“Nell,” Tandy said, taking my hands, which was more than the empath usually did.
“Yeees?” I said, uncertain.
His skin held a strange pallor in the porch light, the Lichtenberglines bright and bloodred in the night. “Whatever is broken in your land, know that I’ll help if I can. And you be careful. Okay?”
I started to deny any problem, but Tandy released my hands and took the steps to the ground. Moments later, PsyLED Unit Eighteen was rolling down the mountain.
TWO
I didn’t sleep as well as I’d expected, despite the new mattress and the fresh sheets and the cats snuggled all around me. I kept replaying Tandy’s last statements to me, and measuring them against the darkness of Brother Ephraim in the earth.
Tandy could feel more than simple emotions in mundane humans. He could resonate with witches, with vamps, and with me. I had known he could feel my land, passively but deeply, from the first moment I met him. Tandy and the werecats could sense the beauty and the magic in the earth of Soulwood. It had been startling and disconcerting that first time, but now I might have to reconsider my own communing with Soulwood. Tandy could feel the malevolence too. Or... he picked up my own unhappiness. Perhaps that. The disquiet kept me awake.
A little after two a.m., I rolled over in bed, into a cold place in the sheets, awake, aware of the soft hum of the new, much bigger converter on the second story. Mindful of the cats purring in their sleep. Alert to everything. Except for those vibrations, the house was dim and silent. I slid a leg out of the sheets and down, until the toes and the ball of my left foot touched the cool wood of the floor. The flooring had been cut from the trees of Soulwood before I was born, but the wood knew me, resonated to me. I sent my awareness down through the floor, into the beams and floor joists, down the rocks of the foundation and into the soil. I sent a slow, delicate tendril of my consciousness into the earth.
I was met with a feeling of warmth, of welcome, as if the land was awake now and waiting for me. As if it had expanded, unfolded, yawned, and reached out to welcome me. The land of my woods was deep and wide, usually a huge, slumbering entity, now stirring and wakeful. “Hey there,” I said. “Long time, no see.”
The energies of Soulwood wrapped around me and held on,warm and gentle, powerful and content, as if it were a parent holding to a child. And, very oddly, the land felt... kind. I didn’t know how land could be or feel kind and welcoming, but Soulwood was. I leaned into the welcome, knowing I was protected and safe, and at long last, sleep took me.
***
Six a.m. came early. There was a time when I’d have been awake long before six, alert, sharp, my day planned out ahead of me, and already with a cup of coffee in my system. Now, with late-night guests and electricity to keep me going long into the night, I was rising closer to dawn. I was a different person, and not sure I liked all the changes, this one included. I stretched, dislodging the cats as I edged upright and turned off the cell alarm.
It didn’t take me long to get ready for work. I didn’t wear a lot of makeup—mostly lipstick, a swish of blush, and a little eyebrow pencil. My bobbed hair needed only damp fingers with a little goop on them, rubbed through my scalp. Now that I was on active duty, the black slacks and a long, lean white shirt over a black, long-sleeved tee seemed appropriate. I added a belt to hold gear. A warm black jacket. Field boots. No heel. Easy to run in, but classy. That was the evaluation that my Spook School mentor had given of my boot choice. LaLa—more officially known as Linda Pierce—had been proud. And I looked good. Slender but tough. Capable. I clipped my badge to my belt at my waist and carried my service weapon in its oversized box under my arm, keys in the other hand. I was glad I had invested in the field boots, which were sturdy waterproof leather. Goose grease was sticky, nearly impossible to get off shoe soles, and Rick had mentioned geese where I was going.
I shooed the cats out onto the back screened porch, into the dark. They didn’t like being out so early, and Torquil hissed his displeasure, following me to the driveway. As I reached the truck I said, “Watch out for the hawks and the foxes. Kill a couple of voles, okay? Kibble when I get home tonight.” Giving me a prolonged vocalization, he slid into the shadows.
Within half an hour of waking, I pulled out of the drive onto the road to Knoxville, the address of the new offices of PsyLED Unit Eighteen entered into my cell phone’s GPS. Behind me, the woods seemed to sigh with the coming dawn, the sound of owl giving way to hawk, deer prancing across the road in front ofme, a six-point buck and two does. A juvenile fox darting in front of me, skulking after the deer, eyes and hunger bigger than his size or abilities.
I took the unlit dirt-and-gravel road down and around the low mountains, or high hills, winding my way toward the Tennessee Valley and Knoxville. Around me, the night grew lighter, a gray-on-charcoal-on-midnight tone that said day was near.
The road merged into a two-lane blacktop tertiary county road and then into a state road. By seven, light was coming over the horizon, and I stopped at a McDonald’s for a special-order bacon, egg, and cheese on a bun. With mustard. And a coffee. I could have eaten homemade granola cereal at home. It might have been stale, but it would have been cheaper. But... I shook my head. I was clearly not the same person I had been.
***
The new offices of PsyLED Knoxville were on Allamena Avenue, a new road on a patch of newly developed land off Highway 62, the building ugly as only a government building can be, three stories with the two top levels set aside for PsyLED and for an eventual PsyCSI, whenever the government got around to fully funding the agency. The bottom floor was a deli and a coffee shop. There were no signs to indicate that I was at the right place, but I recognized the oversized SUV from the night before and parked near it. The second-floor lights were on. An unmarked door separated Yoshi’s Deli and Coffee’s On, with an inconspicuous keypad at the side and a very conspicuous, roving surveillance camera over the door. The security system looked high-end. PsyLED had spared little expense so far.
I hauled my gear, including the witchy cuffs, the zip bag of lightweight, silver-toned pens, and the heavy containment vessel that I had forgotten to give Rick last night, to the door, keyed in the code, and climbed the narrow stairs to another door at the top. There was a keypad there too, but this door didn’t respond to my code, so I ran my ID card through the slot and the doorsnicked open.
The smell of coffee and donuts and stale pizza brought a smile to my face. They might have a fancy new office space with all the electronic bells and whistles that taxpayer money was willing to buy, but the unit was still the unit.
I walked through the door, which automatically latched andsealed after me, and JoJo pointed out an empty office cubicle by holding out a piece of pizza while talking on speaker on one cell, tapping out a text on another cell, and scanning a file on her laptop, all at once. Multitasking. Not my best skill set, unless it involved plants or farming.
My office space was really a low stall with padded, five-foot-tall half walls, a desk, and two chairs, both looking hard and unforgiving. The government was determined to provide the best of everything except comfort for the employees, not that I cared about comfort. I had a window! It was narrow and faced west, which wasn’t the best light, but I could bring plants to work. The dawn light coming through the pane made me want to dance—not that I danced. Not ever. Even the thought made me sick to my stomach. Churchwomen didn’t dance. And I’d look like a cross between a kangaroo, a giraffe, and a platypus. Stupid and clumsy and... stupid. But I had a window!
I placed the witchy cuffs, pens, and containment vessel on the desk along with my laptop and sealed my weapon into a small gun safe set into my desk, resetting the code to something I could remember easily, but wasn’t something anyone else would ever deduce. I put my four-day gobag in the bottom desk drawer and keyed the lock with the keys I found in the middle desk drawer. I inserted one key into my wallet and the other one into the fake plastic tree in the corner. It was a stupid hiding place, and there were probably rules about that kind of thing, but I could move it later as needed.
That hadn’t taken long. Everything was in place. My hands were empty. I made one more quick trip to the truck for the box of small handheld psy-meter 1.0s. The newbie/probie had no idea what to do next. Fortunately or not, Rick strode by, looking a lot fresher than only hours before, and waved me to the other side of the building. He was talking on a cell too, and I pocketed my own cell, grabbed up my laptop, the psy-meters, the heavy containment vessel, and followed.
We passed a cleaning closet, a safe room, and a null room—a spelled, sealed room where witches could be held, unable to use their own powers. The room’s witchy tech was brand-new; I had heard about it at Spook School. The room was set up so that T. Laine, or anyone else who knew the code, could get in or out. The null room could be used as an interrogation room for magical creatures or a safe room for humans, preventing atakeover attempt by magic users, but once locked inside, it was as if there was no magic. A faint sense of electricity skittered across my flesh as we passed, unpleasant and scratchy.
The conference room was not nearly so comfortable as the hotels where we had met when I was just a consultant. No couches, no slouchy chairs. The décor was totally unlike the colorful offices of TV and film cop shops, and was decorated in beige, gray, brown, and charcoal, dull but serviceable. A sleek, fake wood–and-metal table took up most of the space and more of the uncomfortable-looking chairs ringed it, quickly being filled with unit members. A series of wide video screens were on one wall.
I dropped the box of witchy cuffs and the baggie of pens in front of T. Laine, who made a soft squeal of pleasure. She signed the D&R—delivery and release—forms and slid them to the boss faster than I could set the containment vessel and the box of small psy-meters in front of him. Rick grunted in recognition, and I placed the multiple D&R papers on the desk in front of him too, placing a pen in his hand for his signatures. He grunted again, this time in irritation, but he accepted the pen. As he signed, he ended the call and said, “Problem, people.
“Two of the geese that read high on the psy-meter are dead at the pond site. No visible signs of COD. We need to acquire these geese for necropsy by a veterinary pathologist and see if they’re redlining. Our main area of concern is to make certain that the... for now, I’m calling it psysitopic contamination... stops its spread. Whatever spell or working or creature caused the paranormal readings, it may be ongoing. JoJo?”
JoJo opened a satellite map on the wide screen on the wall of the conference room. “Just before sunset last night,” she said, “the county isolated a herd of psysitope-positive deer. They were nowhere near the pond. They were standing in the middle of the road when a delivery truck came around a sharp turn and hit several. Couldn’t stop. Killed three. Injured two. Four more just watched the members of the herd die. They were walking in a circle, like they were drugged. Didn’t even run when the deputies shot the injured deer. They ordered tox screens on them, but after the geese incident, the deputies called for psy-meter readings too. As Rick said, we need to find the source of the paranormal activity causing this and contain it. Then we need to figure out how the magic is spreading and put a stop to that too.”
