by Faith Hunter
Good Lord a Moses, I cursed internally. Lainie was fast. She held the other witch facedown, one of the silver-toned pens I had brought from Spook School on Lidia’s back. It was temporarily blocking or draining her magics. It was a small version of a null working, but clearly a directional one, because Lainie herself wasn’t affected by it. Lordy baby Moses and all the water in the Nile, I swore to myself. Lidia moaned in pain.
The other witches were staring openmouthed, their power dissipating, their amulets unused and unnecessary. “Lidia? Nooo . . . ,” Faust said, sounding tired. “Why?”
“Lidia and probably her sister Irene,” I said. “Just after I got here, I saw an updated report on the single-car accident at the Gay Street Bridge. The accident was magically enhanced, according to psysitope readings. Magic sent the car over the curb and railing and into the river. With Colleen Shee MacDonald inside. She’s dead.”
Taryn closed her eyes, her face crumpling as if someone had crushed her in an immense fist. “You killed Colleen . . . ,” she murmured.
T. Laine yanked Lidia up by the cuffs and a shoulder and shoved her into a chair. The witch had begun to cry, and tears gleamed on her face, but her lips were tight, mulish, and her eyes focused on the near distance, with quick back-and-forth motions, as if she was trying to figure out what to do next. Or was trying to cast a working while in witchy cuffs, which was not going to happen. The last of the painful spears of magic in the air died away.
“What just happened?” Soul’s voice rang in the room from a laptop on the table. I closed my eyes. Soul had been part of this meeting of witches. I had gone all rodeo again, as Rick had said. I was likely to be fired.
“I think our probie didn’t get the text,” JoJo said, “and interrupted our conference call.”
“Conference call?” I tapped my cell screen and saw that the texts I hadn’t looked at were both from JoJo, saying not to interrupt T. Laine’s conference call at LuseCo. My face flamed. “Oh.”
“T. Laine,” Soul said, sounding exasperated and spent, “update.”
“Lidia Rosencrantz attacked and is in cuffs,” Laine said, “under arrest, which I’m sure everyone back at HQ heard.”
To the room in general, Soul said, “The police have BOLOs out for Irene and Petulengo and are staking out all the private and commercial airports for a hundred miles.”
With a knee, T. Laine nudged Lidia’s bound hands and leaned close to the witch’s ear. Gently she said, “You know. Because of the tickets we discovered to the Marshall Islands, a country the US has no extradition treaty with.”
Lidia closed her eyes at the words. “Vacation,” she said, wiping her nose and cheeks on her shoulder.
“Right,” T. Laine said. To the other witches she added, “Yes. Both Rosencrantzes and Petulengo are part of the problem with the workings and with the fungi and the pond and the deaths. We believe they knew that activating both workings in one locale would result in problems and strange growths and attacks on wildlife, and they did it anyway.”
“Did you know it would harm humans?” Taryn ask Lidia softly.
Lidia’s mouth went even harder, but her head tilted to the side in what might have been shame. Or not. I find it difficult to tell real shame from faked shame.
“Oh, Lidia,” Taryn Lee Faust said in a drawn-out sigh. “They’ll blame witches for these deaths. All witches.” She put her fingers over her eyes and pressed gently as if her eyeballs ached. “It will bring all the racial and species tensions back to the surface. We’ll have to start over to be accepted here.”
T. Laine asked Lidia, “Where is Daveed Petulengo? Where is your sister?”
Lidia glared at the table, silence her only answer.
A knock sounded in the room and two male deputies stood at the door, one Caucasian, the other African-American. Both stood with their hands free, ready to draw their weapons if needed. I stepped out of their way, my childhood in God’s Cloud of Glory making me see cops as the enemy, even though I was one of them now.
T. Laine pocketed the pens and pulled Lidia Rosencrantz to her feet. The U-18 witch looked cool and in control, and I remembered telling JoJo to send multiple witches to arrest Lidia. But it hadn’t been necessary, not when we had Lainie and her new equipment. Lainie, who was a . . . moon witch, during the height of the full moon. My mouth formed an O of understanding.
Lidia looked scared, her breath coming in pained gasps. “The cuffs will hold her,” T. Laine said to the men. “I’d appreciate it if you would take her to PsyLED HQ. We have a holding cell there that will negate her magic.”
At the word magic, the human males’ mouths pulled down. Neither was happy to be dealing with witches, and I got the idea that they would rather drown her in the river than transport her anywhere. But they both nodded.
Lidia growled and tried to jerk away, clanking her cuffs. “Fools. Every one of you! I curse you and the land you walk on.”
“You ever wish you had duct tape?” I asked T. Laine.
The darker-skinned man chuckled and the two carted Lidia away, down LuseCo’s hallways.
I tried to think what kind of problems could result if law enforcement, or worse, the general public, got their hands on the silver-toned null pens or reverse-engineered the witchy cuffs. I tried to think what effect the pens might have on me. Neither was a happy thought.
I said, “Ummm . . .”
T. Laine looked at me and her eyebrows went up. A half smile touched her face, and she tucked a strand of black hair behind an ear. “Talk to me, Green Thumb. Tell me interesting possibilities.”
I had told her about my childhood nickname, but it sounded peculiar coming from her. I started to cross my arms over my chest but resisted that protective instinct and stuck my nervous hands in the pockets of my jacket, fists dragging down on the heavy cloth, saying, “Not to change the temper of the room and not to step beyond the purview of PsyLED’s responsibilities, but I have an idea. If it works, the Knoxville witches can be the heroes.” The wide-eyed witches still sitting in their chairs raised their gazes to me. “All it’ll take is for a full coven of the Knoxville witches to try a dangerous Break spell mixed with some nonwitch magic, and swear a blood oath that you’ll keep my own little secret.”
After an uncomfortable silence, during which the witches exchanged meaningful stares that I couldn’t interpret, Taryn said, “Talk to me.”
I watched T. Laine as she retook her seat. Lainie had a speculative look on her face and she gave me a wait-a-minute gesture with one hand as she pulled an elastic and tucked her hair up in a tail to keep it out of the way.
From the tablet’s speaker, Soul asked, “Do I need to be part of this?”
“Beats me,” T. Laine said. “But deniability is always helpful.”
“Indeed. In that case, I’ll handle the questioning of our powerful Rosencrantz suspect in the null room. Keep me informed of anything you think pertinent. Soul out.”
“Me too,” JoJo said. “By the way, we just got a hit on Daveed Petulengo. Local LEOs picked him up at a private airport outside of town. He’s in custody and on the way to FBI headquarters for questioning and processing. Call me if you need me.” T. Laine closed her tablet and turned it over on the small table.
I said. “Remember when we first met and you said you might be able to route a spell through me?”
“A working. Not spell,” she said. “Spell is pejorative.”
“Okay. Fine. Do you remember?”
T. Laine gave me an abbreviated nod. The other witches were watching, puzzled but attentive.
“The slime molds move, almost like magic. Well, what if they are actually being powered by the working? If so, then they can be stopped by a working. And do you remember the Break sp—working you used to cut me loose from the site where the deer were caught up in Infinitio?”
T. Laine frowned as she put two and two to
gether and came up with the same idea I had. Her eyes lit up. “What if witches can direct a Break working to sever the connection between Infinitio and Unendlich,” she suggested. “Instead of trying to stop the workings, we just separate them and then shut them down one at a time.”
“That would prevent backlash,” Taryn said.
“Even if Infinitio has some kind of self-aware AI programming, it should work,” I said, finally taking a place at the table.
“It would take twelve of us—a full coven,” Lainie said. “But if we time it right we can—”
“Destroy the circle and triangle,” I interrupted, not wanting to say certain things—about the Old Ones—in front of the others. If they didn’t know, I wasn’t going to tell.
“Right. And if we can’t contain the Infinitio/Unendlich energies, we can at least break them up and dissipate them safely.” T. Laine gave me a smile that was mostly guile, emphasizing the word contain. She was thinking about the containment vessel I had brought from Spook School, though neither of us could say that aloud. Containment vessels were created in the R&D department of a company PsyLED paid to create antimagic weapons for the sole purpose of protecting humans from magic and magic users. Meaning witches, among others. Fortunately that company was in Silicon Valley, not in Knoxville.
I shrugged and tilted my head in agreement.
“We’d have to test it first. And then”—she pulled her cell phone and checked the time—“get it done tonight, before dawn.”
“Why before dawn?” I asked Lainie.
“Because according to Taryn, this working was sabotaged. The altered working has been building for the last half of the lunar cycle, and is set to complete at the end of the cycle at dawn tomorrow.”
“Complete?”
Carefully T. Laine said, “The working was supposed to pull energy from deep in the earth from a well or reservoir of some kind of ancient magical energy.”
“Ley lines?” I asked.
“That’s what they say.” T. Laine didn’t look at me, but I realized she was talking about more than just ley lines. She too was hinting at the Old Ones, but not saying the name.
Taryn sat forward in her folding chair, concentrating on Lainie and me. “Before we try anything you need to know what was going on. All of it and not the bits and pieces that LuseCo told you and that you figured out yourselves. Our tests of Infinitio and Unendlich were supposed to provide enough power to meet all of Knoxville’s energy needs for a year, tying into and unifying the grid for seamless, available power, not weaponization, as you indicated earlier. We didn’t know it would damage the ley lines. There was nothing in the notes about that ever being a possibility.”
“You were monkeying with the power grid. That’s why the lights have been flashing,” I said. Then, remembering a screen on Makayla’s computer, I added, “Using a back door into the TVA. You hacked the TVA to test your theories.”
“Not us, but maybe someone at LuseCo,” Taryn said. “And if the Rosencrantzes didn’t know that LuseCo was tinkering with the grid, then there’s no telling what will happen when the sabotaged working completes.”
T. Laine said, “Worst-case scenario is a fear that the energies will explode and send a psysitopic backdraft through the empty ley lines, scattering the energies everywhere and shorting them out.”
I thought about that, remembering the fact that the ley lines, early on, had felt empty, almost gone. “Why? To what purpose? There’s no motivation for any of this.”
“Soul and JoJo think that it’s a matter of everyone having different motivations and keeping them all secret from each other,” T. Laine said, “including you and the other witches.”
Taryn sighed and rubbed her eyes again. “Fine,” she said, sounding weary and beaten. “We went to work for LuseCo for two reasons. To make money and to stop them from doing anything with Infinitio. We knew the working wouldn’t do what they wanted. It wasn’t intended to make a self-perpetuating energy device. Infinitio’s original purpose was to take ley line power and dedicate all of it to human use.”
Suzanne Richardson-White, who had been silent until now, said, “Harvesting ley line power would have given them exactly what they wanted—a permanent and secure energy source.”
Theresa Anderson-Kentner spoke, possibly emboldened by Suzanne’s comment. Her words had a Great Lakes accent, some place up north. “It would have resulted in a socioeconomic and political upheaval worse than the invention of steam, and with as many negative consequences to the environment. Worse, it would have put major economic power in the hands of three people.”
“Sooo . . . ,” I said. “We got it wrong? The Rosencrantzes didn’t sabotage the working. You guys sabotaged it?”
Taryn stood, looking innocuous in jeans and leather jacket, her long hair, pulled back from a widow’s peak, caught in a clip. “We weren’t a real coven. A real coven is a group of witches working together for common goals. We were put together and given money to do a job. We all had different goals and different concerns that the larger group didn’t address, which forced us apart. We split into small groups, each with a different aim. Between us, we all sabotaged the workings.”
“And if the Rosencrantz sisters had other aims,” Suzanne said, “to steal the workings for another company, then they just made what we did worse. Beyond dangerous.” She looked to the other witches, communicating something with her eyes that Lainie and I weren’t part of.
“I guess it’s time to tell everyone what we discovered below the lower basement,” Theresa said. “There’s something else down there. Belowground.” The tension in the room went up, and she stopped, uncertain.
Taryn said, “We think the Rosencrantz sisters and Petulengo discovered something else below the ground. A power source.”
“An entity so vast, so amazing,” I said, “that it dwarfs the imagination?”
Taryn’s eyes went wide. The other witches in the Knoxville coven froze. And without a word or a sigh, they began to draw power. The barbs of magic that had died spiked again, hot and piercing on my skin.
T. Laine clicked a silver-toned pen and said softly, “Contineantur.”
The magic in the room shattered and fell with a sound like a dozen vases crashing to the floor. The witches gaped at Lainie. So did I. She said softly, “Don’t make me hurt you.”
The Old Ones were not a secret in this room. I had nothing to protect. “It’s call an Old One,” I said. “And while you may be correct in LuseCo’s motivations, and those of the three in custody, the sabotaged working has done unexpected things. The workings have gathered all the ley line power, power that keeps nature in its boundaries, and wrapped it all around the Old One, like a membrane. Not just in preparation for using the ley lines. But in preparation for stealing the Old One’s power too. Which might wake it.” I took a breath that hurt my rooty middle. “According to ancient Cherokee tradition, the Old Ones are sentient.”
“Holy shit. And if they wake it?” T. Laine asked, quickly opening her laptop and starting a report.
“Earthquakes? Rousing dead volcanoes? A complete slippage of Earth’s crust?” I made a helpless gesture. “All hell may break loose. No one knows what might happen. Even if no one intended it, the consequences of the sabotage might be deadly.
“But back to the Break?” I said to the Knoxville witches. “If I help you, a full coven, one working together, might be able to Break the working.”
And I might be able to capture the energies in the containment vessel.
EIGHTEEN
The witch circle was bigger than anything I had seen at Spook School, and it had been constructed by the witches themselves, on a fresh acre of land, one previously planted with soybeans and never used for a ritual. The flat area was high on a flat hilltop that looked down into the city of Knoxville. It was also above a drained ley line, one big enough and stable enough to handle a colossal
backlash of power. We hoped.
The four-inch-deep circle had been dug from the winter-bare earth with brand-new steel shovels and backbreaking work, aligned to magnetic north with a compass, with the center of the working at LuseCo directly to our south. There was no pentagram or pentacle, which relieved the schoolgirl fears I’d secretly harbored ever since I’d come up with this harebrained experiment. The circle’s trough had been filled in with a peculiar mixture of rocks, leaves, live plants, and, oddly, salt, which the witches claimed would help them control the spell. The working.
That I had come up with. Of all the strange things in this case, that one made my skin crawl.
There were fifteen of us present on the patch of farmland outside of Knoxville. Thirteen of us were witches, twelve sitting in the circle. T. Laine sat outside it with Soul, who seemed to have the most autonomy of any person I had met in PsyLED. And me. I was in the middle of a witch circle, right where the churchmen had always said I would end up. I was not going to be telling my mother one single thing about this event, whether it worked or not.
The four most powerful witches in the covens sat at cardinal points. Taryn, an earth witch, sat at north. Barbara Traywick Hasebe, a moon witch, and arguably the most powerful witch present, at least during the three days of the full moon, sat at east. Suzanne Richardson-White, an air witch, sat at south. And Theresa Anderson-Kentner, water witch, sat at west. The other witches were placed in between, the positioning determined by specialty and power levels in a mathematical negotiation that involved way too many numbers and too much geometry for me. The locations for the moon witches were the most important mathematically, thanks to the lunar cycle and the moon witches’ overwhelming power for these three days.
I recognized all of them from the photos provided by LuseCo. Some looked nervous. Two looked angry. They would all lose the money coming to them from LuseCo for the experiment they were about to Break. The rest looked tired or resigned. They had all been part of an experiment that had killed innocent humans. Odd how things of the soul reflected on the faces.