He chuffed a laugh. “Nell, sugar, the proper response to an out-of-control were-creature is standard ammo, gunfire enough to knock them off course and sway any accidental lapses of control, but lemme guess.” Occam’s golden eyes went hard. “Privately you were told to use silver. Just in case.”
“Pretty much,” I said. “Kill you dead, just to be safe.”
“Hmmm,” he said, his tone lowered, a burr of sound, his eyes so heated that it felt like two torches burning into me. “You got your service weapon in your hand?” He sipped his coffee and waited. When I didn’t answer and the silence between us grew heavy, he said, “Safe . . . is overrated. Sometimes it’s better to live dangerously.” When I still stayed silent—having been reminded of that trick by Daddy—Occam asked, sounding more like himself, “You got a quote for were-creatures?”
I lifted my chin and said, “He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.”
“I got no knowledge about the last two, but the first ones I can attest to.” He chuckled, the sound a low vibration that quivered along my spine. “But you’re more’n safe with me, Nell, sugar. Safer than a running deer or rabbit.”
“I ain’t never been a rabbit,” I said in church-speak. “And I figure Pea right there”—I nodded to his shoulder—“will rip out your’un throat if’n you decide to bite me.”
“And you’ll pull the trigger before I can get across the table,” he drawled. “Right?”
I pulled my weapon, racked back the slide, injecting a round into the chamber, and off-safetied, all in one slick motion. His eyes widened. “I will now,” I said. “Because I know when a cat is playing games with me, and I mean to stop it now, once and for all.”
Behind me, Rick said, “You playing games with the mouse, my brother?”
His voice was deeper too, and my skin prickled, rising in a tight chill. A faint sweat started, and I knew they could both smell the change on me. Both of them edged closer to me, a minuscule, almost silent shifting of feet on the floor. Was I in danger? I wondered if I’d really have to shoot them.
Over the loudspeakers, music flowed, saxophone and flute and the deep, distant notes of trombone. The melody swelled and fell like waves rolling on an ocean. Pea swiveled her head and stared at me, her eyes as green as her neon coat. The gold in Occam’s eyes was snuffed. He shook himself like a cat who had been thrown in a tub full of icy water. Rick shook himself, entered, and went to the coffeemaker. Occam offered Rick a cup of coffee and the boss accepted a mug from him, both guys dipping their heads in that peculiarly male manner of greeting. As if nothing had happened and they were just starting their day.
I blinked, unchambered the round, reset the mag, safetied, and holstered the gun. Because that was what I was supposed to do. But my insides were churning. Fear trickled through my arms and legs and out my boot soles into the floor. I thought to take a breath, and my ribs felt creaky with the motion. I was shaking slightly.
Tandy entered the break room, his ten-mil held at his side, and took a chair beside me. “On the nine days of the full moon,” he said softly, “they get antsy. Soon as they do, we start the music playing. Twenty-four-seven. Understand?” Tandy holstered his weapon, no expression on his face.
I said, “Trust me. I will not forget. Ever. I’m guessing there’s drives with the music on them?”
He placed two in my hand. “One for your cell. Sync it to everything electronic you have. Keep a backup at your house. On the full moon, you keep the music handy and play it continuously.”
“Okay. I just got one question. Why didn’t Pea do something?”
“Pea?” Tandy, swiveled his head, taking in the entire room, seeing Pea back on Occam’s shoulder. His mouth opened slowly and he breathed, “Oh . . . Nell . . .”
“What?”
Before he answered my question, his cell buzzed, and Tandy left the room, his phone to his ear. When I had first known Tandy, he had been this quiet, unassuming, introverted man. Not a man I would think would ever own, much less hold, a gun. Not a man I might consider capable of protecting himself. Not a man I associated with violence, except on the receiving end of it.
I had helped him when we first met, sending him some small bit of strength and power to resist the emotional impressions of the others. Had I sent him more than I knew? Had T. Laine’s spells given him access to more assertive, violent personality traits? Had he picked up the aggression from the werecats? Or had Tandy always been more than I knew?
Before I could figure out how to address a batch of interlocking situations all at once, the others filed in, sleepy and begging coffee, T. Laine tossing a box of Krispy Kremes on the table. Everyone dug in. Pea jumped to the table and accepted a thimble-sized lump of sugared dough from JoJo. She sat up like a cat on the table and took it in her hands, which had opposable thumbs. I hadn’t noticed that until now. Pea nibbled on the donut, her cat eyes watching me, as if entertained.
I stared at the wall, trying to figure out what had just happened.
“Nell?” Rick asked. “Did you ever figure out what the yellow glow in the center of the circle and triangle was?” He swiveled his laptop to me, with the report I had e-mailed last night after I gave myself hypothermia during all my scans.
I said, “I think it’s the location of the activity that resulted in the MED.”
“Can you pinpoint its GPS?” he asked.
“Not like you mean. Not with an address. Just a general location. I already looked. The yellow glow could be any of several businesses in the center of the circle.”
Rick frowned and said, “A typical MED is a postulated weapon,” he reminded his sleepy crew, “a magical exposure device, a black-magic curse, capable of an active or passive working intended to spread violent, offensive, magical energies over a wide area. Contamination of the populace by a dark-magical weapon for terrorist/political aims. We’ve considered the possibility of an MED from the get-go, but until we had some evidence for that unsupported theory—physical, material, human, or paranormal—I had no reason to send the hypothesis up the chain of command. After the things we’ve seen over the last few days, we now have to consider the clear and present danger of an MED. And worse, we may be facing something out of control of the witch or coven who created the working in the first place.”
“Out of control?” T. Laine asked.
Rick nodded, his eyes on her. “Something that was and/or is acting independently of its creator.”
I sat up. “The infinity loop dancer. Is it acting according to a prearranged, integrated part of the original working, or is it developing its own agenda?”
TEN
Rick looked at me the way a bug lover looked at a strange beetle held down by stickpins. “I’ve spent the better part of the night online with PsyLED experts in witch workings, arcenciel paranormal energies, and a theoretical physicist from MIT,” Rick said. “I don’t pretend to understand half of what they were talking about, but they narrowed down the problem with magic—as we currently understand it—being used in such a way that the working itself might become stable even after the initial working is completed and the formation energies are used up. Normally whatever energies remain after a working just blow back into the universe, the way a shock wave eventually disperses into the air. But according to the physicists, there is some theoretical possibility that may not always happen, and the energies might remain available, on-site, for other uses. Or take on stability and keep going even after the witch thinks she’s closed it down. They postulated mechanisms by which paranormal energies—which they are still calling psysitopes but may alter or add to at any time, because they’re scientists and classifications are always changing—can be transformed to become stable. And all of the mechanisms can be accomplished deliberately or by accident.”
The others started taking notes. I took a slow, painful breath, fighting a bad feeling in my middle at Rick’s words, thinking about my land. Thinking about the dancing infinity loop. Thinking about Soul and the energies I saw her become. A dragon made of light. Thinking about my blood, which might create or hold a trace of psysitopic activity when I commune with the earth. Or when I have roots buried inside me. Like at the pond. Thinking that all these things were disparate, but also interlocking because magic was nothing but energy, and energy was interlocking. E=MC2.
I placed one hand on the break-room table, the other still on my middle where I could easily feel the rooty scars, adding my own thought at the top of Rick’s list of possibilities. I might have created a magical something-something when I made roots grow inside, forcing a tree that had once been a live oak to heal me. Because I had to be responsible for that. Me. Not the tree. I might not have wanted to accept that possibility, might have hidden it from my conscious mind, but the knowledge that I had done that had always been there. And if I had done one such thing unconsciously, then something similar, or even vastly different, could happen in other ways and places. So, did someone somewhere accidentally release a magical working that caused the effects all around Knoxville, do it and not know they had done so, or did someone somewhere do it on purpose? Either way, what was the infinity loop now?
Around me the moon music swelled, high notes combined with deep, dire low notes of the compositions that kept the werecats from reacting to the moon so much. Music that Rick had provided to PsyLED, so long as no one knew where it came from and so long as PsyLED didn’t try to find the air-magic composer. I’d studied that at Spook School too. So much I had learned and was now putting into use in the real world.
“Nell? Where y’at?” Rick asked in the slang of New Orleans. He didn’t use it often, but when he did, the odd phrases were comforting on some level. And he might use them more, the closer we got to the full moon.
There was a proper response to the colloquial saying; it swam up from the deeps of my brain. “What it is?” I said slowly, and Rick’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “I’m . . . putting it all together. You’uns go on. I’m listening.”
“A’ight,” Rick said.
A’ight, not copy or okay. That was odd.
“Idea number one,” he said, “is for a working to be so powerful that when a coven is finished with it, the energies don’t dissipate. Two is for a nascent magical consciousness to be stimulated by a low leak of mundane nuclear energy and evolve its intellect in the vicinity of the leak. Since none of the sites is located near a currently active energy plant, that idea is on hold.
“Three is for a creature made of energy, like an arcenciel, to accidentally stimulate and feed the working, giving dispersing working energies the time to stabilize. PsyLED says that there are no such creatures living in the Appalachians at this time.”