“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 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?
FIVE
I stretched and went to find a cup of Rick’s dark French roast Community coffee. The stretch in HQ, before five a.m., doing paperwork and database scans, was hard on me. Trees slept in the night and the urge to lie down and snore was strong, but as probie it most often fell on me, and would until September when the budget said we’d be getting a new probationary officer (unless there was a new hiring freeze), or when I got custody of Mud, whichever happened first. My schedule would change then. For now, I was night shift and I needed the caffeine pick-me-up with three packets of sugar and a dollop of real cream. I made a second cup for Tandy and considered which fixins to add. I had learned that his coffee preferences tended to change based on who he worked with, so I situated the painted metal travel mugs and creamer and sugar packets on a small tray. I placed his coffee at his side and fell into my chair. “Dark. Creamer and packets of sugar and sweetner to the side if you decide to come to the light side.”
Tandy smiled, his skin white, the scarlet Lichtenberg lines vibrant in the light of the screens. “Star Wars? Impressive, Ingram.”
I smiled and sipped. “Does my being so sleepy cause you to feel sleepy?”
“Yes, Nell. It does. It’s easier when there are several people in the building, as the effect of any single person’s emotions is mixed and blunted. But with everyone off shift but us, your …” He paused. “The force of sleepiness is strong in this one.”
Tandy pushed away from the keyboard and took a sip, opened a tiny plastic tub of cream, and poured it into his mug. Sipped again. All of our mugs had been painted by an anonymous artist, Tandy’s with clouds and lightning, which was kinda mean, though he seemed to find it amusing. Mine was painted with green leaves. Tandy asked, “Do you hate paper trails as much as I think you do?”
“I’d rather have a bad cold than have to do an NCIC search and now I have two of them.”
“Summation?”
“Grindylows are scary. The list of were-creature kills is spectacular and a little terrifying for the U.S. grindys.
“Also, blood-sacrifice witch circles are a pain in the neck. I’ve been paper-tracking through police records for reports of sacrifice on the bank of any river or creek and trying to tie it to waning moon cycles. So far I have nothing. You got any idea how not-user-friendly NCIC is for magic-related records?”
The National Crime Information Center—NCIC—might be the lifeline of law enforcement, but it was downright painful for us to use. The agency was an electronic clearinghouse of crime data available to virtually every criminal justice agency nationwide, twenty-four/seven. It had helped LEOs identify terrorists, track down and apprehend fugitives, locate missing persons, and convict serial killers. It had been estimated that there were currently thirteen million active records available, and searchable according to specific keywords. But not magic keywords.
And it was boring.
“I’m aware,” Tandy said. His understanding smile was sweet as he continued, “JoJo loves it, which I’ll never understand.”
“Are you and JoJo getting married?” I asked.
Tandy’s cup bobbled in his hands and some of the creamy coffee splashed out onto the table. “What?”
I frowned at him and maybe at my own unexpected and blunt question. “Well. Ummm. You don’t think that it’s a secret you two are practically living together, do you?”
“No. But, married?” The last word squeaked.
I frowned at him. “I’m less and less inclined to find importance in the institution of marriage, but for most people it tends to be the next logical step in a sexual relationship.”
“Nee-e-ell.” Tandy dragged out my name and I thought he might have blushed, but I couldn’t be sure. He stood and mopped up his spill with a roll of paper towels kept on the windowsill, silent as he worked. I waited, not sure what I had said wrong. “This is a most inappropriate line of discourse,” he said after a too-long silence, and he sounded uncomfortable and snippety, which I found odd.
“Really?” I asked, trying to figure out what was going on. “It’s all anyone in the church ever thinks about: who’s proposing concubinage or marriage to who—whom?—and when.”
Tandy tossed the towel in the garbage and sat back down. “Okay. I guess I understand that.” He met my gaze across the table and dragged his cup closer, fiddling with a spoon and sweetener packets. “Meeting her parents would be the next logical step, and JoJo hasn’t asked me to do that.”
“Why not?” I stirred my coffee, watching from the corner of my eye as he dipped the spoon and stirred his coffee—without adding anything more to it. He blushed harder, the red a certainty now, but he hadn’t walked away, so I went on. “Tandy, why hasn’t she asked you to meet her parents?”
“I’m this white guy with crazy red hair and bizarre red lines on my skin. I’m fine for a roll in the hay but not for taking home to meet her parents.”
“I know for a fact that JoJo would never say something like that.”
Tandy smiled slightly, but didn’t retract his statement.
“You asked her to meet your parents?”
“My father is … not around. And my mother is an unsubtle racist and a bigot. She kicked me out of the house when I was struck by lightning and developed the lines and my gift.” He paused and sipped his coffee again, his expression pained. “She touched me when she threw me out. Her hatred and fear were palpable, so terrible that I—” He stopped. “I haven’t been back and have no intention of ever going back.”
I had nothing helpful to say to that. Sifting through my limited, recently acquired, socially appropriate lines of comfort, I said simply, “Families can suck all the red offa life’s lollipop.”
Tandy burst out laughing, his muscles unclenching. “Yes, they can. Why do you think JoJo hasn’t asked me to meet her family? Has she said anything to you?”
“Not a word. But the reasons can be all over the place. You should ask her instead of assuming it’s the color of your skin.”
“And when I read her emotions when I ask that? And I know exactly what she’s feeling about it? That’s a terrible invasion of privacy, Nell.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way. “So send her an e-mail. You won’t be there when she reads it. She can think about it for a while before trying to answer.”
“Isn’t that taking the easy way out?”
“No. If you tell her in the first paragraph that you’re doing it this way to give her emotional privacy, then it becomes sweet.” I thought about words normal people might use and added, “Mushy sweet.”
Tandy laughed again, and I remembered the anxiety-ridden man he had been the first time I met him. He had changed a lot. We all had.
“I’ll take it under consideration,” he said. He changed the subject. “You need to examine the soil on the roof. It’s been a while and with so little rain and the winds last week, it might have blown away.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, but I tucked the reminder away for later. I could tell the soil was still up there. I could feel it. Rick and Occam had carted ten five-gallon buckets of dirt from my land and deposited it onto the flat roof, as soon as I was human enough to think of returning to my job. They wanted me to have a safe place to rest should I need Soulwood to rejuvenate. Or heal. Or a place to plant green things. Or anything. I wasn’t planning to use it, but it was nice to know it was there and even nicer to know that my coworkers—my friends—cared enough to do that for me.
He looked up and I heard the door to the stairwell open. T. Laine trudged up the hallway. Tandy asked me, “So what did you find in the dreaded NCIC database?”
“Local sheriff’s deputy reports about witch circles that were not routed to us, going back over three months.”
T. Laine dumped her gobag and laptop on the conference room table. “Yeah. That means I’m not getting any sleep tonight,” she groused.
“Should I have waited till morning to send them to you?” I asked.
Tandy tilted his head as if trying to read our emotional reactions.
“No. You did right. Update me.”
“I’ve found ten witch circles reported to the sheriff’s department that were not routed to us, plus the two we already know about. Three had dead black cats, two had white rats, one with a raccoon, four with no sacrifices on-site, all of them located on the bank of a creek or river.”
“Needless to say,” T. Laine said, “there might have been more circles that weren’t discovered or reported. And near running water is not an ideal location because of the possible disruptive action on workings—unless we have a water witch involved.”
“Was Rick in town on the other black cat ceremonies?” Tandy asked.
“No,” I said.
“I’m doing a prelim comparison on the photos of all the circles,” our witch said, her words slow and her tone thoughtful. “So far, they all bear the same magical signature.” She punched buttons on her keybord and photos of the circles I had gathered appeared overhead. “The runes are confusing. The focals are mismatched. Nothing about any of the workings or circles makes sense under the accepted rules of magic. Most importantly, according to the lunar calendar, none of the circles appear to have been worked at the full moon, which I would expect to be the case for any working calculated to hit a were-creature. Rick being called, showing increased signs of ageing, but not being killed when he shows up at the circles, still only makes sense as coincidence. In which case the curse is for someone else and that someone is in danger.”