Before I could figure out how to address a batch of interlocking situations all at once, the others filed in, sleepy and begging coffee, T. Laine tossing a box of Krispy Kremes on the table. Everyone dug in. Pea jumped to the table and accepted a thimble-sized lump of sugared dough from JoJo. She sat up like a cat on the table and took it in her hands, which had opposable thumbs. I hadn’t noticed that until now. Pea nibbled on the donut, her cat eyes watching me, as if entertained.
I stared at the wall, trying to figure out what had just happened.
“Nell?” Rick asked. “Did you ever figure out what the yellow glow in the center of the circle and triangle was?” He swiveled his laptop to me, with the report I had e-mailed last night after I gave myself hypothermia during all my scans.
I said, “I think it’s the location of the activity that resulted in the MED.”
“Can you pinpoint its GPS?” he asked.
“Not like you mean. Not with an address. Just a general location. I already looked. The yellow glow could be any of several businesses in the center of the circle.”
Rick frowned and said, “A typical MED is apostulatedweapon,” he reminded his sleepy crew, “a magical exposure device, a black-magic curse, capable of an active or passive working intended to spread violent, offensive, magical energies over a wide area. Contamination of the populace by a dark-magical weapon for terrorist/political aims. We’ve considered the possibility of an MED from the get-go, but until we had some evidence for that unsupported theory—physical, material, human, or paranormal—I had no reason to send the hypothesis up the chain of command. After the things we’ve seen over the last few days, we now have to consider the clear and present danger of an MED. And worse, we may be facing something out of control of the witch or coven who created the working in the first place.”
“Out of control?” T. Laine asked.
Rick nodded, his eyes on her. “Something that was and/or is acting independently of its creator.”
I sat up. “The infinity loop dancer. Is it acting according to a prearranged, integrated part of the original working, or is it developing its own agenda?”
TEN
Rick looked at me the way a bug lover looked at a strange beetle held down by stickpins. “I’ve spent the better part of the night online with PsyLED experts in witch workings,arcencielparanormal energies, and a theoretical physicist from MIT,” Rick said. “I don’t pretend to understand half of what they were talking about, but they narrowed down the problem with magic—as we currently understand it—being used in such a way that the working itself might become stable even after the initial working is completed and the formation energies are used up. Normally whatever energies remain after a working just blow back into the universe, the way a shock wave eventually disperses into the air. But according to the physicists, there is some theoretical possibility that may not always happen, and the energies might remain available, on-site, for other uses. Or take on stability and keep going even after the witch thinks she’s closed it down. They postulated mechanisms by which paranormal energies—which they are still calling psysitopes but may alter or add to at any time, because they’re scientists and classifications are always changing—can be transformed to become stable. And all of the mechanisms can be accomplished deliberately or by accident.”
The others started taking notes. I took a slow, painful breath, fighting a bad feeling in my middle at Rick’s words, thinking about my land. Thinking about the dancing infinity loop. Thinking about Soul and the energies I saw her become. A dragon made of light. Thinking about my blood, which might create or hold a trace of psysitopic activity when I commune with the earth. Or when I have roots buried inside me. Like at the pond. Thinking that all these things were disparate, but also interlocking because magic was nothing but energy, and energy was interlocking. E=MC2.
I placed one hand on the break-room table, the other still onmy middle where I could easily feel the rooty scars, adding my own thought at the top of Rick’s list of possibilities. I might have created a magical something-something when I made roots grow inside, forcing a tree that had once been a live oak to heal me. Because I had to be responsible for that. Me. Not the tree. I might not have wanted to accept that possibility, might have hidden it from my conscious mind, but the knowledge that I had done that had always been there. And ifIhad done one such thing unconsciously, then something similar, or even vastly different, could happen in other ways and places. So, did someone somewhere accidentally release a magical working that caused the effects all around Knoxville, do it and not know they had done so, or did someone somewhere do it on purpose? Either way, what was the infinity loop now?
Around me the moon music swelled, high notes combined with deep, dire low notes of the compositions that kept the werecats from reacting to the moon so much. Music that Rick had provided to PsyLED, so long as no one knew where it came from and so long as PsyLED didn’t try to find the air-magic composer. I’d studied that at Spook School too. So much I had learned and was now putting into use in the real world.
“Nell? Where y’at?” Rick asked in the slang of New Orleans. He didn’t use it often, but when he did, the odd phrases were comforting on some level. And he might use them more, the closer we got to the full moon.
There was a proper response to the colloquial saying; it swam up from the deeps of my brain. “What it is?” I said slowly, and Rick’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “I’m... putting it all together. You’uns go on. I’m listening.”
“A’ight,” Rick said.
A’ight,notcopyorokay. That was odd.
“Idea number one,” he said, “is for a working to be so powerful that when a coven is finished with it, the energies don’t dissipate. Two is for a nascent magical consciousness to be stimulated by a low leak of mundane nuclear energy and evolve its intellect in the vicinity of the leak. Since none of the sites is located near a currently active energy plant, that idea is on hold.
“Three is for a creature made of energy, like anarcenciel, to accidentally stimulate and feed the working, giving dispersing working energies the time to stabilize. PsyLED says that there are no such creatures living in the Appalachians at this time.”
I raised my gaze to Rick, let a tiny smile onto my mouth, and raised my eyebrows, saying with my expression,One visiting. Does that count?He stared back, not reacting to the meaning in my eyes, almost as if he had no idea what I meant. I had a feeling that Rick was a good actor, or a good liar.
Thomas Jefferson had said,“He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.”Rick LaFleur had learned to lie well and young when he went undercover in New Orleans, and now it was simply part of him. I was pretty sure I didn’t like that about him, not that I would ever tell him that to his face. My mama had raised me with manners. Mostly.
“Idea four,” he said, turning from my knowing look, “is for the energies of a magical working, in the form of psysitopes, to touch a living creature, perhaps one with nascent magical powers. Perhaps one in the earth. And the... let’s call it a nascent magical being... then evolves a way to perpetuate that energy.”
Nascent magical beings,I thought.Yes.
“Number five is for a working witch circle to knowingly and deliberately send psysitopic energies into the earth, creating a stable working or stimulating a nascent magical energy intelligence or creature to evolve and stabilize the working. That would be an MED.
“And number five is for a working to track, trap, and release a, so far, theoretical nascent magical energy intelligence or creature and, deliberately or accidentally, stimulate it, to take over the working.”
“Like shooting a ground squirrel full of magical power and seeing what it might do?” T. Laine asked. Rick gave her a half nod. “Which one do your specialists think we’re looking for?”
“They suggest we search for number two and number three.” Rick glanced at me and walked to the coffeepot, pouring himself the last cup in the pot. He put on a fresh pot. The others were busy typing up notes and working to make sense of new ideas. But the ideas weren’t new to me. Not really. It felt as if the words were simply expressing what I guessed or knew about life and living and energy and magic, what I had known from the beginning when I first fed Soulwood. More, as if the wordshinted at even more understanding, and solutions to my own problems, as well as the problems in Knoxville.
“Number three or number four,” I said, my voice quiet. And now I lied, by omission, because there had been two evolution events in the area in the last few months. One was the interconnected one, on my land, involving Brother Ephraim, the sapling behind the house, and the tree in the churchyard. The other I could talk about. “I don’t know how many of you read my report, but there are presences deep in the earth. I didn’t know what they were. So I made a few early-morning phone calls to some people who know these hills and the mythos surrounding them.”
