“No circle,” T. Laine said, her face going pinched, her arms wrapped around her, her hands clasping her arms in a self-hug. “No active working. And I get why someone thought this might be radioactivity. It looks like what Rick said. Contamination. Like someone brought something magical here and dumped it into the pond.” She studied the small body of water, its surface placid, mirroring the blue sky. “In a sight working, it’s glowing a sickly green gray. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this before.
“If it is a working, which I strongly question,” T. Laine went on, “it’s something new.” The moon witch was rubbing her upper arms, the skin of her palms dry and rasping on her jacket, the gesture a worried tic. One-handed, she tucked her too-long black bangs behind an ear. “If this is some magical attack, it’ll be a homegrown terrorist group, one utilizing witches. Maybe witches being used against their wills.”
I had read about that at Spook School. A full coven in Natchez, Mississippi, had been forced into a working that kept them trapped and slowly killed them as they were forced to keep the magical working going. I put that together with the fact that Congress had still not made a determination about how paranormal beings would be viewed under the law, as equal citizens or something else entirely. If witches had launched some kind of magical weapon, or were even taking part unwillingly, that would likely increase the chance of the government forcing registration of all witches. Throughout history, registration of the populace, or part of the populace, had been a prelude to extermination. Step one of a pogrom.
“We need to report in,” she said, “and get Rick involved. Why don’t you send him the preliminary psy-meter recording results and I’ll have a chat with him. While we talk, I need you to collect the geese and then find a comfortable spot to take readings of your own kind.”
Collect the geese.Ick. But I had killed my first chicken for the pot before I was ten, so dead birds weren’t particularly horrible. Still.Ick. I did as I was told and sent the psy-meter recordings to Rick and opened the bulky, fully stocked physical evidence kit in the back of T. Laine’s Ford. From it I got gloves, the metal forceps for picking up bigger pieces, small numbered plastic markers, and several sizes of plastic evidence bags, fromquart-sized to oversized. The bags were usually paper, to keep bacteria and mold and suchlike from speeding decomposition—decompin PsyLED-speak—but in this case, oversized plastic zip baggies would keep the pond and body fluids from leaking everywhere. I gloved up, took several COC—chain of custody—sheets, sometimes called ERs—evidentiary records—and traipsed clockwise around the pond to the floating bird.
Fortunately it had drifted closer to shore, and I was able to fish it out easily. It didn’t have rigor and its wings moved effortlessly as I folded them, tucked the bird into the bag, and sealed it. I recorded the date, time, GPS location, and all the other info I needed to maintain the chain of evidence.
The other bird was dry, if scattered and well gnawed, and had to be gathered in a different manner. I quartered the area and put a numbered marker at each body part. I probably should have tried to preserve the feathers, but they were scattering everywhere on the slight breeze.
I used twelve markers and gathered twelve pieces of birdy evidence. Which stank exactly as it should: like dead meat left out in the elements. I doubted either bird would ever be looked at in an evidentiary manner, but I was following orders, orders that might have been intended for me to practice my new skills.
Paperwork completed, I sealed the birds into a single, extra-large baggie and placed it all in the back of the vehicle. And looked for T. Laine, who was standing, facing the water, both hands to her sides. I knew she was reading the pond in the way of witches. It should have made me uncomfortable, with my churchwoman background, but it didn’t. I had learned about witches and their gifts and it wasn’t devil worship and they didn’t sacrifice goats to Beelzebub. They just had genetically given gifts for the land or the water or the moon or growing things, whatever. With mathematics and geometry, they could harness and use both free energies and those stored in matter to accomplish certain goals.
T. Laine looked okay, so I began my next chore. Reading the land.
She had meant hand-atop-ground reading, the way I did at Soulwood, and the way I had done at other sites when PsyLED was looking for clues in a series of kidnappings. I glanced at the four law enforcement officers standing nearby, watchingT. Laine, two with well-hidden fear, one with amusement, as if T. Laine was being cute. The other cop, older, graying, looked on with boredom.
I took a notebook, a pen, a small, square, faded-pink blanket, and the psy-meter 2.0 with me to the edge of the redlining border.
I had spent all my life hiding my magics, denying them, so I could stay alive and not get burned at the stake by the ultrahardline elders of God’s Glory. And now I was all but flaunting my tie to the land. As one of my teachers at Spook School had said, life was weird.
After shaking the blanket open and snapping it to the ground, I sat in the middle of it with my knees crossed and the notebook and psy-meter 2.0 in front of me. I synced the device to my cell and sent the recordings to U-18 HQ. I once again noted the date, time, and GPS location on the pad. It looked like I was taking scientific readings. It was utterly a cheat. I studied the land around me, noted a wildlife cam pointed at the pond, the remains of the kudzu-buried, tumbledown buildings on one edge of the property, and spotted the foundations of an old house near them in the pines across the pond. The brick showed signs of a long-ago fire. To my right was a better-kept lean-to filled with farm equipment, a small tractor, and gardening tools, all looking functional and which were secured with massive chains.
Placing my palm on the ground, I took a cleansing breath, blew it out, and relaxed.
Instantly I could tell that something wasn’t right, in a way I had no immediate name for. The ground was... maybe sick, infested with something, some kind of parasite or illness. The earth beneath my palm felt cold, icy, not to the touch but to the spirit, which wasn’t something I could easily explain to other people. It felt sick and murky and restless. As if it was dying, dying in pain. Alone and afraid.
I sent a soothing pulse of calm into the land, searching for the cause of the illness. Reaching down into the earth, I found the water source for the pond, an underground, degraded concrete pipe that ran along the low hill about halfway to the crest. The pipe system capped a spring there and collected the water, sending it down through the pipe and into the pond for collection, probably for former use by farm animals. It was aslow trickle of water, and ran off on the far side, through another, smaller pipe, and into a gully. I dove deeper into the land. Below the surface of the hill, near the springhead, was an upthrusting slab of granite angled toward the sky, driven up and broken during some unimaginable earthquake in the far past. It was now shored in place by accumulated layers of shattered rock and compacted soil all around the slab, softening its contours, creating the hillock.
Along the edge of the granite, I caught a thread of... something. Not more than a quiver of reaction, perhaps to my presence. It wasn’t witch magic in the land. Not exactly. Or not like any witch magic I had studied at Spook School. It wasn’t a warmth, like Soulwood, nor an evil like Brother Ephraim. There was no darting, fearful hatred. This was different, more like a vibration of exhilaration, like a trace of scarlet sunlight through the trees in the final moments of sunset. I sought deeper, following the trail of whatever it was.
It led me through the springhead again and dove deep, through the rising current of springwater, following the vein of moisture into the rock where water was under pressure, seeking outlet. And back up to the pool in a loop. The pond wasn’t deep, but was full of plant life and microscopic life, parasites and minuscule snails, tiny fish swimming sluggishly, and frogs burrowed into the mud. Decaying leaves and tannins. The richness of life and death on a small scale. I followed the traces of the almost-light sensation up to the surface of the pool, which was still and unmoving, and around the pond, following the vibrating hints of the excitement here and there, hoping to find the source.
I found, instead, the geese. The geese swimming on the surface of the pool. Another one was dead. I pulled up the memory of the pond when I was taking photos. All the geese in the circle had been alive and swimming, looking healthy. Now there was a dead one. And the dead goose floating in the water was different from the live geese; there was a faint, delicate hint of that vibration, that almost-light, brightening the feathered body, tangled around it like glowing thread. The thread dropped, seeming tied to the pond and to the earth deep below the surface. Deeper into the land.
The living geese didn’t glow at all. There was no tendril attached to them.
The tendril that tied into the dead goose was something I could follow, deep, deeper, back into the hill and down, along the slab of granite, tracing its broken edges and fractured rim, past roots full of life and reaching for moisture and nutrients. Deep and deep. To a place of bedrock and layers of heavy, dense stone. Soft energies swayed here, bright specks of light in yellow and green and blue, moving among shadows of charcoal and very deep red. Like I sometimes saw when I turned off the lights at night, the energies of my own brain and retinas, sparking. But the colors here reminded me of the glow I had seen last night, just before Ephraim grabbed me, though these were moving and swirling, and last night’s hadn’t.
Stuff in my brain, the glow, and this were too different to be connected. But now that I remembered them, I cached the vague similarities in the back of my mind, just in case.
I remembered the line of dialogue I had heard at a Star Wars marathon weekend at Spook School, the words uttered by the little green thing, Yoda, “You must feel the Force around you, here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes.” I smiled at the memory, at the image. Or I tried to. But at that moment, the tendril I had been following noted me, and wrapped around my wrist, a silken caress. It tugged, gently, deeper.
I hesitated only a moment before I followed the motion of the shadows and lights, dancing and twining, with no boundaries or limits. It led me down and down, until we touched something else, something bigger, darker, so far down that there was only pressure and heat and a formless, lightless blackness like the deepest night in a sky without moon or stars, a blackness that stretched through the earth, massive and seemingly limitless. Apresence. Powerful. Profound and somnolent. The gigantic thing, so very deep in the ground, was sleeping.
The lights and shadows twirled across the surface of the deep in the earth, tapping on a layer of... something... a skin, a thin casing, that kept it separate. A joyful intelligence, happy as a puppy, bounding and pounding its excited paws on its sleeping mother. The lightless presence was the reason the dancing energy had towed me here, the reason for its excitement.
So... two inexplicable things. One thing that was energetic and dancing. One sleeping. And the dancing thing sought tojoin with, or to interface with, or... Yes. Towakenthe sleeping one.
The energy of the blackness was utterly unlike what I felt while communing with Soulwood, and equally unlike what I felt from Brother Ephraim. Unlike what I felt from the mutated tree in the church compound, the one that had put its roots inside me to heal me not so long ago. More similar to, but individual from, the huge sentience buried below the mountains in North Carolina. Both were black-as-death, mammoththings.Presences.
I let the tendril of puppylike energies spin me around and into their dance, and lead me far across the somnolent thing, as, together, we reached deeper. The thing was immense, a presence more so than a being. A sleeping state of consciousness rather than something composed of matter. It was everywhere I felt and looked, at this depth, everywhere, and looking for the end of it was like looking for the end of earth, so much more just beyond the here and now.
Thepresencewas covered with a thin membrane, a barrier. Or a coating. A microscopic layer of quiet separating it from the scarlet light-and-shadows dancer. The dancer moved across the barrier of the sleeping presence, pulsing, reaching down from the surface in several places, strings of pinpoint energies, smaller than hairs, power moving up and down the thin byways.
