“You will walk us to the lower basement. Now,” Tandy said.
“Of course,” Makayla said, leading the way to the elevator, Tandy’s trembling hand in hers. Moments later, we were standing in the bottom of the building, and staring at the twenty-foot circle scorched into the floor. The burn marks indicated that the flames from the broken working had climbed up the walls and even trailed across the ceiling. There were cracks in theconcrete, and moisture had already begun to seep through. At the cracks, black mold blossomed, all one form, with bloodred bulbs on the ends of tall stalks. They looked ready to explode, which would spread the spores everywhere.
“Get out! Get everyone out!” I shouted.
I pushed Tandy and Makayla and three others back into the elevator and shut the doors between us and the lower basement.
“Get military medical people down here,” I said. “We need ultraviolet lights and fungicides. Fast.”
Makayla had regained her own mind and will, eyes flashing, mouth spewing cussing I had never heard, even in Spook School. She was in a cold fury, demanding her attorneys and threatening lawsuits for a magical attack. I blocked out her verbal rampage and, as the elevator rose to ground level, I stared at Tandy, letting thoughts of disappointment and betrayal fill my mind. Tandy caught my gaze and his eyes closed. He slid to the floor of the elevator, his head against the back wall. I knelt beside him and checked his pulse. He was icy-cold and his pulse was fluttery. His breath was ragged. He was also out cold. The doors opened.
The next minutes were little but the frenzied action of a paramedic team taking care of Tandy and putting him on a stretcher. Of men and women in unis, carrying equipment down the elevator. I didn’t stay and watch. I had things I needed to attend to. And though Tandy was down, I couldn’t feel sorry for him. I knew he had gotten information that we would have gotten no other way—or certainly not this fast—but... but Tandy had violated my will. Makayla’s will. He had taken control over us. T. Laine had sat far away at the conference room table, out of the way of his control. She had known what he was going to do and she had let him. She hadn’t warned me to sit on the far end of the table too. I didn’t want to be close to the empath or the moon witch. Not just now.
***
I had been in the CEO’s office for hours. Alone. Once I left the elevator, I didn’t want Tandy anywhere near me. He had made us happy and talkative and taken away all our barriers. He had nudged Makayla to speak the truth. It was something like hypnotism and mind control, and he had used it on us. It was a betrayal and a violation and so unlike him that part of mewanted to find out who had forced him to do it to us. But according to T. Laine, Tandy had done it all on his own. He was nursing a massive headache and flulike symptoms with fever and dehydration. I had no sympathy for him at all.
I wasn’t speaking to either of them. I wasn’t letting the empath within five feet of me, which was about his range, according to T. Laine.
I had reported the change in the empath to JoJo, who was talking to Soul about it. We had problems in Unit Eighteen. Big problems. Missing werecat leader. Two other missing werecats. And none of them had come to work after they shifted back to human at daylight. Power-hungry empath. Moon witch who had allowed her partner to employ questionable methods to obtain information. So the door was shut and I was reading through Kurt’s timeline of the experiments. Something about the research and experimental work seemed out of sequence from what Makayla had been told.
According to his personal files, Kurt had known aboutInfinitioandUnendlichlong before he had talked about them to his partners and the board of LuseCo. And he had known of a problematic outcome long before he turned the papers over to his witch team. I scanned through the papers and his personal notes and discovered a notation that said there had been no problems withInfinitioin the rest of the world. Only in Germany, whenInfinitiohad been paired withUnendlich.
How had Daluege determined that? He wasn’t from a known witch family, yet he had known that the German coven committed mass suicide before they could turn over the weapon to the SS of the Third Reich.
What could have been so bad that an entire coven killed themselves rather than releasing the spell? Or... had it been something else? Had the results been even more powerful than the SS or Hitler had hoped? A doomsday working the witches feared he would use? Or... had it mutated the vegetation around the working there too? WasUnendlicha radiation-type weapon? The first calls to the cops had been about radioactive geese... Had the WWII witches all gotten a disease and killed themselves because of that? All I knew was that the questions were making my sonic-blast-induced headache worse, and I had no idea how to answer a single one except to keep digging through LuseCo’s files, headache or no.
I sent the translations of the coven’s notes to JoJo, along with a list of the witches who had participated in each working, a schedule of each working. There were twenty-seven witches altogether, involved in some capacity with LuseCo, all female.
There was Aleta’s family, Wendy Cornwall and Rivera Cornwall, twins, of the Cornwall witches.
Irene Rosencrantz, of the Rosencrantz witches, listed as a recessive-gened witch, which usually meant a witch of little power, but the Rosencrantz witches were different, especially when working together. And Irene’s sister Lidia Rosencrantz. Colleen Shee MacDonald of the Shee witches. Taryn Lee Faust of the Lee witches, and the leader of the coven. Theresa Anderson-Kentner, of the Anderson witches, and Suzanne Richardson-White, of the Richardson witches. Barbara Traywick Hasebe of the Traywicks. And eighteen more, though none of the rest were from famous witch family lines. Several of the witch families had emigrated to the US after World War Two, including the Rosencrantzes, mentioned by Makayla; the Cornwall family; and Colleen’s family, the Shee witches. It seemed odd that so many powerful witch families had ended up in Tennessee, but in a cursory search nothing stood out as suspicious. Maybe they had written letters and come to a similar part of the country. No matter how it had happened, there were too many possible suspects.
I turned my attention to what Kurt himself had done. The CEO had divided his witches into two groups and melded them into distinct and strong covens. He had given each coven one working to concentrate on. And he had given three orders to each coven. One: test mathematics on the new moon. Two: test workings on the full moon. Three: do not switch the two dates.
Makayla had said the problem occurred during a test on the new moon. Had the coven deliberately disobeyed the orders? If so, why? Sleep deprived, I couldn’t see an answer to any of the questions. I sent the timeline to JoJo and to myself for later study.
I left the CEO’s office, and to keep myself awake, over the course of the next two hours, I walked through the complex, taking readings everywhere and listing them on the building plans. There were a total of eight employees whose office spaces redlined. All were techs except for the office of the CEO, Aleta’s office, and Colleen’s office. None of the employees on-siteexhibited signs of slime mold, but one stood up in the middle of our discussion and said, “Flows, flows, flows...” She was turned over to the Army MedCom and whisked away.
I was beyond exhausted and confused and had no idea what to do next, so I checked in with T. Laine, who was back to interviewing people, Tandy beside her. I didn’t like it. But I wasn’t in charge. I also called JoJo to report in, and left the building, walking into the chilled night. I was hungry. Sleepy. Too exhausted to drive just yet. Hoping the cold night air would wake me.
Someone had stuck something to my truck. I peeled off a blue marker that was taped to my driver window, loaded my gear inside, climbed in, and closed the cab door. Turned the engine on to let the heater warm. I didn’t know what to do about the marker or what it was for. I slumped into the seat and yawned to try to pop my damaged ears. Checked my cell for messages, finding over seventy e-mails and texts that related to the multiple cases. I’d never get a chance to sleep. Holding the blue marker, I sat in the harsh artificial lighting outside of LuseCo’s parking lot, paying no attention to the uni-dressed people rushing around me, and read the day’s correspondence. Well, scanned it. I was too tired to read it all.
At Spook School, only one person had ever mentioned the exhaustion of a multiorganization case, or the mental confusion that set in, or the sheer mind-boggling-ness of it all. I clipped my cell to the steering wheel and blocked out all the action around me as I went through the correspondence, the research and evidentiary chains, the back-and-forth on... way too much stuff. But as I read, a picture of the day and the case began to form.
PsyLED was conscripting people from other units and sending them to help, both in-person investigators and online analysts. Soul had requested a medical team from Tulane University to help treat the people in UTMC and in the Army’s MedCom site. The nurses that had arrived were all witches, and two vampire physicians had been transported in, one to work at the hospital to see if vamp blood would help the sick and dying, one to the MedCom site, which was set up outside of LuseCo.
LuseCo. Where I was.
I looked around me and focused on the dozens of people wearing white with orange stripes, all rushing here and there. They had figured out how to differentiate themselves. Doctorsand medical people had added a medical staff design on the left side of their chests and on the back, the snake and staff in red marker. Military had insignia drawn green. PsyLED had a blue starburst. Hence the blue marker taped to my window. I got it.
There was an update on the patients. The black lichen was still progressing. Doctors were discussing telomeres, whatever they were, previously unseen cancers, cancer-fighting medicines, because the fungicides had stopped working. Witch nurses had setblockworkings to stop the paranormal activity on and by the patients, making them easier to treat medically. Doctors and biologists were discussing transformations and species mutations.
Soul had taken a hotel room in Knoxville and would be at HQ in the morning for a meeting with all members of Unit Eighteen. Eight a.m. sharp. I did not want to attend that meeting and be around when she discovered that her protégé Rick hadn’t been to work for two days in the middle of a crisis.
And I knew that I should—must—commune with the land around LuseCo again to understand and hopefully find a way to stop whatever was happening. But I was afraid. And lack of rest had made me muzzy headed. When I was done with the day’s deluge of information and queries, I drove from the parking lot and headed home.
SIXTEEN
