“I noticed,” I said.
“You pulled on Soulwood.”
I frowned, uncertain.
Occam touched my forearm with an unscarred finger. “It’s okay. I felt a sense of peace. I smelled the firs and the poplars. I felt the soil and the grass and knew it was a safe place to bed down. I felt … Soulwood. I felt you, Nell, sugar. I knew you.”
I looked down at my hands, fingers laced across my lap in the dark. And studied his right hand, the contact between us the pad of a single, warm finger just above my wrist. I said, “I shared the land with you both. I wondered if you could tell.”
“Can’t say as I always know when you draw on Soulwood, but this time I could feel it. It felt good. Peaceful. As if the moon wasn’t in charge of what and who I am. As if you gave me a different kind of power over my cat, that I don’t normally have.” He withdrew his hand and I missed the warmth.
Rick, dressed in dark jeans and a white T-shirt, reappeared, moving smoothly in the night. Occam opened the car door and the overhead light came on and the wild poured in. Evergreens and heat and mosquitoes. I hated summer in Knoxville. Rick said, “Thanks for coming. I have something to show you. Ingram, you too. Got your field boots?” It was as if the previous scene had never happened, and since Occam seemed fine with it, I guessed I was too.
Rather than reply, I unzipped my one-day gobag and kicked off my sneakers, hauling on the boots. While I changed shoes, Rick ate a protein bar. It smelled nasty and I bet it tasted nasty too. I’d tried making protein bars for the cats, but the whey protein powder was awful, the egg-based protein was dreadful, and the powdered fishmeal protein was yucky and hard to work with. Come fall I could make venison jerky and wild turkey jerky from kills the wereleopards brought me. I could also smoke trout from mountain streams. I had ordered some dried skipjack tuna shavings to increase the protein content. Until I got the shavings and hunting season was right for butchering meat, the cats were stuck with the icky commercially prepared stuff.
Stepping out of the car, I twisted my silky skirt up between my legs and tucked it in at my waist, making a kind of baggy drawers. Not having cat eyes, I flicked on my flashlight and slid my gobag over one shoulder as Rick led us into the dark, off to the right, away from the road and toward the Tennessee River. We crossed a field planted with a healthy crop of soybeans, the knee-high plants swishing as we moved, grasshoppers flying up, most moving slow, nearly dead from the poison I felt/smelled/tasted as we walked toward the water.
When the moon rose, it might be bright enough to see something, but for now, my flash was a thin beam on the plants of the field. I sent my awareness into the land as best I was able without touching skin to earth. The land wasn’t dead. It was full of nutrients and organic matter from the last flood, the soil rich. Despite the current moderate drought, the soy was healthy, putting out lots of bean pods, not that I would eat anything from this land. The pesticides that were killing the grasshoppers and other critters that attacked soy had been absorbed by the roots and leaves and into the bean pods. I closed my eyes as I walked, feeling for the life in the ground. Even amid the poisons, I could feel the magic in the land, tendrils twining around and deep. Black magic.
Occam gripped my shoulder, jerking me back. “I forgot you can’t see in the dark,” he said. The cats had stopped. I hadn’t. I’d almost stepped across a witch circle. I had been so involved with my thoughts, walking with my eyes closed, the magics flowing up through my boots, I hadn’t even noticed the soy had ended. That was stupid.
“Thanks,” I said, not sure how I felt about Occam watching over me so closely. And then he released my shoulder and walked away, following Rick, the two of them walking widdershins outside the circle, sniffing the air for scents humans might miss.
“Anything?” Occam asked.
“Something sour, like sickness. Dead cat.” The boss shrugged.
The twenty-foot-wide circle, drawn with what looked like powdered white chalk, studded with crow and buzzard feathers, was a witch circle unlike any I had seen in Spook School. Instead of a pentagram inside a circle, which created a pentacle, this one had angles like the spokes of a wheel. In each of the spokes, there were shapes that might have been runes drawn in the dirt. The spokes connected to a smaller central circle, maybe three feet across, and in the center of that was a dead black cat, blood all around, soaked into the ground. It was hanging upside down from a makeshift wooden tripod, its throat slit. The cat had been sacrificed.
Bloodlust rose up in me, demanding, insistent, needing. Feed the land. Soulwood, so recently invoked, wanted the blood.
“I was driving,” Rick said.
I yanked back on the need, holding it down, trying to smother it.
“I felt something … happening inside me,” he continued, halting, his voice growing raspy, “like a moon-calling, but … different. I pulled over, secured my weapon, shifted, and I woke up there”—he pointed—“lying near the circle, but outside it. And—” He stopped, shook his head, and looked around, his eyes puzzled and perhaps a little bit sleepy. He looked bewildered, as if he had woken up in the middle of sleepwalking.
Occam paced to Rick. He didn’t touch Rick but stood close, looking slightly to the side, cat-like.
Rick said, “That’s a black-magic circle. On the bank of a river, a dead black cat in the center.”
“Yeah, Hoss, we see that,” Occam said, his tone kind. “Anything else you need to tell us?”
“I … I don’t know.” He stared at the dead cat. “My cat grabbed the gobag holding the blanket and my old cell. I ended up here. But I don’t know how I kept from being drawn into the circle.”
Rick must have felt the death of the housecat in the circle and tracked it by … I had no idea.
He shook himself, more dog-like than cat-like, his silvered hair flying with the motion. Sounding more like the senior special agent I knew, he said, “Black magic isn’t illegal, in the human world, except for the cruelty-to-animals part. We need to report this. This could indicate a psychopath, a serial killer, trying out her skills.”
“Statistically speaking,” I said, remembering my studies from PsyLED Spook School, “black-magic users don’t usually become serial killers.” Rick turned his attention to me and I gave a tiny shrug. “It’s a new course for continuing ed. The Statistics of Magic. It isn’t the death or the torture that witches want, it’s the power that the deaths bring.”
“That makes a weird kind of sense,” Rick said. “I can barely smell death on the cat. No release of bowels or urine on the air.” To Occam, he said, “It hasn’t been dead long. Maybe three hours?”
Occam lifted a thumb, an ambiguous agreement. “Maybe less. After sunset.”
A good six feet from the edge of the circle, I continued widdershins around it, stumbling in the dark, taking photos with my camera, the flash too bright, shocking in the night, but revealing the runes in the ground, in the spokes of the wheel. Keeping busy kept the bloodlust at bay, but I shouldn’t have—wouldn’t have—drawn on Soulwood had I known about the cat.
Occam said something that was lost on the night air.
“River is that way.” Rick pointed. “Twenty paces. “North is there.” He pointed in a different direction. “Moonrise will be in that general area.” He pointed.
I made notes on my cell, aligning with the north point on the witch circle. I tackled the pink elephant in the room. “Did the spell call you here? You specifically?”
Rick shook his head. “I don’t see how. To summon a human or a were-creature, the witch needs something personal from them—blood, hair with roots, fingernails with a bit of flesh on them. There’s nothing of mine here.”
“T. Laine—Kent,” I amended, “should be here, not me. My witch-magic knowledge is nothing compared to hers.”
“I texted Kent while I was dressing,” Rick said. “ETA ten. Meanwhile, will you read the land? Are you up to it?”
“Except for the dead cat, yeah.” Death and blood called to my magic. The team knew about me being easily caught up in the earth, but not about my bloodlust. If I got caught up in the land, hopefully someone would knock me out and stop me before I killed someone. Risking a brain injury was better than risking me killing someone.
“Manageable?” Occam asked, reading my worried expression, or maybe my worried scent.
“I think so.” But I’d discovered that most magical things were manageable with Occam around. Two dissimilar species of predator were seldom compatible, but, strangely, being guarded by Occam’s cat soothed my own predatory instincts. Maybe because we suffered bloodlust for two very different reasons. I hadn’t yet told Occam that his cat was so important to me. I didn’t like being dependent on others for something so basic as self-control.
I unfolded my faded pink blanket, settling it on the ground, at the north point of the circle but outside. I sat, my knees decorously covered. I’d learned not to place both palms flat on the ground and thrust myself into the earth, but rather to put one index fingertip on it first and take a peek down. It was my version of testing the waters with a toe.
Rick was behind me, Occam to my left in case he had to cut me free of the earth. It had happened. I touched the ground with the tip of one, then both index fingers. Something wriggled beneath the ground. I jerked my hands to my chest, hugging myself.
“Nell?” Occam asked. “What?” He was kneeling near me, Rick beside him, all our faces on a level. Occam’s white scars and Rick’s strangely silvered hair caught the flashlight’s beam, creating voids of shadow and inky night where their eyes were. It was creepy, but I figured I better not say that. I frowned. Gingerly I put my right index fingertip on the earth. And frowned harder.
“What?” Rick demanded.
“Maggots. Lots of maggots.” For me that meant vampires. Vampires had been here in such numbers that I felt them stronger than the black magic.
“Why?” he asked, understanding what I meant.
“I don’t know. I’m going deeper.” I closed my eyes.
I heard the sound of a knife being drawn from a Kydex sheath, a snap/slide/plastic/steel sound. Without opening my eyes, I knew that Occam had drawn his blade. Just in case. Sometimes the ground got a little too excited when I was around and the earth had been known to send up vines and roots and tendrils to stick into me, to tie me to it, to pull me down. “So far so good,” I muttered.
I dropped slowly through the layers, past the sensation of maggots on the surface, where I encountered the black magic that permeated an inch below. It felt icky, slimy, like burnt motor oil and something I might scrape out of my compost pile. Underneath the magics, I slipped through soil poisoned with pesticides where modern farming had been continuous for decades. Below that was disturbed soil with evidence of earlier farming methods: an iron tip from an old tiller; bits and pieces of metal and old diesel fuel in one spot that felt as if some machine had broken and been repaired on-site; a refuse pit with rusted tin cans and broken bottles.