Rick said softly, “Alocam, Inc., LuseCo Visions, C-Corp Development, Kamines Future Products, Rosco J. Moose, Inc., and San-Inc. Why did you come up with this when we didn’t?”
It wasn’t the first time he had asked me this. It seemed my brain worked differently from the others’. I shrugged and, after one look at his face, dropped my eyes to my laptop. I had to make this sound professional and smart, and not hokey or stupid. I took a breath to center myself, straightened my spine, and said, “With the exception of T. Laine, who thinks in terms of small workings by witches and about mathematics, the unit thinks about sections of the city, neighborhoods, infrastructure, magical beings, and paranormal crimes committed by magical beings. It’s the box you all think in. It’s a big box, but it’s still a box.
“The box I think in is different. I think in terms of the land, of the earth, of its shapes and hills and valleys and water sites.” And the presences beneath the ground, I thought. “That’s my personal thinking box. So I looked at the proximity of the three sites to the hills, the rivers, and the creeks, and to the energy sources that might affect the actual ground around them.” I shrugged again. “The small thing, the dancer, in the ground yesterday and the day before wasn’t acting . . . I guess you could say it wasn’t acting like I thought it should. It was acting like a kid or a puppy, demanding and playful and temperamental. Because it wasn’t acting in what I think of as a natural manner, I considered the possibility that it might be a man-made problem, or have a man-made origination that stimulated a problem with something else.”
“Like a working with a built-in AI, capable of self-evolution,” Rick murmured. It wasn’t the first time artificial intelligence programs had come up.
“And then the woman spoke to me.”
“The woman you couldn’t positively identify as a witch,” T. Laine said, tucking her hair behind her ear.
I thought of offering her some of my hair goop, but there might a social protocol about that, and so I refrained. “I honestly don’t know what she was. As to the other stuff, you’uns got lots better ideas in that department.”
“I don’t know about that,” Tandy said. “You just came up with an insight and ideas that we haven’t discussed.” But I noted that he didn’t say that my ideas were totally new, so I was guessing that others had had similar thoughts.
“How about the people who have been to each of the sites?” I asked. “And who had contact with the deer? Any sign of odd psysitope readings?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Rick said. “We’re thinking that people were hit by a directed working, and these psysitopes dispersed after a time.”
I said, “I think I saw a wildlife camera mounted in the trees at the pond site. If we can get access to the footage, that might help us see what happened to the geese who died.”
Rick said, “Nell, you and T. Laine go to the pond site and see what’s happened to the geese. Get the wildlife cam footage if you can, or find who has it and ask for it. If they refuse, we’ll get a warrant. The dead deer were sent to Richmond, to PsyCSI. I expect prelim necropsies back in a few days. The living deer were taken in by the University of Tennessee’s Forestry, Wildlife, and Fisheries Department. Assuming things don’t change with what you learn at the pond, I’d then like you to swing by the school and see what’s happened to the deer.”
“I’ll get the dead geese sent on too,” T. Laine said.
Rick nodded and went on. “JoJo, I’d like you to take Nell’s research on the companies and gather everything you can on them, what they do, what their area of research is, employees, financial status, everything you can find out without digging so deeply you ping something and attract the attention of their security systems. If none of these companies are responsible for the psy-contamination, we’ll widen our search. But for now, we’ll start on Nell’s six.”
“What about us, boss?” Occam asked, pointing to Tandy and himself.
“I want you to check in with the other PsyLED units. See if they’ve noted similar readings or unusual human or animal activity. When Nell and T. Laine are finished at the pond, and when Nell feels up to it, I want Occam and T. Laine and Nell back at the DIC’s house in North Carolina. I want a reading to see if that site is also affected.”
“Boss, that isn’t—”
“I know it’s not a good idea, Occam. I know Nell could be injured. But it’s a long way away. I’m hoping she can read it safely.”
I frowned. “What if I can read it from Soulwood? Safer?”
Rick frowned back. His eyes looked blacker, shadows hidden in caverns of bruised-looking flesh. “That’s over eighty miles, straight-line measurement.”
I started to speak and stopped. Started again. “I bled on that land. My blood in the earth”—I waffled my hands, searching for ways to say something I had no words for—“gives me a tie to it. I can’t explain it because I don’t understand it myself. I haven’t tried what we’re talking about, but it might work.”
“Try that first, then. If it works, see what you feel from the pond area. You bled there too.”
I gave a little hand gesture that meant, I’ll do what I can.
“Your stitches are gone,” Rick said, his attention on my hands in the air. I tucked them beneath the table and said nothing.
“People,” Rick said, after a moment. “We have humans redlining from magical workings. This is no longer an information-gathering case. This is an attack of some kind, whether by accident or on purpose. It looks more and more likely that we have an MED.”
I didn’t feel very happy about it. Not at all. Neither did T. Laine. It had been an easier case, and actually a stressless, pressureless case, despite my run-ins with the dancer shadow-and-light thing, when it only involved a pond and a flock of geese and a few deer. Now it was people who were being hurt. When it hit the media that we had an MED in Knoxville, the news would likely cause severe repercussions against T. Laine’s subspecies. This wasn’t fun for any of us anymore.
Rick went on. “There is no law or system of laws currently established based on judicial precedent to deal with this sort of situation. Nor are there statutory laws created by legislation to deal with this situation. We are off the legal grid. This is why PsyLED was created: this is our mandate, to deal with problems like this. To stop them. And if people or beings or creatures are responsible, to find them and make sure they are stopped.” He closed his laptop, picked up his cell, and stood. “Go. Do things. Be smart. Tread carefully. Let’s get this solved fast. Forty-eight hours would be good.
“I’ll be notifying our upline people at PsyLED and the DOD. A task force will likely be created to deal with the situation if the contamination spreads. And, Nell, welcome to the team. I’d say your first case is well on the way to being something that PsyLED Spook School will study for some time to come.”
Rick turned and left the conference room.
“And thank you for the reminder that the first night of the full moon is forty-eight hours away,” JoJo said, sarcasm in her tone and her eyes on her screens, fingers tapping keys. “Ain’t this gonna be fun with all you people going furry on us.”
“I promise I won’t bite anyone,” Occam said, something sharp and cutting in his tone. “I like my life just fine and got no intention of bleeding out on the floor just for a taste of you people.”
“Pea’s claws are sharp,” JoJo said. “You’d be dead long before you felt a thing.”
“Stop it, you two,” T. Laine said.
JoJo looked as if she might want to say more on the subject, but instead said, “Nell, your research is good, but you can’t get jack in the public domain. I’ll dig deeper into our own databases.”
“Government-linked sites are likely to be top secret,” Tandy said, a thread of relief in his tone at the order for his teammates to stop picking at each other, “locked down on info.”
“Yeah, the feds and the spies are stingy suckers. I’ll set up an automatic search from a third-party site. And not ping anything.” JoJo shook her head. She was wearing her braids swirled up in an enormous bun today, with some strands sticking out like twigs. She looked beautiful, with her tattoos and piercings and her colorful clothes.
Maybe . . . maybe I could pierce my ears when this was over. Mama would—
I shut that away. I was a woman grown. I could pierce my ears if I wanted to.
I went to sign out the P 2.0 and get my freshly packed one-day gobag. Case first, lifestyle later.
* * *
We arrived at the pond site and parked close to the main road. The pond was still officially locked down by the local LEOs, but they hadn’t been back to the site in a while, long enough for people to hike in, circle around the crime scene tape, down the drive, and set up to stay awhile. There were three cars parked out of sight of the road on the curving two-rut drive. “People are fricking insane,” T. Laine spat, picking up her pace as we walked the long curve toward the pond. “I hate crowd control.” She thumbed on her phone and gave our location to the local LEO dispatch.
“Worse than insane,” I murmured, catching her arm and pulling her to a stop. I gestured through the trees to the opening beyond. “They set up tents. Campfires. And I don’t hear anyone.”
T. Laine went still, listening. There was only the wind and the faint clack of tree branches. The distant hum of traffic. The faint smell of old wood smoke from campfires. T. Laine asked the dispatcher to send three units to her twenty. When she was done, she turned off the ringer and pocketed her cell. I followed her lead until she drew her service weapon.
“Wait,” I said, my voice soft, so it didn’t carry. I stooped and placed one palm on the ground. Bloodlust slammed into me. Desire so strong it twisted my guts like barbed wire knotting inside me. So much blood . . . I whipped my body back. Nearly fell onto my backside trying to get away. So much blood . . .
T. Laine wrenched me up by my armpit. “Are you insane? You could get dragged down—”
“Death,” I said, and I wrenched away from the heat and warmth and blood in her veins, just beneath the skin of her hand. I stumbled again. Caught my balance. “A lot of death. And blood.” I squeezed my palms into tight fists, fighting the desire to feed the blood to the earth. Not the blood at the pond. Not the blood inside T. Laine. I closed my eyes. No, I thought, No, no, no. But my mouth went dry and tight and my breath came fast.
T. Laine touched my shoulder with her warm, blood-filled hand and shook me gently. “You okay?”
I backed away, nodding. Lying. Wanting. I moistened my lips and said, “Rick said that the directed working dissolved. I don’t think this one did. I think it got stronger.”