“Wait,” I said, my voice soft, so it didn’t carry. I stooped and placed one palm on the ground. Bloodlust slammed into me. Desire so strong it twisted my guts like barbed wire knotting inside me. So much blood... I whipped my body back. Nearly fell onto my backside trying to get away.So much blood...
T. Laine wrenched me up by my armpit. “Are you insane? You could get dragged down—”
“Death,” I said, and I wrenched away from the heat and warmth and blood in her veins, just beneath the skin of her hand. I stumbled again. Caught my balance. “A lot of death. And blood.” I squeezed my palms into tight fists, fighting the desire to feed the blood to the earth. Not the blood at the pond. Not the blood inside T. Laine. I closed my eyes.No,I thought,No, no, no.But my mouth went dry and tight and my breath came fast.
T. Laine touched my shoulder with her warm, blood-filled hand and shook me gently. “You okay?”
I backed away, nodding. Lying.Wanting. I moistened my lips and said, “Rick said that the directed working dissolved. I don’t think this one did. I think it got stronger.”
T. Laine gripped her service weapon in a two-hand grip, her finger off the trigger at the slide, the weapon by her thigh as she walked, moving into the edge of the trees. I forced down the desire to feed the land, hard, as if shoving the need into a dark crevice, and followed, but kept my weapon holstered. As far as I had been able to tell, nothing and no one was alive for acres and acres in any direction. Stepping carefully, silently, we moved toward the pond. The trees fell behind as the road opened out into the clearing. More parked cars appeared. Tents in all the colors of the rainbow. A car seat. Bicycles. A keg in a big aluminum bucket full of water. Fires that no longer smoked, but still smelled and felt warm when we passed by. A ladder on the ground. Beach blankets and those webby-seated aluminum chairs, several on their sides.
The pond came into sight. We both stopped.
Bodies floated in the still water. Bodies littered the shore; some on land showed signs of violence, bullet holes in heads, chests, a few with blunt force trauma. I gripped both fists tightly, letting my nails cut into the newly healed flesh, the pain grounding me to thereal world, holding off the bloodlust. The yearning to feed the earth with the bodies of the dead grew, the lust stimulated by the death everywhere.
We stepped slowly up to two bodies the farthest from the shore. Two men. One with a death grip on a shotgun. One holding a tire iron. A semiautomatic, the slide locked back, was on the ground, empty, between them. From the looks of things, they had fired through the weapons’ ammo at the people in the pool of water and at each other, and then beaten each other to death with the tools once the bullets ran out.
I didn’t spend any time looking at them, instead staring at the water. “Look. Look at the bodies. They were swimming in a circle. Idiots went for a swim in the pond. T. Laine?”
She had lowered her weapon so it pointed at the ground, held in the lax fingers of one hand. She took a step toward the pool of water.
“T. Laine?” I said again. She took another step. And another. I called her name, louder. When she didn’t turn, training took over. I rushed her. Dropped. Tackled her at the hips. One hand ripping the gun away from her. And to my feet.
She came up swearing, fists swinging, and she shouted, “What the holy hell do you think you’re doing? Gimme my gun!”
I held the weapon at her, centered on her chest.
T. Laine’s face underwent a series of changes. “What the holy hell. Nell?”
“Are you back in your right mind?”
“Huh?”
“Who is president of the US? Who is the leader of Unit Eighteen?”
She answered both questions, her expression shifting from anger to bewilderment. “What happened?”
I lowered the weapon. Uncurled my finger from the trigger and placed it along the slide. Dropped my shoulders, which had hunched up at the stress of watching T. Laine fall under some weird kind of compulsion from the pond. “You were walking to the water. Just like the other people. So now we are walking away, back to the main road, to warn the local LEOs answering your call that there is an MED here. A big one. Directed or not, it’s not disintegrating, but spreading. And people are dying. Do you understand?” She glanced over her shoulder and I shouted, “Do you understand?”
She flinched and ducked. “Yes.” She started back down the curved road, away from the pond. “I got it. I hear you. And more, I feel the pull beneath my feet. There’s acome-hitherspell going, or something like it.” She brushed off her clothing, where the dust from the ground had mussed her. “I never thought I’d say this on the job, but thank you for tackling me.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You okay? About”—her hand waved back behind us—“all that?”
My eyes followed her waving hand to take in the pond and the dead. There were dead humans... adults and teenagers... children. In the water. Faces just below the surface. Or floating on their backs, arms out, hair out in spirals. Dead. Dead all around me. I had worked so hard, given up so much, to protect and save children at the church. And here other adults—not churchmen, but regular people—had brought children into a situation and made a party of it. And children had died. And I wasn’t feeling a thing that I thought I should. Not a hint of fear. No remorse. Nothing. Except fury that it had happened at all. Anger. A boiling rage that I swallowed back down, acidic and burning.
I released a breath. “No. I’m not. I’m not okay about anything.”
T. Laine reached over slowly and took her weapon from my hands, removed the magazine and the round from the chamber, replaced the mag, set the safety, and holstered the weapon, the tinysnaptelling us both it was seated in the Kydex holster. The sound of sirens coming down the road made her pull her cell and tap on a call. “Rick? Problem. Big-assed major problem.”
I shifted my jacket so my badge was showing and got out my ID. I moved ahead of the moon witch and her report to our boss. I signaled to the sheriff deputies as they pulled up, to gather with me, and when I had all three out of their cars, I told them what had happened, all except the holding-a-gun-on-my-partner bit. I kept that to myself. I ended my report with, “We need to make sure all the roads and trails into and out of this entire area are covered. No one in or out. Not even law enforcement.”
“Not a problem, in theory,” one of the deputies said. “How do we keep the buzzards and rats out? And how do we recover the bodies and how do we ID the bodies? Huh? You got an answer to that?”
I looked at him for the first time and I laughed. The sound was a little shaky and frantic to my own ears, and it must have sounded odd to him too because he backed up two steps before he caught himself. “How?” I repeated his question. “PsyLED has protocols on the books. All kinds of protocols on the books. Someone will figure out what to do.” I blinked, and on the lightless flesh of my lids I saw the bodies in the pond. Bodies all in a circle. And only in retrospect did I see the geese. All dead. As if they had swum and swum and swum until they’d died. Okay, maybe I was more shocky than I had thought, but at least the bloodlust was gone. Voice steady now, I said, “Someone will make sure we get the proper paranormal personal protective equipment. Then we can do our jobs.”
I stopped and my forehead crinkled at a new thought. T. Laine had felt the pull of the pond. I hadn’t. Not even a little. The bloodlust might keep other compulsions at bay. Or maybe my species didn’t feelcome-hitherspells. And... there was a wildlife camera back at the pond. A camera with all the footage of the last two days on it. “Keep people out,” I said, and I turned and headed back along the curved drive, dialing Occam as I went. I passed T. Laine still on the phone. She didn’t look up at me.
