We made good time to the turnoff for the pond, and I drove T. Laine’s Escape past the yellow caution tape and parked on the two-rut drive. A pond was visible through the trees, dark water around a bend. Nervous energies tingled under my skin, half worry, half anticipation. This was my first, real, active, ongoing paranormal site. It wasn’t a crime site, but it was a big part of what I had trained for.
I let the lead agent handle introductions and the Q and A with the county deputies, while I calmed my mind and went over the protocol for dealing with such sites. Because this was a fresh scene and supposedly no one magical had been on the grounds of the old farm, the first thing I needed to do was use the P 2.0 to determine if there was an active working anywhere near.
I stepped to the back of the vehicle, where I unpacked the device and went through the start-up procedure. I turned the sensor on the closest human to verify human-standard, then on T. Laine to get a good witch reading, and then walked around the bend toward the pond.
It was small, about a hundred feet in diameter, an irregular oval with an open space on the side where I stood, and pine trees on all the others. Kudzu covered dilapidated buildings on the far side. A small shed with farm equipment was to my right. The dew-wet grass beneath my feet had been cut recently and the smell of countryside filled the air.
I was about a hundred feet from the water’s edge and didn’t expect to get a reading at all. Instead, I got a midline reading on level three and a near twenty-five percent on level-four psysitope. Which was a surprise. Something was still happening here.
T. Laine glanced my way, and I gave her an abbreviated nod. Her eyes went wide for an instant before the cop mask fell back in place.
Because there was no crime, just a quirky reading, I didn’t have to take trace matter and blood samples to be held for PsyCSI workup and possible DNA testing. In the event that we discovered culprits or victims, that might change. In that eventuality, I would need to create more than a simple evidentiary record, take psy-meter readings, and gather samples of any elements used in magical workings. I had been trained to collect fingerprints and study blood spatter, but usually in magical crimes, PsyCSI took care of the crime scene workups. Of course, with Knoxville not having a PsyCSI team yet, the techs would have to fly in from another territory. For now, I went back to protocol, starting over with a strictly human evaluation.
I could see what the Haz Mat tech had thought was a problem. The geese were floating . . . No. Slowly swimming on the water. In what looked like a perfect circle. Steady, unhurried. But a perfect circle. Geese didn’t do that.
Using two different cameras and my cell phone, I took photographs of the pond, the water dark with the tannins of decayed plant matter, the flock of geese slowly swimming in the middle, and the humans watching from the shore. Redundancy in everything kept us from losing evidence that might be valuable at any trial. I got some nifty shots of geese and a few good shots of the morning sky with the pond reflecting golden clouds and the trees that lined it on one side.
I called out to T. Laine, “I’m goin’ in for closer readings.”
“Copy,” she said and turned back to the cops. The dark-haired witch was enjoying being boss. I knew I’d get my share of scut work and paperwork and menial jobs. What no one knew was that I enjoyed this part of the work. According to my coworkers, I had a knack for several things—briefing summations, evidence gathering, and telling the boss what he needed to know, when he didn’t want to hear it. And organizing paperwork and files. Scut work.
I documented everything I had done, along with the readings at one hundred feet out, and then tucked my pant legs into my boot tops. Through the high grass, I headed into the seventy-five-foot mark and took readings, then at fifty feet out, then again at twenty-five feet from shore. At that point, the P 2.0 was nearly redlining on all four levels. I went no farther, because if someone had drawn a witch circle for a working big enough to cover the pond and back this far from shore, I didn’t want to step on that circle and trigger something. Like a magical bomb. I had seen pics at Spook School, and they had been awful, including shots of humans blown to mincemeat, or with missing limbs, or burned.
If there was an enormous working, then the officer who had taken the reading here, with the older model psy-meter, had been lucky.
Keeping a fairly even twenty-five feet out, I walked around the pond. When I was on the far side of the small body of water, I spotted the first dead goose on the shore. I wasn’t sure what had killed it, but scavengers had been eating it postmortem. From the size of the bites and the scattered feathers and body parts, I’d say buzzards and maybe feral cats. If the working was still active, why hadn’t the animal activity broken the circle? Assuming there was a circle. I hadn’t detected one, and T. Laine was better qualified than the P 2.0 to determine the presence of an active working.
I took photos of the scavenger depredation and continued my circumnavigation of the pond, finding the second goose, this one floating on the water, wings and feathers spread. I couldn’t see a cause of death, but there was no visible blood or disfigurement. I took photos and went on around the pond to the car to record everything I had seen and all the readings. T. Laine joined me there when I was done, and she asked, “Finished with the human and tech eval?”
I nodded and closed up the P 2.0. “I stayed outside the redline zone. But there’s a couple of dead geese on the far side, with clear scavenger activity at one. If there’s an active circle, it didn’t break.”
“No circle,” T. Laine said, her face going pinched, her arms wrapped around her, her hands clasping her arms in a self-hug. “No active working. And I get why someone thought this might be radioactivity. It looks like what Rick said. Contamination. Like someone brought something magical here and dumped it into the pond.” She studied the small body of water, its surface placid, mirroring the blue sky. “In a sight working, it’s glowing a sickly green gray. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this before.
“If it is a working, which I strongly question,” T. Laine went on, “it’s something new.” The moon witch was rubbing her upper arms, the skin of her palms dry and rasping on her jacket, the gesture a worried tic. One-handed, she tucked her too-long black bangs behind an ear. “If this is some magical attack, it’ll be a homegrown terrorist group, one utilizing witches. Maybe witches being used against their wills.”
I had read about that at Spook School. A full coven in Natchez, Mississippi, had been forced into a working that kept them trapped and slowly killed them as they were forced to keep the magical working going. I put that together with the fact that Congress had still not made a determination about how paranormal beings would be viewed under the law, as equal citizens or something else entirely. If witches had launched some kind of magical weapon, or were even taking part unwillingly, that would likely increase the chance of the government forcing registration of all witches. Throughout history, registration of the populace, or part of the populace, had been a prelude to extermination. Step one of a pogrom.
“We need to report in,” she said, “and get Rick involved. Why don’t you send him the preliminary psy-meter recording results and I’ll have a chat with him. While we talk, I need you to collect the geese and then find a comfortable spot to take readings of your own kind.”
Collect the geese. Ick. But I had killed my first chicken for the pot before I was ten, so dead birds weren’t particularly horrible. Still. Ick. I did as I was told and sent the psy-meter recordings to Rick and opened the bulky, fully stocked physical evidence kit in the back of T. Laine’s Ford. From it I got gloves, the metal forceps for picking up bigger pieces, small numbered plastic markers, and several sizes of plastic evidence bags, from quart-sized to oversized. The bags were usually paper, to keep bacteria and mold and suchlike from speeding decomposition—decomp in PsyLED-speak—but in this case, oversized plastic zip baggies would keep the pond and body fluids from leaking everywhere. I gloved up, took several COC—chain of custody—sheets, sometimes called ERs—evidentiary records—and traipsed clockwise around the pond to the floating bird.
Fortunately it had drifted closer to shore, and I was able to fish it out easily. It didn’t have rigor and its wings moved effortlessly as I folded them, tucked the bird into the bag, and sealed it. I recorded the date, time, GPS location, and all the other info I needed to maintain the chain of evidence.
The other bird was dry, if scattered and well gnawed, and had to be gathered in a different manner. I quartered the area and put a numbered marker at each body part. I probably should have tried to preserve the feathers, but they were scattering everywhere on the slight breeze.
I used twelve markers and gathered twelve pieces of birdy evidence. Which stank exactly as it should: like dead meat left out in the elements. I doubted either bird would ever be looked at in an evidentiary manner, but I was following orders, orders that might have been intended for me to practice my new skills.
Paperwork completed, I sealed the birds into a single, extra-large baggie and placed it all in the back of the vehicle. And looked for T. Laine, who was standing, facing the water, both hands to her sides. I knew she was reading the pond in the way of witches. It should have made me uncomfortable, with my churchwoman background, but it didn’t. I had learned about witches and their gifts and it wasn’t devil worship and they didn’t sacrifice goats to Beelzebub. They just had genetically given gifts for the land or the water or the moon or growing things, whatever. With mathematics and geometry, they could harness and use both free energies and those stored in matter to accomplish certain goals.
T. Laine looked okay, so I began my next chore. Reading the land.
She had meant hand-atop-ground reading, the way I did at Soulwood, and the way I had done at other sites when PsyLED was looking for clues in a series of kidnappings. I glanced at the four law enforcement officers standing nearby, watching T. Laine, two with well-hidden fear, one with amusement, as if T. Laine was being cute. The other cop, older, graying, looked on with boredom.
I took a notebook, a pen, a small, square, faded-pink blanket, and the psy-meter 2.0 with me to the edge of the redlining border.
I had spent all my life hiding my magics, denying them, so I could stay alive and not get burned at the stake by the ultrahardline elders of God’s Glory. And now I was all but flaunting my tie to the land. As one of my teachers at Spook School had said, life was weird.
After shaking the blanket open and snapping it to the ground, I sat in the middle of it with my knees crossed and the notebook and psy-meter 2.0 in front of me. I synced the device to my cell and sent the recordings to U-18 HQ. I once again noted the date, time, and GPS location on the pad. It looked like I was taking scientific readings. It was utterly a cheat. I studied the land around me, noted a wildlife cam pointed at the pond, the remains of the kudzu-buried, tumbledown buildings on one edge of the property, and spotted the foundations of an old house near them in the pines across the pond. The brick showed signs of a long-ago fire. To my right was a better-kept lean-to filled with farm equipment, a small tractor, and gardening tools, all looking functional and which were secured with massive chains.