Mud and I spent the hottest part of midafternoon outside, deciding where to put the possible greenhouse, how to situate it so it got the best sun in fall and winter. But it was too hot to stay out for long. I had to work come evening, and so I called it a day in late afternoon, took another cool shower, and grabbed an hour’s nap.
• • •
It was evening. I hadn’t slept enough to make it through my usual twelve-hour shift without nodding off. I had dropped Mud off at Daddy’s and went in to apologize for my anger and rudeness. Not that I took the threat to kill churchmen off the table. Any who came on my property were still at risk of death. I just phrased it with a smile, as if I was discussing tea and scones instead of self-defense by shotgun. Daddy accepted the apology and brought up the greenhouse. It was a nice visit, all in all, mainly because I wasn’t being judgmental or causing problems. This time. There was a time and place for that later, in what would be an ongoing, lifelong battle, I was sure. I left Mud in deep conversation with Mama Grace about how to make her special cheese biscuits.
As I walked to the door, Daddy looked up at me and then at my youngest true sib, in a sort of a promise. “You got child care worked out?” he asked.
I was nowhere near a solution, but I nodded. “Getting there.”
“She’ll be safe here tonight. I’ll keep an eye on her. And on Larry Aden.” Daddy might not make the best decisions all the time, and getting him to walk into the twenty-first century wasn’t easy, but Mud was safer with the Nicholson clan than with me tonight. Until she grew leaves and the churchmen burned her at the stake.
FOUR
I dropped my four-day gobag off in the locker room and took a few seconds to trim back stress-growth leaves at my hairline. Talking to Daddy hadn’t been horrible, but it hadn’t been easy, either. I’d been a tree for about six months after the last big case and that experience had left me leafy and viny and rooty. I didn’t so much indulge in personal hygiene as landscape myself. Half of the team was equally injured and had been in rehab of one kind or another. Unit Eighteen had been working a skeleton crew for months—paperwork, protocol, and research. Now that Occam was back from healing, and I wasn’t so rooty, we were a full crew. It felt good to be back to work.
When I was presentable, I went to my cubicle, stuck a finger into the soil and herbs at the window, and locked my one-day gobag and weapon in the drawer. The weapon wasn’t needed in HQ. The herbs were too dry, which severely limited the salad flavors I had planned on for supper. I fished an empty bottle from the recycles bin, filled it with tap water, and emptied it slowly over the herbs. “There you go, my pretties. Sorry about the chlorine. I promise not to clip you for a day or two to let you recover, and I’ll bring better water tomorrow.” Kissing the air over them, I picked up my laptop and two tablets and carried them to the conference room, where Tandy was bent over the unit’s main system, the one where orders and comms originated. I took my place at the conference table and logged in to the PsyLED system. “Hey,” I said.
“Evening, Nell. I brought salad fixings for supper,” our resident empath said. He wasn’t prescient, but because of his empathy gift, he sometimes seemed to be expecting things ahead of time, like what I wanted for supper. He’d explained that it was a part of knowing us so deeply, not a form of psychic mind control or prophecy.
“I can do salad,” I said, proud that I sounded like a modern city girl. I’d never be hip or cool or chic, but at least I fit in now, sharing a more common accent and language syntax. “I’m sending you my report on the black-magic circle from last night.”
Tandy nodded, the sharp overhead lights picking out the Lichtenberg lines that traced across his skin like scarlet lightning.
I read over the summation reports for the last few days and the latest on Rick’s black-cat-in-a-circle case. There wasn’t much. The focals—the bloody gauze, the knife, the golf ball and tee—from the circle had been sent to the lab, signed for, and placed into a queue for eventual testing. No date for actual analysis had been sent to us. T. Laine still wasn’t sure what the circles were for, but causality needed to be proved or disproved in law enforcement, and she was working on the “Rick being called by a black-magic spell” aspect to see if it was happenstance or deliberate.
Someone had asked Rick if he played golf and he’d said, “Not for years.” The tee and ball looked brand-new. No tie there.
Lainie had gone through the runes in the black-magic circle, trying to provide us with an interpretation. Tandy had chatted with the owners and managers of the businesses on Riverside Drive, the street near the circle. Two employers had recently fired several people, and one young woman had been fired for smoking marijuana and crack on the job. The woman was in her twenties, short and slight, and the manager had provided Tandy with her ID and address.
Tandy and T. Laine had run the ID. It was real, but the address on it turned out to be an empty lot behind the wastewater treatment plant off of Neyland Drive. They had tracked down her parents, who lived in Nashville, but they hadn’t seen their daughter since they kicked her out for stealing and pawning her grandmother’s silver. There had been no indication of witch genes in the lineage. No one had been able to find the woman and there was no way to determine if she had cast the circle.
The local witch coven had been asked to take a look at photos of the circle and they had no idea who had cast it. They also had no idea what it did except something bad. They had refused to go to the circle in person and had broken off contact. Which they had done before when bad magical things were taking place in Knoxville.
We were no closer to knowing if the witch circle had been a deliberate call to Rick or if he accidently answered it because of proximity and the black cat used as sacrifice. We had nothing except bloody gauze we couldn’t track to the blood source, a bunch of weird focals, and … Nothing. Except that someone was casting nasty curses with unknown magic. This alone had everyone worried, especially the werecats.
Tandy was in charge for the night and also handling comms, should we get a case. As long as no one took a day off or went on vacation we had enough people to staff the office twenty-four/seven. On nights when that wasn’t possible, calls were autorouted to Rick or JoJo and they called us in. Computers were grand things when they worked. Satisfied that I was caught up on everything, I went to work on my assignment, tracking grindylows and their kills and why grindys were indifferent about Rick. PsyLED’s mandate was to investigate paranormal crimes, keep paranormal records, track paranormal trends, and I had traced and amassed a lot of records in my time at Unit Eighteen.
On my first break, well after midnight, the waning moon was visible and the sky was black against the city lights as seen though the windows. I trimmed back dead leaves—on the herbs in the windowsill boxes, not on me—and enjoyed the novelty of air-conditioning. Novelty because I was still mentally stymied about going on the grid or adding to my solar array and solar batteries just for comfort. It was hard to turn away from a lifelong independence. I weighed it all as I worked on the plants.
“Nell,” Tandy called over the in-house speaker system. “Come to the conference room, please.” I put down my small watering can and went back to join him. “It’s probably nothing,” he said as I stepped in the doorway, “but Knoxville PD called in something and are asking for an agent to liaise.”
“You want me to go on a call? Alone?”
He didn’t look up at the obvious excitement, apprehension, and delight mixed together in my voice. “Sending coordinates and address to your cell. Meet Officer Holt at the scene. Convenience store robbery a little after midnight, on the heels of an earlier title loan shop robbery as the employees were closing. The businesses are within a mile of each other and the perpetrator in both cases was described as male, five-nine, black hair, pale skin, and ‘acting strangely.’ He stole cash and a gun and ammo from the pawn shop and food items and cash from the convenience store. Neither business’ security footage shows the unsub’s face, but both describe bloody clothing. The descriptions were similar enough for KPD to put them together. They want the place read for vampire.”
Unsub was cop-speak for unknown subject. “Species profiling because of blood and pale skin? Maybe he’s a butcher.”
Tandy didn’t look up, but the amusement was clear on his face in the glare of his tablets. “You get to decide what species. If human, you can give the investigation back over to the local PD.”
So, no crime workup, just a reading. Scut work. I gave a long-suffering breath and gathered my gear—my weapon and Kevlar/antimagic vest, the psy-meter 2.0, and a comms set.
• • •
I didn’t push my old red truck, didn’t run lights and siren. The C10 wasn’t designed for the strain of pursuit or emergency driving, and since the delivery of my official vehicle had been delayed while I was a tree, I had to protect my only mode of transportation.
I reached the address to find a Pilot Gas and Convenience store just off Cumberland Avenue. Before I stopped, I drove around and found the title loan shop, an odd business for what was a midscale retail area. There was no crime scene tape, no indication of a crime committed, which was odd. I motored back to the gas and convenience store. The Pilot was newish, open twenty-four hours a day, with bright lights and a lot of traffic. It wasn’t the kind of place I’d expect a robbery during heavy business hours. After two a.m. maybe, but not before that. Again here, there was only a single strip of bright yellow crime scene tape around one entrance and one cash register, but no plethora of detectives.
I parked beside the KPD unit and pulled up the security footage of the Pilot robbery itself, which Tandy had sent as I drove. I watched on my tablet as the skinny unsub in jeans and a dark hooded jacket walked through the entrance and pointed his pocket at the cashier closest to the door. The pocket could have concealed a hand holding a weapon, but looked like the tip of a finger. It was hard to say. The cashier removed a handful of bills from the drawer and handed them to the subject, who reached out and accepted the bills, his hand narrow, thin, and shaking, as white as any vamp’s. He left the Pilot at a steady, slogging pace. Not running, not panicked, but not acting odd in any way I could see. No cameras caught his face, and he seemed to disappear into the shadows across University Commons Way toward the Walmart.
Something seemed odd and I watched the video again, realizing the male unsub could be a gangly female. The slender hand. The way he, or she, ran wasn’t suggestive of gender.
I read the rest of the report. The kid—estimated to be about seventeen by the cashier—had asked for four hundred dollars. Not everything in the register. Just four hundred dollars. That was weird. I looked up felonies and discovered that in Tennessee, a robbery involving less than five hundred dollars, and committed without a weapon, (fingers didn’t count) was a misdemeanor. That explained the lack of police presence here, just the one police car, Unit 102.