Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)

There were bullet holes on the wall opposite the windows. And there was a pool of blood on the floor. A body lay in the middle of it. She had taken a chest shot. Dead instantly if I was any kind of judge. There was no taped outline. No chalk outline. Just the blood and the body, still in place.

I stared at her. The victim was middle-aged with dyed blond hair and blue contacts drying and wrinkling, shrinking over her gray eyes. She was wearing a pale blue sweater top and black pants, three-inch black spike shoes. Diamonds. Lots of them. There was blood spatter on the wall in an odd outline, as if someone had been standing behind her. Blood on a chair and small table. Blood on a shattered glass on the mantel near her. That bloody pool beneath her was tracked through by the shoe prints of the people who had tried to save her. There was a lot of blood.

My gift of reading the land—and feeding the land with blood—was less reticent now, more focused. Hungering. But I had been working with it, trying to harness it, and I stroked the need like the hunting cat I compared it to, flattening its surface, pushing it into stillness. Proud of myself that I had the strength of will to not feed my hunger and the earth beneath the house, I turned from the body.

By now, the crime scene had been captured in photos and video and cell cameras and drawn out on paper by hand. Multiple redundancies. Crime scene techs were still working, but oddly, there were no numbered evidence markers in the room. I had to wonder why. Maybe they had been placed there, then already removed as CSI gathered up the physical evidence.

I approached the broken windows. Outside, a coroner’s unit waited, lights not flashing, not in an upscale neighborhood. The EMTs and their vehicles had left with the wounded, three, I had heard, one critical. Farther beyond, a media van waited, a camera on a tripod and a reporter in front of it, filming for the morning news. In the dark of the driveway, where the cameras couldn’t get a shot, two uniformed figures lifted a gurney with a body bag into the coroner’s van. There was already one gurney inside. Three dead, three wounded at this scene.

The window glass was shattered, in pellets all over the floor. It reminded me of the automobile glass outside, but this was clear and the vehicle glass had been tinted and well ground into the asphalt.

The cloth blinds were burned and tattered, the drapery seared. The walls were scorched all around them, and up to the ceiling. A table by the window was mostly shattered charcoal and candles had melted across the surface. A blackened glass was on its side. It looked as if the shots had smashed the glass, spilling the alcohol and toppling the lit candle. I guessed that the fire had spread quickly, but I wasn’t a fire and arson investigator. I knew to keep my opinions to myself unless asked. Opinions went into the evidentiary summary report in the “Opinion” box, where they were mostly ignored. They weren’t facts.

I slipped out before someone asked me what I was doing. Next door was the master bedroom. Master suite. Yes, that sounded right. It was full of people. Instead of pushing my luck, I slowly went up the staircase onto the second level.

On the second floor were six bedrooms and four full baths. Counting the servants’ powder room, the en suite in the master, and the two guest powder rooms on the ground floor, that was a lot of bathrooms. I had grown up in a house that technically had more square footage and more bedrooms than this one, but it was nowhere near as fancy. The Holloways’ home was luxurious, what T. Laine probably called “new-money decadent.” They probably paid their decorator more than the yearly income of most American families.

I traipsed back down, hearing T. Laine’s and Tandy’s voices from the master suite. T. Laine was Tammie Laine Kent, PsyLED Unit Eighteen’s moon witch, one with strong earth element affinities and enough unfinished university degrees to satisfy the most OCD person on the planet. That was how she had introduced herself to me. Tandy was the unit’s empath, who claimed his superpower was being struck by lightning.

I’d wandered around as much as I could without entering the master suite, but I was nosy, so I stood just outside that door, taking the excuse to see, hear, and learn what I could before being banished back into the cold by Rick. Who was now standing in said master suite. He was in front of the window, facing the door and me, being dressed down by a well-suited FBI-agent-type in an expensive suit and tie, regulation all the way. Rick’s black hair was too long to be regulation, his black eyes were tired, and his olive skin looked sallow. Rick had aged in the last weeks, though he looked a bit better now that he had learned how to shift into his black wereleopard form and back to human. He frowned at me, but didn’t interrupt his conversation.

“This isn’t one of your magic wand and broomstick investigations,” the fed said. It was said in the tone of an older kid to a young one, insult in each syllable, in a local, townie accent. “This was an attack on a house party and fund-raiser with some of the biggest movers and shakers in Tennessee. Super-wealthy business and political types, with their fingers in every financial pie in the nation.”

Toneless, Rick said, “With all due respect, there were witches and vampires at the party. The strike could have been aimed at the Tennessee senator, Abrams Tolliver, as you assume, or at Ming, the closest thing Knoxville has to a vampire Master of the City, with whom he was speaking.”

I knew of the Tollivers. Rich, powerful people who made their money when the Tennessee Valley Authority stole the land of all the state’s farmers and changed the face of the South. The men of God’s Cloud preached about the entire Tolliver family going to hell, and maybe taking up their own special circle right next to the devil himself.

“Or just the fully human victim, or one of the human homeowners, which is far more likely. This is not your case,” the suit said. “This is a joint FBI, ATF, and Secret Service investigation, not some trivial magic case.”

“You are incorrect,” Soul said. I stepped quickly to the side, because the assistant director of PsyLED was standing behind me and I was blocking the door. My heart started beating too fast, and my bloodlust rose with my reaction. I pushed down on it, anxious about its agitation, but not worried enough to leave the house.

“You need to return to the living room with the other guests, lady,” the suit said. He sounded frustrated. And unimpressed at the vision Soul presented, all gauzy fabrics, platinum hair, and curves.

“On the contrary. I am exactly where I belong, young man.”

“Who the hell are you? If you’re law enforcement, where is your badge and ID?” he replied.

The room fell silent. I covered my mouth and moved inside quickly, along the wall, to keep them all in view. Soul walked slowly closer to him, silvery gauze waving in a rising wind that wasn’t really there. I didn’t have the same kind of magic as Soul, but I felt her power on my skin like small sparks of electricity. Arcenciel magic was wild and hot, a shape-shifting ability that defied the laws of physics as scientists understood them. It wasn’t common knowledge—in fact, half of Unit Eighteen didn’t know—that Soul was a rainbow dragon, a creature made of light. But even without that knowledge, if the suit didn’t know a stalking predator when he saw one, then he needed to spend more time in the wild, to hone his survival instincts.

“What. Did. You. Say?” Soul asked.

“Hamilton!” a woman barked. “What the bloody hell.”

It was the woman from the game room, the African-American woman who wore the power of her office like a crown and robe. Her ID was clipped at her collar and her name was E. M. Schultz.

Soul didn’t turn to her, keeping her eyes on the suit and saying, “I’ve been on conference call to PsyLED director Clarence Lester Woods, the secretary of Homeland Security, and the director of the FBI, as well as the head of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. This is a joint investigation between four, not three, branches of law enforcement. You may address me as Assistant Director, PsyLED. And your services are no longer needed at this crime scene.” She turned her head as if looking for something.

In a tone that wasn’t quite a question, not quite a demand, she said, “Special Agent Ingram?”

I jumped. Soul kept on talking. “Take Mr. Hamilton outside. Give him your flashlight. Teach him how to do a perimeter grounds search. Then come back in here. I need your services.”