Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)

? ? ?

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.