Curse on the Land

by Faith Hunter

  “Where are you hit?” I asked as the ward gonged twice like a bell. It had been hit with rifle rounds. Someone was shooting with a high-powered weapon. Without the ward, it likely would have penetrated the brick even though the shots came from far enough away that the sound was a heartbeat later than the damage. Again, and once more, it was hit and gonged in a vibration I could feel. I placed my weapon on the floor beside me and pulled a striped throw off the couch nearby, wrapping it around the woman’s waist and the pillow, applying pressure. Rivera crawled over and pressed her hands on her sister’s side, still moaning, “No. Noooo.”

  A gun was pushed into my face. It had been there for a while, but I hadn’t seen it until the cold barrel touched my forehead. My mouth went open. The barrel looked about four feet long and bigger around than a cola can.

  “Move and you die.” Aleta wasn’t a witch. But she clearly wasn’t powerless.

  “Ummm . . . not moving.” I could try to grab my ten-mil and fire. I could roll away and hope she missed. I could swat the gun and likely get a head shot for my trouble. I was on my backside. No way to kick or hit or run. With two fingers, moving slowly, I pushed my service weapon toward her. And held up my hands.

  Outside, the firing had stopped. In the distance I heard sirens. Well, this was gonna be a mess and a peck.

  “How did you find us?!” Aleta demanded, knowing the answer, her tone calling me dimwitted and dangerous.

  My mouth opened slowly. “Ooooh. I’m an idiot.” Someone who wanted a chance to kill the women, but who knew they were hiding behind a ward, had sent me the address. Then waited with a high-powered rifle for the ward to be dropped while both women stood in the open doorway because a stupid law enforcement probie had shown up. “Cell text. Address. Turned out to be a burner phone, but I thought I should check it anyway.”

  “Is your name Stupid?”

  “It is today.” I sighed. With the same two fingers, I removed my badge and ID and slid them across the floor to Aleta. “I’ll call in a GSW. Okay?” I pulled my cell phone and called JoJo. After that, things got a lot more hectic.

  I got the chance to ask Aleta and her mom questions before the ambulance pulled away, but it turned out I learned little I didn’t know, except that the COO at LuseCo, Daveed Petulengo, had a mother who was a Romney witch out of the Petulengo family. And there had been a Petulengo clan witch at the German research and development site in World War Two, working under duress to keep her family alive. I texted JoJo to run a check and see if Daveed was back in the country.

  Moments later, she called me. “Wouldn’t you know,” she said. “He’s been back in town for a week.”

  “Military training?” I asked.

  “Sniper,” she said quietly.

  I remembered the animal heads on his office wall. There was a man who knew how to shoot a high-powered rifle. A high-powered rifle had been used against Aleta and her family. A strange, itchy heat buzzed in my palms and through my chest. “He texted me the address. But why would he wait to shoot them now, when he could have killed them anytime at the company?”

  JoJo said. “He really was out of the country, so maybe he had no idea things were going bad.”

  “The Cornwall witches seemed to think that Shonda or Irene sent me the burner text with this address. And when I told them that Irene was missing, Wendy said something like Lidia. Well, now we know. Though I don’t know what good it does us.”

  “I don’t know what good it does us either,” JoJo said, “but I’m running a deeper background on Irene, Lidia, and their families and finances.”

  “Interesting that Daveed Petulengo has been out of town this whole time,” I said. “What do his finances look like?” I heard tapping in the background, JoJo’s faster-than-light fingers working on her keyboard.

  “More than strained,” she said. “Bank records came in overnight, and he’s strapped, in debt up to his eyeballs.”

  “Follow the money,” I murmured, quoting the Spook School lessons.

  “On it,” JoJo said. “I’ll try to have something on Petulengo and the Rosencrantzes by the time you get to HQ.” She disconnected.

  * * *

  I got to work minutes late, my mind full of worries, all as ugly as one of the slime mold blooms. JoJo met me at the top of the stairs with the words, “Daveed Petulengo just received an infusion of money. Fifty thousand into his account routed through the Caymans.”

  “How is Wendy Cornwall?” I asked.

  “In the emergency department. They’re still trying to decide if she needs surgery. Where’s Paka? And Soul?” Jo asked.

  I closed the door on the narrow stairs, and Jo followed me to my cubicle. “I left Paka and Pea and Occam fighting in my front yard. I haven’t seen Soul since she took off just before the big revelation about Paka’s goal in the US. Maybe an hour, an hour and twenty minutes ago.”

  “Soul was here when your text came in. No way was she with you then.”

  I blinked. “Okay. I must be mistaken about the time.” But I wasn’t. Soul had traveled to HQ by other than mechanized means. She had . . . flown? Right. Dragons have wings.

  JoJo continued. “When she heard about Paka’s little job, she cursed, words I never heard her use before, and took off like her tail was on fire.”

  “Hmmm.” I put my gobag and weapon away.

  “Before that, though, Soul said to tell you that we’ve been getting little earthquakes, registering zero-point-two to zero-point-three on the Richter scale, for the last hour. That’s too low for a human to feel, but she said you’d be interested.” JoJo did a one-eighty and left my cubicle. She was wearing gray and black clothing, not bright and vivid hues. That was different.

  Probie scut work was supposed to be paperwork, research, and errands, so I went to work on the Germany/World War Two/Kurt Daluege/Rosencrantz/Daveed Petulengo relationship. I was done with the Internet and history research by lunch and had JoJo’s deep background information on file. I was still not used to electronic methods and so I printed off the background on the Rosencrantzes and sat at the conference table, where I could spread out my papers. The first thing I noted was that the Rosencrantz sisters had received financial infusions in multiple small batches of $2,500 each. This was well below the limit that would make a bank inform the US government about large deposits, but the total added up to well over a hundred thousand dollars over the last year. Each deposit had come from a bank in the Caymans, the same one that provided Daveed Petulengo’s windfall.

  Someone was paying three members of LuseCo to do . . . something. So . . . maybe this was . . . The thought worked up through my subconscious like a seed sprouting. What if this was evidence of corporate espionage? I did a search on the finances of the other company involved in magical propulsion systems, Kamines Future Products, the company that was LuseCo’s foremost competitor in energy R&D. Surprise, surprise. Their company’s financial holdings were in the Caymans. That one key unlocked others. Sometimes being the probie put on scut-work research paid off.

  I put my thoughts into a report that included the witches in the workings at LuseCo and their relationships to covens involved in World War Two energy experiments. There was a considerable overlap.

  Then I went looking for T. Laine, U-18’s resident witch. I had feelings about what T. Laine and Tandy had done to Makayla and to me, but that could wait until the Old One was safe. JoJo mumbled something about Lainie interviewing more LuseCo employees, so I needed to drive to the company. Again. My driving patterns were ping-pong-ball specific, but I had an idea and needed to toss it around with the moon witch. It might be nothing. But it might be something. It might fix some things. Or ruin them. It was that kind of idea. Worrisome. Problematic. But an idea all the same. Before I left, I gave JoJo my report and said, “Check out the Rosencrantz info first. If you find them and send someone to pick them up, make sure it’s a mixed bag of paranormal
s, with as many witches on the team as you can get.”

  “We’ve got exactly one witch on payroll. Where you think I’m gonna get ‘some’ witches?” Her eyes flashed, and she looked at me like I was ridiculous. “How many are some? Three? Five? A full coven’s worth?” JoJo was tired. With Rick gone, she had been sleeping in the office, grabbing catnaps when she could, pulling back-to-back twenty-four-hour shifts. Her colorful clothing had made way for comfy sweats, and her healthy eating habits had been replaced by delivery—pizza and burgers, and takeout from Yoshi’s Deli and Coffee’s On, downstairs.

  “You’ll figure it out,” I said. “That’s why we call you Diamond Drill behind Rick’s back.”

  JoJo spluttered with laughter. “Really?” I nodded and she glared at me. “You even know what Diamond Drill means?”

  I leaned over her desk. There was a pile of earrings on the surface, and I realized that JoJo had no jewelry on, and no makeup either. “It means you were a hacker of the highest order, able to drill into any website or secure computer system, before you were recruited by PsyLED. Which means you can do anything.” I tapped her keyboard. “Anything.” I turned for the door. “If you need a dozen witches with really big magical mojo, you’ll find them, I’m sure. I’ll be back at LuseCo. Again. I feel like I live there.”

  “Cry me a river,” JoJo grouched as I headed down the hall. Then she shouted, “Wait!”

  I stuck my head back into her cubicle. JoJo was speed-reading my report. “The Rosencrantzes and Daveed Petulengo were all three being paid off to sabotage LuseCo’s R&D?”

  “The rule says, ‘Follow the money.’ That’s what the money said.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense. They all three stood to make a lot more money when LuseCo was successful.”

  “Petulengo needed money now. The sisters had reason to want revenge on Kurt and his family for what their own family suffered in the war.” I hesitated, thinking about Paka and vengeance and her being paid to hurt Rick. “Maybe revenge was enough all by itself. Maybe the money was just the tipping point. Maybe we don’t have all the answers or know all the motivations yet.”

  “So why is the working in a triangle? Why is it generating slimes?”

  “Not sure. Except that Infinitio was being tested all over the world during World War Two. But in one place it was being combined with Unendlich. And in that place it grew molds. And the witches died.”

  “They committed suicide,” JoJo said.

  “Before or after they grew molds on their bodies?”

  JoJo grunted softly, her eyes growing wide, but she didn’t answer. She was already fact-checking my report, muttering, “That’s it. The two workings together. That’s the tie.” She pulled on her earlobes, her smile cutting through the exhaustion. “If we know what started it, we can stop it.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed it was all so simple, but I didn’t argue. I said, “There are two ley lines that cross under Kassel, the town in Germany where the witches worked. Just like here. Ley lines in both places.”

  JoJo added, “If you find the LuseCo witches, bring them in for questioning.” She whirled in her chair to her printer and whipped a single sheet off the tray. “Here. Here’s molds in a triangle.” She slid the sheet, which was a color photograph taken from the air, across her desk to me. “That weird stuff is growing everywhere, from the pond to the deer spot to the three houses in the neighborhood.”

  “They seem to be spreading out in the surrounding area.”

  “What odds you gonna give me that they’ll eventually fill in to form a circle? That slime mold is indicative of a working that’s going haywire. I’m sending this to the unit and up the line to DC, to PsyLED central. Figure this out and get it stopped before one of those wingnuts in the government decides to nuke the place.”

  * * *

  I got gas in the truck, checked the tires, and ogled spanking-new cars in a Ford dealership while stuck in traffic on the way to LuseCo. I figured it was my fifteen-minute break for the day. At LuseCo, the uni-wearing cop checked my ID and sent me to basement level one, without asking me who I wanted to see. Which was interesting. On the way down on the elevator, I checked my messages, found some noteworthy tidbits of info, and mentally added them to the image I was building as I wandered the halls seeing what might need to be seen.

  My phone dinged with a text just as I rounded a hallway corner and spotted the U-18 witch in a lounge with four other women. I could make out two of the faces through blinds that partially covered a window between hallway and room. It was two of the LuseCo witches. I hugged the wall and put my cell on vibrate. They were sitting around a small table with T. Laine. There were papers, silver-toned pens, and two laptops on the table, along with cells and brightly colored tablets. It looked like a business meeting.

  I was alone in the hallway, and I moved closer to the open door, listening. The smell of stale coffee and old food clouded the doorway. Two vending machines were in the back, and a microwave sat on top of a minifridge. A small cabinet held a bar-sized sink beside an overflowing garbage can.

  I wasn’t certain whether to go in or not, hearing the words though the partially open door. “It’s not our fault,” one of the women said. “It was Daveed’s fault. We warned him and he didn’t care.”

  The voice. It was the voice I had heard underground. The woman had short black-dyed hair, but her back was to the door and I had no clue who she was. Except that she was a witch and she had done all this. Somehow, she had spoken Infinitio and Unendlich into life, with dangerous consequences.

  T. Laine asked calmly, “What did you warn him about?”

  “That using both workings in a confined space, even on separate days, would result in poisoning the land,” the woman said. “In the growth of strange fungi and molds. In . . . other problems. Just like in Germany.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell us?” another woman demanded. Her I could see. Taryn Lee Faust, the Knoxville coven leader. “You let us harm the earth? You bitch!” Power streamed from the room, a gathering of magic that raised the hairs along my arms and up the back of my neck.

  “How do we stop it?” Taryn asked, her blue eyes blazing. If the itchy feeling on the air was any hint, she was powerful and livid.

  “It’s too late to stop it,” the dark-haired woman said, her tone exhausted.

  My cell buzzed, the vibration unexpectedly loud.

  “Who’s out there?” a third woman demanded.

  The hum of magic through the partly open door strengthened. Thinking T. Laine might need help, and knowing I was discovered, I entered. T. Laine had been working to locate the witches involved in the LuseCo workings and get them together to tell us what was going on with the testing. From the photographs in the LuseCo consultants’ records, she had succeeded. She had found four of the witches. And unless our exhausted Diamond Drill had somehow forgotten to tell me that, Lainie hadn’t told anyone. “I’m Special Agent Nell Ingram.”

  The power in the room spiked. I looked at the black-haired woman and felt my insides crawl. Black eyes glared at me. In her photos she had long gray hair. Now it was black-dyed, cut short, and stood out in a dark corona as if she had spent hours scraping her fingers through it. This was the face to go with the female voice beneath the ground.

  I glanced at T. Laine, looking for a cue as to what I should say. Her eyes were wide, full of speculation, darting from one witch to the other. She gave me a single hard look and a minuscule nod that seemed to tell me to talk. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about it now that I had interrupted the meeting, so I turned on church-speak and manners I had learned at Mama’s knee, in the same instant that Spook School training kicked in. I stepped into the doorway, blocking their only way out.

  My cell buzzed again. Ignored. Tucking it into a pocket, I said, “Suzanne Richardson-White, of the Richardson witch family. Theresa Anderson-Kentner, of the Ander
son witches.” I stared at the third woman. “And I believe you must be the long-lost Knoxville witch coven leader, Taryn Lee Faust, of the Lee witch clan.” To the fifth woman, I said softly, “And Lidia Rosencrantz of the German Rosencrantz witches.

  “You’uns talking about World War Two and a city that came under attack by fungi and molds? And resulted in the suicides of a full coven of conscripted witches working against their wills for the der Fürher?” I paused for half a beat and finished with, “And about the Romney witch whose last name was Petulengo?”

  Lidia’s shoulders hunched.

  “You, I recognize from the curse on the land,” I said. “I’m not sure why you’re here, unless you’re under arrest for crimes against humanity, including releasing a weapon of mass destruction on the city of Knoxville.”

  Lidia raised her hands off the table, her power lifting her crown of hair like black fire. The other LuseCo witches realized we had a problem and they lifted their hands, some already holding amulets with pre-formed spells. This was going badly, and fast. Power filled the small lounge, burning and pricking my skin.

  “It’s not my fault,” Lidia said, magic sparking the air. “And I won’t pay for this. I won’t spend time in a null.” Her hands fisted. The air crackled with electric power. Lidia started to speak again.

  T. Laine threw a ballpoint pen at her and said, “Contineantur.”

  The flames of Lidia’s working snuffed out. Before Lidia could react, T. Laine said, “Finis,” and threw her entire body across the table. In a power roll, she slammed into Lidia and dragged her to the floor. Faster than I could follow, T. Laine snapped witchy cuffs on her prisoner and set a ward, repeating the wyrd spell, “Contineantur.”