Circle of the Moon

by Faith Hunter

  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 know 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, wat
ching 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.

  As the conversation turned even more theoretical, Jo and Tandy worked on traffic cameras from the day the Blalock girl was kidnapped, trying to find and track the van. I hid in my cubicle and called the Nicholson house. I needed to talk to my mother, which almost never happened. Needed to think for just a minute that normal, whatever normal was, might be part of my life someday. Instead, Mama was busy putting the little’uns to bed and handed off the cell to Mud.

  “Hey, Nellie,” Mud said. “Sam done offered to give me a puppy. And before you’un say no, she’s a twelve-week-old, house-trained springer that some townie done gave to Sam, but he don’t want her. Can I have her? Please, please, please?”

  Mud had lapsed back into church-speak in the time she had been with the family, and that would make it hard for her to fit in at school, but dialects and teen angst would have to wait. I tilted the cell to the side so she couldn’t hear my sigh. My vampire tree had killed Mud’s last puppy. I waited for Mud to use that to get her way, but all she said was, “I think you’un should let me keep her. You’un always know when company’s coming up the road, but I don’t. If I’m gonna be a latchkey kid, I’ll need protection when I’m there alone. If’n I have a dog, I’ll be safer.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, knowing I was already lost. And knowing that Mud would need child care, that she wasn’t safe on the farm alone. Knowing that Larry Aden and his kind would always come hunting us.

  “Her name is Charade. Cherry for short. She’s a tricolor and she’ll be getting spots on her nose. And she loves me already.”

  “Springers have to be exercised. A lot. They’re high-energy dogs.”

  “I can set me up an agility course out back a the house. And she can run with the werecats!”

  “The werecats might eat her,” I teased.

  “You tell Occam I’ll hit him with a rolled-up magazine if’n he hurts my dog.”

  I chuckled at that image. I’d felt the same way before. “When I get some time off, we’ll bring her home for a few days and see how she does. But if she’s not really house-trained or can’t get along with the cats, including our friends, we’ll have to take her back or find her a new home.”

  “Friends?” The silence was so intense that I thought the call had been dropped, and then she said, as if figuring it all out, “Wereleopards. Deal!”

  “I’ll see you as soon as this case is over,” I promised.

  “I forgot to say! SaraBell’s in labor. Love you!” She ended the call.

  “Love you too,” I said to the empty air. SaraBell’s in labor. Sam was getting ready to be a daddy. I was getting ready to be an aunt. A small smile formed as it hit me. SaraBell didn’t want a dog around her new baby. I had just been backed into a corner by a preteen manipulator. “You little scamp.”

  “Nell!” Tandy shouted. “Get in here! We got the van!”

  I sped into the conference room to see photos on the screens overhead. On one was grainy security camera video. It was the van that been stolen to pick up the Blalock girl.

  “They trolled the streets in neighborhoods all around, looking for prey. We have multiple sightings from those doorbell security cameras,” Jo said. “Those devices are ridiculously easy to hack. A tech-savvy burglar’s wet—Ummm. Sorry.”

  I didn’t know what she had been about to say and I didn’t ask.

  Tandy said, “According to the crime techs, the AC in the van wasn’t working and at some point, it got hot inside and the window went down. And we got this.”

  The security footage began to move. Leaning from the passenger seat was a young man. “Who?” I asked.

  “This is from Loriann’s laptop,” JoJo said, putting up another photo. “Jason Ethier. He was in the van with the group of nonlocal vampires. Maybe was with them from the beginning. I’m sending this to Occam and Rick. They need to know it. And to T. Laine,” JoJo said.

  “Tell her to hold it,” I suggested. “Don’t share it with Loriann. We might need all this later. Or . . . she might not know her brother is vamp-ridden.”

  “Vamp-ridden?” Jo asked.

  “A church term. It’s one they use for blood-slaves, and it’s based on spiritual possession, like demon-ridden.”

  “The church of God’s Glory does exorcisms?” Jo asked softly.

  “A few. And no. Never on me. I left the church before I’d have been old enough to see or participate in one. But I’ve heard tales.”

  Overhead, JoJo, tech whiz extraordinaire, followed the van through the neighborhoods near where Raynay was taken. The unit had received more files via e-mail from Alex Younger and I put them on the screen. They were titled Godfrey of Bouillon_1, Godfrey of Bouillon_2, Godfrey of Bouillon_3, and Godfrey of Bouillon_4.

  I opened the files to the overhead screen and began scrolling through the information, which was presented in bullet points with footnotes and links to more information on the Internet.

  Godfrey of Bouillon, aka Godefroi de Bouillon in French, Gottfried von Bouillon in German, Godefridus Bullionensis from Wiki, and Godefridi Bullonensis in some other language I didn’t speak

  Born on September 18, 1060

  As a young human he was a Frankish knight—Lord of Bouillon

  A leader of the First Crusade

  Later became known as the Duke of Lower Lorraine

  I figured that Lower Lorraine was someplace in France. The church taught a lot about the valiant knights of Western Christianity who went to free the Holy Lands from satanic rule, but my own research had led me to understand that the Crusades were more along the lines of torture, rape, theft, murder, and genocide. The next part of Alex’s information suggested that was more true than I had ever known.

  In 1099, Godfrey laid siege to Jerusalem

  His goal: to wipe out all Jewish people in vengeance for the death of the Christ

  Charged into Jerusalem and killed anyone who didn’t leave

  Destroyed holy sites of three religions

  Soldiers, citizens, Jews, Muslims, and Christians who opposed him were killed

  Victims were burned or sliced open and left to bleed out

  Surviving Jews fled to a synagogue; Godfrey burned it down

  Ordered his men to hunt down and kill all survivors

  According to records, no one survived

  Piles of hands, feet, and heads were scattered throughout the city

  Godfrey is said to have stripped to his undergarments and walked barefoot through the blood, which reached to his ankles

  70,000 Muslims were killed there

  Became the first ruler of
the Kingdom of Jerusalem, though he called himself Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher or Baron of the Holy Sepulcher, not king; others of his time called him the Crusader King

  He never married

  Pedophile and sexual predator

  He died from “plague”—was turned on July 19, 1100

  Godfrey sounded like the perfect Naturaleza: a warped vampire psychopath with no morals of any kind. As a human he’d used religion to hurt who he wanted and to steal what he wanted. He was like the churchmen of God’s Cloud of Glory Church, who put their wants and beliefs and political values before the scriptures themselves.

  Godfrey and his vampires were in town, attacking Ming, kidnapping a teenaged girl. We had Jason, who had been drank from as a child and sexually abused by Isleen, an insane vampire. A sexually abused teen in cahoots with—not in bed with, that was hitting too close to the truth—Godfrey. And Rick and Ming were targets. Had Jason gone to Godfrey willingly? Or had Jason used black-magic circles to call Godfrey to use him?

  Jason was awfully young to be so devious.

  As I considered the list, the historical files that followed, and Alex’s documentation, JoJo turned up the null room speakers again. T. Laine said, “You have to realize that the others can’t trust you. You might be influencing Rick through his tats.”

  I spun my chair to face the null room screen. T. Laine sat forward, intent on Loriann, leaning across the table that stretched between them. Our witch had one hand lightly clenched on the tabletop. She looked kind, understanding, even gentle, unlike the plainspoken, straight-talking witch I knew.

  “Loriann, I can’t see you being able to work with Rick or this team. We can’t trust you.”