by Faith Hunter
“Or treat?” Tandy repeated. “Are you saying this the beginning of a pandemic?”
“We’re all going to be slimed to death?” JoJo asked, tapping on the tablet. “I thought I’d go out with a bang, not a B-grade movie title.”
The empath chuckled, relaxing in JoJo’s nonchalant energies.
“Last thing,” I said. “The energies may be interfering with, or disrupting, the power grid.”
“The brownouts and power shortages?” Tandy asked.
I chewed and swallowed. “We might be looking at problems with community services. And with the Secret City experiments, which all need stable power systems.”
“So the company that probably started all this might suffer the results?” T. Laine asked. “Good. I hope they have to call and beg for help. And if they do—”
“You’ll get off your butt and go help,” JoJo said.
“Yeah.” T. Laine tossed a crumpled napkin into the garbage, followed by paper sandwich wrappers, her face as scrunched as the trash she threw. “I know. I’m such a goody-two-shoes witchy woman. Anytime people are dying, there I am, lending a hand. Even if the humans don’t freaking deserve it.”
“Human here. Be nice.” JoJo tapped her chest. Glancing at me, she said, “I got the papers from the office of General David Schlumberger, from Lieutenant Colonel Leann Rettell. I checked her out and she’s for real. She asks for something, give it to her. She’s a doctor with ties to CDC, as well as being in charge of Schlumberger’s medical team.”
I drained my drink, letting the caffeine energize my brain. A military doctor might be in a position to get other doctors and researchers to try unusual drugs on the mold, even if just in the lab. The mold had mutated and was growing like a cancer, so why not try something new in one of the fancy, supersafe labs? Or if people were dying, why not try it on people? Desperate times call for desperate measures. I put my sandwich down and sent an e-mail to Dr. Rettell. It couldn’t hurt. And since I’d be speaking as one underling to another, it might work. Though a lieutenant colonel was not exactly an underling.
“If it’s a magical mutation, do you think a magical working might help stop it?” T. Laine asked. “When I finally get in contact with the Knoxville coven leader, I can make her compliance part of any plea bargain. Assuming there are charges leveled against her.”
“You still haven’t seen her?” I asked.
“No. Once she was fired from LuseCo, she disappeared and has now missed two appointments we’ve made.”
“So you’ve talked to her?” I clarified.
“If you can call two thirty-second exchanges actual convos, then yes. If you mean anything significant, then no. And her cell’s GPS has been disengaged, so I can’t ping her. All the witches have nonworking GPS on their phones.” T. Laine lifted her sandwich to me in a toast or a salute. “I went with a deputy to her house, which is empty and has been for a week. I put out a BOLO on every single witch. Not one has been seen. They have to have a safe house or two to have dropped so thoroughly below the radar. More coincidence, Nellie. Not.”
BOLO—be on the lookout. Spook School cop-lingo class kicking in.
“The local DA will make any charges, but you can certainly get with him in that event,” JoJo said. “This case is likely to play havoc with current laws about paranormals.” Her cell rang, and JoJo made a little groan when she saw the number. She pasted a fake smile on her face, though the person on the other end couldn’t see her, and said, “Soul. What fantastical favor do you need? A pot of gold at a rainbow’s end? A solution to turning lead into gold?”
I thought the questions were snide and not particularly appropriate for an underling to say to a VIP, but then, I was raised in the church of God’s Cloud, where any female speaking like that to anyone would have been slapped down. Most firmly. And maybe the two had a history I didn’t know about.
JoJo leaned back in her desk chair and rubbed her head, eyes closed. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. T. Laine and Nell will be there ASAP.”
She ended the call and looked between us. “You’re getting your service weapon back,” she said to me.
“Okay, but protoc—”
“Protocol is temporarily canned. We need you on this, and I’m making an executive decision. I don’t know what’s going on, and I want you armed. I also know everyone needs sleep but there’s been a major change at UTMC. Gear up and get back there.”
“Gear up how?” T. Laine asked.
“As in weapons and unis and the psy-meter 2.0. As in any magical tricks, trinkets, and a magic wand. Take a frigging Quidditch broom if you got one. Soul says someone is flying.”
* * *
“Flying,” T. Laine murmured softly.
We had taken our own vehicles in the hope that when we got done, we’d get to go home, in different directions, though that seemed unlikely as quickly as things were evolving. We had parked one lot over and entered another building, and were taking a pass-through to the back entrance of the paranormal unit, thereby avoiding the press, which was wonderful, and so smart. I had to remember this.
“Freaking flying.” She sounded as amazed and tired as I felt.
“Like a witch on a switch?” I asked, not smiling, but teasing nonetheless.
“Ha-ha. Not.”
Ahead, in the empty hallway, something moved, but when I looked, it was gone. Just the way witches looked when they hid behind an obfuscation spell. “Lainie?”
“I saw,” she murmured. “We might have found our missing witches. Be ready.”
“For—” Power raked along my skull.
I reached for my Glock.
T. Laine threw up her hands. Shouted, “Revelabitur!”
In the same instant someone else shouted, “Dormio!”
A sleep spell slammed through me. My eyes closed. I dropped my weapon with a clatter. Hit my knees. Fell to my belly, face to the hospital floor. I blinked, hearing booms and shouted foreign words, feeling the scalding abrasion of magic along my flesh. I was the victim of a magical attack. Was lying on the floor. Grit under my cheek and on the palms on my hands. But not enough to do anything, not without the attacker’s blood, and so far she was uninjured. I was useless.
T. Laine stepped across me, one foot to either side, her shoes touching me in a protective stance that kept me within her defensive circle. Something hit the ward she had erected around us, and she shuffled back in reaction, kicking me. I felt the vibration of the curse hitting the wall behind us and through the floor. She fought back. I saw blue and red behind my lids.
T. Laine screamed, “Mortem!” Blackness stole the light. T. Laine fell beside me, heaving breaths, gagging twice, gasping, “Oh God. Oh God,” over and over.
Minutes passed like dreams, and she moved away from me, touching me now and again. Finally she said, “Did I kill you?” When I didn’t reply, she shook me. “You have a pulse.”
When I still didn’t reply, she said, “Suscito.”
Witch energies raced along my nerves and my eyes popped open. “Owwww,” I said.
“Sorry. I didn’t know what witch workings would do to you, but I needed you awake.”
“I’m awake.” I pushed myself to a sitting position. “Did you get her?”
“Not a scratch on her. Next time I’ll have bigger guns.”
I managed a laugh and let the U-18 witch pull me to my feet. The witch energies were zinging through me. I felt pretty good. Like I’d downed a cup of really, really strong tea. “I’m good,” I said, surprise in my tone. I looked at the moon witch, who looked like a faint breeze would blow her over. “You okay?”
“Good. Well, good enough. I’ve reported in. Soul is trying to track the energies and follow the witch. We need to check the patients.”
“Yeah. I figured.” I followed T. Laine down the hallway, wondering why I was still alive. Wondering what effect the
Mortem working had on the other witch. Because I was pretty sure mortem meant death in some foreign language.
Outside the sealed doors of the paranormal unit, we identified ourselves to the armed county deputy sitting there. He made a few calls to the unit at his back and nodded us on. Before he could ask, we dressed out in unis and bagged the psy-meter. Then we entered the controlled chaos of the paranormal unit. Which was a madhouse in the most literal way imaginable.
In one room, a young woman was strapped to her bed, arms bleeding, while above her, all the medical equipment was circling, like something out of The Exorcist—which I had walked out of one movie night at Spook School. Along the freshly scarred walls was broken equipment and several busted bags of IV medicines. It looked as if they had been smashed against the walls before being dropped. A lone, blue-dressed nurse was trying to bandage the woman’s bleeding, blackened arms, stopping the blood flow, from where the IVs had been scratched out. But the equipment overhead kept dipping as if to bash her brains out. The nurse ducked and bobbed and, when she was done, raced through the door and into the hall, between us. She was huffing breaths inside the faceplate and cursing steadily as she rushed past, blond hair stuck to her sweat-damp face in the airless uni.
Without a word, she stripped and redressed before bustling on into the next room, where a child was being held down on the bed by three hefty-sized men. The child kept rising up off the bed, like in a magic act, and it looked as if she wanted to spin in a circle, her body twisting clockwise.
“Patient in room three twenty-one exhibits poltergeist-like activity,” T. Laine said into a handheld mic, watching back and forth between the two rooms. I realized she was taking notes while her hands were gloved. That was smart. I needed a microphone recorder. I pulled the P 2.0 and started taking readings, feeding them to her. She stated what was happening in the room and what equipment was flying around, and ended with, “Violent reaction. Patient is covered with black . . . stuff. Looks like mold.”
Into the mic, I said, “Redlining on all four levels.”
“Patient in room three twenty-two is trying to levitate. Three people, probable combined weight of six hundred pounds, are managing to hold her down. This seems to confound Newton’s third law of physics. And gravity. And Einstein’s everything. Ditto on the mold.”
I said, “Redlining on all four levels.”
We walked on and T. Laine kept up a steady commentary as we paused and studied the patients in each room, ignoring any patient confidentiality rules and laws. “Male humans in three twenty-five appear psychotic and hallucinatory, talking about things they see that no one else does. Though they both seem to be discussing the same thing, as if they see into each other’s heads. Or into the same alternate reality. One has a moderate amount of mold; the other seems to have little.”
“Redlining on all four levels.”
“Patients in three twenty-four: One appears to be sleeping or comatose. The sleeping one is moldy. The other one is saying, ‘Flows, flows, flows. Pools, pools, pools.’ Over and over.”
I stopped at the room and covered her mic with one hand, saying, “His words are similar to what I heard deep in the earth, at the triangle sites the first day, the flows and pools phrases.” What I didn’t say aloud was my fear that something I had heard below the ground was capable of communicating in human language, maybe just the woman I had heard before. It was probably just parroting back the words of the working, but what if something down there, besides the sleeping Old Ones, was sentient? Mythology offered some unexplainable truths about the life of the ancient world. In my understanding it was Biblical—powers and principalities that humans should fight and guard against. But this felt different from anything I had been warned about in Bible lessons in my childhood in God’s Cloud of Glory Church.
T. Laine nodded, and my hand fell from the mic. We moved on, me listening. “A female patient in room three twenty-three is saying, ‘Dancing in the earth,’ and she’s moving as if dancing, even though she’s restrained. Double mold. Her skin is nearly tarry all over. Sheets and floor are tarry. There are ultraviolet lights in the room, all on the patient.”
I said, “Redlining on all four levels.”
As I watched, T. Laine reached the nurses’ desk and turned on the toes of one foot, nearly a dance pointe, and moved back up the hallway. She took the P 2.0 out of my hands. I watched as she went into first one room and then another, retaking readings, making notes on the recorder. When she had been in all the rooms we had passed, and taken readings on all the patients, a nurse stopped us and told us that we couldn’t enter patient rooms and couldn’t be on this floor, and threatened to call security.
Rather than argue or explain, T. Laine and I stripped off our contaminated suits and left, me trailing behind my current partner. She was still muttering into the recorder, “Upon bedside inspection, patients exhibiting poltergeist activity redline in level four but are slightly less than redline on other levels. Patients with the strongest signs of black mold redline on level three and are slightly less on other levels. No idea what this means, if it means anything at all, but a coven of witches might be able to help.” She clicked off the recorder.
“You really think a coven could help?” I asked, our voices echoing hollowly along the hallway to the outside.
“No idea. Hope for the hopeless,” she said. “I’ve been at this going on twenty hours. I’m heading home. You?”
“Yes,” I said, pushing open the outer door and staring out over the parking lot as we walked to our vehicles. “I think so.”
“Well, be careful and don’t get bit.”
Which seemed a strange comment in every way, until I was closing my truck door on the cold and looked up to see the moon rising over the horizon, full and bloated, as if it had eaten a corpse. This was the first night of the three days of the full moon. The werecats of U-18 would be hunting on my land, as they had on each full moon I was away at school. I wondered if I’d be safe sleeping in my own house. I wondered if I should change out my ammo for silver. I wondered if could kill my friends before they killed me. Of if I’d stand there, frozen in horror, as they tore me to pieces and ate my entrails.
I started the C10, which coughed and spat and got the heater cranking before I checked voice mail, and found one from Soul. It was polite but pointed. “Nell. Soul. Rick has been making progress on his were-shifting predicament. It is not impossible that he might yet shift into his leopard, and if he does, he might be dangerous. Occam has a cage prepared for such an emergency, and it is in the edge of your trees, near the graves of your dogs. Stay away from it.”
“Well. That stinks,” I mumbled through a yawn. “It’s hunting season. If the churchmen spot it while hunting, we might have a dead wereleopard.”
I pulled out of the parking lot and toward the hills of home, but before the turn to home, I made an illegal U-turn and headed back to the triangle of contaminated houses. I hadn’t inspected every house or yard. What if I had missed something?
And I had. Once again, the deputies dressed in unis told me I could go in, but my truck couldn’t. I should have thought to bring them a box of coffee and cups. Stakeout nights and traffic guard duty were supposed to be the worst.
I passed through the barricade again. There were landscaping lights on at some houses, the solar-powered kind that came on by themselves. Light-sensing security lights brightened backyards. Two motion-sensor lights came on as I walked down the streets, too sensitive or aimed improperly. My breath hissed and thrummed inside the faceplate of the 3PE uni. My booties shushed softly on the pavement with each step. The absence of humans and pets—of anything alive—made me want to run home and hide, as I walked the gloomy streets alone. The night wrapped itself around me, isolating, insulating, like a freezing, menacing blanket.
I had checked Point B, Alisha Henri’s house, so I inspected Point A this time. The black slime was worse here. How co
uld I have missed it before? The mold coated every tree, branch, stem, every blade of grass. In the center of the front yard, a ring of black toadstool-looking things formed a perfect circle, about seven inches tall. Around it trotted four possums, one adult and three small, like a mama and her toddlers, all coated with the slimy tarlike stuff. Their squat bodies glistened with it. As I watched, they went around once, twice, and kept going, clockwise. They were stuck walking in a circle like the geese and humans swimming at the pond, and the humans who had walked here. Like the goldfish in the tank. There was no smell of poison, and I guessed that KEMA hadn’t sprayed this yard yet. The possums would die. The possums were dead already, but didn’t know it.
In the distance, at the third house, Point C, bluish lights as bright as stadium lighting were shining, illuminating the whole area. I heard a generator running, and voices carried on the faint breeze, along with the stink of poison. Someone was spraying the house and grounds. I stopped midstep and turned around, heading back to the truck. The breeze appeared to fall away, moving no faster than my own feet. Moonlight draped over my shoulder, painting my shadow ahead of me, long and lean, even in the bulky suit. Overhead, movement caught my eye. Limned by silver moonbeams, crows were sitting on a telephone wire. Seven of them, sitting equidistant on the line. Shadows so black they were iridescent. The birds were silent. Awake. Black eyes on the distant lights. I hadn’t looked up as I’d passed by the first time. Surely they were perched there then too. I hadn’t heard the sound of wings.