Movement caught my eyes, and I scanned the trees to see the man I had shot shuffle-running into the standing lumberyard, bent over, holding his backside, limping on a bleeding foot. I’d hithim twice. He was disabled but still moving. Directly toward the pond.
The pond. The working had called the man whose blood landed upon the ground. The magic beneath the ground had snared him. He was nearly at the water, with its glistening blacker-than-night surface.
“Occam!” I screamed, pointing. “That man!”
TWELVE
The cat’s ears lifted, swiveling. His head turned toward me, to the man, tracking movement at the pond’s edge. The wounded man. Heading toward the water. He leaped up, from tree to tree, covering yards with each bound, faster than any human. Catching up. When he was close, Occam sprang twenty feet to the earth, landed, and dropped his head, shoulders rising. He crouched. On paws and belly, low to the ground, he crawled toward the scant kudzu near his car.
Walking to the lip of the water, the man took one step into the pond.
With a single massive lunge, Occam tackled the man and knocked him away from the pond, banging the shooter’s head with the landing. A siren cut through the air, close, pulling along the drive. Flashing lights caught on the trees and reflected blue on the black water. Occam growled at the man beneath him and swiped his prey with his paw, batting hard, but not slashing. Frustrated, Occam slinked away from the pond and the sheriff deputy’s bumping, grinding car. Into the brush, where he leaped up into the trees. Vanished in the green needles. I remembered to breathe.
By the time the deputies pulled to a stop, I was in control of myself, mostly, and told Rick to call dispatch and tell the cops to put on 3PEs. I climbed out of the hole in the rocks and got the man Occam had landed on and knocked out safely in handcuffs. He was unconscious, so I didn’t Mirandize him, just patted him down and left him where he was.
The deputies had given similar treatment to the man I had shot, and tossed him in the back of the unit before Rick’s orders came through, the officers walking the Earth with no problems, seemingly with no desire to go for a swim—yet. The attackers’ weapons were confiscated, rounds removed, weapons andequipment were tagged, placed in evidence bags, with heavy rubber straps acting as trigger guards, and stored in the deputies’ cars. And somehow, through it all, I controlled the desire to feed the earth the blood of my victim, pressed down on it, smothered it. And remembered to breathe.
KEMA’s ETA to the pond was forty minutes. Rick’s was only slightly shorter. For now, I was on my own. My partner was at his car, mostly dressed. Missing a shoe, both socks, and his ankle holster. He was dressed in his outer clothes, though his shirt was open to the waist, the tails fluttering in the cold wind, and he seemed to have no desire to button it. His badge and ID were both clipped at his belt, to be seen easily. He was grim-faced, leaner than he had been only an hour before. His beard was half an inch long, scruffy and uneven. His hair had grown out too, a tousled blond tangle. His eyes were mostly their usual amber-brown shade and he seemed moderately in control, once he drank several bottles of water that I found in the trunk of his car. But he wouldn’t dress out in proper protective gear, and I knewhis head wasn’t on straight yet—a phrase I had learned in Spook School but had never seen in action until now.
The deputies and I were wearing the requisite antispell white unis with the ugly orange stripe across the chest. I was pretty sick of seeing them by now. I had marked off the crime scene around the boulders with crime scene tape. Brought out the basic crime scene evidence kit. It was my first arrest, my first crime scene, and was something I should have been walked through. Instead, I took it step by step, alone, according to protocol laid out in PsyLED training, because I was the PsySAC, PsyLED special agent charge, until someone with seniority showed up. Or Occam got his head together. This was bizarre.
He wasn’t himself. He was silent, unsmiling, and went about making reports in monosyllabic grunts. I had a feeling the reports he was writing were going to be equally terse. But he finally agreed to wear the uni-style booties I gave him, protecting his feet from the magic in the land. He didn’t say thank you. Hadn’t called mesugar. But he kept away from the pond and the men who had attacked us, so I was counting that as a win.
When Rick arrived and took over the scene as SAC, even he noticed Occam’s silence, but he did nothing about it, except to find earbuds in the sportster and hold them out to the werecat. Which I should have done. I was Occam’s partner for the day,and I should have been thinking for him. Occam had dropped his antimoon music while driving. I should have grabbed the antispell music. I was an idiot.
I said so in my report. All the reports, including the reports I had to fill out for having drawn and fired my service weapon. And the one for having hit a suspect. So much paperwork. There was more paperwork when the ambulance picked up the injured attackers. Neither had ID on them, and it would take a while for AFIS—Automated Fingerprint Identification System—to deliver any fingerprints that might be on file. The car was stolen just this morning, and there might be traffic cam or security cam footage, but everything took longer than on TV and in film fiction. And no one was talking.
Both suspects were taken to quarantine at UTMC where they would be given medical treatment and held against their wills. Interrogated. Background checks. They had fired fully automatic weapons at federal law enforcement. Life wouldn’t be easy for them.
Midway through the workup, a deputy found Occam’s lost shoe. The werecat took it and walked away, without a thank-you or a comment. His face like a stone.
In the ordinary course of life, I didn’t experience guilt about living, didn’t overthink what I said or replied or did, didn’t agonize about what I should have done. But this was different. I had let my partner down. I had let him shift in a dangerous situation where he might have bitten someone and then might have died at Pea’s claws. I should have played the music and forced him to stay human shaped. That was my job. And I had failed at something Unit Eighteen had required of me as the most basic part of my job.
Just before the three days of the full moon.
I couldn’t fix what I had done, but I could take Rick’s advice and do my job.
***
Within hours, the site had been worked up and Occam drove off in his car, without a word, with all my gear except my laptop behind the seats. Without me. He was being a typical moon-called werecat, but still. Abandoning me was just mean, no matter where his head was. Once again, I hitched a ride back to HQ with a deputy, where I got in my truck and drove to LuseCo.Still on the job. Because for some reason, Rick had accepted my gun when I offered it, but hadn’t asked for my badge, hadn’t pulled me from the field, hadn’t sent me home. At best, I was supposed to be deskbound now, until an investigation into the shooting was completed. That hadn’t happened. It had to be the effect of the impending full moon, making him forgetful or cranky or something. I knew he would get around to it, but for the moment, I had time to do the job.
I had one innate talent: reading the land. I was going to use it for as long as I could. Wearing my uni, I parked my C10 in the visitor parking lot in front of LuseCo and got out.
I walked out into the center of the lawn, facing the building. It had a gated entrance and was built like a medieval fortress, three stories high with long, narrow windows, and a flat roof with four turret-looking things, one on each corner. There were trees on the roof, and a tentlike awning was visible, possibly a location where employees might take breaks or even work in the sun. The drive split, leading to visitor parking in front and probably to employee parking in back.
The plantings out front were sparse, over- or undertrimmed, underfertilized, and underwatered. There were spindly nandinas that reached for the second-floor windows. The first time I’d driven here, I had barely noted the landscaping around the building. Now I saw that it had been poorly planned, poorly executed, and was uncared for, winter bare, and slowly dying. The grass had been cut so low, so often, that the roots were dying. The nandinas were too tall for the location and in need of trimming. All the plantings needed fertilizer. Mulch. A decent irrigation system. All this I took in without thought, processing it, letting it go.
All in all, the landscape gave off no evil-castle vibes. The place had the look of a moderately profitable small business. I sat down on the dying grass and got as comfortable as possible without the blanket that was still in Occam’s car. I took a calming breath and looked up, into the plantings. And stopped. Still as death.
There was a slimy film on the underside of the nandina leaves. Black as tar. Oily. Just like the slime on the plants at one of the victims’ houses. Just like what I’d thought I was seeing at the surface of the water at the pond. I got up, went to my truck, and trundled around until I found the evidence bag with the scraping inside. Carrying it away from the Chevy, I knelt on theconcrete parking area. Carefully I opened the envelope. Inside were scaly, dried strips. Nothing oily. But it had nothing to grow on either. I thought about dropping them onto the ground, but that sounded dangerous, and so I resealed the envelope and put it in a plastic zippered bag, to be on the safe side. I tucked it into the passenger-side pocket of the C10, and I instantly assigned it as the evidence collection area. I needed a car with a trunk.
Back in LuseCo’s yard, I pulled off my uni’s glove, wrenching my wrist trying to get the rigid, plasticized, and spelled fabric off. Next time I’d just cut the glove. I put a single finger on the ground, as I had recently for reads. I let a wisp of myself coil down, slowly, beneath the starved and dying grass roots. Into the soil. I didn’t go deep, but stayed near the surface, close to my body. Beneath me, I could feel the corners of the triangle. The movement of...somethingalong the vertices and angles of the triangle, pooling at the angle points.Apexes?The “8”-shaped infinity loop no longer danced, but raced along the circle, its energies tighter, no shadow between the pinpoints of light now. And this time I was certain that all of the energies were tied to the facility in front of me. The glow beneath the building was brighter, sending out sparkles of sun yellow to the loop as it traveled.
“Nell?”
I recognized T. Laine’s voice, and I pulled myself back to the surface. Blinked. Remembered to breathe again. I stood and pulled the uni’s glove back on, which involved much twisting and discomfort.
“You okay?” she asked me. She looked tired, her eyes ringed with mascara that she had rubbed off. Black hair plastered to her head from the moisture that collected in the 3PE suit. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
