Curse on the Land

by Faith Hunter

  I hauled my gear, including the witchy cuffs, the zip bag of lightweight, silver-toned pens, and the heavy containment vessel that I had forgotten to give Rick last night, to the door, keyed in the code, and climbed the narrow stairs to another door at the top. There was a keypad there too, but this door didn’t respond to my code, so I ran my ID card through the slot and the door snicked open.

  The smell of coffee and donuts and stale pizza brought a smile to my face. They might have a fancy new office space with all the electronic bells and whistles that taxpayer money was willing to buy, but the unit was still the unit.

  I walked through the door, which automatically latched and sealed after me, and JoJo pointed out an empty office cubicle by holding out a piece of pizza while talking on speaker on one cell, tapping out a text on another cell, and scanning a file on her laptop, all at once. Multitasking. Not my best skill set, unless it involved plants or farming.

  My office space was really a low stall with padded, five-foot-tall half walls, a desk, and two chairs, both looking hard and unforgiving. The government was determined to provide the best of everything except comfort for the employees, not that I cared about comfort. I had a window! It was narrow and faced west, which wasn’t the best light, but I could bring plants to work. The dawn light coming through the pane made me want to dance—not that I danced. Not ever. Even the thought made me sick to my stomach. Churchwomen didn’t dance. And I’d look like a cross between a kangaroo, a giraffe, and a platypus. Stupid and clumsy and . . . stupid. But I had a window!

  I placed the witchy cuffs, pens, and containment vessel on the desk along with my laptop and sealed my weapon into a small gun safe set into my desk, resetting the code to something I could remember easily, but wasn’t something anyone else would ever deduce. I put my four-day gobag in the bottom desk drawer and keyed the lock with the keys I found in the middle desk drawer. I inserted one key into my wallet and the other one into the fake plastic tree in the corner. It was a stupid hiding place, and there were probably rules about that kind of thing, but I could move it later as needed.

  That hadn’t taken long. Everything was in place. My hands were empty. I made one more quick trip to the truck for the box of small handheld psy-meter 1.0s. The newbie/probie had no idea what to do next. Fortunately or not, Rick strode by, looking a lot fresher than only hours before, and waved me to the other side of the building. He was talking on a cell too, and I pocketed my own cell, grabbed up my laptop, the psy-meters, the heavy containment vessel, and followed.

  We passed a cleaning closet, a safe room, and a null room—a spelled, sealed room where witches could be held, unable to use their own powers. The room’s witchy tech was brand-new; I had heard about it at Spook School. The room was set up so that T. Laine, or anyone else who knew the code, could get in or out. The null room could be used as an interrogation room for magical creatures or a safe room for humans, preventing a takeover attempt by magic users, but once locked inside, it was as if there was no magic. A faint sense of electricity skittered across my flesh as we passed, unpleasant and scratchy.

  The conference room was not nearly so comfortable as the hotels where we had met when I was just a consultant. No couches, no slouchy chairs. The décor was totally unlike the colorful offices of TV and film cop shops, and was decorated in beige, gray, brown, and charcoal, dull but serviceable. A sleek, fake wood–and-metal table took up most of the space and more of the uncomfortable-looking chairs ringed it, quickly being filled with unit members. A series of wide video screens were on one wall.

  I dropped the box of witchy cuffs and the baggie of pens in front of T. Laine, who made a soft squeal of pleasure. She signed the D&R—delivery and release—forms and slid them to the boss faster than I could set the containment vessel and the box of small psy-meters in front of him. Rick grunted in recognition, and I placed the multiple D&R papers on the desk in front of him too, placing a pen in his hand for his signatures. He grunted again, this time in irritation, but he accepted the pen. As he signed, he ended the call and said, “Problem, people.

  “Two of the geese that read high on the psy-meter are dead at the pond site. No visible signs of COD. We need to acquire these geese for necropsy by a veterinary pathologist and see if they’re redlining. Our main area of concern is to make certain that the . . . for now, I’m calling it psysitopic contamination . . . stops its spread. Whatever spell or working or creature caused the paranormal readings, it may be ongoing. JoJo?”

  JoJo opened a satellite map on the wide screen on the wall of the conference room. “Just before sunset last night,” she said, “the county isolated a herd of psysitope-positive deer. They were nowhere near the pond. They were standing in the middle of the road when a delivery truck came around a sharp turn and hit several. Couldn’t stop. Killed three. Injured two. Four more just watched the members of the herd die. They were walking in a circle, like they were drugged. Didn’t even run when the deputies shot the injured deer. They ordered tox screens on them, but after the geese incident, the deputies called for psy-meter readings too. As Rick said, we need to find the source of the paranormal activity causing this and contain it. Then we need to figure out how the magic is spreading and put a stop to that too.”

  “That’s not the way magic works,” T. Laine said. “It doesn’t just spread, like an airborne disease. It can’t get into the groundwater. It can’t spread by touch. It has to be formed and ordered and shaped. It isn’t amorphous or contagious, despite what a lot of hardline, witch-hating right-wingers say.”

  “Okay,” Rick said. “Then we need to find the people who are setting workings loose and stop them. Which is why you take lead on this one, Lainie. You and Nell and the psy-meter 2.0.”

  T. Laine said, “Plugging in the two locations now. But I have to say, again, this is not the way magic works. At all.”

  “Noted. Check it out.” Pea jumped on the big conference room table and then off onto the floor to disappear. Catlike.

  I had a much higher, upgraded security clearance than I’d had as a consultant, though not as high as the other team members. As a probie, I’d be taking orders, getting coffee, and doing paperwork. And reading the land. I went to the new coffeemaker and started a second pot, remembering the first time I saw such a device and had to figure out how to make it work. This time, I found Rick’s special French dark roast Community Coffee and started a pot, as if I had done it all my life. Then I poured coffee for all the unit members while they discussed possibilities of creatures and events that might cause the readings. When I reached Occam’s cup, he said, “Nell, sugar. Whatchu doing? Waiting on us?”

  I pointed a finger at my chest and said, “Probie. Lowest on the totem pole. Paper pusher and waitress. At least for a while.”

  “Nell,” T. Laine said, with a half smile on her face, teasing. “Make mine to go, milk and sugar.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, pouring us both to-go coffees in metal mugs. “Ummm. Weapons?”

  “Special agents do not say ummm. Service sidearms should be sufficient,” Rick said. “If you find animals that need to be euthanized, call the sheriff’s office or animal control. I’m assigning the handheld psy-meters. Record the model and serial numbers and enter them on the paperwork that will be on your desks when you return. You’re responsible for them. Take care, people.”

  I grabbed my coat, a small handheld P 1.0, my laptop, the new psy-meter 2.0, and my service weapon, and followed T. Laine out the door, down the steps, into the day. I got my small everyday gobag out of the Chevy.

  “Good God, girl. You still driving that old truck? We’ll take my car.” T. Laine took the passenger seat of a white Ford Escape. “You can drive a normal car, right?” She waved a key fob at me. “I’ve got paperwork to do and I always wanted a driver.”

  I stowed my gear in the back and started the SUV with the push-button start. This was a bottom-of-the-line Escape and had no rearview cam
era and no electronic upgrades, which relieved me. When I first got the money for John’s shotgun, I test-drove a brand-new Escape and was intimidated by the electronics. This one was okay. I adjusted the seat and rearview before driving into the early-morning rush-hour traffic. “I can manage,” I said mildly, merging into the flow of vehicles. I had passed the aggressive driving course at Spook School, and it wasn’t for the faint of heart.

  “Good. Rick can assign you a government-owned vehicle for field use. You can’t drive it for personal use, but it’ll be better than that truck on city streets.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I liked my truck. I could haul all sorts of things in the bed. But she had a point about work-related city-street driving. Maybe a small coupe would be better, one with a trunk for locking away my weapons and electronic equipment.

  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.