Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)

“Rick LaFleur guesses.” Paka knew everything. If she came back that might be a hold she would have over me. But Soulwood had a hold over her, so maybe they would cancel out each other out. Maybe.

“I think it’s best that we keep it between us, then, don’t you?” she asked.

I nodded. “You okay knowing all this grown-up stuff?”

“I’ll keep our secrets. And I’m good, long as you ain’t totally shutting out the possibility of a greenhouse. But, since we’un’s chatting, I need some clothes for school. I need two pairs of khaki pants to start the year on account of it being so hot. And some sneakers. I got a list. I been looking on my tablet and I like the prices at Kohl’s and Walmart.”

I smiled and drank some of her tea. “We can shop. You really want to go into business making teas?”

“Yep. Soulwood teas. Only the very best local ingredients, hand grown, hand harvested, organic. That’s what it has to say on the tins. But you gotta make up to Daddy so he’ll build us that greenhouse. You hung up on him. He’s gonna be mad.”

“Well. Okay, then. He’ll be mad.” I picked up the phone and dialed Rick LaFleur, my up-line boss at PsyLED Unit Eighteen. He didn’t answer, so I left a message telling about Larry and the shotgun blasts.

Mud and I spent the hottest part of midafternoon outside, deciding where to put the possible greenhouse, how to situate it so it got the best sun in fall and winter. But it was too hot to stay out for long. I had to work come evening, and so I called it a day in late afternoon, took another cool shower, and grabbed an hour’s nap.

? ? ?

It was evening. I hadn’t slept enough to make it through my usual twelve-hour shift without nodding off. I had dropped Mud off at Daddy’s and went in to apologize for my anger and rudeness. Not that I took the threat to kill churchmen off the table. Any who came on my property were still at risk of death. I just phrased it with a smile, as if I was discussing tea and scones instead of self-defense by shotgun. Daddy accepted the apology and brought up the greenhouse. It was a nice visit, all in all, mainly because I wasn’t being judgmental or causing problems. This time. There was a time and place for that later, in what would be an ongoing, lifelong battle, I was sure. I left Mud in deep conversation with Mama Grace about how to make her special cheese biscuits.

As I walked to the door, Daddy looked up at me and then at my youngest true sib, in a sort of a promise. “You got child care worked out?” he asked.

I was nowhere near a solution, but I nodded. “Getting there.”

“She’ll be safe here tonight. I’ll keep an eye on her. And on Larry Aden.” Daddy might not make the best decisions all the time, and getting him to walk into the twenty-first century wasn’t easy, but Mud was safer with the Nicholson clan than with me tonight. Until she grew leaves and the churchmen burned her at the stake.





FOUR




I dropped my four-day gobag off in the locker room and took a few seconds to trim back stress-growth leaves at my hairline. Talking to Daddy hadn’t been horrible, but it hadn’t been easy, either. I’d been a tree for about six months after the last big case and that experience had left me leafy and viny and rooty. I didn’t so much indulge in personal hygiene as landscape myself. Half of the team was equally injured and had been in rehab of one kind or another. Unit Eighteen had been working a skeleton crew for months—paperwork, protocol, and research. Now that Occam was back from healing, and I wasn’t so rooty, we were a full crew. It felt good to be back to work.

When I was presentable, I went to my cubicle, stuck a finger into the soil and herbs at the window, and locked my one-day gobag and weapon in the drawer. The weapon wasn’t needed in HQ. The herbs were too dry, which severely limited the salad flavors I had planned on for supper. I fished an empty bottle from the recycles bin, filled it with tap water, and emptied it slowly over the herbs. “There you go, my pretties. Sorry about the chlorine. I promise not to clip you for a day or two to let you recover, and I’ll bring better water tomorrow.” Kissing the air over them, I picked up my laptop and two tablets and carried them to the conference room, where Tandy was bent over the unit’s main system, the one where orders and comms originated. I took my place at the conference table and logged in to the PsyLED system. “Hey,” I said.

“Evening, Nell. I brought salad fixings for supper,” our resident empath said. He wasn’t prescient, but because of his empathy gift, he sometimes seemed to be expecting things ahead of time, like what I wanted for supper. He’d explained that it was a part of knowing us so deeply, not a form of psychic mind control or prophecy.

“I can do salad,” I said, proud that I sounded like a modern city girl. I’d never be hip or cool or chic, but at least I fit in now, sharing a more common accent and language syntax. “I’m sending you my report on the black-magic circle from last night.”

Tandy nodded, the sharp overhead lights picking out the Lichtenberg lines that traced across his skin like scarlet lightning.

I read over the summation reports for the last few days and the latest on Rick’s black-cat-in-a-circle case. There wasn’t much. The focals—the bloody gauze, the knife, the golf ball and tee—from the circle had been sent to the lab, signed for, and placed into a queue for eventual testing. No date for actual analysis had been sent to us. T. Laine still wasn’t sure what the circles were for, but causality needed to be proved or disproved in law enforcement, and she was working on the “Rick being called by a black-magic spell” aspect to see if it was happenstance or deliberate.

Someone had asked Rick if he played golf and he’d said, “Not for years.” The tee and ball looked brand-new. No tie there.

Lainie had gone through the runes in the black-magic circle, trying to provide us with an interpretation. Tandy had chatted with the owners and managers of the businesses on Riverside Drive, the street near the circle. Two employers had recently fired several people, and one young woman had been fired for smoking marijuana and crack on the job. The woman was in her twenties, short and slight, and the manager had provided Tandy with her ID and address.

Tandy and T. Laine had run the ID. It was real, but the address on it turned out to be an empty lot behind the wastewater treatment plant off of Neyland Drive. They had tracked down her parents, who lived in Nashville, but they hadn’t seen their daughter since they kicked her out for stealing and pawning her grandmother’s silver. There had been no indication of witch genes in the lineage. No one had been able to find the woman and there was no way to determine if she had cast the circle.

The local witch coven had been asked to take a look at photos of the circle and they had no idea who had cast it. They also had no idea what it did except something bad. They had refused to go to the circle in person and had broken off contact. Which they had done before when bad magical things were taking place in Knoxville.

We were no closer to knowing if the witch circle had been a deliberate call to Rick or if he accidently answered it because of proximity and the black cat used as sacrifice. We had nothing except bloody gauze we couldn’t track to the blood source, a bunch of weird focals, and … Nothing. Except that someone was casting nasty curses with unknown magic. This alone had everyone worried, especially the werecats.

Tandy was in charge for the night and also handling comms, should we get a case. As long as no one took a day off or went on vacation we had enough people to staff the office twenty-four/seven. On nights when that wasn’t possible, calls were autorouted to Rick or JoJo and they called us in. Computers were grand things when they worked. Satisfied that I was caught up on everything, I went to work on my assignment, tracking grindylows and their kills and why grindys were indifferent about Rick. PsyLED’s mandate was to investigate paranormal crimes, keep paranormal records, track paranormal trends, and I had traced and amassed a lot of records in my time at Unit Eighteen.

On my first break, well after midnight, the waning moon was visible and the sky was black against the city lights as seen though the windows. I trimmed back dead leaves—on the herbs in the windowsill boxes, not on me—and enjoyed the novelty of air-conditioning. Novelty because I was still mentally stymied about going on the grid or adding to my solar array and solar batteries just for comfort. It was hard to turn away from a lifelong independence. I weighed it all as I worked on the plants.

“Nell,” Tandy called over the in-house speaker system. “Come to the conference room, please.” I put down my small watering can and went back to join him. “It’s probably nothing,” he said as I stepped in the doorway, “but Knoxville PD called in something and are asking for an agent to liaise.”