by Faith Hunter
“University of Tennessee Medical Center, the paranormal room of the emergency department,” Occam said.
“Why?”
“You weren’t breathing right when we got you free. Your heart rate was racing. There was the little matter of the blood. And someone had called an ambulance. Rick said to put you in it. Boss’ orders.”
“I’m not complaining,” I said, again holding his hand as if it were the only stable spot in my universe. “This ain’t the first time you cut me free from the earth. Thank you.”
“Welcome.” There was humor in his tone and I focused on his face. His blondish hair was pulled back in a tail, his eyes amber and gold, the gold of his werecat.
I was suddenly aware of the rank smell that came from my body and my state of dishabille. My nakedness beneath the thin hospital gown. I almost let go of his hand, but he said, “It’s okay, Nell, sugar.” And encircled our clasped hands with his other one, his grip tightening. I realized that I felt safe with his hands on mine.
Scrubbing my face with my shoulder, I scuffed my hair back and looked around.
“The gang’s all here,” Occam said. I nodded to the others. They looked exhausted and frightened. For me. Something lightened inside me, and I felt almost weightless for a moment as I looked from one to another. “It’s night,” he added. “Ten hours since you first touched the ground. You’ve been sick as a dog. Now you’re exhausted and dehydrated. The doctors want you to stay overnight for observation. You’re all the rage with the interns. There’ve been about twenty in and out all afternoon.”
Telling me, in a kind manner, that more and more of my secret was out. That I had magic and it was strange and unknown, as I was myself.
“Not staying here,” I said. “No way.” University of Tennessee Medical Center was a teaching hospital, and they had one of the few paranormal units and staff in the state. The state’s other two paranormal hospitals were in Nashville and clear across the state in Memphis. And their idea of observation might be a lot more invasive and personal than I was willing to undergo so soon after the Spook School examinations.
“Figured as much,” Occam said. “Your mama’s been callin’ you. Rick handled it.”
“Oh no. I gotta go. We’uns got family dinner tonight.”
“Not tonight,” he said. “You took a rain check with your family. Rick told ’em that you came down with a raging case of the flu and that the girls’ll take care of you for a few days.”
“Oh. Oh, that was a good lie. Okay. Thank you.” Feeling steadier, I let go of Occam’s hands, pinched the damp hospital gown between two fingers, and let it fall. “Ugh.” He was right. Mama would have a conniption if I showed up looking like this and then passed out face-first in my dinner.
“Tonight you’ll bunk in with JoJo. We’ll all eat and visit and you’ll tell us what happened during the hours you were tied to the earth. And we’ll inform you what we got. Boss’ orders.”
I nodded, a knot in my throat. I think I’d have been crying again if I weren’t so dehydrated.
“Soon as you sign out, we’re going to JoJo’s apartment. We’ll feed you and update you. Debrief and pizza.”
I made a noise of agreement. “Lemme call my mama, though. She’s gonna be mighty upset.”
* * *
But Mama seemed okay, and had nothing but praise for my wonderful boss and all my friends for taking care of me with my sudden influenza. Rick had lied. To my mama. And I had approved. I was sure and certain going to hell, because I followed along and told her that I had to be careful being around the little’uns and the elders, to keep them from getting sick. The flu was a bad one this year. Mama was so fine with my lie that it was almost scary and was certainly shameful of me. But the family dinner was one problem I didn’t have to deal with at the moment, and was, in the end, a lot easier to lie about than to try to explain the truth. That must be why lying is such a common sin. It’s successful and makes life easier.
Talking to Mama turned out to be much easier than getting my sweat-sticky legs into my pants. After two tries that left me weak as well water, T. Laine brought in my four-day gobag, which she had picked up from HQ, after she’d found my extra key in the fake tree. “Stupid hiding place. Obvious,” she said.
I couldn’t disagree, but said, “In my own defense, I’m glad you were able to find the extra key.” She chuckled as she helped me into an old, elastic-waist skirt and a new sweatshirt, which had both been spooled into a tight roll, the way we were taught at Spook School.
* * *
We arrived first and JoJo kicked off her shoes at the door and turned on soft lighting that made the gray, charcoal, and concrete color scheme feel warmer than it might otherwise. I don’t know what I had expected JoJo’s place to look like, maybe a Bohemian-style cottage, to match her wildly patterned clothing and eccentric personal style. The two-bedroom duplex, with sparse furniture and a sleek modern look, made me rethink everything I thought I knew about her. She had a leather couch, two upholstered chairs, an industrial metal TV stand, and bookshelves in the front room, shelves that also supported a real turntable and speakers placed for quadraphonic sound, something I had read about but never experienced. As if reading my mind, she put on some soft jazz, an instrumental that made my feet want to move. Not that I knew how to dance. Her music collection was enormous and mostly vinyl.
A table made of reclaimed wood with a metal base and six antique Shaker-style chairs sat in the dining space. There were no rugs, just spotless wood floors and a clean scent in the house that reminded me of sage.
I stood in the middle of the living area, my arms weighted down with my gear, feeling totally out of my element. I was shaking with exhaustion when JoJo took my bags from my arms and dumped all but my four-day gobag on the coffee table. She pointed me upstairs. “Come on. Let’s get you showered. It’ll make you feel better.” She shouldered my gobag.
“Are you sure? I feel kinda funny—”
“You offer me hospitality every time I come to your house.” She tossed me an exasperated look as, one-handed, she unwound her turban and let her multitude of braids down. “I’m offering you hospitality now. Kick off your boots and come on. I’ll get you situated and see that you have any toiletries you need.”
She preceded me up the stairs, her bare feet silent. This was surreal. I hadn’t showered in a stranger’s house in . . . ever. If I hadn’t been covered with dried sweat and dried blood and reeking of exhaustion, I might have declined, despite the offer of hospitality. But I stank and I was still so dehydrated that my skin felt as if I had rolled in ground glass.
My boots were still unlaced, so I toed them off as per her orders and followed her up.
Upstairs, the guest room had been turned into an office with a black metal desk and ergonomic chair, and a sofa against the wall that looked like it might pull out into a bed. Across the hall was JoJo’s room, centered by a queen-sized four-poster bed with a shiny metal finish. It had a silky comforter on it and lots of pillows. There was a bureau with the shiny metal finish, three candles, and a wooden box with an old-fashioned lock. Minimalist.
I followed her into the bath, which was just as sleek and modern as the rest of the house. “Your house is beautiful,” I said, meaning it.
“Home sweet home,” she said, with a tone I couldn’t place. “You keep a full travel pack in your gobag?” I nodded. “If you left anything, use what you need. Shampoo and conditioner.” She pointed out each item as she spoke. “Bar soap, or there’s a pump liquid in the shower. Washcloth and towels. And lotion. Don’t forget to put on lotion, girl. Your skin looks a mite pruney, as my gramma might say.”
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“Anytime. T. Laine is bringing your shoes and dirty clothes and blanket in her car. Shower’s hot. Get clean. You’ll feel better.” JoJo left the room and shut the door.
I had never been in a showe
r so luxurious. It was like standing in a heated waterfall, one that melted the sweat and blood off my body into a pinkish pool before the drain sucked it down. I had brought my own soaps and toiletries, but once the blood was liquefied and drenched away, I made use of JoJo’s gray washcloth, which matched the decorative band of tiles along the bathroom wall.
Her towels were fluffy, so soft they made me want to cry again, when I dried off. And JoJo was right. A shower made a big difference in how I felt.
I smeared moisturizer all over and applied some antibiotic cream from the med pack of my gobag to the stitches. I counted twenty-two on a cut that ran from below my elbow to my middle lower arm, with eight stiches on the outside of my hand, and two more each on two fingers where it looked as if I had been stabbed. They all hurt and showed signs of swelling, so I took two painkillers and smeared on some of my homemade salve. I applied lipstick, adding some to my cheeks and smearing it in, since I looked so pale. I didn’t want to hunt for a hair dryer among my friend’s things, so I towel-dried my hair and gooped it up more than usual. It would dry fast, now that it was so short. I dressed in clean undies and pulled the pink skirt back on. I managed to pull a fuzzy rose T-shirt over my injured arm, and a soft pink hooded jacket. Not the usual work clothes, but I was glad I had packed the skirt. I looked professional again and not like a body they had pulled out from an underpass, three days dead. When I opened the door, I smelled pizza and heard voices, and the hunger that had been a midlevel complaint now roared and my mouth watered. Pea dashed out to welcome me and then loped back to the living area.
* * *
Pizza and Coke restored my energy levels, and when we were all done eating, Rick said, “Debrief. T. Laine, why don’t you start?”
I curled my legs under me on the couch and wrapped my bare toes in my skirt to keep them warm. Sipped Coke as I listened.
“We got to the pond site at zero-seven, forty-two. While Nell did prelim readings, I conferred with the local KEMA techs and local law enforcement, who explained the circumstances of the initial report. As of the last three weeks, there have been two episodes of radioactive wildlife, all reported to the sheriff’s office via burner phone. So when the call came in about the hot geese at the pond, the local KEMA techs brought the Haz Mat Geiger counter, which read normal background levels. Fortunately the tech was new on the job, still with a fire in her belly, and decided to try out Haz Mat’s old psy-meter. Which redlined. The officer in charge followed protocol, worked his way through the system, and called us. At the site, Nell initiated the human and tech eval while I took reports from the OIC and KEMA techs. Nell, you’re up.”
I nodded and wiped my fingers on a napkin. “I completed full human/tech eval on the pond, which entailed photos and psy-meter readings at one hundred feet out, seventy-five feet out, fifty feet out, and then twenty-five feet. At one hundred feet, the readings were midline on level three and a near twenty-five percent on the other four psysitopes, which suggested an active working, and I had to consider the possibility that I might set it off like a bomb. At twenty-five feet out, all the levels were redlining, so I stopped there, went no closer to the water at that time, and began a circuit of the pond. I sent the readings to HQ. You should all have them.”
“JoJo,” Rick said. She pointed her remote at the TV, punched some buttons, and the TV screen came up. “Readings are up.”
JoJo had synced her laptop to her TV and pulled my readings up on the wide screen, which was just so cool I couldn’t help the “Ohhh. Nice!” Then I took up my narrative. “The first readings you see are from my walk directly toward the pond, with the readings every twenty-five feet. These are the pics that correlate.” I pointed. “The next batch of readings starts when I began to walk the circumference of the pond.” I pointed. “That GPS is where I found a dead goose showing signs of scavenger activity, which crossed right up to the waterline. That would have disrupted working circles?” I made the line a question to T. Laine.
She said, “Most. Yes. But the presence of scavengers said it was safe for you to cross. But when I did a visual scan working, there was no witch circle, which is why I let you collect goose gobbets.”
“Thank you,” I said, and everyone laughed. I realized that they thought I was being sarcastic or funny.
I made a mental note to study which witch circles can be crossed and which ones can’t. “Here, at this GPS, is where I found the second goose, dead and floating on the surface of the water. I got back to the starting point and saved my info, sending it to you guys. I see a little blip here that I don’t remember.” I pointed again. “There wasn’t anything at this GPS, and I don’t know what it meant.
“I collected the dead geese as per orders, but I don’t know where they are now.” I looked at T. Laine.
“They’re in my car. They stink. They’re rotting. Thank all that’s holy it isn’t summer. I’ll get them packed and sent to PsyCSI in the morning.” PsyCSI was in Richmond, Virginia. T. Laine waggled her fingers at me, and I continued.
“I took a blanket here”—I pointed on a sat map that JoJo pulled up on the TV screen—“for the paranormal eval.”
I tried to explain what had happened, and got exasperated when Rick made me repeat, five times, the part about the woman. I finally said, “You can ask me ten more times and I’ll say the same thing. Female. Not human. That is all. I. Know.”
Rick sat back in his chair, one hand rubbing his chin and the heavy five-o’clock shadow that darkened it, thinking. “Okay,” he said finally. “Probie, what do you think the things you felt beneath the ground have to do with psysitopes and magic as we now understand it?”
I pursed my mouth, thinking about magical energy and the light-and-shadow things in the earth. There was something there, just beyond my understanding. Something about the massive thing deep in the ground, sleeping, about the dancer and the woman. And the way energy worked. The way it looked when I was communing with the earth. Something about electrostatic energies, and magical bindings, and maybe even magnetism. Physics that I had been introduced to in Spook School, but had never really understood.
“I don’t know. But physicists in the nineteen sixties speculated that paranormal energy, even magical energy particles, must follow the laws of physics. Psysitopes aren’t understood, but they’ve been qualified and quantified into four subparticles that are capable of working together, and every type of paranormal creature has its own range. Therefore, the things under the ground have to have their own values.” Understanding popped into my brain like lightning flashing. “And this is why you wanted me to read land around Knoxville.”
“Not bad. Not bad at all.”
I blushed at the compliment. Praise was a rarity in my life.
“Summation?”
It was short and probably confusing. “To start out, there were three different . . . let’s call them purposes. So, yes, three different purposes belowground at the pond. One that’s active and full of movement, and one that’s deeper and asleep. Let’s call them the dancer and the sleeper for now. And then there was the woman—species unknown, location unknown, purpose unknown, involvement in the pond and deer situation unknown.”
But he still wasn’t satisfied. Wearing one of those unreadable looks, Rick said, “Fine. The dancer and the sleeper. What are they?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve felt something like one of the sleepers before, in North Carolina, when we rescued the imprisoned vampire in the basement of the Tennessee DIC. It was under his house. Out in his yard. All through the mountains around his place.”
Rick stared at me, waiting.
The DIC was the director in charge of the Knoxville FBI office. He had been a Welsh gwyllgi, like Brother Ephraim, a shape-shifting devil dog in more ways than just speciation. He had also been a rapist and a cannibal. I had fed him and his buddies to the earth, and good riddance. And despite my God’s Cloud upbringing, I didn’t feel the least b
it of guilt for the deaths. “I don’t know,” I said again.
“Does your land have one?”
“No. My land has its own soul. It’s awake and alert and tied to the moon and the seasons. These things are bigger and deeper and sleeping. Or hibernating. This one today had some thin, microscopic threads of energies leading to the surface, but I don’t know what they lead to or where, except that they have something to do with places where large numbers of people died in the past. The dancer is using some of the threads to go up and down to the sleeper.”
“Is the woman making that happen, or is she a prisoner being forced to participate?” Rick asked.
“I don’t know. It . . . They? Yeah, they, if you count the one in North Carolina. I got the sense that the sleepers live on the life and death and blood of war. That this one had been most active when thousands of humans died at a time, like in the tribal wars, the tribal-European wars, and the Revolutionary and Civil wars.”
Rick shook his head. “Okay. I’m guessing there’s no way to verify their existence?”
“No idea. One more thing, though. I got a sense that the active consciousness, the dancer, was trying to wake the sleeper. Poking on it, metaphysically speaking. It felt like some form of communication, repeated over and over. I think the dancer recognized me as an intelligence. When it latched onto me, it was gentle at first, like a silk bracelet. And it learned something from me. It started a litany of words, in threes. Something like ‘Flows, flows, flows. Pools, pools, pools. Gone, gone, gone,’ over and over. And then the woman said the words, but who was repeating them I don’t know.”
Rick had sat forward, his eyes focused on the distance, thinking. “Say again.”
I repeated the litany of concepts I had taken from the dancer.
“At what point in the reading did the grass try to grow inside you?” Rick asked. Pea leaped from the floor up into my lap, and I petted her. Which hurt.
I held up my hand and looked at the unbandaged stitches. “Is that what happened?” Trying to appear more nonchalant than the full-blown panic that grabbed at my rib cage and squeezed, I took another slice of pizza, curled it up in half, and bit down. I chewed and swallowed, breathing through my nose. Pizza suddenly tasted like dust and ashes and fear.