Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)

by Faith Hunter

  When I explained my blood-servant-kidnapper theory, JoJo said, “So you think we have three cases. A kidnapping involving the vampires who also attacked Ming of Glass, a witch creating a circle to curse Rick, and Paton with his child porn addiction.”

  “Yes. Or maybe overlapping cases,” I said. “And if the vampires need blood, they’ll be taking more people off the streets.”

  “Why is nothing ever easy?” she muttered and ended the call.

  • • •

  I was back at HQ when the case turned itself on its head, and because I was the probie taking calls on the night shift, I got the news first. “PsyLED Unit Eighteen, Special Agent Nell Ingram,” I said, answering the official line.

  “I’d like to speak with Rick LaFleur,” a female voice said.

  “Special Agent LaFleur isn’t in right now,” I said, as I perused the list of missing teenaged girls within a ten-mile radius of Paton’s house. There had been seven in the last twenty years, three returned safely, four never found. That seemed like a lot. Distracted, I said, “Can I help you or do you want his voice mail?”

  “Will you call his cell and tell him to call Loriann Ethier at New Orleans Police Department, CLE. It’s urgent.” She gave me a number, pronounced and spelled her last name, which didn’t match at all, and hung up.

  Loriann. Rick’s Loriann. And she had just called PsyLED from NOPD. I sat at my desk, not sure what to do. I finally called JoJo on her cell so I could speak privately.

  “This is weird, probie,” she answered. “I can see you from here.”

  “Loriann Ethier just called HQ. She wants me to have Rick call her at NOPD CLE, whatever CLE is. Can you track it back?”

  “I’m in the system. Hang on.” She repeated the number back to me. Then, “Dang, probie. You’re batting a thousand. You were right. The witch who spelled and inked Rick, currently works for the New Orleans Police Department.”

  Rick had to know Loriann worked at NOPD. Boss man had been keeping secrets. “Rick was going to stick around HQ until the witch circles stopped. But he’s not in-house. What do I do?”

  “Call his cell. Pass along the message. I’ll notify Soul.”

  I dialed Rick’s cell and opened with, “A woman wants you to call her. Her name is Loriann E-t-h-i-e-r,” I spelled out, “pronounced ‘Etta.’” His reaction was so intense it shivered through the silence on the cell. I stilled, feeling his shock through my bones and through my connection to Soulwood. Whatever it was, it was something with power, with magic, and it had hit Rick. Or come from him. “She’s the witch who inked you, isn’t she?”

  Reluctant, hesitant, he said, “Yes. Loriann Ethier is the witch who … tattooed me … with a blood-magic … spell.” He growled out the last words as if they ached.

  Magic. I’d been right. “Do you think she’s the one who’s cursing—”

  “I’m not speculating. Occam and I dropped by my house to pack more clothes and I’m on my way back. I’ll make the call from HQ. ETA eight minutes.” He ended the call.

  I gathered up my tablets and the note with the name and number and walked into the conference room. In the darkened space JoJo and Tandy were both pouring over laptops and multiple tablets. “Rick’s on the way in to call her back. He says she’s the witch who gave him his tats.”

  JoJo suggested that someone have sexual relations with her and scrubbed her hands over her turban. Tandy laughed. “We’ve already amassed a lot of research on her,” Tandy said.

  Jo dropped her hands. “Yeah. With our combined talents, we pretty much know where Loriann is, where she gets her hair done, what her pets’ names are, what medicines she takes, and how she likes her steak cooked. All in fifteen minutes work. All we needed was a last name. Which Rick never gave us.”

  I didn’t envy Loriann the loss of personal privacy. As we waited on Rick, I gave attention to my plants, sliding sturdy leaves through fingers and thumbs, thinking, trying to make the investigation fit together. Nothing fit. Parts of the puzzle were missing. Or I was blind to them. Probably that. But I did know that Rick should have told us about Loriann, that she worked for the New Orleans Police Department, because many of the witch circles had been found in Louisiana. No matter what she was today, this witch had done evil to Rick once. She should have been on a list of suspects from day one. And Rick hadn’t told us about her.

  • • •

  Rick blew into HQ like a storm, his eyes glowing the green of his cat, his black and silver hair flying around his head and shoulders as if caught up in a wind. He dropped his gobags and took his place at the conference table. Occam wasn’t with him, and I felt a shaft of disappointment. “I assume you’re all up to speed on Loriann,” he snapped. When Tandy and JoJo nodded, he said, “Fill me in.”

  Crisply, JoJo said, “She’s twenty-seven years old, lives in New Orleans on the second floor of a two-bed, one-bath, Victorian-style two-story duplex just outside the Garden District.” She pointed to a photo of a house on the screen overhead. “She owns the house and two others, courtesy of her grandmother’s will. She’s single, has two cats, and works for NOPD Crime Lab and Evidence. She rents out the lower floor of her home to a doctor of paranormal species at Tulane Medical. She has a brother with a drug problem. She reported him missing twelve months ago. The number she gave us is the CLE direct number, but it’s possible that your call will be diverted elsewhere. This”—a second photo popped up on the big screen over the windows—“is from her most recent driver’s license, and the one beside it is from her NOPD ID.”

  The woman had dark brown eyes and pale skin. She wore her brown hair parted down the middle and hanging close to her face in the driver’s license. In the NOPD photo, her hair was back in a tail, exposing her ears. Ear cartilage, shape, and placement on the head were better identification markers than facial markers, which could easily be changed by surgery. In both photos, she was unsmiling. I got the impression of heavy burdens and years of sadness from the photographs.

  “She stopped dying her hair,” Rick said, his voice going soft. He cleared his throat as if something clogged it, and I remembered that odd sound when he told us about the ink spell earlier. “After I was rescued, Katie Fonteneau, once number two in the Pellissier vampire clan of New Orleans, and who is now Master of the City of Atlanta, saved Lori.”

  “Why would a vampire help a witch?” Tandy asked.

  His voice hoarse, Rick said, “Isleen was Katie’s scion—her blood-made vampire child. Isleen was also a psycho fanghead. Katie felt responsible for everything done to Loriann. And to me, I think.”

  A vampire had to have known that her scion was insane.

  Rick put his hand on his throat. Coffee gurgled into the pot behind him. Raspy, he said, “I helped Loriann get a job as a consultant at Crime Lab and Evidence. She did good work for a couple of years. Then she vanished. I haven’t had contact with her since.”

  Jo said, “She was rehired by CLE this past January when the European Mithrans tried to take over. She’s full-time now, instead of the former consultancy. Her six-month evaluation was excellent.”

  “Has she been researching something in private?” Rick asked softly.

  “I can’t tell,” Jo said. “Her work computer files are encrypted and her personal system is set up to give an alarm if anything tries to read it. I can’t get in easily, if at all.”

  “Really?” he said, as if he found that interesting. “Okay. Let’s do this. Clementine,” he said to the voice-to-text software, “record. Rick LaFleur, Jo Jones, Tandy Dyson, Nell Ingram, on conference call to Loriann Ethier”—he spelled it out—“currently of NOPD CLE.”

  “CLMT2207 recording,” the system said.

  He gave the date and time and punched in the phone number.

  It rang once. “Crime lab. Loriann Ethier. How may I help you?”

  Rick’s mouth opened. Nothing came out. I felt an odd, tugging sensation on Soulwood. “Rick LaFleur,” he said, sounding calmer than he looked. “How are you,
Loriann?”

  “You’ve had fifteen minutes, you and Diamond Drill. I’m sure you know everything about me.”

  Jo’s head snapped to Rick at the use of her old hacker name. Loriann had been researching us, it seemed.

  Loriann continued. “How are you? Since the calling started, I mean.”

  Jo tapped on her laptop so fast it was a tiny little burr of sound. Tandy focused on the far wall, as if blocking out everything except the voices.

  “How do you know about the calling?” Rick asked. I’d have thought him steady, uninvolved, except for the brightening green glow of his black eyes.

  “Your tats are being pulled on. I can feel the magic attacking them. So I did a little research.”

  Tension shot through me. Loriann knew something about the magic in Rick’s tats, and not just from the original inking. Could Loriann be the witch cursing Rick? It made sense, except for the logistics. She wasn’t in Knoxville. But … she knew too much and there was no reason why she should know. Unless she had left a backdoor into Rick’s magic tats. I sent that possibility to Jo, who shot me a startled look.

  Tandy scribbled something and passed the note to Rick. It read, Too far away to be sure, but I think she’s half lying.

  Rick rubbed his eyes and temples as if his head hurt. “Go on,” he said, sounding a lot more cop-like than he currently looked.

  “I heard about the Knox vamps being attacked and the witch who’s casting a curse there.”

  “Who is the witch?” Rick asked. “What is she casting?”

  Loriann said, “I got a look at the photos of the circles and they look a lot like ones I saw on the bank of the Mississippi last December, a month or so before the European vampires were destroyed.” Her voice took on an intensity that sharpened her sibilants, making her next words almost hiss. “Three circles. All created to be cast on the three days of the new moon. The spells are called Circle of the Moon-Cursed, or Circle of the Curse, or more commonly, Circle of the Moon.”

  “Ohhh,” I whispered as something seemed to fall into place in my brain. As a curse, it would be cast as a new moon circle. Curses and new moons had been taught in Spook School, but the course info had been sparce. Curses were rare, against witch law. We had already considered that this spell was brand-new, experimental. If this was the testing phase, then it worked like a pulse of magic and then stopped. Was that why Rick was aging slowly—a pulse at a time? If so, then the final, full curse was still to come. It all made sense, but my knowledge of magic lore wasn’t extensive. I pulled my laptop to me and sent my info to the unit. JoJo’s system pinged softly and she shot me a look, nodding once to say she agreed.

  I had missed something and looked back up to see Rick’s hand drop. “You know what the spells are,” he said softly to Loriann. Because until now, we hadn’t fully known how to classify them or the spell they contained.

  “Yes. Maybe. I think so. I don’t know for sure. But I think I can help. I’ve requested to be assigned to Knoxville to assist you. My boss said there’s no crossover with NOPD and KPD or PsyLED Knoxville. But if PsyLED DC asked for me, and offered to pay my salary while I’m there, he would let me go.”

  The home office of the Psychometry Law Enforcement Division of Homeland Security was located near the District of Columbia. She was asking for help from the main PsyLED office. She had already worked out the knots in her request. “Go on,” Rick said.

  “Soul could ask,” Loriann said. “And I’d be there to help Tammie Laine Kent if you needed spell casting. Since the local coven has gone in hiding.”

  Loriann knew a lot about what was happening in Knoxville. A lot about our agents. She’d had access through NOPD CLE channels and she hadn’t wasted the opportunities. She’d done her research. I wondered if she had gotten all that from our employee sleeves or was a hacker like JoJo. Of if she had a contact in Knoxville. And who that might be. Perhaps Margot Racer?

  Working at PsyLED had made me a suspicious woman.

  I didn’t like that about myself.

  Rick promised to talk to Soul, though he didn’t promise to request that Loriann be loaned to the Knoxville PsyLED field office, an oversight I caught even if Loriann didn’t. After the call ended, we sat around the table, three of us silent and thinking, JoJo tapping away like a madwoman, jerking on her earrings between attacks on the tablets and laptop. Rick watched us, the green glow in his eyes diminishing slowly. I caught him reaching up, several times, to rub the mangled tattoos, to touch the amulets hanging around his neck, to rub his throat, and I wondered if he was aware of the gestures. Abruptly, he turned and went to his office.

  Softly, I said, “she has access to the magic in Rick’s tattoos.”

  No one responded.

  I excused myself and went to my cubicle, where I stuck my fingers into the soil of the plants in the window boxes, trying to decide how I’d research curse circles, tattoo magic, and my boss. Because no matter how much we hid it from ourselves, Rick LaFleur could be a security risk. A big one. Propped against a basil was a small envelope. I tore it open to read a note from Occam. Nell, sugar, no matter what time you read this, you should know I’m missing you something fierce. An unfamiliar emotion, soft yet intense, swept through me, and I tucked the note in my gobag to take home.

  THIRTEEN

  I didn’t really know what I was looking for, so I started with Rick’s NOPD sleeve, the parts that my clearance level allowed. This was not the same as a personnel folder, but the kind of information that other law enforcement officials had access to. A lot was redacted, but I refreshed my memory on his history.

  Richard LaFleur graduated from high school in three years, started university at seventeen in prelaw, and got his degree in criminal justice in two years. He was spotted early on, recruited and fast-tracked into undercover, researching the New Orleans vampires, which was where he met Isleen and Loriann Ethier. At the age of twenty-one he started living on the dark side, where he stayed for nine years, far longer than the one or two years for most undercover operatives. He had been in the public, visible side of law enforcement for only about three years, since he was bitten. His long history undercover explained his willingness to accept JoJo’s less-than-lawful talents. And perhaps my own, much darker, gifts.

  I buried myself in research on curse spells, on blood-magic bindings and tattoo magic, and into Loriann Ethier, digging as deep as I could, saving reports to study later. Sadly, the magic stuff looked apocryphal, like boogeyman stories, not like reality. Loriann’s sleeve and social media presence were sparse to nonexistent. I was getting nowhere.

  JoJo left to sleep, giving me a wave of her hand on the way past. Rick went into his cage soon after, taking a mattress and a fluffy comforter. The office went quiet. Lights low.

  At three a.m. Tandy buzzed my desk phone. “What’s up, Tandy?”

  “Get up here. I just heard a report on official police radio frequencies that the body of a young girl has been found in a ditch. Passing motorist, grisly crime scene, according to the chatter.”

  I raced to the conference room. “We’ve got voice-to-text,” Tandy said, pointing to a screen that had text across the bottom, dedicating it to KCLE—Knox County law enforcement.

  “Is it the Blalock girl?”

  Tandy shook his head, his pale skin and Lichtenberg lines picking up the glow from the screens in the darkened conference room. “I don’t know.”

  I got coffee for us and waited with him, the volume on the radio chatter turned low, watching the screen. We sipped, listened, read as things were updated, Tandy still tapping away on his tablet, his body mechanics currently a lot like JoJo’s. It made me wonder if he was picking up more than just an intro into information gathering—hacking—from JoJo, but also taking on her personality and habits. I wondered if that meant the empath was losing bits of himself, of his own personality. Taking on bits of everyone else. Wondered if that was common to all empaths or something peculiar to Tandy.

  Most of what Margot had p
ut together about missing girls and our suspect would be incorrect if the body was ID’d as Raynay Blalock. There was no way creepy Jim Paton could have taken her, stashed her, banged on her mother’s door, and killed her. The timeline was impossible. And Paton was in custody now. He wasn’t the killer.

  Within half an hour, we saw text from the investigator who had taken over the scene, calling for the chief forensic pathologist and the chief medical examiner of Knox County.

  Tandy muttered, “Odd that both were called.”

  Having both the forensic pathologist and the ME on-site was a rare event under any circumstances, TV and films notwithstanding. “What does it mean?”

  “At a guess, it implies that the crime scene is so bad, or so weird, that the top brass are needed personally to handle the body at the scene and direct the evidence collection.”

  “If it’s weird, then PsyLED should be there,” I said. But the phones didn’t ring.

  I drank too much coffee and ingested too much chatter that told me nothing, but in my rooty gut I had a feeling that the girl—the body—was Raynay Blalock.

  The coroner’s van arrived. KPD set up a live-feed camera and Tandy put it up on the screens. More lights lit the scenes.

  A woman in a white Tyvek uni with mask and gloves stepped into a ditch. We got a view of the body from the camera on her suit. I looked away.

  “Someone from PsyLED needs to be there,” Tandy said.

  “Yes,” I said. “And the officers at the scene had to know that. They didn’t contact us.”

  “I’ve got their names and the name of the investigator who showed up first. Detective Emery Hamm.”

  He punched in a number on the official line and Occam answered, “What’s up?” his voice carrying over the speakers in the conference room. He sounded groggy. Voice rough. The way a man did when he was waked from a deep sleep. Something warmed in me at the sound and Tandy sent me a look that said he had picked up on my reaction. I looked back at the screens, finding them suddenly fascinating.