“Finished ’em,” Mud said absently. “So I started on the required reading for eighth grade. They talk a lot about sex.”
“Oh.” I studied her from the corners of my eyes. “Does that bother you?”
“Nope. I think people are silly when it comes to sex.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that so I settled on, “You have a point.” Leaving her at my desk, I went through the office, ostensibly searching for Rick LaFleur, but also looking for Occam, whose office cubicle was dark, though whether he was off work or on a case, I didn’t know. I found Rick sitting at his desk, his face green in the light of his laptop. He looked twitchy, tense, and very tired. I tapped on the doorjamb. “Got a minute?”
He glanced up and back down at his screen. “Maybe one. I just approved a request from the feds to have Margot Racer liaise with us on the situation involving Sheriff’s Detective Steff not following protocol. And since she managed to dig him out, I’m approving her request. We had a long conversation and I read her in on the circles, including my part in it. She wants to see all the circles ASAP and we need eyes on the ground, even though most of the circles are old and were worked up by the locals. You up for that?”
Margot had moved fast. So much for needing my input and my request. I wanted to read the ground at each of the witch circle sites for maggots, so yes, but I wasn’t the most important PsyLED agent for that job. “Why isn’t T. Laine going?”
“Kent is going out later with Tandy or Occam to do a full workup. I want you with the feeb. Your best pal. Chat her up. Bond.” Rick’s eyes were on the screen, not on me, and I frowned, not sure what he thought I was supposed to do.
“Fine, but Mud is here. Is it okay to leave her?”
Rick looked up. “You’re going to have to deal with child care. Soon. For now, make sure the weapons locker is secured.” His dark eyes returned to his screen. “T. Laine is working late and Tandy will be in the office all night trying to get caught up on the missing reports and doing research on the similar witch circles here, and some more that Racer found and sent us. Seems as though there were similar circles down south and one in Asheville.” A hint too casually, he added, “T. Laine will also be talking to the NOLA coven and the Asheville coven.”
I put the locations together with Rick’s personal history. The Asheville coven was predominately the Everhart coven. The Everharts were Jane Yellowrock’s friends. Jane Yellowrock was the Dark Queen of the Mithrans and Rick’s ex, and she had spent a lot of time in both New Orleans and Asheville. That explained why he seemed twitchier. “Okay. Interesting,” I said. According to the rumor mill, things had ended badly for them on a dance floor (thanks to Paka) and then ended badly again in a permanent way while I was a tree. I didn’t have an emotional context for Rick’s life, though I’d been brought up to speed on the facts of the breakup. My question toneless, I asked, “Is Yellowrock involved?”
Rick stared at his laptop, his hair glowing black and silver in the screen lights. When he answered his tone was lifeless. “Not that I know.”
I took a slow breath, fighting any kind of tentativeness. “Shall I find out?”
“If the case leads you to look for that information.” He sat back in his chair and met my eyes, his skin lined and sallow. “Ingram, Jane and I ended months ago. I’m good. I am not, and I don’t want to appear to be, stalking her. She has enough problems without having to worry about me. If you need to call her, call her. You don’t have to run it by me. Copy?”
“Copy that,” I said softly.
“And Nell?” A faint smile curved Rick’s lips, making him look younger and less sharp-edged. “Your official vehicle is on the way. I’ll let you know when the delivery date is confirmed.”
My mouth opened and closed. Opened again. “Oh. Thank you.” I stood there a moment longer before spinning around and nearly skipping back to my cubicle to talk to Mud. I was getting a car! And Rick was sending me out in the field again. I was still a probie but not such a newbie that I was useless.
• • •
“Rick is an interesting man,” Margot said.
I slanted my eyes at her. Margot was staring out the windshield at the night, hands light on the wheel, guiding her official vehicle. If you call a man who had been driven to the edge of insanity by kidnapping, torture, and his were-creature interesting. Strong, determined, gritty, and maybe a mite crazy might be better terms, wrapped up in a man carrying the magical equivalent of an incurable, infectious disease, but I didn’t say that to the special agent, settling on, “Mm-hm.”
“It’s got to be heartbreaking to be a wereleopard and have no females around. Unless he and Occam are together.”
I managed to hold in my yelp of shocked laughter. To give myself thinking time, I adjusted the air-conditioner vent. Then I readjusted it. The FBI had access to personnel files on PsyLED. There was no reason to suppose Margot hadn’t simply gone through official channels to learn about us all, and no reason to suppose she had anything negative in mind for us. She was just nosy, and not very delicate about her nosiness. Or she had orders to chat me up, orders similar to my own. I couldn’t think of a way to deflect her comments or ignore them, so I just put my head down and bulled through it. “That was a leading question, Special Agent Racer. And kinda personal to them both. Where’s this going? Is the FBI collecting data on my team?”
“What? No.” Margot shrugged, her wrists rising and falling on the wheel. “Rick’s managed to make a life and move up in a federal agency despite his para state. He’s got that bad-boy-tamed-and-suffering thing going, and he can’t do anything about normal human desires now that the wereleopard Paka is no longer part of your team, and missing in action. Neither can Occam and he was gorgeous before his accident. A regular vampire chick magnet.”
Occam had me. The notion was just there in my brain, like being stabbed by a pitchfork, impaled on the thought. Occam had me.
And then several things hit me: Margot knew something about Paka, from the missing in action comment; some of her questions were personal on a sexual level; and some were professional law enforcement. They could also be construed as asking if Rick was a liability and security risk. Which he was. Which we all were, and which we never put into reports.
Except she’d said that Occam had been a vampire chick magnet.
I stuffed my reaction to the Occam part of her comments down deep inside for now, so I could concentrate on the other things. But I felt it there, under my skin all crawly. I couldn’t lie to Margot and get away with it. I didn’t know what to say to both protect my team and remind Margot that we knew the were-taint was contagious. “Ummm. Well. They aren’t gay. They don’t date each other, not that it’s your business, Racer. And we have grindylows on-site to keep the populace safe, just in case anyone doesn’t follow protocol to keep from spreading the were-taint.”
“Prickly,” she said of my tone. “And put in my place with pure truth. Okay.” She sent me an amused look.
The crawly feeling under my skin got worse, but I pushed on. “Special Agent Racer, I’m sure that every single human on the planet is aware that were-taint is spread by blood sharing, saliva in cuts and bites, and sex. We know, and Rick knows, that any of the above means a death sentence for any were-creature who bites, or has sex with, someone who can contract the taint—and for his partner if the grindys decide so. He’s careful.” I wanted to add, And alone, but I didn’t.
She brought the conversation back to the witch circles. “Site of the oldest Knoxville witch circle is just ahead. The circle was discovered by a local teen. It was fairly fresh at the time and I’m putting its tentative date of construction and activation just before the new moon, or waning sickle moon in May. The witch circle was cold and dead and there was no sacrifice present on the site when the circle was reported. There was also no blood when the deputies checked it out, though we have to consider the activity of scavengers carrying away any sacrifice and the spell itself taking away any blood. How close to the river are we?”
Back to business. A wave of relief flushed through me. Margot’s hands tightened on the wheel, as if she felt my reaction. I said, “GPS says two hundred feet to the river. Then down a ways to the actual water.”
Margot parked near a copse of trees and we got out, switched on flashlights, and started to the site, my gobag over my shoulder. There was nothing left of the circle except shallow trenches here and there. With a little imagination I could create a spoked circle out of them, but it was hard in the dark and with the passage of time and early summer rains. I had already calibrated the psy-meter 2.0 and done QC on it by reading everyone in the office. I laid my blanket on the ground and measured the circle’s levels. There was nothing left of magic in the ground. But when I surreptitiously touched the soil with a fingertip, I got a hint of maggots. I didn’t share that with Margot yet. Not until Rick gave me permission to read her in to everything.
Silent, I packed up and we went back to the car, where Margot marked her map with a green star. There were other stars, three now green, the rest yellow. She put the tablet down and started the car. “What kind of witch is doing the circles?”
“Our first thought was a single moon witch sitting at north, but T. Laine pointed out that moon witches always practice their workings at the three days of the full moon, to make better use of the moon’s entire power, so we changed it to a water witch working alone because of the river locations. Looking over your shoulder at the map of the witch circles—those stars are the witch circles, aren’t they?” I interrupted myself.
Margot nodded.
“Then I’d say we have a water witch. We’re not ruling out a second witch. We’re not even ruling out a moon witch.” I frowned. “We’re not ruling out anything at this point.”
“I think that’s wise. So maybe two witches,” Margot said. “Or a single really powerful witch who has a secondary affinity for the moon. Or … I hate guessing.” She started the car and we motored on to the next-closest site. And then the next. By midnight we had visited five sites and I had tested each with the psy-meter and a fingertip. I felt maggots at almost all the sites and magic at one—levels one and four. Vampires were part of this—whatever this was. Or maybe even witch-vamps. Was the witch also a vampire? I had a lot to talk about to the team, and since Margot was driving, I typed out the bones of an outline for a report. Ninety-nine percent of my job was paperwork. I had always been good at it and I was getting better.
We brought hot Krispy Kreme donuts back to HQ, where I found my sister watching a horror movie on the biggest screen in the conference room, sitting with Tandy, earbuds in her ears. Mud’s eyes were wide and her knees were drawn up under her chin. When she saw me she pointed at the screen and shouted, “Aliens! There’s such a thing as aliens!”