Night of the Unicorn (The Federal Witch Book 5)

by T S Paul

  Chapter 6

  "So, are they evil or not?" Chuck stared at me from across the table.

  Wincing, I shook my head. "Not sure? The vibes I get from them are similar to that wave of power coming out of the house, but that could just be their association with it. There is something funky about this whole case."

  "Funky how?" Anastasia sat in shadow at the back of the room.

  "Like we are either missing something or haven't been told the whole story. It's like a little fish nibbling at the back of my brain." I shook my head again. "Troubling is all I can say."

  "Then we have a problem if you aren't sure. What do we know for sure so far?" Bill stood and pulled down one of the built-in white boards.

  "There have been deaths. At least two mutilated Unicorn corpses were found way outside of their pens. That much has been verified by both the regular FBI and the staff members we interviewed." Cat pointed out.

  Bill scribbled on the board under known facts.

  "Both Magnus family members are Magickal and don't have any qualms about using magick to influence others. Plus, there are enough Unicorn parts in that house to have come from over a hundred individuals. From what I know about Unicorns, they don't die off in numbers like that. Their average lifespan in captivity is double that of wild herds. At least, according to the very rare interview the Magnus family gave to the British press in the 1920s."

  "That's a good point, Agatha." Bill filled in another column.

  "Agent Zusteller mentioned Skinwalkers. What do we know about them? Agatha, you started to talk about them earlier." Cat gave me a nudge.

  Grunting, I stood up. The Magickal wave or whatever that was in the main house made me feel dirty and very uncomfortable even though I never came into direct contact with it. "Skinwalkers. To Native Americans in the southwest that is the name they call Black Witches. These are men and women that were willing to do horrible things to gain power. The list of forbidden acts they may have committed is varied and includes the murder of a sibling or other close relative, incest, and necrophilia.

  The Navajo word for 'Werewolf' is the same as their word for Skinwalker." I looked at Chuck. His face was turning red, and he clenched his fists several times. "Before Chuck gives himself an aneurysm, you have to take into account that this word is centuries old. Our community was still trying to hide for our own protection at that time. They believed there are no good Witches. To them, we are all bad. Similar beliefs exist throughout many native cultures. Shamans or medicine men were exempt from this. They were the lore-keepers and the healers for their communities. All of you have met both my Grandmother and my Aunt. There is good and bad Magick. Period. If this is a traditional Skinwalker, he or they will be hard to find around here."

  "Should we just look them up in the phone book under Evil Witch?" Bill smiled at me.

  "Funny. If we were in the southwest, we would look for someone who wears an excessive amount of fur or other animal products. That won't work around here. Fur is pretty common as a both decoration and clothing items. Unicorn products, however, might be rare. The Magnus family exports much of what they collect. The one trait that shows up across almost all the legends concerns their eyes. The eyes are said to glow in daylight and are red at night. Some tribes believe Skinwalkers can possess a human if they stare into their eyes for too long. Which explains why most natives don't stare at you for long."

  "So, if they don't have red eyes we can't find them?" Chuck remarked.

  "Yes. We're screwed." I sat back down.

  "Agatha, what was that box you took from the locals?" Bill finished writing about the Skinwalkers and looked at me.

  I blew out a breath and nodded. "Over the past couple of years I've had some ... issues with the Marines stationed at Quantico. This all of you know, yes?" There were nods all around the room.

  "On one of those occasions, I trapped several members of the intelligence community like flies in amber on my side of the shield."

  Cat started. "You mean like inside the fence? How? I've seen that shield of yours stop an attack!"

  "Each of the frozen people had a device in their hands. It was larger than this one but very similar." Reaching into my coat pocket, I pulled out the Magickal detector.

  "Not wanting it to happen again, I took the devices from them and secured them in my lab. I never once heard a complaint or accusation that I took anything from those people by the way. Just last year it happened again. Three members of Navy Intelligence managed to get stuck inside the fence. They each had a small device, smaller than the first ones. Even though they were frozen, they could speak and talk to each other. Once again, I took their devices. No accusations were made against me from them either."

  "What happened to the other devices?" Bill took the one from my hand.

  "Grandmother has them. She passed off the duplicates to the Witches Council. Now I find out about these. It's interesting that the regular FBI gets them and not us. Agent Zusteller said that they were supposed to detect Magick, but didn't work. He's right. I aimed it at Fergus and got a zero reading."

  "Wait. So, the detector doesn't work? Why send it to the local FBI then? That makes no sense. How does that one relate to the ones back in Virginia?" Cat pointed to the box in Bill's hand.

  "From the outside, it looks the same. Same lights and dials in the same locations with the power source being sealed at the bottom. The ones I took back in Virginia operated on a similar system. I think the reason this didn't work is it was set up wrong, and no one told them specifically what it would and would not work on."

  Anastasia stepped out of the darkness and took the box from Bill. She turned it over a couple of times. "Do you know how it works?"

  "I do."

  Ana made a come-on motion to me with her hands. I smiled at her. "It's like an older model vending machine."

  "It dispenses snacks? Tell it I could use some beef jerky right about now." Chuck snapped from the sidelines.

  "Not quite. When you drop coins into one of those machines, how does it tell if what you put in is real? Funny story. Grandmother owns a wide variety of businesses around town. She says it's a benefit of living a long life. So, over the hill and down the road just a short bit is a motel. Outside it is a line of soda machines. Minerva didn't keep soda in the house. If I wanted one, I had to hike over to the motel. Sometimes I didn't have any money at all and tried a variety of things in place of it." I smiled at the memory.

  "I won't get into how frightening that thought is about a young girl, loose on her own, near a motel in the middle of nowhere. But why didn't you try to Magick it?" Bill stared at me.

  "You have a point. What kid thinks about stuff like that? I was protected though. Grandmother gave me an amulet similar to the ones I gave all of you. This one was much more powerful. Its charge was used up when I was attacked my first day at the Academy.

  "Zapping the machines was one of the first things I tried, actually. Did you know that a can of soda if propelled by enough force, can penetrate a brick wall? Neither did I. The repair bill for that one was too high to attempt again. My butt stung for a week." The room erupted in laughter. It was funny now, not so much all those years ago.

  "So, I tried more mechanical means. I found or made slugs trying to fool the machine into giving me a candy bar or soda. About half of those attempts jammed the machine, requiring a repairman to come out. In the process, I learned how they worked from watching and asking questions. They knew that it was me causing all the repairs. One of the guys called me 'job security.' It was years before I understood that one.

  "Now. How they work. You drop a coin into the machine. Sensors in the coin slot compare the physical characteristics of the coins. Diameter, thickness, and the number of ridges are the primary ones it scans for. Some of them check weight or even metal composition. The early bill machines used optical scanners to read the bills. Since most modern United States currency is printed using magnetic ink, there is a sensor that can look for that now as well.
Believe it or not, some machines pass a current through the bill looking for a certain conductivity. These devices are similar in that they are set to look for a specific form of Magick. Only that will trip the sensor."

  "How does it know what to look for?" Ana turned the box around in her hands.

  "If you open it, you will discover some sort of artifact set up in each one. Since Montana is full of former Native American reservations, I suspect this one is set for that style of Magick. Ana, be sure to open it in a secure area. It might be booby-trapped." I took the machine back from her and set it on the table in front of me.

  "Could our bad guy be someone from the tribes? I mean they are right here with us." Cat pulled up a map of Montana on her tablet.

  "What do they have to gain Cat? You forget they are considered their own countries now. Why worry about what the Magnus family is doing when they have their own issues to worry about?"

  Cat frowned and scrunched up her face. "What do you mean?"

  "She means you should ask someone who was there at the time. There are or were almost three hundred Native American Indian reservations in the United States after the Demon War. Scores of the troops from the Southwest came from reservations. The war didn't just take place in Europe. That maniac opened the gates to Hell, and the demons poured forth. Chaos is not how I like my world to be. I remember those times." Ana paused and began circling the table.

  "As a country, we managed to stay out of the early stages of the war. Our President kept us neutral even though we preferred to not sell to Germany. Then the demon sightings began. At first, the incursions were small and spread out. Prominent scientists claimed they were scouts or even lost demons from the war in Europe. That maybe they tagged along on returning ships.

  "Until the Hellmouth opened in California. I remember that day clearly. The radio reports at first claimed it was a hoax, but soon the horror overcame it all. The War was here, and it was real. Conception, California, was what the Hellmouth was originally called. Not much was there except a few tourists, but then the hole opened, and demons poured out. Santa Barbara was the first to fall. How Los Angeles didn't get swarmed still surprises me to this day. Maybe it was the city of Angels?

  "The National Guard was called in, as was the military. We weren't yet at wartime levels. Only about thirty-thousand troops were active in this country at the time. The only people who could get there fast were hometown militias and law enforcement groups. Thousands more came from the reservations. I won't get into details, but the fighting was heavy. Lives were lost, and even the politicians in Washington finally took notice. One of the first post-war suggestions was granting total freedom to both the Native tribes and the Weres. They deserved it."

  "Ana, how do you know so much about the Demon War?" Chuck stared at her in shock.

  "Everyone from that time period knew all of this. We needed to understand why sending troops to Europe was so important. It was way before I joined the FBI. I got gathered up in one of the demon follower sweeps, but that is a story for another time." She paused giving Chuck a stare down.

  "I had a very lovely villa in the San Joaquin Valley overlooking never ending fields of vegetables. I had invested well and was trying to stay off most paranormal radars as well as that of the government. I wasn't exactly here legally at the time.

  "After destroying San Bernardino to the south, the swarm went north, consuming San Luis Obispo. The Sierra Nevada Mountains was all that protected my valley from the coast. Flights of demons slid down them like kids at a water park. Many of the farm workers had no chance. My estate was protected, but not from demonic Magick. I soon became one of the many refugees that were swept up by local authorities." Ana threw up her hands.

  "Sorry if I got off track. It was a trying time. After the war and destruction of the Demonic threat, the reservations were set free. The Weres could leave if they wished, as well as working openly, unlike the past. The Natives were different. They already had lobby groups pushing for independence, and they got it, in spades.

  "Each reservation was declared to be its own country, having the same sovereign rights as other countries have. President Long didn't expect any of them to last without federal assistance. But he was wrong. More than half are still in existence today."

  "Why not all of them?" Chuck asked.

  "It brings us back to the original question. To be independent of our government means no outside power, water, telephone, mail, and everything else we rely on to make life work. The tribal councils organized and managed to stay independent on more than two-hundred reservations. Many of the smaller ones were absorbed by the larger, but the deal set forth by President Long was either you make it, or you don't. Land rights would revert back to the government if you failed to make a go of it. Was it fair? No. But it did force the tribes to work together. The work they put forth, along with the commitments they made, is what earned them the two extra stars on the flag." Bill pointed to the American flag on the wall with its thirteen stripes and fifty-two stars.

  "That is what I meant by other commitments and issues. They are running a country. Officially, they may not even be aware of the problem. We will have to talk to the locals to find out. Tomorrow we'll start with the local representatives and then the Blackfoot Nation. I've contacted Washington, and they have sent a few guidelines for us to follow." I took a big breath. "If you will excuse me, I have a Unicorn and a potential crisis to head off. If you were traumatized by that place, think how much Fergus was." Standing up I gathered my notes.

  Anastasia and Chuck had arrived at the motel by the time we returned from the ranch. Now that we had both the SUV and the lab we could really get to work. But first I needed to console an old friend.

  <<<>>>

  The hotel room was dark, but the light was on in Fergus's barn. I didn't hear any music or even tap dancing though. "Fergus? Are you in there?"

  Walking across the room to the bathroom sink area, I peeked into the windows and started to open the two front doors. This barn didn't moo like the old one. Chuck swore he saw a thing on the internet that could make the new doors moo, but I wasn't holding my breath. I laid my hands on the top of the barn and started to pull it apart.

  "What'cha doing?" Fergus's voice so close to me made me jump almost slamming my fingers in the barn.

  "Why do you do that?" I could feel my heart pounding in my chest he startled me so badly.

  "Do what?"

  "You know what you did," I said as I looked down at him.

  "Whatever. Did you call me?"

  "Yes. Are you OK? I was worried about you during the visit to that house of horrors the Magnus family lives in."

  Fergus stood still and stared up at me. For just a moment, it looked as though he was going to run for it. But he shook his head at me. "No. My people need to know that humans are not kind and good. Have they protected us from the dragons? We found one that they didn't know was there."

  "That's true. You were a part of that Fergus. You helped."

  "My father was in there. I saw him. Why did they have his head on the wall?" Fergus lowered his head to the ground.

  It was breaking my heart. The little guy's world view was being turned on end. "Greed. They wanted the Magick that he produced, and they wanted it now, not ten years from now."

  "Do you know what the last words from my father were?" Fergus looked up at me.

  The non sequitur threw me off. His father? "No."

  "Just before he disappeared, he told me to honor what the ancestors laid down. That was the Unicorn way. He must have known it was time. The humans were about to enter the barn, and he told me to leave. He wasn't the lead stallion anymore. Peter's father had beaten him in a fight. My mother... My mother taught me so much about life and how things worked. Do you think she understood how to speak human? She must have known he wasn't a sacrifice. The elders have to know."

  I could feel my eyes widen as Fergus spoke. He was not normally very eloquent or talkative for that matter. Ot
her than cursing my grandmother and me for the first couple of years, this was the most he had ever said at one time to me and not in a joking way. "What do you want to do?"

  "It's like that Doctor on TV. I need to talk to the animals. Isn't Peter going to be surprised!"

  Chapter 7

  I didn't want to deal with this case. It was entirely too close to home for me.

  'Loss and Heartbreak' should be the name we would file this case under. Fergus just had an awakening and not in a good way. Over my so-called summer vacation, I know the little guy had a chance to talk to a real Familiar. He never said, but I think Dascha may have set him straight on a few things. Unlike Dascha, his Magick was subtle and hard to explain. Fergus's power might be stronger than I realized. Fergus somehow had the ability to move and acquire impossible things. The jumping he never explains. I need to explore his abilities further.