“Okay. I’m going to cast ascanworking and aseeingworking. Wish me luck.” T. Laine moved back into the weeds, wearing the night-gear headset and a comms set, no weapon drawn, a tiny green light on her shoulder. She was holding a small moonstone amulet carved into a bear. We followed her progress as she moved slowly through the weeds. I started to follow.
His voice strained, his body taut, Rick said, “Get back here, Ingram. If she triggers it and explodes there’s no point in you getting hurt too.”
I wanted to say something like,Wow. Show some concern, why don’t you?But the female agents I worked with had told me that I tended to overreact to male authority even when it was appropriate, like a male boss giving a perfectly reasonable order. So I swallowed the insubordinate words before they left my mouth, scuttled behind the iron engine block, and crouched close to him. Our positions put two engines between the working and us.
“What did you get when you read the earth?” Rick asked.
“The magic was hot, like getting a shock from a live wire. The feeling of death was fresh and strong, but small.”
“No feeling of maggots?”
I frowned. I had forgotten the sensation of maggots I had picked up at the other circle. “No. What does that mean?”
Rick shook his head, barely visible as his silver locks caught the meager light. He didn’t reply. Silently we followed T. Laine’s slow, methodical progress in a straight line to the location of the magical working. She started walking widdershins to the circle, then stopped and backed away, and started back sunwise, which was unusual. It could mean a lot of different things, depending on what she was sensing in her magical scans.
A good fifteen minutes later, T. Laine moved back toward us. When she was close enough for us to hear without comms, she said, “Same markings and style of circle as the last one. Same runes. It’s the same magic signature, but the animals are three white rats, not a cat. Smaller animal mass and radius of the circle means a less powerful spell. And the rats were carried here, not summoned here.”
“Different pattern,” Rick said, thoughtful. To me, he said, “Tap on your comms and ask Tandy to compile a listing of allthe pet stores in the area that sell white rats. Tomorrow someone will need to drop by and ask about recent sales and request surveillance footage.”
“For now?” T. Laine asked him. She stopped about halfway between the working and the vehicles.
Rick said, “Can you safely disrupt whatever working is in progress? I’d like us to get up close and personal ASAP.”
“Can do. Back in a bit.”
T. Laine moved back through the wild grasses, stopped, and began to mumble, nothing in English, but with lots ofs’s andl’s and something that sounded like she was dying of consumption. Maybe some form of Gaelic. She raised an arm and made a tossing motion. Nothing happened, and her shoulders went slack. Louder, she called to us, “It’s down and safe.”
I noted that Rick was less stiff, his posture less rigid. LaFleur had been prepared for the working to explode. Or he had been ready to fight off a calling.
Before we could take a step, T. Laine had her personal light on high beam and was searching the ground. We moved in close but kept our feet far outside of the circle, which had been cut into the ground with a spade or narrow shovel.
The circle was smaller than the last one, but at twelve feet across, it was still a big circle for one witch to make and handle. There were runes drawn into the earth but no focal items except two more golf balls and one tee, what looked like a used facial tissue with a trace of lipstick on it, and a shoelace from a man’s dress shoe. Rick bagged the tissue, golf implements, and shoestring, hoping for a DNA match with the witch or with the intended victim of the circle. They bagged the rats for a necropsy at PsyCSI. We worked with a sense of reprieve. Rick hadn’t been called.
Rick and T. Laine took measurements and photos and made drawings and I went back to my original task, taking readings of the foliage around Third Creek and back behind the Walmart. I got zilch. The robber wasn’t here anymore if he or she had actually come this way. Eventually I left T. Laine and Rick at the circle and headed back to HQ to finish writing my reports. Something about all this seemed off. But I was a probie. What did I know?
FIVE
I stretched and went to find a cup of Rick’s dark French roast Community coffee. The stretch in HQ, before five a.m., doing paperwork and database scans, was hard on me. Trees slept in the night and the urge to lie down and snore was strong, but as probie it most often fell on me, and would until September when the budget said we’d be getting a new probationary officer (unless there was a new hiring freeze), or when I got custody of Mud, whichever happened first. My schedule would change then. For now, I was night shift and I needed the caffeine pick-me-up with three packets of sugar and a dollop of real cream. I made a second cup for Tandy and considered which fixins to add. I had learned that his coffee preferences tended to change based on who he worked with, so I situated the painted metal travel mugs and creamer and sugar packets on a small tray. I placed his coffee at his side and fell into my chair. “Dark. Creamer and packets of sugar and sweetner to the side if you decide to come to the light side.”
Tandy smiled, his skin white, the scarlet Lichtenberg lines vibrant in the light of the screens. “Star Wars? Impressive, Ingram.”
I smiled and sipped. “Does my being so sleepy cause you to feel sleepy?”
“Yes, Nell. It does. It’s easier when there are several people in the building, as the effect of any single person’s emotions is mixed and blunted. But with everyone off shift but us, your...” He paused. “The force of sleepiness is strong in this one.”
Tandy pushed away from the keyboard and took a sip, opened a tiny plastic tub of cream, and poured it into his mug. Sipped again. All of our mugs had been painted by ananonymous artist, Tandy’s with clouds and lightning, which was kinda mean, though he seemed to find it amusing. Mine was painted with green leaves. Tandy asked, “Do you hate paper trails as much as I think you do?”
“I’d rather have a bad cold than have to do an NCIC search and now I have two of them.”
“Summation?”
“Grindylows are scary. The list of were-creature kills is spectacular and a little terrifying for the U.S. grindys.
“Also, blood-sacrifice witch circles are a pain in the neck. I’ve been paper-tracking through police records for reports of sacrifice on the bank of any river or creek and trying to tie it to waning moon cycles. So far I have nothing. You got any idea hownot-user-friendly NCIC is for magic-related records?”
The National Crime Information Center—NCIC—might be the lifeline of law enforcement, but it was downright painful forusto use. The agency was an electronic clearinghouse of crime data available to virtually every criminal justice agency nationwide, twenty-four/seven. It had helped LEOs identify terrorists, track down and apprehend fugitives, locate missing persons, and convict serial killers. It had been estimated that there were currently thirteen million active records available, and searchable according to specific keywords. But not magic keywords.
And it was boring.
