Home > Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)(5)

Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)(5)
Author: Faith Hunter

I wasn’t certain what birds had to do with cat spells, but I agreed with the coincidence factor. I nibbled on a piece of cold toast, letting the conversation flow through me like a stream, searching for eddies and pools where logjams and detritus of thought had gone overlooked.

Breakfast had been really good, even though it was only microwaved scrambled eggs, toast, and jelly. The washed dishes were piled on the kitchen counter, except for the last of the toast and jelly on a platter in the middle of the coffee table. The work-related tablets and laptops were scattered around, as were glasses of iced cola or tea. Everyone had brought their own drink. I was sipping on my own cold mint tea to try and keep cool. It wasn’t helping much. My single-unit air conditioner had never been intended to chill down a house this big, in daylight, warmed by this many people. John, my deceased husband, may have planned to get more window units, had the children he wanted ever appeared. Living alone, I hadn’t needed them, but Tandy, Occam, T. Laine, and JoJo did.

Rick, our senior agent, was in an interagency conference all day at Knoxville FBI headquarters, with the assistant director of PsyLED—Soul—and with the regional heads of the FBI, CIA, ICE, ATF, the Tennessee and North Carolina National Guards, the state bureaus of investigation from Tennessee and North and South Carolina, MEPS (the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command located in Knoxville), top Highway Patrol chiefs, and Homeland Security. It was a big meeting of the biggest LEO brass from three states, working on creating protocols for potential security and terrorist threats of all kinds, human and paranormal, homegrown and foreign.

Our new up-line man, the special agent in charge of the eastern seaboard, Ayatas FireWind, was at the Pentagon for high-level meetings about vampires. FireWind spent a lot of time on planes, jetting around, dealing with politically delicate paranormal criminal cases, often with the vampires, who seemed to be in an uproar since Leo Pellissier, the former Master of the City of New Orleans and most of the southern United States, was no longer in charge of his Mithrans. We were on our own today. FireWind had run other units and even other regions, but they had been primarily human units. Unit Eighteen was the first largely para unit, and though I hadn’t met him yet, I had gotten the feeling that things hadn’t gone nicely the first few times FireWind was in the office. There was some smoldering discontent in the unit, and clearly they didn’t want to discuss Rick around HQ, where the boss might walk in unexpectedly.

Since electronic equipment allowed us to run the office remotely, and since Occam had hunted as he protected my land all day, the office meeting was here and we were unobserved. It was kinda nice.

T. Laine’s lips puckered and her eyes went distant, still thinking. She said, “Rick seemed … odd this morning. Even for a moon-called beast, he seemed distracted, agitated, preoccupied, and even more distant than usual.”

“It’s not new,” the unit empath said. “He’s been unvaryingly unpleasant inside his own skin for weeks, the way he is on the three days of the full moon. I’m glad he’s not here. He’s throwing off confusing emotions that make my skin itch, and he’s pacing like a cat in a cage. No offense, Occam.”

“None taken, Tandy,” Occam said. “You’re a lightning rod who reads minds. I’m a cat. We all have issues.”

Tandy gave a breathy laugh. He had been struck by lightning three times, which had ignited his empath gifts and left him with permanent Lichtenberg lines on his skin. Issues. True, I thought. Occam had surely done his share of pacing during twenty years in a cage, in cat form. T. Laine was a witch without a coven. JoJo was the Diamond Drill, the highest level of hacker known. I was turning into a plant.

Right now, Occam was stretched out on the sofa, his jeans and T-shirt damp with the heat. He was stroking Cello’s head, the once-feral cat purring and stretching under the big-cat’s hand. “That’s why I called our meeting here. We needed a break from HQ and a chance to voice our thoughts.”

“How far from the circle was Rick when he was called?” I asked. “If he was really called, that is, and it wasn’t coincidence.” We were all dancing around that possibility, that Rick was in danger personally and was also a liability to the unit. “Which side of the river?”

Occam twisted and leaned over the coffee table, punched a key on his laptop, and whirled it around to show us the screen, before dropping back to his lazy position. On the laptop, a small map of Knoxville and the surrounding area appeared, marked with a circle and a dot. The center of the circle was near the river. The dot was tagged as Rick’s car. “I checked that. He was on the same side of the river, and within five miles of the circle as the crow flies.”

“What was he doing?” Jo asked.

“Driving home from dinner and drinks with a hungry feeb,” Occam said, referring to an FBI agent who was low on the food chain. “He pulled over, secured his weapon, and shifted. His cat grabbed an old, mostly empty gobag that contained an old flip phone and a blanket, and went overland.”

I remembered Rick saying that part and added, “Pulling over, securing his weapon, and then his cat taking the gobag took critical-thinking skills and problem-solving ability.”

“Right,” Occam said. “He felt something was coming and got ready for it. He was driving, and though he doesn’t remember it, he drove himself two miles closer to the circle, shifted in the car, ruining his clothes, and went on overland. We still haven’t found his new cell, his car key fob, or his right shoe, but his weapon was under the seat, which, while not locked in the gun safe in his trunk, was put away, not in plain sight on the car seat. His memory is spotty until he woke up at the circle site, still in cat form, bag and flip phone beside him.”

“That preparation suggests he was in his right mind,” T. Laine said, in agreement with me, “though not remembering the drive suggests something else.”

“At the scene he thought the cat had been dead about three hours,” I said. “When you discount our drive time, that leaves about two hours and twenty minutes from the time the spell was at its zenith to the time Rick was sane enough to call for help. It takes him something like twenty minutes each time he shifts shape. So that takes away another forty minutes, leaving an hour twenty or so. How long did it take him to get to the spell site?” I asked. “Did he smell vampires when he got there?”

“He didn’t know, and he doesn’t remember anything about vamps,” JoJo said, her mismatched earrings swinging silvery in the light of her laptop screen as she tapped keys. “But he was alone each time he shifted. Good questions, probie.”

I ducked my head in pleasure. “In that case I have another one,” I said. “If the purpose was to call Rick, then the spell succeeded. Why wasn’t the witch waiting for him? Why do the spell and leave? By not being there, that suggests coincidence, not causality.”

T. Laine brightened and said, “Yeah. My gut feeling is that this blood-magic caster didn’t know Rick would come.” She pointed a finger at me approvingly. “Our blood-magic witch initiated the spell in the inner circle, slit the cat’s throat, closed the inner circle to let the spell run its course, and then stepped outside the outer circle and reclosed it too.” She took a long draw of her iced drink through the straw, trying to combat the heat of my house. The tiny window-unit air conditioner was straining. Come full dark, when the temps outside dropped lower than the temps inside, I’d open the windows and doors and let the winds sweep out the heat, but for now it was just miserable. “It’s a freaky working,” the unit’s witch continued. “I still don’t know what it’s supposed to do, but I think the spell was a fast one. She killed the cat and once it was dead, the spell ended and she left.”

“And the maggoty feeling Nell got?” JoJo asked the witch.

“I’m spitballing here, but I think the vamps showed up and left before Rick arrived. And no, I have no idea if vamps were there for the working, or were summoned, or if that’s an accident too.”

JoJo adjusted the elastic waist of her sweat-damp skirt, plucking at the thin cotton fabric printed with big aqua blooms, smaller bright pink flowers, and small green leaves. “Dear God, I’m hot. Nell, this place reminds me of my great-grandmother’s place in Georgia.” Jo took off her turban, which was a one-piece thing like a toboggan, tossed it to the kitchen table like a Frisbee, and gusted a hearty sigh. “Great-Gramma had AC but never used it. Said her bones were cold all the time. Her place was a sauna too.”

I almost said that I was sorry, but it wasn’t my idea for the unit to invade my home, so … no apology. It was nearly August. It was hot.

“Yeah, I know,” JoJo said, reading my face the way Tandy could read emotions. “I have to deal.”

“According to the calendar,” Tandy said, hiding a grin, “last night was a waning half-moon, days after full. It wasn’t a moon working, which would take place on the full moon. It didn’t look like an earth magic working or a water working. It wasn’t any recognizable or standared magical working. Which adds to the possibility that this was an accidental summoning. A deliberate summoning of a were-creature would most likely be on the full moon.”

“What do we know about the circle?” JoJo asked T. Laine. “Anything expected and ordinary? Anything we can use as a jumping-off point?”

“The circle was downright strange,” T. Laine said. “Nothing traditional about it except the starting point aligned to magnetic north. Most circles that big need multiple witches to invoke. This was a one-woman circle. Most are geared to the element the witch is called by. I’m a moon witch, so I’d only attempt a big circle on the full moon, using moonstones as focals. An air witch would use feathers and fallen leaves and even carved wood amulets from wind-downed trees. This circle had focals from all the elements and some of the focals were totally unfamiliar to me. There was a branch freshly broken from a black walnut tree, the leaves wilted, and is the only thing that might point to an earth witch. There was a lump of unformed clay, probably from the nearby riverbed, which might point to a water witch. A golf ball and golf tee, both new looking. I got nothing for them. There were two glass vials full of black liquid that stinks like old blood. A rotten scrap of gauze or cheesecloth stained with what might be blood. There was a small steel paring knife. A cheapie.”

“I’ve sent everything off for analysis,” JoJo said, “but it’ll all go on the back burner since there’s no crime involved with the circles and I have no favors I’m willing to call in yet. It could take weeks.”

“No witch would combine all the things she did and then add steel to it,” T. Laine said. “Steel is disruptive to magic. And no witch leaves behind focals. When the working is done, they end the circle and take all the goodies away.”

“Steel. Black walnut,” I said, trying to make sense out of it. “That wood is somewhat toxic. Is it possible that she was going to go back later to gather the focals and make sure the working was really completed, but we got there first?” I asked.

   
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