T. Laine said, “Worst-case scenario is a fear that the energies will explode and send a psysitopic backdraft through the empty ley lines, scattering the energies everywhere and shorting them out.”
I thought about that, remembering the fact that the ley lines, early on, had felt empty, almost gone. “Why? To what purpose? There’s no motivation for any of this.”
“Soul and JoJo think that it’s a matter of everyone having different motivations and keeping them all secret from each other,” T. Laine said, “including you and the other witches.”
Taryn sighed and rubbed her eyes again. “Fine,” she said, sounding weary and beaten. “We went to work for LuseCo fortwo reasons. To make money and to stop them from doing anything withInfinitio. We knew the working wouldn’t do what they wanted. It wasn’t intended to make a self-perpetuating energy device.Infinitio’s original purpose was to take ley line power and dedicate all of it to human use.”
Suzanne Richardson-White, who had been silent until now, said, “Harvesting ley line power would have given them exactly what they wanted—a permanent and secure energy source.”
Theresa Anderson-Kentner spoke, possibly emboldened by Suzanne’s comment. Her words had a Great Lakes accent, some place up north. “It would have resulted in a socioeconomic and political upheaval worse than the invention of steam, and with as many negative consequences to the environment. Worse, it would have put major economic power in the hands of three people.”
“Sooo... ,” I said. “We got it wrong? The Rosencrantzes didn’t sabotage the working.Youguys sabotaged it?”
Taryn stood, looking innocuous in jeans and leather jacket, her long hair, pulled back from a widow’s peak, caught in a clip. “We weren’t a real coven. A real coven is a group of witches working together for common goals. We were put together and given money to do a job. We all had different goals and different concerns that the larger group didn’t address, which forced us apart. We split into small groups, each with a different aim. Between us, we all sabotaged the workings.”
“And if the Rosencrantz sisters had other aims,” Suzanne said, “to steal the workings for another company, then they just made what we did worse. Beyond dangerous.” She looked to the other witches, communicating something with her eyes that Lainie and I weren’t part of.
“I guess it’s time to tell everyone what we discovered below the lower basement,” Theresa said. “There’s something else down there. Belowground.” The tension in the room went up, and she stopped, uncertain.
Taryn said, “We think the Rosencrantz sisters and Petulengo discovered something else below the ground. A power source.”
“An entity so vast, so amazing,” I said, “that it dwarfs the imagination?”
Taryn’s eyes went wide. The other witches in the Knoxville coven froze. And without a word or a sigh, they began to draw power. The barbs of magic that had died spiked again, hot and piercing on my skin.
T. Laine clicked a silver-toned pen and said softly,“Contineantur.”
The magic in the room shattered and fell with a sound like a dozen vases crashing to the floor. The witches gaped at Lainie. So did I. She said softly, “Don’t make me hurt you.”
The Old Ones were not a secret in this room. I had nothing to protect. “It’s call anOld One,” I said. “And while you may be correct in LuseCo’s motivations, and those of the three in custody, the sabotaged working has done unexpected things. The workings have gathered all the ley line power, power that keeps nature in its boundaries, and wrapped it all around the Old One, like a membrane. Not just in preparation for using the ley lines. But in preparation for stealing the Old One’s power too. Which might wake it.” I took a breath that hurt my rooty middle. “According to ancient Cherokee tradition, the Old Ones are sentient.”
“Holy shit. And if they wake it?” T. Laine asked, quickly opening her laptop and starting a report.
“Earthquakes? Rousing dead volcanoes? A complete slippage of Earth’s crust?” I made a helpless gesture. “All hell may break loose. No one knows what might happen. Even if no one intended it, the consequences of the sabotage might be deadly.
“But back to theBreak?” I said to the Knoxville witches. “If I help you, a full coven, one working together, might be able toBreakthe working.”
And I might be able to capture the energies in the containment vessel.
EIGHTEEN
The witch circle was bigger than anything I had seen at Spook School, and it had been constructed by the witches themselves, on a fresh acre of land, one previously planted with soybeans and never used for a ritual. The flat area was high on a flat hilltop that looked down into the city of Knoxville. It was also above a drained ley line, one big enough and stable enough to handle a colossal backlash of power. We hoped.
The four-inch-deep circle had been dug from the winter-bare earth with brand-new steel shovels and backbreaking work, aligned to magnetic north with a compass, with the center of the working at LuseCo directly to our south. There was no pentagram or pentacle, which relieved the schoolgirl fears I’d secretly harbored ever since I’d come up with this harebrained experiment. The circle’s trough had been filled in with a peculiar mixture of rocks, leaves, live plants, and, oddly, salt, which the witches claimed would help them control the spell. The working.
ThatIhad come up with. Of all the strange things in this case, that one made my skin crawl.
There were fifteen of us present on the patch of farmland outside of Knoxville. Thirteen of us were witches, twelve sitting in the circle. T. Laine sat outside it with Soul, who seemed to have the most autonomy of any person I had met in PsyLED. And me. I was in the middle of a witch circle, right where the churchmen had always said I would end up. I was not going to be telling my mother one single thing about this event, whether it worked or not.
The four most powerful witches in the covens sat at cardinal points. Taryn, an earth witch, sat at north. Barbara Traywick Hasebe, a moon witch, and arguably the most powerful witch present, at least during the three days of the full moon, sat at east. Suzanne Richardson-White, an air witch, sat at south. AndTheresa Anderson-Kentner, water witch, sat at west. The other witches were placed in between, the positioning determined by specialty and power levels in a mathematical negotiation that involved way too many numbers and too much geometry for me. The locations for the moon witches were the most important mathematically, thanks to the lunar cycle and the moon witches’ overwhelming power for these three days.
I recognized all of them from the photos provided by LuseCo. Some looked nervous. Two looked angry. They would all lose the money coming to them from LuseCo for the experiment they were about toBreak. The rest looked tired or resigned. They had all been part of an experiment that had killed innocent humans. Odd how things of the soul reflected on the faces.
With the exception of Taryn, we were all sitting in our places, cross-legged, each of us on a blanket, and each witch had an object, a focal for her power, at her knees: feathers, stones, a small live plant, a stick of wood, a bowl of water from the nearby creek—whatever element signified their power and would hold a measure of that power to steer into the working. I had two things in front of me: a tiny empty silver bowl and a fire burning in an iron brazier.
Carrying a wooden tray, Taryn walked to Soul, placed it on the ground, and, with long-practiced dexterity, opened an alcohol packet and a sterile lancet. She removed the lavender top from a small plastic blood collection tube. “The anticoagulant will keep the blood from clotting. It will do nothing to keep the antibody-antigen reaction from taking place, so we still have to work quickly, but we’ll have a few minutes to work before the collected blood goes bad,” Taryn said.
Soul lifted her eyebrows, the evening sunlight catching in her silver hair. She was smaller than Taryn, a diminutive figure, but she seemed bigger than life, her flesh glowing in the reddish sunset. She hadn’t told them what she was, but she wasn’t hiding her power from the witches, which seemed odd and maybe a little scary. “Science and magic? Together?”
