Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)

“When I’m hunting on Soulwood, you’re there to protect me,” Occam said. “I’m not trying to protect the little woman. I’m watching my partner’s back, not trying to keep you from doing your job. When an evil is in the land and you read the land, you need backup.”


Stubbornness welled up in me, not wanting to give in so easily, but … but, Occam wasn’t talking about being dominant over me. He was talking about being my equal, about mutual dependence. Feeling guilty, I said, “Yes. I did it alone.” I scowled up at him. “I promise not to do it again.” Occam raised his mismatched eyebrows in disbelief. I turned away and stomped off through the brush. It grew thick and green right up to the road, which I crossed to trees on the far side. The shade was deep here and the soil loamy enough for there to a springhead nearby. I was on the same side of the road as the house where Jason was supposed to be, assuming he was still with the vampires. “Stupid man,” I grumbled.

“Say again, Ingram?” he said to my back, a hint of laughter in his voice. Ingram. Not Nell, sugar. He had heard me perfectly with his cat hearing.

I positioned the pink blanket on the slightly damp soil and sat on it. Touched a single fingertip to the ground, glanced once at Occam, and dropped deep and fast, like plunging a knife blade into the dirt. I was mad at my partner but still trusted him to have my back.

I didn’t look for the demon or the circle, but I knew they were both there. I could feel the filth in the earth at the livestock center, like used motor oil mixed with clotted blood and grains of rotted wood and rat feces. It was a nauseating sensation and I stayed away.

Closer to me, partially overwhelmed by the sensation of the demon, maybe three hundred feet ahead, I felt … maggots. Thousands and thousands of maggots. They were all over the property but mostly on the left side of the house, in the basement. Avoiding the hedges, using the smallest hint of power, I eased my attention up through the gravel and the concrete of the slab foundation, trying to see how many vampires there were. I couldn’t get close enough, but I hesitated, feeling something familiar. I pressed up just a bit. And touched wood in the walls. Local wood. The house had been built with local wood and I could feel through it, into the house. And I felt maggots. True-dead vampires. Undead vampires. Vamps in cages. Blood. Lots of blood. Rotting flesh.

Gagging, I heaved my mind away from the house. Accidently dragged myself through a mound of freshly turned earth. More rotting flesh. Human. I yanked away from the fresh graves. Seven of them. I wrenched myself out of the land and wriggled my cell from my pocket with shaking fingers. Called JoJo.

She answered with, “Ingram. Where are you? You and Occam aren’t with the others.”

“Looking for Jason. How many humans lived at the lair?”

“Five family members and two full-time help. The estate is forty acres of horse pasture and timber. The Blounts are a quiet, unassuming millionaire family who made their fortune in railroads and coal.”

“Were.”

“Huh? Were what?”

I said, “I just found seven graves.”

? ? ?

“Drink some water, Nell, sugar. You don’t breathe enough when you’re underground, and you might not know it, but you ain’t exactly yourself for a while after you read the earth.”

“What kinda ‘not myself’?”

He put a bottle of water in my hand and bent over me as if to speak quietly. Instead I felt him clip the leaves in my hairline. No need to advertise I wasn’t human to the local LEOs.

Chagrined, I said, “Oh. The leafy kind.”

Occam chuckled quietly, as he worked to slice through a vine on my thumb. “And the grouchy kind. And the bossy kind.”

“If I was a man, it would be called taking charge or alpha male or something else good.”

Occam tossed my leaves to the ground and squatted down beside me, his throat exposed in what might look like submission, but I knew better. His eyes were laughing. “You trying to lecture me about women’s rights and misogyny, sugar?”

“No. I’m trying to say being bossy or an alpha isn’t a problem if I’m right. I needed to be on that side of the road to read the house properly.”

“Why?”

“’Cause tar tastes bad.” I drank down the water, crushing the bottle.

His eyebrows went up again, his burned one a little lower than the other. “Oh. I didn’t know that. And maybe I should have.”

“Yeah. Let’s go find Rick and tell him.”

“You’re in charge.”

“Now you’un jist messin’ with me.”

“Pretty much,” he agreed.

Rick wasn’t surprised when Occam and I showed up, all hot and sweaty and covered in beggar-lice. I told him about the vamps and the graves. The sheriff’s department had shown up and launched an RVAC, a remote-viewing aircraft, one with advanced cameras and sensors, and had seen the turned earth. They had also skimmed around the house and acquired infrared images through all the windows, giving them a head count of the living humans—fifteen. He and FireWind put their heads together, muttering, and wandered away, toward a group in front of the abandoned house.

The brass were standing around a makeshift table covered with house plans (which were on file with the county) and the security system (which had been provided by the company once a warrant had been delivered). They included the sheriff, the chief of the Highway Patrol, a TBI investigatory agent wearing suit pants and a jacket, and six SWAT team members in camo and laden with gear, most of it lethal. All of them were sweating in the heat.

The SWAT captain—Gonzales—was former military and opened the discussion with the words, “Listen up, people.” He held up four fingers. “Ends, ways, means, risk. Strategy is like a three-legged stool, with ends, ways, and means balancing a plane of varying degrees of risk. We create strategy based on known variables and face risk depending on how we use our resources and what the enemy does. We have weapons, we have tools, we have floor plans, we have personnel. What we will not have is military backup before sundown. This is on us. Gather around!”

I yawned and ate an apple. SWAT and local LEO brass discussed ingress and egress and potential barriers and the proper times and places to use flashbangs, which were the perfect weapon against vampires, affecting their light-sensitive eyes and their better-than-human hearing. A well-timed flashbang was enough to knock an ordinary vamp on his butt for several minutes.

They also covered strategic choices such as bait and bleed, which would have meant letting Ming’s people attack and the vamps fight it out among themselves. This would have let the demon loose and maybe killed Rick. They decided to keep the local vamps out of the picture and go in before sunset, which was a good thing, as I’d have gotten myself fired warning Yummy. To no one’s surprise they decided on a blitzkrieg offensive with SWAT as the sole offensive wave.

Despite the fact that this was a paranormal crime scene, SWAT determined that PsyLED wouldn’t be going in until the scene was contained and the house was cleared, because the hallways were too narrow and the chance of getting in the way of people with lethal weapons was too great. I listened long enough before I shouted, “What about sleep spells?”

The SWAT captain looked my way and saw a skinny female in jeans and a T-shirt, with a pink blanket over her shoulder. He grinned, one of the patronizing expressions a big man sometimes gives a woman who he perceives as a lesser being.

I didn’t like his grin at all, and maybe I was feeling a little too prickly, but I scowled at him and said, “Kent, how many combatants did you take down last week with one spoken wyrd?”

T. Laine said, “I think it was twelve.” That got Gonzales’ attention. The captain looked from me to T. Laine and back, his grin fading.

“Magic keeps our side from getting hurt,” I said. “You walk into a magically protected site with mundane weapons and you may not come out again.”

T. Laine moved through the crowd, saying, “I’m Kent, a PsyLED witch. My intel says the vamps lairing in the basement have at least one very powerful sorcerer with magical protections and one daywalking vamp with purperior mesmeric capability. Wyrd workings like the sleep spell are not the only offensive or defensive weapons in my arsenal.”

Gonzales asked, “How long for my men to develop proper techniques with your arsenal?”

“Tell me, Cap,” T. Laine said, halting in front of the group. “You go to an operation and turn your weapons over to someone with less training and experience?” Gonzales scowled. “I didn’t think so. I’m a witch. I’m not giving you my weapons.”