We ate like ravenous wolves, and were joined by Tandy and T. Laine, who dove onto the sandwiches with just as much fervor, silent, all of us eating and passing around colas, T. Laine griping because beer wasn’t allowed while on duty. Not that they followed that rule all the time, I was sure.
I had thought that seven feet of sandwiches would last twenty-four hours at least, but it seemed no one had eaten a real meal all day, just coffee and vending machine donuts and chips and fried-fat snacks and antacids. When I finished, I passed around the cookies. As everyone began to come back to life, thanks to calories and caffeine, I asked JoJo, “Did you get the HVAC flyover of the deer site approved?”
“Rick had already put in for it and we have shots. Slimy messin all three sites. I’ll send them to you after I finish this small bit of Italian heaven.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “I think I know what’s happening. I don’t understandwhyit’s happening orhowit’s happening, but I think I knowwhatis happening.”
JoJo wiped her mouth with a paper napkin and took out her dangling earrings, tossing the six pairs on top of the table. As she worked on her jewelry, she said, “God, I’m tired. Go for it, chicky.” As if reading her mind, Tandy opened his laptop, signed on, and slid it across the table to Jo, who took the fastest case notes in the group.
When she had wiped her fingers free of greasy tomato sauce and pulled the laptop to her, I said, “We have three hot spots of magic and psysitopes in the city, in a perfect triangle, one point lined up with magnetic north. In every location, peculiar growths have appeared, stuff that looks like black slime to the mundane eye, but that spreads like a cancer. It’s attacked—the mold itself, not people acting under the influence of the underground psysitopes—and nearly killed two people from the houses. It may be all or part of what killed the people at the pond. There may be a huge mold at the surface of the water. I’ve put in a request to KEMA and PsyCSI techs to take samples there. I also called the KEMA forensic pathologists to look for mold in the pond bodies.”
“Son of a witch on a switch,” T. Laine cursed softly. “It’s a good thing Soul is working PR on this case. This thing is gonna need spin like a helicopter blade.”
“It gets worse,” I said. “I can read the mold, and it isn’t mundane. It has strange black shadows in it and red and blue energies just like the infinity loop of early energies, spinning and dancing through the circle. And I think that whatever magical working initially started this is still going, and being altered and changed by someone. I heard syllables, nonsense sounds ofaaaaap, aaaaap, when I did a reading.”
“Describe the loop again,” T. Laine said, licking her fingers clean and taking notes one-handed. When I finished describing it, T. Laine said musingly, “I talked this morning with a coven leader in Charlotte, North Carolina. She said her mother, who was the former Charlotte coven leader, talked about energy experiments during World War Two, looking for a sustainable,self-perpetuating energy working that could be weaponized and offered to the US government. It would have meant coming out of the closet, but things were tough, and at the time, the war wasn’t going well. They thought it was worth the risk. The search produced some positive results for a witch working for self-perpetuating energy, but it was abandoned after Hiroshima. If someone in the original group picked up the testing... and if it worked... and if that got away, it might be still active.”
“That is a lot ofifs,” Tandy said, speaking what we were all thinking.
I said, “The magic is becoming more cohesive and the molds are spreading beyond the original borders.” I stopped as possible conclusions lit up inside my brain, like the release of energy in an explosion. “Oh... yes... We don’t know if one ispartof the other or a direct or accidentalresultof the other. They may not be the same thing, but they may be working together, or maybe they’re in some kind of symbiotic relationship. Like a... yeah, like asymbiont.” I had thought that word before at some point in this investigation. Excitement raced through me, igniting possibilities, as I drew conclusions. I set the last of my sandwich on the table. “What if the energies of the working did two things, one or both by accident? One, creating the infinity energies, and two, mutating an existing mold, and then the mutated mold latched onto the energies... yeah. A mutation in the mold might change it into something the hospital can’t identify or treat.”
“Ortreat?” Tandy repeated. “Are you saying this the beginning of a pandemic?”
“We’re all going to be slimed to death?” JoJo asked, tapping on the tablet. “I thought I’d go out with a bang, not a B-grade movie title.”
The empath chuckled, relaxing in JoJo’s nonchalant energies.
“Last thing,” I said. “The energies may be interfering with, or disrupting, the power grid.”
“The brownouts and power shortages?” Tandy asked.
I chewed and swallowed. “We might be looking at problems with community services. And with the Secret City experiments, which all need stable power systems.”
“So the company that probably started all this might suffer the results?” T. Laine asked. “Good. I hope they have to call and beg for help. And if they do—”
“You’ll get off your butt and go help,” JoJo said.
“Yeah.” T. Laine tossed a crumpled napkin into the garbage, followed by paper sandwich wrappers, her face as scrunched as the trash she threw. “I know. I’m such a goody-two-shoes witchy woman. Anytime people are dying, there I am, lending a hand. Even if the humans don’t freaking deserve it.”
“Human here. Be nice.” JoJo tapped her chest. Glancing at me, she said, “I got the papers from the office of General David Schlumberger, from Lieutenant Colonel Leann Rettell. I checked her out and she’s for real. She asks for something, give it to her. She’s a doctor with ties to CDC, as well as being in charge of Schlumberger’s medical team.”
I drained my drink, letting the caffeine energize my brain. A military doctor might be in a position to get other doctors and researchers to try unusual drugs on the mold, even if just in the lab. The mold had mutated and was growing like a cancer, so whynottry something new in one of the fancy, supersafe labs? Or if people were dying, why not try it on people? Desperate times call for desperate measures. I put my sandwich down and sent an e-mail to Dr. Rettell. It couldn’t hurt. And since I’d be speaking as one underling to another, it might work. Though a lieutenant colonel was not exactly an underling.
“If it’s a magical mutation, do you think a magical working might help stop it?” T. Laine asked. “When I finally get in contact with the Knoxville coven leader, I can make her compliance part of any plea bargain. Assuming there are charges leveled against her.”
“You still haven’t seen her?” I asked.
“No. Once she was fired from LuseCo, she disappeared and has now missed two appointments we’ve made.”
“So you’ve talked to her?” I clarified.
“If you can call two thirty-second exchanges actual convos, then yes. If you mean anything significant, then no. And her cell’s GPS has been disengaged, so I can’t ping her. All the witches have nonworking GPS on their phones.” T. Laine lifted her sandwich to me in a toast or a salute. “I went with a deputy to her house, which is empty and has been for a week. I put out a BOLO on every single witch. Not one has been seen. They have to have a safe house or two to have dropped so thoroughly below the radar. More coincidence, Nellie. Not.”
BOLO—be on the lookout. Spook School cop-lingo class kicking in.
“The local DA will make any charges, but you can certainly get with him in that event,” JoJo said. “This case is likely to play havoc with current laws about paranormals.” Her cell rang, and JoJo made a little groan when she saw the number. She pasted a fake smile on her face, though the person on the other end couldn’t see her, and said, “Soul. What fantastical favor do you need? A pot of gold at a rainbow’s end? A solution to turning lead into gold?”
I thought the questions were snide and not particularly appropriate for an underling to say to a VIP, but then, I was raised in the church of God’s Cloud, where any female speaking like that to anyone would have been slapped down. Most firmly. And maybe the two had a history I didn’t know about.
