FIFTEEN
I waited until we were alone in the first basement hallway to pull the P 2.0. I zeroed it and then read the hallway, which read high on level one—the witch reading.
As I worked, Tandy murmured, “You should have been a lawyer, Nell. That was spectacular.”
“I’ll admit it gave me a peculiar and forceful sense of power. I also admit that this could become addicting. You best promise to slap me down hard if I overstep my bounds.”
Tandy slid me a sideways look and said, “Somehow I think you’ll know when to pull back.”
“Hmmm. Maybe. Maybe not. That was fun. And nothing at all like what a churchwoman would be able to do in similar circumstances.”
Tandy chuckled, sounding entertained and, again, a bit more self-confident than he usually did. I assumed it was because he was picking up on my own emotions. I had to be careful where I might be headed with this new attitude. It was one thing to race headlong down a road to some kinda insolent arrogance, for which I might someday pay a price I hadn’t considered yet. It was another thing entirely to drag Tandy with me.
“Which office first?” I asked him.
Tandy tilted his head a little to the side as if hearing a distant melody. “This one, I think.” He pointed. “I watched T. Laine interview her and she kept secrets. Nothing we could pin down, but secrets nonetheless.” We entered the office of Colleen Shee MacDonald, who looked as Irish or Scottish as her name implied. A blond woman about my age, but with a calm, self-confident worldliness and a sharp intellect in her blue-eyed stare that instantly left me feeling outclassed, outsmarted, and outgunned. “May I be of some help to you?” she asked with a burr of an accent that went along with the name. And in my hands,the psy-meter 2.0 redlined on level one. This was a powerful and capable witch.
LuseCo was keeping secrets. Lots of secrets. Or... they didn’t know that they had a witch employed here? Oh...
I might not have been told a lie exactly, but I hadn’t been told the truth either. I had to wonder what other partial truths were at work here.
I decided that the chatty hillbilly talk wouldn’t work with Colleen, so I flipped open my ID, stepped forward, introduced myself again, and said, “Tandy? Did Colleen deny she was a witch during your first interview with her?”
“Yes,” Tandy said slowly. “She did.”
“Did she read as a witch on the psy-meter?”
“No. Which means she knows a working that will hide what she is.”
“Interesting,” I said. “You wanna tell me about that working?” I asked her.
The elevator door opened again and Mr. Lawyer Man stepped out.
I started to speak to him when Tandy grabbed my shoulders. Threw me at the floor. I jerked out my hands to catch my fall. Tandy landed on top of me. The floor smashed into me with awhoomp,a vibration like a bass drum, deep and low. Bone shattering.
***
It took us over fifteen minutes to sort ourselves out and get some of our hearing back, but we had missed the worst of the blast, thanks to Tandy knowing someone intended us ill will. It wasn’t the first time the empath had saved us.
By the time we could sit up amidst the debris field, we had security, Makayla, the CEO, whose name I couldn’t remember, and two white-suited military VIPs standing in the small elevator area with us. And by then, Colleen was gone.
T. Laine showed up moments later and was able to tell us that Colleen had set off a small, short-range, locally contained acoustic knockout bomb. The sonic blast had left Tandy and me with terrible headaches, but because we were on the floor when it detonated, that was the extent of our troubles. Mr. Lawyer Man/Brad Maxwell had a headache, busted eardrums withcomplete but temporary loss of hearing, and the need to spend an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom.
The magical sonic bomb was an evil weapon spell, one that targeted the brains, ears, and bowels of the victims. T. Laine said it was something left over from a vampire war in Europe over a thousand years ago. I could only imagine vampires lined up to use the Dark Ages’ equivalent of a portable toilet to rid themselves of the day’s blood. Or their blood-meals leaning on trees in the woods, so sick there was no way for the vampires to feed.
As my hearing returned, I put myself together, running my hands through my stiff hair until it popped like Rice Krispies, rearranging my clothes, checking my equipment. I picked up the thirty-thousand-dollar psy-meter from the floor. The P 2.0 was broken. While in the hands of the probie. I’d be in trouble once Rick came back from his moon-called crazies.
More important, Tandy had lost (briefly, I hoped) his empathic abilities. He was sitting, a beatific smile on his face, in a corner, totally alone inside his own emotions for the first time in years. He looked like a happy drunk, inebriated on the emotional silence. I asked him—three times—for his P 1.0 and he finally understood what I wanted. He pulled it from his pocket and extended it in my general direction. A very happy drunk.
The sonic attack on federal law enforcement officers was exactly what law enforcement needed for all the agencies to walk in and take over. That and the fact that Colleen’s office redlined on the P 1.0. That was the nail in LuseCo’s legal defense. Whether deliberately or by accident, we had been lied to about a threat to the populace, a magical weapon of mass destruction.
With the absconding of Colleen, Mr. Lawyer Man counseled Makayla (from the bathroom, yelling through the stall walls as his hearing returned) to share a good deal more information with us, and we discovered that, contrary to the account given to the feds earlier, there was a LuseCo employee missing. Aleta Turner, a specialist in particle physics, had dual citizenship in the US and in South Africa, and she hadn’t been to work in three days. Her mother, Wendy Cornwall, and her aunt, Rivera Cornwall, were both among the fired contract witches, powerfulwitches who could trace their ancestry back to Salem, Massachusetts. Aleta’s father was not in the picture and hadn’t been in twenty years, having traveled back to a tiny South African township and the pub he owned there. Aleta wasn’t a witch. But she had contacts through her mother and aunt. All this was info we should have had access to the minute we started working with LuseCo. The deluge now was more than suspicious, the kind of thing a guilty party might provide to shift attention away from itself.
I was provided the electronic files on all the fired contract witch employees, which I sent off to JoJo during a quick trip to the surface level, and I got offers to look at the security footage, to search all the offices of the missing people and the lab where they had worked, and nearly obsequious attention from Mr. Lawyer, whose name I couldn’t remember since the explosion.
Leaving Tandy where he sat in silent bliss, I reentered the busted office where Colleen had disappeared. The walls were scored with cracks and scrapes. The ceiling was pitted. Her work laptop was missing and her personal things were gone. Her desk was covered with dust and debris, and the plastic-and-metal base of her chair was split as if it had been hit with an ax. I moved her desk chair, the wheels squeaky on the tile flooring. It seemed to be otherwise intact and so I sat in it and went through the drawers. All empty. Except the bottom drawer, which had four dead plants in it. They looked like succulents that hadn’t been watered in years: brown, dried husks; leaves lying limp over the sides. But in the soil of each plant, black spots were growing. Slime mold.
Each slime had a different type of reproductive body fruiting. One had several yellow, vaguely bell-shaped buds. One flower—though I used the term loosely—was black and shaped like a tulip. One was orange and looked like something my cats might leave on the kitchen floor. One was in the midst of crawling—at microspeeds I couldn’t actually focus on—over the lip of the pot and into the bottom of the drawer. It had reached the corner and was spreading up the sides. Perilously close to a tiny micro–thumb drive memory device. I was pretty sure we had both probable cause and a warrant by now and so I took the thumb drive, which was shaped like a jade leaf, a heavy, deep green, like a charm for a bracelet. I dropped it into an evidence bag, added date, time, and my initials to the bag,and started an evidentiary chain of custody form to indicate where I had found the item, what it was, and its evidence number. I left the next line blank, which would be for the person who opened the bag and worked with the microdrive. It would likely be me. I was pretty sure I was going to hate COC forms before the day was out. I tucked the bag into my uni pocket.
