Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)

“I only got a good look at the chin,” he admitted, “but it had a few hairs on it like a kid trying to grow his first beard. If it wasn’t a dude, then she was the ugliest chick I ever saw in my life.”

“Hmmm.” Mentally, I ran through the possibilities. Vamps were white skinned, and both robberies had been after dark, but vamps had mesmerism abilities and would blood-kiss-and-steal to get money, not rob. Juvenile Welsh devil dogs were skinny and apt to be unkempt, and it was possible that one had slipped by in the recent roundup of the horrid, foul shape-changers. Maybe a witch wearing a glamour to look like a male? Could be; a glamour would mess up my readings. Male witch? Not likely. Male witches succumbed to childhood cancers with a regularity that was scary. Because of the childhood mortality rate, male witches, sometimes called sorcerers, were once rarer than hen’s teeth. With modern medicine, more males had begun to survive to adulthood, but the percentages were still low. If the pale unsub was a sorcerer, he might be sick. Even dying. There was a single report in the PsyLED databases that a sick sorcerer had thrown off strange psysitope readings. For now, I was betting on human junkie. I touched the counter and felt no maggots, but that meant nothing since the robber hadn’t touched the counter.

Reading the rest of the store took a full three minutes, and I saved my readings on my tablet before thanking the cashier and leaving the store. I went up to Holt and said, “It’s all yours.” I didn’t wait for his reply and got into my truck. I drove away, across the street toward the Walmart where the robber had seemed to be heading when he raced away on foot.

I drove around the Walmart, past big rigs parked in the shadows, a few RVs and travel trailers. Spotting the security guard, who was riding around in an orange vehicle with a flashing orange light on top, I followed and flashed my blue lights to get his attention. Unlike Holt, former KPD sergeant Wellborn was genial and chatty. We sat, driver-side door to driver-side door, and gossiped over the window edges for a while about the robbery and the homeless and drug problem in Knoxville.

He pointed to the back of the Walmart and said, “We try to keep them from bothering the shoppers and joggers. When there’s two of us working and when the numbers get too bad, we help the local boys flush them out of the greenery along the greenway back there.”

I assumed that local boys meant KPD and not armed yahoos looking for excitement.

“But they don’t need much more than a bush to sleep under in summer, and with Third Creek back there and nearby places to beg, they have everything they need to survive for six to nine months a year. Come winter, things’ll change up a bit, but for now, it’s homeless heaven.”

I pulled up the video of the suspect. “You ever see this guy?”

Together we watched both sets of footage and Wellborn shook his head. “No. Dark jacket, jeans, sneakers, maybe an old pair of Jordans. Moves like a female. I have to say, robbery by the homeless isn’t as common as most folk think. They make more and better money begging, without the fear of ending up in jail.”

Making a note to check the statistics, I considered the darkness behind Walmart. The security lights didn’t reach beyond the parking area, and though the moon was still up, it wasn’t providing much illumination. I really didn’t want to go back there, but … “I need to inspect it, to see if I can spot the perpetrator.”

“If you want to take a look, drive around and come in the back way, on the far side of the creek. Shine your lights at the creek and the back of the store. You’ll see some. See a campfire or two. Maybe a tent. If you want to wait till I’m off shift I’d go with you, but I’m the only one on tonight and can’t go now.”

“Thanks. I’m good. I’ll call for backup if I see anything that means I need to get out of the truck.” I shook his hand across the space between our vehicles and followed directions to the far side of the creek. I motored in behind a storage building or warehouse—there wasn’t a sign on the back road to tell me what it was—braked, and measured with the psymeter out the window. The readings read background normal, and I moved on down the road. On my GPS it was called Unnamed Road, which seemed an appropriate and sad place for the human homeless. I made three stops, working from inside the truck cab, and found only tents, tarps, trash dumps, an abandoned campfire, and glimpses of people escaping into the brush, until I got past the Walmart. The psymeter 2.0 went off, spiking and holding at level one and level four, the readings matching the circle that had called Rick. My heart rate rocketed. There was something witchy on the bank of Third Creek.

I called Tandy. “Got something, but not what I expected.”

“Describe.”

“Checking psysitope levels on an open field in the direction the subject had been walking after the robbery. High readings on one and four, holding at redlining, no downward movement. I don’t know what it is, but I’m requesting backup. Is T. Laine on call?”

“Roger that. Putting in a call for KPD and Kent. Do not—repeat, do not—leave your vehicle.”

“Roger that,” I said. “I’ll write up reports while I wait in the Walmart parking lot with Wellborn, formerly of KPD and armed.”

In my report, under “Comments,” I speculated that the store thief was human, but couldn’t rule out a witch using a glamour or carrying a charm that might affect the psymeter.

? ? ?

Lainie made it to the parking lot in under an hour and a small KPD night-shift team met us in the parking area behind the warehouse-type building on Unnamed Road. Lainie and I went over the psymeter numbers I had collected, and made an informed guess at the location of whatever or whoever awaited us in the brush near the creek. It hadn’t moved. I mentioned the robberies and the remote possibility that the two were related, based on my theory of a witch under glamour.

The KPD team listened in. There were six of us, the cops looking psyched at going into the wild and kind of freaked too, probably at the combination of an armed, magic-using suspect in the area, though I explained that the readings were wrong for a witch lying in the grass or for a vamp. There were no apparent heroes and no obvious para haters in the cop group, so that was good. Better was the fact that we could all share a single communications channel. After the crazy things that had happened with strange magic in the last year, KPD, KFD, and Knox County Sheriff’s Department had dedicated a single frequency to ops involving paranormal investigations or creatures. Most cops call it the para freq, and laughed.

Together we moved into the brush, every officer except T. Laine with service weapon drawn, tactical flashlight glaring, and wearing a vest. Over a shoulder, I carried a gobag with my pink blanket, tablet, and the psymeter 2.0. T. Laine was armed with bright yellow number two pencils that R&D at PsyLED central in Virginia had imbued with a null force working to stop magic and magical attack. The null sticks were impossible for a human to activate, and painful for a witch to handle, making it nearly impossible for T. Laine, our moon witch, to carry a gun too, so she wore night-vision gear, both low-light and infrared oculars, and took a track beside me and a little ahead so my flash didn’t interfere with her headgear.

The null sticks were General brand pencils, with the word semi-hex on the side, surely a joke on the part of the witch who had spelled them. T. Laine carried one by the eraser and was ready to toss it at will.

As we moved through the tall grasses and brush, the only sounds were the trickle of water in the creek ahead and the swish of the summer grasses on our clothes. We’d have to do a thorough tick search when we got back to HQ. Maybe Lainie had a tick-search spell. That would be handy. Stupid thoughts to indulge in when there was something magical on the creek shore ahead.

“Halt,” T. Laine said softly into her mic. She turned to her right in small angled degrees. “Two o’clock from my location, twenty paces ahead. No live bodies in infrared, no DBs on low-light, but … something. The null sticks just flashed hot.”

“They shouldn’t flash hot unless there’s an active working,” I said. “Let me read the earth.” Which meant, let me put my fingers to the ground.

T. Laine tapped her mic and explained to the others, as she swished through the grass around me, “Ingram will be vulnerable, unable to seek cover in case of attack.”

“Copy,” several voices said.