Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)

“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, watching 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.