midscale retail area. There was no crime scene tape, no indication of a crime committed, which was odd. I motored back to the gas and convenience store. The Pilot was newish, open twenty-four hours a day, with bright lights and a lot of traffic. It wasn’t the kind of place I’d expect a robbery during heavy business hours. After two a.m. maybe, but not before that. Again here, there was only a single strip of bright yellow crime scene tape around one entrance and one cash register, but no plethora of detectives.
I parked beside the KPD unit and pulled up the security footage of the Pilot robbery itself, which Tandy had sent as I drove. I watched on my tablet as the skinny unsub in jeans and a dark hooded jacket walked through the entrance and pointed his pocket at the cashier closest to the door. The pocket could have concealed a hand holding a weapon, but looked like the tip of a finger. It was hard to say. The cashier removed a handful of bills from the drawer and handed them to the subject, who reached out and accepted the bills, his hand narrow, thin, and shaking, as white as any vamp’s. He left the Pilot at a steady, slogging pace. Not running, not panicked, but not acting odd in any way I could see. No cameras caught his face, and he seemed to disappear into the shadows across University Commons Way toward the Walmart.
Something seemed odd and I watched the video again, realizing the male unsub could be a gangly female. The slender hand. The way he, or she, ran wasn’t suggestive of gender.
I read the rest of the report. The kid—estimated to be about seventeen by the cashier—had asked for four hundred dollars. Not everything in the register. Just four hundred dollars. That was weird. I looked up felonies and discovered that in Tennessee, a robbery involving less than five hundred dollars, and committed without a weapon, (fingers didn’t count) was a misdemeanor. That explained the lack of police presence here, just the one police car, Unit 102.
I accessed the surveillance cameras from the earlier title loan shop robbery. Same slim form, same white skin, same hand in pocket. A finger. He had stolen a gun and ammo as well as money. Here, the lanky thief stole less than a hundred dollars and the .32 Smith & Wesson. He—I chose male for convenience—had calculated the value of the gun and ammo, adding them to the cash. Stealing a gun carried heavier penalties. I was guessing he didn’t know that. But, if both robberies had been connitted by the same person, he or she had been in possession of a gun on the second robbery, and hadn’t used it. So why steal the gun?
I clipped my badge where it could be seen, adjusted my vest and weapon, and stacked my tablet on top of the psy-meter. The robberies hadn’t been violent, but the robber wasn’t in custody. He’d taken off on foot, was smart enough to dodge security cameras, and was armed. Better safe than sorry. I checked my comms unit and went inside, spotting the cop right away, leaning over the counter, chatting with the Pilot employee. I said, “Officer Holt?”
The cop turned and looked me over, a frown on his face. He muttered, “You gotta be kidding me,” just loud enough to make sure I heard. Holt didn’t like female special agents, especially ones who looked too young to have come up through the ranks and paid their dues, as he had. And based on the hint of fear in his eyes, he especially didn’t like paras, and I didn’t look quite human right now.
His attitude got all over me like deer ticks on a dog. “Not kidding at all, Officer Holt.” I looked him up and down just like he looked at me, my eyes alighting on his thinning hairline and his paunch, which he sucked in to make himself look in better shape. “You were hoping for a nice big former Green Beret with scars and wartime experience? You call PsyLED about a nonviolent, very questionable vamp robbery after midnight, and you get me. Special Agent Ingram. You got a problem with that, you can call your headquarters and see if they’ll let you run and hide from the big bad para.” I tapped my chest.
Holt flushed.
“Did you get all that, Special Agent Dyson?”
“Every word,” Tandy said into my ear. “Making friends, there, Ingram.”
“I got your report,” I said to Holt. “How about you stand outside and ask people to wait out there for five minutes while I read the premises.” I turned my back on him and set the psy-meter on the counter near the Slim Jims and Ho Hos. I heard the door open and close and I caught sight of Holt walking it off outside. I hadn’t done a very good job improving interagency relations. LaFleur would probably have a few things to say about that.
To the clerk I said, “Okay if I tape our interview?”
“Sure.” The cashier nodded. He was in his midthirties, with patchy facial hair and an old odor of alcohol and weed about him. Idly I wondered where he’d hid his stash when he’d had to call the police. His name tag read HANK.
“Okay, Hank. Speak into the tablet. Tell me your full legal name, the date, and the current time. Then tell me what happened.” I set the tablet to record and as he talked I calibrated and did QC on the psy-meter 2.0. His story was pretty much what I had seen in the security cameras. “Can you describe the alleged thief?”
“Kid. I’m saying male. I mean, chicks don’t rob stores, ya dig?” I nodded, encouraging him to talk. “Probably between seventeen and twenty. White skin, black greasy hair to his shoulders, skin was dirty, medium height. Skinny.” He added, “He was shaking like a junkie, but the thing that made me think vampire was the white skin and the blood on his clothes. And he talked funny, so I was thinking fangs.”
I was betting that this kid loved horror movies and read vamp porn. “But you never saw fangs?”
“No, ma’am. Just the blood on his clothes and the white skin. But I thought bloodsucker and the cop agreed.”
“Uh-huh. Right. Okay, with your permission, I’m going to read you, then take a reading everywhere the perpetrator stood.” I calibrated the four levels to zero and then scanned Hank, who was excited to be part of a PsyLED investigation and who read fully human. But his countertop read moderately low on psysitope one, slightly lower on two and four, and a rise on three, giving a nod to every para in the book. The Pilot store had a lot of traffic and the residue had accumulated. I frowned. Such an accretion of psysitopes didn’t make sense. I pulled up a map and compared the location to the Glass Clan Home and to the address of the leader of the local witch coven. The store was close enough to these social gathering places to be used for gas and late-night purchases, hence the readings. “What made you think the subject was male?”
“I only got a good look at the chin,” he admitted, “but it had a few hairs on it like a kid trying to grow his first beard. If it wasn’t a dude, then she was the ugliest chick I ever saw in my life.”
“Hmmm.” Mentally, I ran through the possibilities. Vamps were white skinned, and both robberies had been after dark, but vamps had mesmerism abilities and would blood-kiss-and-steal to get money, not rob. Juvenile Welsh devil dogs were skinny and apt to be unkempt, and it was possible that one had slipped by in the recent roundup of the horrid, foul shape-changers. Maybe a witch wearing a glamour to look like a male? Could be; a glamour would mess up my readings. Male witch? Not likely. Male witches succumbed to childhood cancers with a regularity that was scary. Because of the childhood mortality rate, male witches, sometimes called sorcerers, were once rarer than hen’s teeth. With modern medicine, more males had begun to survive to adulthood, but the percentages were still low. If the pale unsub was a sorcerer, he might be sick. Even dying. There was a single report in the PsyLED databases that a sick sorcerer had thrown off strange psysitope readings. For now, I was betting on human junkie. I touched the counter and felt no maggots, but that meant nothing since the robber hadn’t touched the counter.
Reading the rest of the store took a full three minutes, and I saved my readings on my tablet before thanking the cashier and leaving the store. I went up to Holt and said, “It’s all yours.” I didn’t wait for his reply and got into my truck. I drove away, across the street toward the Walmart where the robber had seemed to be heading when he raced away on foot.
I drove around the Walmart, past big rigs parked in the shadows, a few RVs and travel trailers. Spotting the security guard, who was riding around in an orange vehicle with a flashing orange light on top, I followed and flashed my blue lights to get his attention. Unlike Holt, former KPD sergeant Wellborn was genial and chatty. We sat, driver-side door to driver-side door, and gossiped over the window edges for a while about the robbery and the homeless and drug problem in Knoxville.
He pointed to the back of the Walmart and said, “We try to keep them from bothering the shoppers and joggers. When there’s two of us working and when the numbers get too bad, we help the local boys flush them out of the greenery along the greenway back there.”
I assumed that local boys meant KPD and not armed yahoos looking for excitement.
“But they don’t need much more than a bush to sleep under in summer, and with Third Creek back there and nearby places to beg, they have everything they need to survive for six to nine months a year. Come winter, things’ll change up a bit, but for now, it’s homeless heaven.”
I pulled up the video of the suspect. “You ever see this guy?”
Together we watched both sets of footage and Wellborn shook his head. “No. Dark jacket, jeans, sneakers, maybe an old pair of Jordans. Moves like a female. I have to say, robbery by the homeless isn’t as common as most folk think. They make more and better money begging, without the fear of ending up in jail.”
Making a note to check the statistics, I considered the darkness behind Walmart. The security lights didn’t reach beyond the parking area, and though the moon was still up, it wasn’t providing much illumination. I really didn’t want to go back there, but . . . “I need to inspect it, to see if I can spot the perpetrator.”
“If you want to take a look, drive around and come in the back way, on the far side of the creek. Shine your lights at the creek and the back of the store. You’ll see some. See a campfire or two. Maybe a tent. If you want to wait till I’m off shift I’d go with you, but I’m the only one on tonight and can’t go now.”
“Thanks. I’m good. I’ll call for backup if I see anything that means I need to get out of the truck.” I shook his hand across the space between our vehicles and followed directions to the far side of the creek. I motored in behind a storage building or warehouse—there wasn’t a sign on the back road to tell me what it was—braked, and measured with the psy-meter out the window. The readings read background normal, and I moved on down the road. On my GPS it was called Unnamed Road, which seemed an appropriate and sad place for the human homeless. I made three stops, working from inside the truck cab, and found only tents, tarps, trash dumps, an abandoned campfire, and glimpses of people escaping into the brush, until I got past the Walmart. The psy-meter 2.0 went off, spiking and holding at level one and level four, the readings matching the circle that had called Rick. My heart rate rocketed. There was something witchy on the bank of Third Creek.
I called Tandy. “Got something, but not what I expected.”
“Describe.”
“Checking psysitope levels on an open field in the direction the subject had been walking after the robbery. High readings on one and four, holding at redlining, no downward movement. I don’t know what it is, but I’m requesting backup. Is T. Laine on call?”
“Roger that. Putting in a call for KPD and Kent. Do not—repeat, do not—leave your vehicle.”
“Roger that,” I said. “I’ll write up reports while I wait in the Walmart parking lot with Wellborn, formerly of KPD and armed.”
In my report, under “Comments,” I speculated that the store thief was human, but couldn’t rule out a witch using a glamour or carrying a charm that might affect the psymeter.
Lainie made it to the parking lot in under an hour and a small KPD night-shift team met us in the parking area behind the warehouse-type building on Unnamed Road. Lainie and I went over the psy-meter numbers I had collected, and made an informed guess at the location of whatever or whoever awaited us in the brush near the creek. It hadn’t moved. I mentioned the robberies and the remote possibility that the two were related, based on my theory of a witch under glamour.
The KPD team listened in. There were six of us, the cops looking psyched at going into the wild and kind of freaked too, probably at the combination of an armed, magic-using suspect in the area, though I explained that the readings were wrong for a witch lying in the grass or for a vamp. There were no apparent heroes and no obvious para haters in the cop group, so that was good. Better was the fact that we could all share a single communications channel. After the crazy things that had happened with strange magic in the last year, KPD, KFD, and the Knox County Sheriff’s Department had dedicated a single frequency to ops involving paranormal investigations or creatures. Most cops call it the para freq, and laughed.
Together we moved into the brush, every officer except T. Laine with service weapon drawn, tactical flashlight glaring, and wearing a vest. Over a shoulder, I carried a gobag with my pink blanket, tablet, and the psy-meter 2.0. T. Laine was armed with bright yellow number two pencils that R&D at PsyLED central in Virginia had imbued with a null force working to stop magic and magical attack. The null sticks were impossible for a human to activate, and painful for a witch to handle, making it nearly impossible for T. Laine, our moon witch, to carry a gun too, so she wore night-vision gear, both low-light and infrared oculars, and took a track beside me and a little ahead so my flash didn’t interfere with her headgear.
The null sticks were General brand pencils, with the word semi-hex on the side, surely a joke on the part of the witch who had spelled them. T. Laine carried one by the eraser and was ready to toss it at will.
As we moved through the tall grasses and brush, the only sounds were the trickle of water in the creek ahead and the swish of the summer grasses on our clothes. We’d have to do a thorough tick search when we got back to HQ. Maybe Lainie had a tick-search spell. That would be handy. Stupid thoughts to indulge in when there was something magical on the creek shore ahead.
“Halt,” T. Laine said softly into her mic. She turned to her right in small angled degrees. “Two o’clock from my location, twenty paces ahead. No live bodies in infrared, no DBs on low-light, but . . . something. The null sticks just flashed hot.”
“They shouldn’t flash hot unless there’s an active working,” I said. “Let me read the earth.” Which meant, let me put my fingers to the ground.
T. Laine tapped her mic and explained to the others, as she swished through the grass around me, “Ingram will be vulnerable, unable to seek cover in case of attack.”
“Copy,” several voices said.
Surprisingly, Lainie was setting a circle around the two of us, which I didn’t expect or understand. She tapped off her mic and added softly to me, “There’s mundane cover and there’s magical cover. I can handle the latter if not the former, hence the circle around both of us.”
I holstered my weapon and withdrew the pink blanket and the psy-meter from my gobag. I partially opened the blanket and sat on it, making a nest in the tall grass for my backside and legs, which I folded under me. I opened the psy-meter, which had gone to sleep, and pointed it at the direction Lainie indicated. Levels one and four redlined instantly. It wasn’t a person. It was a thing, and whatever it was, it was big. And its magic was still active.
Gingerly, I placed a left fingertip on the ground and pressed through the tightly interwoven roots to the soil. I jerked away so fast that I nearly rolled off the blanket. “It’s very active,” I whispered into the mic. “And there’s something dead there.” I pointed. “Something cold, been dead a few hours.”
“Human?”
“No. Too small. Maybe a pound or two?” I suggested.
“Cat?” T. Laine asked, thinking about Rick’s black-magic circle.
“No. Smaller. Maybe half that size. Maybe a kitten?”
“Okay. Pack up,” she said to me. I shoved my gear in my bag, strapped it around me, and took my weapon in a one-hand grip, my tactical flash in my free hand, held out to my side. If someone had us in their sights, I wanted any targeting mark to be out to my side, not midline on me. As I stood, Lainie dropped her circle and said, into the mic, “Let’s move in.”
The cops said, “Copy that,” in unison, and we all moved forward, spreading out.
Just ahead, the grass fell away, as if cut too close so that it had died in the summer heat. A small flat area appeared on the bank of the creek. In its center was a witch circle, about twelve feet in diameter, with spokes that ran out from the center. In the center of the circle were three dead white rats.
Laine tapped off her mic and murmured to me, “Not a black cat.”
“But an active witch circle,” I said, “close by two robberies likely perpetrated by a para.” And the circle was very similar to the last one we had found, which neither of us said aloud.
Lainie tapped her mic back on. “Maintain positions. I want to check something.” She tapped it again, going to PsyLED freqs. To Tandy she said, “Dyson, call LaFleur. Get his twenty and condition. Tell him what we found.” What she meant was, find out if he was human shaped. “Report back to me.”
“Roger that,” Tandy said. “I’ve been monitoring. If he doesn’t answer, I’ll get Occam there ASAP.”
We were currently assuming the same potential scenario, that Rick might have been called by this witch working too, and could show up in black leopard form. Rick hadn’t been a werecat for long and control over his beast was sometimes precarious. The grindys assigned to Knoxville were juveniles and didn’t always show up at the right time. None of us wanted to have to shoot our boss to keep him from biting a human. We would, of course, but it would bother us.
Moments later, Tandy said into the PsyLED-only frequency, “LaFleur responded. He is en route to your twenty. ETA twelve minutes. He recommends that you pull back. Suggests that you thank KPD for their assistance and send the officers on scene back to their units.” That meant Rick was human shaped. His order was not entirely unexpected. Humans near an active working might accidently set in motion a magical working that had been initiated but placed on hold and not yet fully launched, injuring themselves or others. In a slightly different tone Tandy said, “Alerting PsyLED agents on scene: Pea is with LaFleur.”
Lainie shot me a look through the dark, not one I could decipher. Pea hadn’t been around much in the last few weeks. The grindy hadn’t appeared at the other circle. Why did she show up—I looked around at the nearby humans. Right.
T. Laine slid her dark eyes to me and said into the shared para freq, “Copy that, Dyson. Officers, this is an active witch working. Repeat, an active magical working of unknown intent. We’ve been advised by Knoxville PsyLED HQ to evacuate humans from the premises.” To get them going, she shooed me back toward the cars and the cops began to follow, tactical flashes swinging slowly back and forth. “PsyLED appreciates your assistance,” she said, to get them moving faster, “but we need to evacuate this area.”
“Copy that, but I thought we were looking for a robbery suspect,” one of the cops said.
“We were. That is now officially on the back burner. Officer safety is paramount to PsyLED, and we’ve stumbled on what is a dangerous paranormal scene.”
Stumbled on? Or were led to? By a witch under glamour? Or something else?
“What about the homeless?” the cop pointed across the creek to the camping area.
“Most likely took off when you guys showed up. And running water will keep them safe,” T. Laine said.
T. Laine and I were sitting in her official vehicle, the engine running and the AC pumped up high, when LaFleur coasted up. We all got out, the neon green grindylow sitting on Rick’s shoulder holding a cat treat in her front paws and nibbling on it, like a squirrel might. Rick wasn’t wearing a vest or headset, but his badge was clipped to his jeans and his shoulder rig was prominently displayed against his white T-shirt. Usually Rick was cool and collected at paranormal scenes. This time he looked fidgety, as if he was holding anxiety down by force of will.
“Update,” he said.
T. Laine brought him up to speed on the night’s events and finished by saying, “Did you feel anything? Any attraction to shift and come here? Do you feel anything now that you are here?”
“No,” Rick said, one hand smoothing the grindy’s tail along his shoulder and down one arm. “Nothing.” He tilted his head like a cat and sniffed. “I don’t smell anyone. Don’t sense moon-calling magic at all. Is it active right now?”
I opened the psy-meter 2.0 and reread the earth. “The levels are dropping, pretty close to midhigh,” I said. “And I agree. No witch other than Lainie or human in the immediate vicinity, including the large group of homeless camping on the other side of the creek.”
T. Laine pointed across the creek toward the Walmart. “I can make out a few tents. More upstream. A few campfires. No people on infrared.”
Rick grunted, unconvinced.
“Let me inspect the circle. Alone,” T. Laine said. “I want you two behind the engine blocks. There’s enough iron in them to frazzle any working that might get by me.”
Get by me meant any working that exploded and killed her. “You will not die,” I ordered.
“Roger that,” she said.
“Don’t get too close,” Rick said, giving permission even as he backed away. “Use a personal indicator light so we can follow you.”
“Okay. I’m going to cast a scan working and a seeing working. Wish me luck.” T. Laine moved back into the weeds, wearing the night-gear headset and a comms set, no weapon drawn, a tiny green light on her shoulder. She was holding a small moonstone amulet carved into a bear. We followed her progress as she moved slowly through the weeds. I started to follow.
His voice strained, his body taut, Rick said, “Get back here, Ingram. If she triggers it and explodes there’s no point in you getting hurt too.”
I wanted to say something like, Wow. Show some concern, why don’t you? But the female agents I worked with had told me that I tended to overreact to male authority even when it was appropriate, like a male boss giving a perfectly reasonable order. So I swallowed the insubordinate words before they left my mouth, scuttled behind the iron engine block, and crouched close to him. Our positions put two engines between the working and us.
“What did you get when you read the earth?” Rick asked.
“The magic was hot, like getting a shock from a live wire. The feeling of death was fresh and strong, but small.”
“No feeling of maggots?”
I frowned. I had forgotten the sensation of maggots I had picked up at the other circle. “No. What does that mean?”
Rick shook his head, barely visible as his silver locks caught the meager light. He didn’t reply. Silently we followed T. Laine’s slow, methodical progress in a straight line to the location of the magical working. She started walking widdershins to the circle, then stopped and backed away, and started back sunwise, which was unusual. It could mean a lot of different things, depending on what she was sensing in her magical scans.
A good fifteen minutes later, T. Laine moved back toward us. When she was close enough for us to hear without comms, she said, “Same markings and style of circle as the last one. Same runes. It’s the same magic signature, but the animals are three white rats, not a cat. Smaller animal mass and radius of the circle means a less powerful spell. And the rats were carried here, not summoned here.”
“Different pattern,” Rick said, thoughtful. To me, he said, “Tap on your comms and ask Tandy to compile a listing of all the pet stores in the area that sell white rats. Tomorrow someone will need to drop by and ask about recent sales and request surveillance footage.”
“For now?” T. Laine asked him. She stopped about halfway between the working and the vehicles.
Rick said, “Can you safely disrupt whatever working is in progress? I’d like us to get up close and personal ASAP.”
“Can do. Back in a bit.”
T. Laine moved back through the wild grasses, stopped, and began to mumble, nothing in English, but with lots of s’s and l’s and something that sounded like she was dying of consumption. Maybe some form of Gaelic. She raised an arm and made a tossing motion. Nothing happened, and her shoulders went slack. Louder, she called to us, “It’s down and safe.”
I noted that Rick was less stiff, his posture less rigid. LaFleur had been prepared for the working to explode. Or he had been ready to fight off a calling.
Before we could take a step, T. Laine had her personal light on high beam and was searching the ground. We moved in close but kept our feet far outside of the circle, which had been cut into the ground with a spade or narrow shovel.
The circle was smaller than the last one, but at twelve feet across, it was still a big circle for one witch to make and handle. There were runes drawn into the earth but no focal items except two more golf balls and one tee, what looked like a used facial tissue with a trace of lipstick on it, and a shoelace from a man’s dress shoe. Rick bagged the tissue, golf implements, and shoestring, hoping for a DNA match with the witch or with the intended victim of the circle. They bagged the rats for a necropsy at PsyCSI. We worked with a sense of reprieve. Rick hadn’t been called.
Rick and T. Laine took measurements and photos and made drawings and I went back to my original task, taking readings of the foliage around Third Creek and back behind the Walmart. I got zilch. The robber wasn’t here anymore if he or she had actually come this way. Eventually I left T. Laine and Rick at the circle and headed back to HQ to finish writing my reports. Something about all this seemed off. But I was a probie. What did I know?