by Faith Hunter
Flies dive-bombed me as I approached the pens and walked into the shade under the metal roof. Buzzards perched on fencing. Dead animals were everywhere: three goats in the first pen, a miniature horse in the next, a sow and piglets. The animals had bled out from every orifice.
I dug out a small spiral notepad and walked down the wide aisles, beginning a listing of the animals with roman numerals. That was when I saw the man. Like the animals, he had died horribly—blood down his face, across his chest, dried and crinkled on his clothing. He was Caucasian, bearded; his blue eyes were clouded over, his light brown hair caked with dried blood. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, and, like the animals, he had bled from every orifice. I backed a step away before I remembered that this was my job. I stopped, swallowed acidic bile that rose in my gullet. Quickly figured it out. The man was lying on a sleeping bag, barefoot, half-covered by straw. A pack rested beside him, with a bag of canned goods, a twelve-pack of cheap beer, and a bag of trash. He was homeless. He had made the unfortunate decision to bed down yesterday in a pile of straw. And now he was dead.
“Nell,” T. Laine called out.
“Here! We got a DB.” Dead body. Not a homeless man, not a person with a past and a name and hopes for a better tomorrow. But a DB, to keep our souls distant from the awful part of the job of a cop.
T. Laine strode into the shadows and the buzzing of flies, saying, “Check for ID. Then back away. We’re still waiting on PsyLED crime scene investigators.”
The stench grew and the clouds of flies buzzed like a speeding engine as they laid eggs. We ascertained that there was only the one human body, hunted for ID, and anything arcane or black magic. There was nothing. and we left the stench of the pens for the witch circle, sweating like churchwomen.
Lainie had been reading arcane texts and had brought along a version of a seeing working. She wanted to see if she could re-create a vision of the spell at its inception, as it was drawn and cast, and then determine what the circle was doing now. I was more interested in the bodies we had left in place in the circles. Vampires were known to burst into flame in sunlight and we’d had a lot of sun already today.
“The vamp bodies are gone,” T. Laine said, “and the circles are still intact. No one has been here but us. I don’t even see a pile of ash.”
Not that I intended to tell Lainie, but when I fed the earth, the ash was eaten by the land. There was nothing left at all. Jason had found a way to do that. If there had been vampire ash, it had soaked into the earth. Which meant that Jason might have used vampires in other circles and the remains were gone by the time we got there. That would explain the maggoty feeling. Ming had her scions locked down, but some might have gone missing in the months before we knew about Jason’s circles. And . . . maybe the invading vamps had donated vamp prisoners for sacrifice.
“What do the vamps who are helping Jason get out of this?”
“Best guess? Jason’s such a blood junkie. They think they can control him and use the demon’s power vicariously, maybe even drinking the power down with Jason’s blood. All the power, none of the side effects of being demon ridden.”
“Oh. That makes sense.”
“Stay back and take readings,” she said.
I retreated to the shade and leaned against a tree, calibrating the psy-meter 2.0 and testing the readings against T. Laine. She read pure witch. But the circle didn’t. It read witch and vampire and fluctuating levels of one and four.
I didn’t have my blanket, but I touched a pinkie finger to the earth and yanked it away. Nasty. Maggots. Death. I wanted to gag and promised myself to never, ever do that again at a scene filled with dead animals and filth of demon.
At the circle, T. Laine walked sunwise around the circle, pausing every few steps, her eyes on the center. When she finished one complete revolution, she stopped and studied it, put an amulet on a silver chain around her neck, and removed a plastic zipped bag from a pocket. It contained blue powder. She opened the baggie and tossed a few grains of the blue stuff over the edge of the circle. They fell slowly and . . . stopped. They hung in midair.
T. Laine called to me, “Keep measuring and film this on your cell. If I explode, see that my family never learns I was stupid enough to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Measure!” she demanded.
I set my cell on a tree limb and focused the video on the circle. I tapped the small button to film Lainie’s activities. Then I extended the psy-meter’s wand and hit record. “Go.”
T. Laine took a fistful of the blue dust and tossed it high. It went up and out and was caught by the breeze; it swirled and settled across . . . the hedge. Nothing happened. She tossed another. Then another. She finished by upending the baggie and shaking out the last of the blue dust. It didn’t spread out perfectly, but enough settled that I could make out the form of the hedge of thorns. It looked exactly as if someone had upended a massive, shallow, splotchy blue bowl.
T. Laine held out her arms and leaned down. Gingerly, she touched a patch of blue dust. I saw the magics as they were enacted. From the circle’s point at the south, a line of blue raced around and back to the beginning as the circle was cut and chalked into the earth. The energies sparkled for a moment, then moved down the spoke closest, to the center. They sparkled again, growing in intensity, and shot out the spokes to meet the outer circle. The vision dimmed.
A red circle rose inside it, concentric, smaller than the blue one. It too dimmed. A small smearing of blue energies at the north point led to the center of the circles. Another smearing. And two more. They faded. And then the red circle sprang into place, followed by the blue one. They stayed in place, visible to human eyes in the daylight, stable and unwavering. I understood that it was an image of what had been, created by Lainie’s working. It made no sense to me at all, but T. Laine was grinning like a cat with a bowl of cream.
She called to me, “The circles were two spells in one. The inner one called the vampires and a black cat, and imprisoned them in the center. The outer one—”
A black light burst from the ground. T. Laine jumped back. Something long and smoky and dark moved from the earth. Two more, then two more. They were . . . fingers and a thumb. An amorphous blue-ish hand reached out of the pit. It was wearing a ruby ring. It made a fist and withdrew into the land. The red circle winked out. The blue one blazed up high, sparkling in the sunlight.
T. Laine raced away from the edge of the outer circle. Dropped flat to the ground. As if—“Get down!” she screamed at me.
I dropped, clutching the psy-meter to me. The blue circle glared so bright I had to look away. I duck-walked behind the tree. The blue energies exploded. Brilliant. Silent. They evaporated. I peeked out from behind the tree to see a ring and spokes of bluish powder. There had been only light, nothing kinetic.
T. Laine rose from her crouch. She was breathing hard. Panicked. Sweat ran down her spine and dampened dark half circles beneath her arms. She backed away. Stumbled. Caught her balance and turned to me. Raced close. I looked down at the psy-meter 2.0. It was bouncing all over the place, all the levels, jumping up and down.
“Son of a witch on a switch,” she cursed. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m pretty sure no one has ever seen that before and lived to tell it. Except Jason.”
Uncertain, I said, “That was a demon’s hand, wasn’t it?”
“Holy hell and back again, yes.” T. Laine opened a bottle of water and poured it over her head, splashing us both with the icy contents. She gasped and shivered once and opened a Coke, which she drank down, crushing the plastic bottle to force it down her throat fast. She burped. Burped again as the Coke’s carbon dioxide bubbled in her stomach.
I saved the reading, turned the meter and the cell off. Carefully, I asked, “Did you free the demon?”
“No! I’m adventurous, not stupid. The blue powder is part of a . . . let’s cal
l it review working. It lets me see recently executed spells. Once. It’s like a delayed reflection; it triggers nothing, the demon is still trapped. You get the video?”
“Whatever my cell managed to capture.” I walked to the edge of the circle and bent to look at the blue talc. A few grains had spilled to the side and I gathered them up, without touching the circle itself. The powder felt oily and coarse and rough all at once. I carried it back to the tree and put it in a paper evidence bag.
T. Laine said, “This spell drained the blood from every farm animal on the property and a human and, if we guessed right, the vampires that were sacrificed in the circle.” She caught her breath and stared out over the stockyard. “Demons suck dill pickles. Come on. PsyCSI is working up a paranormal scene in New York. They won’t get here until tomorrow. Let’s get out of here before we further contaminate the crime scene.”
* * *
• • •
As she drove back to HQ, T. Laine talked as if her mouth had lost its brakes, the words pouring out nonstop. She needed to talk, the vocalization a result of what she had seen and the huge coffee she had downed on the way. And the Coke. I couldn’t forget the Coke. I was exhausted, thinking about the earth and communing with it, using a pinch of bluish powder. On the way I got a text from Sam.
Larry Aden’s first wife came to see my baby. She spotted Mindy and was caterwauling about how Mindy was supposed to be hers. I feared it might attract the Jackson crowd so I took Mindy and the dog to your place.
My sister and her dog were alone at Soulwood. Alone.
I needed to get there, but we had to tell FireWind what we had discovered and write up our end-of-day reports. The new boss met us at the top of the stairs. I touched my cell open and handed it to him. A video was worth a thousand words.
I cleaned up in the locker room and followed the sound of their voices to the break room.
FireWind and T. Laine were studying a drawing on the table. Lainie said, “This is Tandy’s rendition of Rick being spelled by Loriann when she tattooed the tat magic. Tandy was finally able to get him to talk about it some.”
The drawing was pencil on lined paper, depicting a barn and a straw-covered floor. There was a black marble square in the middle of the open floor and an iron ring, and shackles. There was a crack and a small broken place in the stone. Something about the shape of the broken place drew my attention and it took a bit to figure out why. When I did, my brain began to put things together.
To the side of the huge black stone crouched a female figure, her hands busy. And upon the black square stone a naked man was stretched, arms and legs spread. Rick. The tattoos unfinished, dark smudges.
“Rick finally got around to describing the inking. It was . . . pretty horrible,” Tandy said.
“Okay,” I said, putting the page down. I didn’t want to see the event of my boss’s torture. First torture. He’d been attacked and tortured by a werewolf pack too. And by Paka. Rick LaFleur had been beaten by life so badly it was hard to comprehend how he got out of bed in the mornings. “Did you see the hand in the video? Did you see the ring it wore?”
FireWind started. Almost in unison he and T. Laine said, “Ring?”
I leaned in to my cell and tapped it on. Hit the play button. FireWind moved to face the computer system and the video appeared on the overhead screen, much larger, though pixelated and grainy. It wasn’t easy to see, but the ring was there, a brownish gold (though gold wasn’t supposed to tarnish) and in the center a brownish red stone was mounted. I didn’t know much about stones. There were shapes incised into the stone, but they were impossible to make out, even with a little computer sleight of hand to enhance it.
FireWind said, “Soul is calling the Vatican. She’s sending their lead investigator all we have on the demon. We hope someone there will know something.”
T. Laine made a sound of breathy laughter. “And I called my experts, the U.S. Council of Witches. Between the two opposing sides, we should learn something. Hopefully not things in total conflict with each other.”
I nodded, feeling like a bobble-head doll, and looked around. Occam wasn’t here, either off for a few hours of rest or away doing things for the investigation. Rick and Margot Racer were in the sleep room, talking softly. I was tired and worried and I had too much to do before I could rest. There was a Shakespeare quote, something about exhaustion, but I was too tired to remember it. I downloaded the video to the main system and left.
* * *
• • •
My sister was setting up an agility course in the backyard using found objects. A length of rope, some pointed wooden stakes from the woodpile, a stack of cement bricks, a few two-by-ten boards, and two shovels. Mud and Cherry were racing to and fro in the heat, the silly little dog wearing herself out.
I waved to Mud and carried my pink blanket into the woods, back from the house, deep under the heavy foliage. There was a spring back here and a rill of water. It was dark and cool and silent. I hadn’t been here recently, though I remembered walking here when I was coming back from being a tree.
The rocks were a tumbled mass in the near-vertical hillside and the pool was deeper than I remembered, the bottom clay, lined with a layer of leaves from last fall. The trees around the pool weren’t old growth, though they looked like it. Until I first fed the land with the body and soul of the faceless man who had attacked me, right here, they had been only twenty-five years old. Now it would take several tall people to hold hands around the trunks. The boles were massive. This was home as no other place on the face of the earth would ever be home. This was the heart of Soulwood.
I dropped the blanket to the surface of a flat rock and sank down on it. I laid out the things I had stolen and secreted away. The bits of tissue, stained with Jason’s blood. The gauze, brown with Loriann’s blood. The grains of blue talc. There was also a bit of Rick’s blood that had splattered in his office. No one had seen me take it, either.
I wasn’t a witch. But my magic was, and always had been, blood magic.
By every definition I had ever learned, I was a black-magic practitioner. It was time to test out that theory.
EIGHTEEN
Anywhere else, and I would have been cautious reading the earth. I had learned the hard way not to dive into the land, but to touch it with a fingertip and ease into the ground. But this was Soulwood. This was home. I toed off my shoes and placed my bare feet on the ground. The soil against my soles was dark and rich, composed of organic compounds and minerals; this close to the rill of water and the broken stone of the hillside, it had rock chips throughout in dozens of browns and tans and blacks. I leaned against a boulder, cool and sturdy at my back, and let down my hair. It was sweaty and thick as a tangled ball of tree roots; it curled around my face and shoulders. I worked my fingertips into the soil, scratching with my nails until fingers and palms were below the surface of the earth.
Rootlets coiled up to my flesh as if inspecting me, but they didn’t try to grow into my skin. A simple nudge sent them into place, touching, but not drinking, not damaging me. Oak and poplar and maple, even a Douglas fir, shoved against my flesh, the soil rippling, quivering, and rising as the roots reached for me, dislodging the sediment. When they ran out of room, they rose above the ground and arched over my feet and hands like loose socks and mittens. I sighed in contentment.
Time passed. I sank into the land. Knew it. Knew everything on it. The coyote family down the hill. The small herd of does and young nibbling grasses. The smaller but more rowdy bachelor herd. Squirrels sleeping in the heat of day. Birds pecking at the ground, several at a small pond of water, bathing, splashing. A feral cat, ready to pounce on them. A bobcat watching them all, curious about the smaller cat but not hungry enough to take its meal. An owl nest with juveniles and two adults. A dozen turkey buzzards perched near the road at the bottom of the hill, ripping at a carcass, a deer hit by a car sometime in the last
week.
I reached for the vampire tree, which was enormous now. The biggest part of the tree was at the original site, where I had pulled on the tree to heal me after I was shot and lay dying. The bole of the trunk was massive there, bigger than some houses, more than twenty feet across. The branches twisted and draped, so heavy they had settled to the ground like huge sinuous snakes. The root system covered the entire church land, having sent rootlets out in every direction, poking up a small stem and a few leaves every few yards, as if tasting the air, testing the world in that spot. The tree had formed a twenty-foot-tall hedge behind the chain-link fence at the church’s gates. It had even tested a few places on my own land, but it hadn’t claimed the ground as it had the church lands. The vampire tree was interested in something taking place at God’s Cloud, enough so that I could do what I wanted without attracting it to me.
I reached through the land to the bits of bloody tissue. Rick’s blood was easy to recognize and access because I had claimed him for the land as I healed him. He was a part of Soulwood. Not sure what I was looking for, I studied the blood, the twists and turns and things that didn’t feel human. I studied Loriann’s. I turned my attention to the blood I had collected from Jason, not to claim him, but to find him. I studied the blood, felt the ways it was different from Loriann’s, from Rick’s, and even different from my own. I hadn’t studied much biology beyond Paranormal Physiology 101 at Spook School, and I was curious. After inspecting all the blood samples through the power of Soulwood, and setting aside the ones that belonged to my land, and the one that had come from Loriann, I searched.