“That’s not the way magic works,” T. Laine said. “It doesn’t just spread, like an airborne disease. It can’t get into the groundwater. It can’t spread by touch. It has to be formed and ordered and shaped. It isn’t amorphous or contagious, despite what a lot of hardline, witch-hating right-wingers say.”
“Okay,” Rick said. “Then we need to find the people who are setting workings loose and stop them. Which is why you take lead on this one, Lainie. You and Nell and the psy-meter 2.0.”
T. Laine said, “Plugging in the two locations now. But I have to say, again,this is not the way magic works. At all.”
“Noted. Check it out.” Pea jumped on the big conference room table and then off onto the floor to disappear. Catlike.
I had a much higher, upgraded security clearance than I’d had as a consultant, though not as high as the other team members. As a probie, I’d be taking orders, getting coffee, and doing paperwork. And reading the land. I went to the new coffeemaker and started a second pot, remembering the first time I saw such a device and had to figure out how to make it work. This time, I found Rick’s special French dark roast Community Coffee and started a pot, as if I had done it all my life. Then I poured coffee for all the unit members while they discussed possibilities of creatures and events that might cause the readings. When I reached Occam’s cup, he said, “Nell, sugar. Whatchu doing? Waiting on us?”
I pointed a finger at my chest and said, “Probie. Lowest on the totem pole. Paper pusher and waitress. At least for a while.”
“Nell,” T. Laine said, with a half smile on her face, teasing. “Make mine to go, milk and sugar.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, pouring us both to-go coffees in metal mugs. “Ummm. Weapons?”
“Special agents do not sayummm. Service sidearms should be sufficient,” Rick said. “If you find animals that need to be euthanized, call the sheriff’s office or animal control. I’m assigning the handheld psy-meters. Record the model and serial numbers and enter them on the paperwork that will be on your desks when you return. You’re responsible for them. Take care, people.”
I grabbed my coat, a small handheld P 1.0, my laptop, the new psy-meter 2.0, and my service weapon, and followed T. Laine out the door, down the steps, into the day. I got my small everyday gobag out of the Chevy.
“Good God, girl. You still driving that old truck? We’ll take my car.” T. Laine took the passenger seat of a white Ford Escape. “You can drive a normal car, right?” She waved a key fob at me. “I’ve got paperwork to do and I always wanted a driver.”
I stowed my gear in the back and started the SUV with the push-button start. This was a bottom-of-the-line Escape and had no rearview camera and no electronic upgrades, which relieved me. When I first got the money for John’s shotgun, I test-drove a brand-new Escape and was intimidated by the electronics. This one was okay. I adjusted the seat and rearview before driving into the early-morning rush-hour traffic. “I can manage,” I said mildly, merging into the flow of vehicles. I had passed the aggressive driving course at Spook School, and it wasn’t for the faint of heart.
“Good. Rick can assign you a government-owned vehicle for field use. You can’t drive it for personal use, but it’ll be better than that truck on city streets.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I liked my truck. I could haul all sorts of things in the bed. But she had a point about work-related city-street driving. Maybe a small coupe would be better, one with a trunk for locking away my weapons and electronic equipment.
We made good time to the turnoff for the pond, and I drove T. Laine’s Escape past the yellow caution tape and parked on the two-rut drive. A pond was visible through the trees, dark water around a bend. Nervous energies tingled under my skin, half worry, half anticipation. This was my first, real, active, ongoing paranormal site. It wasn’t a crime site, but it was a big part of what I had trained for.
I let the lead agent handle introductions and the Q and A with the county deputies, while I calmed my mind and went over the protocol for dealing with such sites. Because this was a fresh scene and supposedly no one magical had been on the grounds of the old farm, the first thing I needed to do was use the P 2.0 to determine if there was an active working anywhere near.
I stepped to the back of the vehicle, where I unpacked the device and went through the start-up procedure. I turned the sensor on the closest human to verify human-standard, then on T. Laine to get a good witch reading, and then walked around the bend toward the pond.
It was small, about a hundred feet in diameter, an irregular oval with an open space on the side where I stood, and pine trees on all the others. Kudzu covered dilapidated buildings on the far side. A small shed with farm equipment was to my right. The dew-wet grass beneath my feet had been cut recently and the smell of countryside filled the air.
I was about a hundred feet from the water’s edge and didn’t expect to get a reading at all. Instead, I got a midline reading on level three and a near twenty-five percent on level-four psysitope. Which was a surprise. Something was still happening here.
T. Laine glanced my way, and I gave her an abbreviated nod. Her eyes went wide for an instant before the cop mask fell back in place.
Because there was no crime, just a quirky reading, I didn’t have to take trace matter and blood samples to be held for PsyCSI workup and possible DNA testing. In the event that we discovered culprits or victims, that might change. In that eventuality, I would need to create more than a simple evidentiary record, take psy-meter readings, and gather samples of any elements used in magical workings. I had been trained to collect fingerprints and study blood spatter, but usually in magical crimes, PsyCSI took care of the crime scene workups. Of course, with Knoxville not having a PsyCSI team yet, the techs would have to fly in from another territory. For now, I went back to protocol, starting over with a strictly human evaluation.
I could see what the Haz Mat tech had thought was a problem. The geese were floating... No. Slowlyswimmingon the water. In what looked like a perfect circle. Steady, unhurried. But a perfect circle. Geese didn’t do that.
Using two different cameras and my cell phone, I took photographs of the pond, the water dark with the tannins of decayed plant matter, the flock of geese slowly swimming in the middle, and the humans watching from the shore. Redundancy in everything kept us from losing evidence that might be valuable at any trial. I got some nifty shots of geese and a few good shots of the morning sky with the pond reflecting golden clouds and the trees that lined it on one side.
I called out to T. Laine, “I’m goin’ in for closer readings.”
“Copy,” she said and turned back to the cops. The dark-haired witch was enjoying being boss. I knew I’d get my share of scut work and paperwork and menial jobs. What no one knewwas that I enjoyed this part of the work. According to my coworkers, I had a knack for several things—briefing summations, evidence gathering, and telling the boss what he needed to know, when he didn’t want to hear it. And organizing paperwork and files. Scut work.
I documented everything I had done, along with the readings at one hundred feet out, and then tucked my pant legs into my boot tops. Through the high grass, I headed into the seventy-five-foot mark and took readings, then at fifty feet out, then again at twenty-five feet from shore. At that point, the P 2.0 was nearly redlining on all four levels. I went no farther, because if someone had drawn a witch circle for a working big enough to cover the pond and back this far from shore, I didn’t want to step on that circle and trigger something. Like a magical bomb. I had seen pics at Spook School, and they had been awful, including shots of humans blown to mincemeat, or with missing limbs, or burned.
If there was an enormous working, then the officer who had taken the reading here, with the older model psy-meter, had been lucky.
Keeping a fairly even twenty-five feet out, I walked around the pond. When I was on the far side of the small body of water, I spotted the first dead goose on the shore. I wasn’t sure what had killed it, but scavengers had been eating it postmortem. From the size of the bites and the scattered feathers and body parts, I’d say buzzards and maybe feral cats. If the working was still active, why hadn’t the animal activity broken the circle? Assuming there was a circle. I hadn’t detected one, and T. Laine was better qualified than the P 2.0 to determine the presence of an active working.
I took photos of the scavenger depredation and continued my circumnavigation of the pond, finding the second goose, this one floating on the water, wings and feathers spread. I couldn’t see a cause of death, but there was no visible blood or disfigurement. I took photos and went on around the pond to the car to record everything I had seen and all the readings. T. Laine joined me there when I was done, and she asked, “Finished with the human and tech eval?”
I nodded and closed up the P 2.0. “I stayed outside the redline zone. But there’s a couple of dead geese on the far side, with clear scavenger activity at one. If there’s an active circle, it didn’t break.”
