by Faith Hunter
“Not her sister,” Rick said, choking. “Her … her brother, Jason.”
“Brother,” I whispered. A brother, who, if he had magic, was a sorcerer. Things began to fall into place, as if shattered crystal tinkled to the conference room table before me. Gently, I asked, “Loriann had a brother who was kidnapped and drank from by a vampire as a child? Abused by an insane vamp?” Vamp blood and saliva did sexual things to the person being drained. “The boy was physically and sexually abused?”
Rick didn’t look up from his hands. They were fisted so tight they looked bloodless.
“Boy witches grow up fighting cancer all their lives.”
“Nell,” Tandy said, the word sounding like a warning.
I held up a hand at him, stopping him. “The homeless thief at the Pilot gas station, the one who disappeared behind the Walmart, near the circle we found, looked sick. The person who bought the white rats wasn’t a skinny female under a glamour, wasn’t Loriann herself, or someone she was working with, but was a very skinny, possibly sick, teenaged boy. He was Jason, wasn’t he?” I studied Rick, his pale skin, the deep lines in his face, his silver hair. His pain. Why hadn’t he told us? Asked us to look into this possibility?
Rick put a hand to his throat. “It didn’t occur to me … until Loriann showed up. But yes. Possibly.”
“And Loriann possibly inked you with a Blood Tarot?” T. Laine asked.
“Her grandmother was the owner of a very old, very special deck of tarot, used in my inking, in the spell Loriann cast to try to bind me to Isleen.”
I said, “Clementine. Stop recording.” The mic like went off. “Boss, I know you have a right to privacy, but if we had known about the brother, we could have raided the homeless tent camp the night I found the circle and maybe caught him.”
“Yes.” The word was rough, full of regret and pain. He rubbed his shoulder as if it ached. “Yes. I know. I should have told everyone. But … I—” His words stopped as if cut by a knife.
“Son of a witch on a switch,” T. Laine cursed. “That’s what I’m seeing. Loriann included a nondisclosure spell in your inking.”
Rick’s whole body tightened. “Is that what this is?” He gripped his shoulder. “I thought it was PTSD … a heart attack. That’s the reason my chest and shoulder and arm ache when I try to talk about it?”
“Coercion spell,” Occam said, “keeping you from understanding or speaking about it.”
“Witch bitch,” T. Laine said, her own face hard and cold.
Rick’s eyes went wide and greenish as he considered the effects of this revelation on his security clearance and his future in law enforcement. “That’s why you shut down Clementine,” he said, his voice easier.
“Yes. Oh,” I said, as something occurred to me. “That was why you weren’t spell-called the night I was behind Walmart. The witch was still setting it up. He heard me arrive and he grabbed what he could and took off. If he had stayed around and seen you—” I stopped.
Rick nodded, the motion jerky, sending silver-black strands flying.
“A coven of two is better than none,” I quoted. “She was talking about her brother and her. Loriann taught him all she knew about spell casting and he refined it. Now he’s coming for you. Why?”
Rick said, “I honestly don’t know. I let his sister ink a bonding into my flesh to keep him safe. There’s no reason for him to hate me.”
“He may not know the true story,” I said. “Sometimes people leave things out, thinking that it will be easier for the victim to be kept in the dark.”
“Personal experience?” Rick asked, his lips twisted into a wounded smile.
“Yes.” I thought about the welfare fraud and the money paid to John for my dowry. “Secrets are stupid and evil.” Except my own, of course. I refrained from saying that.
Rick nodded. “Yes.” He looked up at the screen. “Loriann is here. Are we all agreed? The null room?”
“Yes,” T. Laine said, grim. “Loriann’s been holding out on us to protect her brother. That’s gone on long enough. If we can’t find him, we can’t help him. And if we can help her brother, she might help get rid of the messed up spells in your tattoos.”
Rick sent her a quick, fierce smile, all teeth, like a snarling cat. He gave quick directions and we moved into place. “JoJo,” he said when we were all in position, “get her computer. Crack it. See if she has photos of witch circles on it.”
“And photos of Jason,” I suggested.
“Yes,” Rick said, sounding more like the boss I knew. “Photos of the little bugger would be nice.”
FOURTEEN
I stood out of the way, in the opening of my cubicle, watching. Holding a plant, my fingers in the soil of Soulwood. Not that I had any idea what to do if Loriann started throwing around wyrds of power or hitting people with magic.
Tandy led Loriann up the stairs, their feet muffled and yet sharp in the enclosed space. Rick stood in the hallway, the open null room door between the witch and him, the cold, deadening energies spilling from the room. T. Laine stood down the hall, hidden by the open stairway door, her null pens ready to throw and a wyrd spell of sleep, ready to speak. JoJo was in the conference room, monitoring everything on the screens. Tandy reached the top and stepped to the side, as if waiting on Loriann.
I watched as the pale woman reached the hallway and stepped toward Tandy.
Occam shut the stairway door and leaned against it. Loriann came to a complete stop, looking around fast. Seeing the trap. Some emotion combined of numbness and terror carved its way onto her expression. Her hands rose as if to grab something at her waist.
Rick said, “Wait. Please.” Loriann hesitated and he went on. “I have approval from NOPD CLE for you to work with us on this case. But we need to talk, one on one, about your personal involvement. About Jason.”
“Dear God,” she whispered. She closed her eyes and her hands fell to her sides. “I knew you were going to figure it out. I knew it. I had to be here to keep you from … from hurting him.”
“I’d never hurt Jason, Lori. You know that. You made sure of that, didn’t you? You inked his survival into my flesh. You put something in my tattoos to force me to protect him. And to make it difficult for me to talk about him.”
She opened her dark eyes and said fiercely, “You won’t hurt him. I made sure of that. But your team is a different matter.” Lori looked at T. Laine and then to the null room. “I guess this isn’t a weak threat. That you’ve contacted the U.S. witch enclave for permission to put me in a null room.”
Rick stared at her, waiting.
T. Laine said nothing, though there hadn’t been time to get permission to use the null room on Loriann.
“I’ve never been in one of those. Is it going to hurt?”
“Every second,” T. Laine said. “For all of us.”
“Shit,” she whispered.
Rick held out a hand and said, “Your electronics.”
Loriann’s mouth curled in distaste, but she dug into her bag and handed over a small stack of electronics—laptop, tablet, and cell phone—to Rick, who passed them to Occam.
Loriann squared her shoulders and walked into the null room. Rick, Tandy, and T. Laine walked in after. The door closed, cutting off the miserable energies.
The rest of us went to the conference room, where we could watch everything on the screens from the cameras in the room, filming every angle, every nuance of speech, tone, and body language for later analysis. JoJo plugged Loriann’s laptop into a special system she kept for just such purposes. The host system promptly began to mine Loriann’s.
Rick told Loriann to remove all her weapons, magical and mundane. Loriann placed her satchel on the table. “My weapon’s in there. And I have these, which will do me no good whatsoever in here.” She slid off a ring I hadn’t noticed and placed it on the table. Beside it she added a bracelet, a pair of what looked like reading glasses, and small things from her pockets. She took the seat Rick pointed to a
nd sat. Looking around at the windowless room, she hugged herself, shivering, and not just from the air-conditioning temps.
“Tell me about Jason,” Rick said. Loriann looked down, her mouth tight with bitterness and grief. She seemed to be thinking through what she might be willing to say. “Lori?” Rick pushed.
“I’ll tell you what I have on Jason,” JoJo said to Occam and me, muting the volume. “The kid vanished off social media over a year ago. Wiped his accounts, not that he used them much except for searching witch sites and black-magic chat rooms. His sister reported him missing within a week of him wiping the accounts and no one has seen hide nor hair of him. Prior to that, he was in and out of the juvenile system for years, and ended up in therapy mandated by the state, which usually means some fresh-faced counselor just out of school.”
“We should have had prints from the focals,” I said.
“His records were sealed when he turned eighteen. I’m trying to get them, but that can be harder than you think.” Her fingers were flying over her keyboard as she spoke, and files began to pop up on the screens overhead. “Jason ended up with a Dr. Robert Perkins, a well-respected psychologist in New Orleans. Looks like payments went through the state and all overages were paid by a …” JoJo stopped and yanked on her earrings. It looked painful. “Isleen was Katie Fonteneau’s scion, and Fonteneau paid the overages, until Jason went missing. As an aside, seven or so months ago is when Katie left New Orleans and took over as Master of the City of Atlanta.”
I said, “I’m starting an Internet search on public events that took place twelve months ago, something, anything that might have set Jason off.”
“Is Perkins alive?” Occam asked. “Patients who go off the deep end sometimes try to kill the therapist. And what can you tell us about Perkins’ therapy files?”
“Alive and well. Old money. I’ll never get into the doctor’s accounts, not from here, and maybe not even if I was in the office. He has a nice firewall or three and the files may be encrypted. I’ll come back to it.” She put something else up on the screen. “Ah! Got something. Hang on.” A moment later she said, “Pictures of Jason, one from only two years ago. Aaaaand, Nell guessed right. According to the state’s records, Jason was sexually abused by a vampire. Because he was so young, he developed an addiction to vamp blood.”
“He was a child,” Occam growled, repressed fury in his voice. The memory of his cage glowed in his eyes.
I glanced at him and back to my laptop, thinking about the churchmen. Tender youth was a turn-on to pedophiles. My computer screen showed multiple news articles. “I found something,” I said. “Twelve months ago in New Orleans, a single vampire killed more than fifty people in a dancehall-bar and sexually assaulted some of them. It was all over the news, twenty-four/seven. That might have brought it all back to Jason. Might have been the tipping point.”
“I remember that,” Jo said. “Good work.”
“Listen,” Occam said, pointing to the screen with the null room video.
Jo hit a key and the speakers came on again.
“Jason stole my grandmother’s tarot deck,” Loriann said to Rick. “And yes, it was the same deck I used on you. He stole all the gauze and things I collected from the barn where I inked you.”
“You kept some of the gauze with my blood on it. You were planning on … what? Finishing the working? Binding me to yourself?”
“No, I—I don’t know why I didn’t burn everything. I wasn’t planning on anything. I swear.”
Surprise in his tone, Occam murmured, “I sniffed the gauze and I didn’t recognize Rick’s scent, because he wasn’t infected with were-taint when it was collected. His scent’s different.”
“And that’s not the point,” Loriann said to her interrogators. “The point is that Jason has your blood even if it isn’t your werecat blood, it’s still yours. When he calls you, he can get you.” She looked around at the walls. “Unless you’re in here. God, this place makes me want to puke.”
“Yeah,” T. Laine said. “Cry me a river. Tell me about the working. What part does the tarot deck play?”
“From what I could tell, he was using a combination of the Celtic Cross spread and, beside it, what might have been an Angels and Demons spread, with other cards at each spoke of the circle. It’s a complicated working and he’s been refining it for years, no matter where we’ve lived or vacationed. He’s obsessed.” She raised her gaze to Rick, something of guilt in them. “And he wants you dead.”
“Why?” Tandy asked her.
“I have no idea,” Loriann said.
Tandy’s finger touched his cell. My cell screen brightened. So did Occam’s and JoJo’s. A single word appeared on the screens. Lie.
“Tandy’s magic works inside the null room,” I said softly.
“Not well, but well enough,” Occam said.
“Tell me about the tarot deck itself,” T. Laine said. “It was a … very special deck, yes?”
Loriann blanched. She was a pale woman to start with, but she went vampire-pale. “So I guess you know it was a Blood Tarot deck. It had been in the family for generations.”
“Yes,” T. Laine said, showing no satisfaction at having elicited the information.
I touched my laptop and looked up the cities where the witch circles had been reported. Had Jason created all of them? New York? Arizona? I began a search for Jason’s next of kin, other than Loriann. I quickly found a paternal grandmother in New York and, shortly after, a vacation rental in Arizona, about five miles from the witch circles found there. Jason had been working on the spell for a long, long, long time. Loriann had known. Loriann had been hiding it or hiding from it. I sent the info to JoJo and to T. Laine in the null room.
A bit more work proved Loriann had witches on both sides of her family. The maternal grandmother killed by Isleen and the paternal grandmother Jason and Loriann vacationed with were both witches, according to PsyLED files. That was rare. I began a search to find out if the paternal grandmother was a member of a coven. Instead I got a hit on an obituary. I said, “The paternal grandmother died a little over a year ago, about the time Jason started having problems. The mother and father are both deceased.”
“Sending that info to Rick, T. Laine, and Tandy,” Jo said.
Overhead, I heard Loriann say, “Yes. I came to Knoxville to find Jason.”
True.
“And how did you intend to do that?” Rick asked, his voice too soft, too gentle. It was his good-cop voice, one he used when he was about to get someone to say something they hadn’t intended to say. “You were going to use me, weren’t you? And the binding you inked into my skin.” Rick leaned toward Loriann. His face looked sad, like a TV father disappointed in his child.
JoJo whispered someone should have sex with her again. We were all focused on the screen.
“How did you figure that out?” Loriann whispered. Rick didn’t answer.
“Yeah. How did you?” Jo muttered. “Been nice to know that too.”
“He’s guessing,” Occam stated, reading body language with cat communication skills.
Loriann reached for the ring that was no longer on her finger. She made little turning motions where it used to lie, as if she twisted the ring. “During the original ink-spell casting?” she said, as if reminding Rick of the torture but not having the guts to call it what it was. “I put … bindings into your ink. A binding to keep you from talking. A binding to Jason. To protect him if he ever needed it. To save him. But I didn’t have any of Jason’s blood to create a link to find him through you. So no.”
Tandy texted Uncertain.
“Why bind me?” Rick asked, as if unsurprised.
“I had to. In case I was killed before Jason was freed, and you managed to get away. I had to make sure you would save Jason.”
“You could have asked,” Rick said, in that same quiet tone. “Said please. I’d have protected your brother even without a spell forcing me.”
“Right. But I didn’t kno
w anything about you then. All I knew was that I might die and someone had to save my brother.” Loriann lifted dark eyes to Rick. “Then it was over and Jason was safe and … I didn’t need the bindings. And I didn’t know of a way to undo them.”
Tandy texted a single word. Lie. That was interesting.
“And now?”
“And now, you have a blood tie to Jason,” she said fiercely. “When he calls you, you have to answer. And you won’t be able to hurt him, no matter what he’s done or what he’s doing when you find him. No matter what he does to you. And I can follow you to him.”
True.
JoJo was cursing steadily under her breath. Occam’s eyes glowed cat-gold. He was silent, that deadly stillness of the predator waiting to pounce. I just sat, thinking of what I might do, what legal and illegal boundaries and rules I might push or break, if I was trying to protect Mud. I would never have done what Loriann Ethier had done. But I understood.
• • •
On the screens, Rick left the null room and disappeared into the dark of the building. Tandy raced to the conference room. He shook his head at JoJo’s questions and said to Occam, “He needs you.” Occam took off after Rick, moving in a burst of were-speed. To me Tandy said, “I had to get out of there. And I think I can read her from here.” He dropped into a chair and pulled his cell, watching the screen. “She’s wide open. No shields at all.” He shivered with leftover null-effects and glanced at the coffee pot. “Please?” he asked. I got up to make a pot. “Thanks,” he said.
In the null room, T. Laine took over the interrogation, concentrating on the spell Jason was using to call Rick and the spell Loriann had inked into Rick’s flesh, and how they interacted. She was getting the particulars, the nitty-gritty. It was a magic/mathematics dialogue on a level I couldn’t follow, about workings with energy. There were phrases like “potential energy versus kinetic,” which I Googled to refresh my stagnant brain. I’d had magical energy classes in Spook School, but it had been a while. Potential energy is stored energy, like chemical, gravitational, mechanical, and nuclear. Kinetic energy is doing work—like electrical, heat, light, motion, sound, magical, gravitational, or mechanical energy. Kinetic energy is all about movement. In magical workings, forms of energy can be transferred and transformed between one another and between matter. I understood only enough to know that if a witch mixed the wrong kind of energies together things could explode, or transform in the wrong ways. There had been horror stories, which I hoped were apocryphal.