Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)

“Maybe … a little. Yeah. Turn up the music.”

T. Laine turned off the antishift music in the rest of HQ but increased the volume in the null room. “How can a summoning spell reach him through the null room?”

No one replied.

“Put your hand on the speaker,” she directed Rick. “The music magic should work on you even there.”

We heard stumbling through the system, perhaps the sound of a chair turning over. Then Rick groaned out a note of relief.

Margot cocked her head and muttered, “That’s why he was playing that awful music.” She leaned over the table and said into the mic, “Hey, LaFleur. Stop being such a pussy.”

I stepped back in surprise at the crudity. Rick laughed, the sound shocked but less pained and more human.

“Don’t ask me to feel sorry for you,” she said into the mic, as she took a seat. “Injuries are part of the job.”

“True dat,” Rick said, a New Orleans cadence strong in his pain.

“But since I have you as a captive—pardon the pun—audience, I’ll finish the update and debrief your unit. I’ve been going over NCIC files looking for spell/animal-sacrifice sites and crimes and tracking them back for twenty-four months. You were right. Some found in Louisiana eighteen to twenty-four months ago.”

“Year and a half?” T. Laine said. “Two years? Rick was in NOLA then.”

“Yes. And the circles look odd,” Margot said. “I sent photos of the Louisiana ones to the coven leader of NOLA, Lachish Dutillet. She says that some of the early ones look like summoning workings, the kind lonely women do to call a man to their side, except more. More intricate and more vicious, a summoning combined with a curse. It’s peculiar.”

“You know Lachish?” T. Laine asked.

“Not personally,” Margot said. “But her grandmother knew my grandmother. She’s been helpful. So I know stuff. Like despite the fact that Lachish is scared spitless of this circle, not that she said so. You still with us, LaFleur?”

“Yeah. Tell me more,” Rick said, his voice breathy and harsh. “Cuss a lot. Be callous. I’ll try not to be such a wimp.”

“Good. Nothing worse than a whiny-ass man. Survive childbirth and then tell me about pain.”

“You had a baby?” Rick asked.

“Yeah. I was sixteen. Baby didn’t make it.”

“That’s terrible.” Rick stopped. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too. So, if someone will get my laptop out of Rick’s car, I can sync my system with yours and we can update data.” Which would give Margot Racer complete access to all our files. Not what we had planned.

Rick, sounding more like himself, asked, “Why did the FBI want a liaison on this case? A case with no crime and no victim except me? And that might be accidental.”

“I don’t think it’s accidental,” Margot said. “The bureau wanted what I wanted—to get me on the inside of PsyLED. Except they want info on the paras you keep track of. I want access to your people to keep paras safe.” Like her witchy family.

No one spoke or moved, and finally Tandy said, “I’ll get the laptop.” Which meant the empath had just approved of Margot Racer and her motivations for liaising with PsyLED.

And just that fast, Special Agent Racer’s transition to a provisional part of the team was complete. We wouldn’t trust her with everything, but we wouldn’t treat her like a potential enemy either.

“What about demon summoning as the motivation for the circles?” Rick asked. “I’ve seen two demons, one that was willingly working with a black-witch and eating her friends, and one that had been summoned in concentric hedge of thorns workings, trapped in a reversed hedge, and was eating the sacrifices.”

“That had to suck. None of the circles I’ve seen have centered, reversed hedge of thorns,” Margot said, “and no halfway competent witch would summon a demon into a circle with her. The demon would eat her, use her blood and body to disrupt the circle and get free. Waste of time and good protein.”

Rick made a chuffing cat sound of laughter, probably at the waste-of-protein comment.

T. Laine said, “I’m going to try and scry for a witch circle or a magical working. See if I can spot the calling. I’ll be outside.”

“Take your weapon,” Tandy said. “Keep comms open.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, waving the words at us. “Roger that.”

I had heard only bits and pieces about the cases Rick described and went back to my cubicle to research it all, still not satisfied. But Tandy was the motivational and emotional gatekeeper of the unit and he approved of the special agent, so my misgivings weren’t significant.

I pulled up the reports Margot had compiled and studied the witch circles in Louisiana as well as here. Some of the early circles overlapped with Rick’s travel itinerary. Margot hypothesized that the caster had been tracking and calling Rick specifically. Rick had been the PsyLED special agent in charge of the Southeast region—five states—for less than a year, with Knoxville as his home base. Before that he was working as a detective with NOPD, and even before that, he’d been undercover with NOPD. His itinerary up on my laptop, I compared the circles with Rick’s whereabouts. Some matched. Some didn’t. But something had happened to Rick tonight. It was the waning moon. If someone was trying to call Rick—specifically call Rick, not a coincidence—to use him in a sacrifice or to harm him, that made this a crime against a federal agent. That made this an investigation, not just an inquiry.

I added Margot’s research to mine and, using her search parameters and language, broadened my own search pattern much further back. I found a witch circle in New York State, near a small town called Aurora, on the bank of Cayuga Lake. This one was from over five years ago, and though it had no runes, it had an odd, six-sectioned wheel-spoke form, no dead animal in the center. In a report from six months later, I found another circle documented on the same lake but farther south, close to Ithaca, centered with a single rune. Nauthiz. In Arizona, where Margot had found one witch circle in the desert, I discovered another one on the bank of the Salt River, near Apache Lake Marina and Resort. It was the oldest one yet, the circle smaller, no runes at all, and only a cross pattern instead of the twelve spaced spokes. But there was a dead rattlesnake coiled in the center.

Rick had been nowhere near New York or Arizona on the dates the circles were found. He had never worked or lived in either state.

I thought it unlikely that Nauthiz and the odd circles would be coincidental with the circles found here, though I couldn’t prove it, and the distance between all the places suggested it was different witches or witch factions. Maybe several witches, all members of different covens. Or isolated witches with no covens nearby. Or outcasts, banned from their covens for doing evil, who met on the Internet. That sounded possible. Likely even. Did covens have Internet gossip boards or pages? Would word of outcasts have made it out of the covens and into witch gossip? What if a cadre of black-magic witches, keeping in touch over the Internet, were trying to refine a spell of some kind? That made even better sense. There was nothing to tie the early circles to Rick. He wasn’t summoned then. Everything about this summoning seemed coincidental. But I kept working on the case/inquiry, just in case. I sent a note to T. Laine asking all my spell-type, coven-type questions and turned my attention to more mundane possibilities.

Over the years, Rick had arrested or been involved with the arrests of seventy-four people. Of that number, some were witches, one was a vampire down in New Orleans. Then there were the werewolves who had died or who were in permanent custody in silver cages because of him. Large numbers of gwyllgi—devil dogs—had died here in Knoxville, and the rest had been shipped out. Maybe we had missed some? All the recent cases involving paranormals had been high profile, and Rick was quickly becoming a high-profile para in Knoxville law enforcement. He had enemies who might pay a witch for revenge. Maybe a witch had honed a curse spell and was selling it?