by Faith Hunter
“And was the research into Infinitio successful?” Tandy asked, his voice beguiling.
“Beyond our wildest dreams. Up until the night of the new moon. When everything was ruined.” She set the mug on the table and hung her head over it. “Ruined. Three dead. Ruined. All our plans ruined.”
“Who died?” Tandy asked.
“Three techs. We were able to cover it up, so none of the others knew about the failure, but we think Aleta had heard rumors about Unendlich, and the witches in Germany. We think she and Colleen found that they were working on Hitler’s paranormal research and sabotaged the tests.”
“Why would Aleta and Colleen ruin it after they worked so hard to put it all together?” Tandy asked, his voice growing hoarse with the effort of doing whatever he was doing.
“They had morals,” Makayla said, softly scathing. “Aleta went to HR about the morality of a working that might possibly affect the structure of atoms or degrade biological cells or damage matter nearby. The morality of re-creating a weapon that the German witches had died to protect. When there was so much money waiting for us if we pulled it off.”
“Wait,” I said, sitting up fast. “The German witches died?”
Makayla frowned and shut her mouth, her eyes going narrow and accusing. She turned to Tandy, stunned, recognition dawning that she had spoken her company secrets aloud. Tandy reached over and took the CFO’s hand. The accusation on her face melted away and she smiled again. Patted Tandy’s hand. T. Laine, who had been tapping on her laptop at the head of the table, said, “I’ve been looking through Kurt’s electronic files and I found a summary that explains a lot. “The German coven was close to a finished Infinitio. But they knew Hitler was going to weaponize it and turn it on the world. They created a death spell and set it over themselves. It was too late for Hitler’s SS to re-create the research and save the war effort. The witches destroyed everything, except one copy of the notes, which was smuggled out of Germany by the wife of an SS officer and her children. The notes were recovered by Kurt at his grandmother’s. The notes mention Unendlich, a similar working but with the ability to store immense amounts of energy and then direct it to other uses. Like the weapon he envisioned.”
“And you think Aleta discovered all this?” I asked. “Maybe after she introduced the coven to Kurt? And felt responsible for setting them up, for releasing Infinitio and Unendlich on the world?”
“She was afraid of Infinitio being combined with Unendlich and weaponized,” Makayla said, sounding sleepy again. “That wasn’t a big part of what Kurt was looking for. Hoping for.” Makayla sipped her coffee and made a face. It must have grown cold. “That was what the DOD wanted. A weapon that no one would expect, that could be set off with a single spoken word. That needed nothing to make it work but the will of the witch and the air she breathed to speak. A thing of deadly beauty.”
“God bless quantum mechanics and psysitopes,” Tandy said, his voice hoarse. He had sweated through his clothes and I could smell him from across the table. His skin looked sallow, a dull yellow as if his liver had stopped working weeks ago and he was dying. I hated what Tandy was doing, but . . . he looked so bad that he might really be dying. I looked at T. Laine, but she refused to acknowledge my stare.
Makayla laughed softly. “Exactly. But we would never have given such a thing over to them.”
“So why are you still in business?” T. Laine asked.
“Because of the success of Unendlich. And the money that came in from the Department of Defense. So. Much. Money. Initial testing suggested that we were closer to an end product on the energy research than we expected. And then the readings started going haywire. The growths started. Our power grid kept going down. We knew we had been sabotaged, but we weren’t sure who on our team was responsible. We had been able to keep it from the DOD and our backers, until you showed up on our doorstep.”
“Unendlich?” Tandy rasped. “What does that mean?”
“Unending,” Makayla said. “Unending power.” She closed her eyes, some mixture of anger, despair, and exhaustion. “All the power. Everywhere. It . . .” She stopped, and her eyes moved behind her closed lids as if she was dreaming or thinking very fast. “It may have gotten loose and . . . caused a problem. And now we can’t stop it.”
I blinked. The dancing infinity loop—Infinitio—had been created by LuseCo’s coven, and it was trying to wake an Old One. How the slime and deaths related to the Old Ones, I didn’t yet know. Except that magic is power, and power has to come from somewhere, despite people’s hunt for a self-perpetuating energy device. Were the Old Ones part of the power they were trying to tap and use?
“You will walk us to the lower basement. Now,” Tandy said.
“Of course,” Makayla said, leading the way to the elevator, Tandy’s trembling hand in hers. Moments later, we were standing in the bottom of the building, and staring at the twenty-foot circle scorched into the floor. The burn marks indicated that the flames from the broken working had climbed up the walls and even trailed across the ceiling. There were cracks in the concrete, and moisture had already begun to seep through. At the cracks, black mold blossomed, all one form, with bloodred bulbs on the ends of tall stalks. They looked ready to explode, which would spread the spores everywhere.
“Get out! Get everyone out!” I shouted.
I pushed Tandy and Makayla and three others back into the elevator and shut the doors between us and the lower basement.
“Get military medical people down here,” I said. “We need ultraviolet lights and fungicides. Fast.”
Makayla had regained her own mind and will, eyes flashing, mouth spewing cussing I had never heard, even in Spook School. She was in a cold fury, demanding her attorneys and threatening lawsuits for a magical attack. I blocked out her verbal rampage and, as the elevator rose to ground level, I stared at Tandy, letting thoughts of disappointment and betrayal fill my mind. Tandy caught my gaze and his eyes closed. He slid to the floor of the elevator, his head against the back wall. I knelt beside him and checked his pulse. He was icy-cold and his pulse was fluttery. His breath was ragged. He was also out cold. The doors opened.
The next minutes were little but the frenzied action of a paramedic team taking care of Tandy and putting him on a stretcher. Of men and women in unis, carrying equipment down the elevator. I didn’t stay and watch. I had things I needed to attend to. And though Tandy was down, I couldn’t feel sorry for him. I knew he had gotten information that we would have gotten no other way—or certainly not this fast—but . . . but Tandy had violated my will. Makayla’s will. He had taken control over us. T. Laine had sat far away at the conference room table, out of the way of his control. She had known what he was going to do and she had let him. She hadn’t warned me to sit on the far end of the table too. I didn’t want to be close to the empath or the moon witch. Not just now.
* * *
I had been in the CEO’s office for hours. Alone. Once I left the elevator, I didn’t want Tandy anywhere near me. He had made us happy and talkative and taken away all our barriers. He had nudged Makayla to speak the truth. It was something like hypnotism and mind control, and he had used it on us. It was a betrayal and a violation and so unlike him that part of me wanted to find out who had forced him to do it to us. But according to T. Laine, Tandy had done it all on his own. He was nursing a massive headache and flulike symptoms with fever and dehydration. I had no sympathy for him at all.
I wasn’t speaking to either of them. I wasn’t letting the empath within five feet of me, which was about his range, according to T. Laine.
I had reported the change in the empath to JoJo, who was talking to Soul about it. We had problems in Unit Eighteen. Big problems. Missing werecat leader. Two other missing werecats. And none of them had come to work after they shifted back to human at daylight. Power-hungry empath. Moon witch who had allowed her partner to employ questionable methods to
obtain information. So the door was shut and I was reading through Kurt’s timeline of the experiments. Something about the research and experimental work seemed out of sequence from what Makayla had been told.
According to his personal files, Kurt had known about Infinitio and Unendlich long before he had talked about them to his partners and the board of LuseCo. And he had known of a problematic outcome long before he turned the papers over to his witch team. I scanned through the papers and his personal notes and discovered a notation that said there had been no problems with Infinitio in the rest of the world. Only in Germany, when Infinitio had been paired with Unendlich.
How had Daluege determined that? He wasn’t from a known witch family, yet he had known that the German coven committed mass suicide before they could turn over the weapon to the SS of the Third Reich.
What could have been so bad that an entire coven killed themselves rather than releasing the spell? Or . . . had it been something else? Had the results been even more powerful than the SS or Hitler had hoped? A doomsday working the witches feared he would use? Or . . . had it mutated the vegetation around the working there too? Was Unendlich a radiation-type weapon? The first calls to the cops had been about radioactive geese . . . Had the WWII witches all gotten a disease and killed themselves because of that? All I knew was that the questions were making my sonic-blast-induced headache worse, and I had no idea how to answer a single one except to keep digging through LuseCo’s files, headache or no.
I sent the translations of the coven’s notes to JoJo, along with a list of the witches who had participated in each working, a schedule of each working. There were twenty-seven witches altogether, involved in some capacity with LuseCo, all female.
There was Aleta’s family, Wendy Cornwall and Rivera Cornwall, twins, of the Cornwall witches.
Irene Rosencrantz, of the Rosencrantz witches, listed as a recessive-gened witch, which usually meant a witch of little power, but the Rosencrantz witches were different, especially when working together. And Irene’s sister Lidia Rosencrantz. Colleen Shee MacDonald of the Shee witches. Taryn Lee Faust of the Lee witches, and the leader of the coven. Theresa Anderson-Kentner, of the Anderson witches, and Suzanne Richardson-White, of the Richardson witches. Barbara Traywick Hasebe of the Traywicks. And eighteen more, though none of the rest were from famous witch family lines. Several of the witch families had emigrated to the US after World War Two, including the Rosencrantzes, mentioned by Makayla; the Cornwall family; and Colleen’s family, the Shee witches. It seemed odd that so many powerful witch families had ended up in Tennessee, but in a cursory search nothing stood out as suspicious. Maybe they had written letters and come to a similar part of the country. No matter how it had happened, there were too many possible suspects.
I turned my attention to what Kurt himself had done. The CEO had divided his witches into two groups and melded them into distinct and strong covens. He had given each coven one working to concentrate on. And he had given three orders to each coven. One: test mathematics on the new moon. Two: test workings on the full moon. Three: do not switch the two dates.
Makayla had said the problem occurred during a test on the new moon. Had the coven deliberately disobeyed the orders? If so, why? Sleep deprived, I couldn’t see an answer to any of the questions. I sent the timeline to JoJo and to myself for later study.
I left the CEO’s office, and to keep myself awake, over the course of the next two hours, I walked through the complex, taking readings everywhere and listing them on the building plans. There were a total of eight employees whose office spaces redlined. All were techs except for the office of the CEO, Aleta’s office, and Colleen’s office. None of the employees on-site exhibited signs of slime mold, but one stood up in the middle of our discussion and said, “Flows, flows, flows . . .” She was turned over to the Army MedCom and whisked away.
I was beyond exhausted and confused and had no idea what to do next, so I checked in with T. Laine, who was back to interviewing people, Tandy beside her. I didn’t like it. But I wasn’t in charge. I also called JoJo to report in, and left the building, walking into the chilled night. I was hungry. Sleepy. Too exhausted to drive just yet. Hoping the cold night air would wake me.
Someone had stuck something to my truck. I peeled off a blue marker that was taped to my driver window, loaded my gear inside, climbed in, and closed the cab door. Turned the engine on to let the heater warm. I didn’t know what to do about the marker or what it was for. I slumped into the seat and yawned to try to pop my damaged ears. Checked my cell for messages, finding over seventy e-mails and texts that related to the multiple cases. I’d never get a chance to sleep. Holding the blue marker, I sat in the harsh artificial lighting outside of LuseCo’s parking lot, paying no attention to the uni-dressed people rushing around me, and read the day’s correspondence. Well, scanned it. I was too tired to read it all.
At Spook School, only one person had ever mentioned the exhaustion of a multiorganization case, or the mental confusion that set in, or the sheer mind-boggling-ness of it all. I clipped my cell to the steering wheel and blocked out all the action around me as I went through the correspondence, the research and evidentiary chains, the back-and-forth on . . . way too much stuff. But as I read, a picture of the day and the case began to form.
PsyLED was conscripting people from other units and sending them to help, both in-person investigators and online analysts. Soul had requested a medical team from Tulane University to help treat the people in UTMC and in the Army’s MedCom site. The nurses that had arrived were all witches, and two vampire physicians had been transported in, one to work at the hospital to see if vamp blood would help the sick and dying, one to the MedCom site, which was set up outside of LuseCo.
LuseCo. Where I was.
I looked around me and focused on the dozens of people wearing white with orange stripes, all rushing here and there. They had figured out how to differentiate themselves. Doctors and medical people had added a medical staff design on the left side of their chests and on the back, the snake and staff in red marker. Military had insignia drawn green. PsyLED had a blue starburst. Hence the blue marker taped to my window. I got it.
There was an update on the patients. The black lichen was still progressing. Doctors were discussing telomeres, whatever they were, previously unseen cancers, cancer-fighting medicines, because the fungicides had stopped working. Witch nurses had set block workings to stop the paranormal activity on and by the patients, making them easier to treat medically. Doctors and biologists were discussing transformations and species mutations.
Soul had taken a hotel room in Knoxville and would be at HQ in the morning for a meeting with all members of Unit Eighteen. Eight a.m. sharp. I did not want to attend that meeting and be around when she discovered that her protégé Rick hadn’t been to work for two days in the middle of a crisis.
And I knew that I should—must—commune with the land around LuseCo again to understand and hopefully find a way to stop whatever was happening. But I was afraid. And lack of rest had made me muzzy headed. When I was done with the day’s deluge of information and queries, I drove from the parking lot and headed home.
SIXTEEN
The security light came on as I drove up, illuminating parts of the house and yard and not others. The three mouser cats were on the porch, mewling and crying, tails straight up, walking in circles—not in a line like the possums in the neighborhood, but with each cat going its own way. They were acting very strange, almost the way cats acted when in heat, but all my cats had been spayed or fixed prior to me taking off for Spook School. No kittens for me.
I turned off the truck, gathered up my gear, and opened the door, letting the icy air of night sweep in. It carried in a noise that had never belonged here, on Soulwood, a purring, chuffing sound, in and out, two sets of them. As if breathing out of sequence.
Wereleopards. Close by.
A screa
m slit the night, powerful and petrifying. Not an African lion roar, but the dark of jungle nights, half shriek, half rumble, a hacking, growling reverberation that spoke of blood and threat and death. Close. Too close.
I twisted, searching for the sound, still in the protection of the truck body. I dropped everything onto the passenger seat. Drew my weapon and a flashlight. Placed my feet to the ground. The rumbling noise was from the roof of the house. I trained the powerful flash high. On the roofline, at the crest, were two leopards, a black leopard and a spotted one—Paka and Occam. Their eyes were trained on me, one greenish gold in a black coat, the other the amber shade of old gold, in a spotted coat.
For a moment, I knew what it felt like to be prey, a prickly, enervating weakness, as if all the blood had already drained from my body. The cats were crouched, showing fangs, white in the flash.
Pea was between them and me, on the edge of the roof, facing them, her neon green fur standing out all over. Her impossible steel claws were out, catching the flash in silver slashes of illumination. She was spitting with rage, and when Paka shifted her paws, Pea yowled with fury, louder than the weres, the sound full of warning. The mouser cats bolted to the ground and under the front porch. Paka seemed to rethink whatever it was she’d wanted to do and settled back, belly to the crest of the roof.
I stayed where I was too, protected by the body of the truck, and shined the flash around. I spotted Rick on the porch, curled into a ball in the shadows of the swing. I trailed the strong beam over him. He was a mess. Bleeding from what looked like claw slashes and fang bites. Paka’s bites? Rick was a were stuck in his human form, unable to shift into his cat form, spending the three days of the full moon each month in torture. But from the black hair covering him from head to foot, it looked like Rick was now part cat, partway through the shift into his black leopard form, which he had never achieved before. The tats on his shoulder were four glowing golden discs, so bright that they looked heated. As if reacting to the burn of the tats, Rick tightened the muscles of his arm and gripped it with the clawed hand of the other. Cat claws. He mewled, clearly in agony.