“I noticed,” I said.
“You pulled on Soulwood.”
I frowned, uncertain.
Occam touched my forearm with an unscarred finger. “It’s okay. I felt a sense of peace. I smelled the firs and the poplars. I felt the soil and the grass and knew it was a safe place to bed down. I felt... Soulwood. I felt you, Nell, sugar. I knewyou.”
I looked down at my hands, fingers laced across my lap in the dark. And studied his right hand, the contact between us the pad of a single, warm finger just above my wrist. I said, “I shared the land with you both. I wondered if you could tell.”
“Can’t say as I always know when you draw on Soulwood, but this time I could feel it. It felt good. Peaceful. As if the moon wasn’t in charge of what and who I am. As if you gave me a different kind of power over my cat, that I don’t normally have.” He withdrew his hand and I missed the warmth.
Rick, dressed in dark jeans and a white T-shirt, reappeared, moving smoothly in the night. Occam opened the car door and the overhead light came on and the wild poured in. Evergreens and heat and mosquitoes. I hated summer in Knoxville. Rick said, “Thanks for coming. I have something to show you. Ingram, you too. Got your field boots?” It was as if the previous scene had never happened, and since Occam seemed fine with it, I guessed I was too.
Rather than reply, I unzipped my one-day gobag and kicked off my sneakers, hauling on the boots. While I changed shoes, Rick ate a protein bar. It smelled nasty and I bet it tasted nasty too. I’d tried making protein bars for the cats, but the whey protein powder was awful, the egg-based protein was dreadful, and the powdered fishmeal protein was yucky and hard to work with. Come fall I could make venison jerky and wild turkey jerky from kills the wereleopards brought me. I could also smoke trout from mountain streams. I had ordered some dried skipjack tuna shavings to increase the protein content. Until I got the shavings and hunting season was right for butchering meat, the cats were stuck with the icky commercially prepared stuff.
Stepping out of the car, I twisted my silky skirt up between my legs and tucked it in at my waist, making a kind of baggy drawers. Not having cat eyes, I flicked on my flashlight and slid my gobag over one shoulder as Rick led us into the dark, off to the right, away from the road and toward the Tennessee River. We crossed a field planted with a healthy crop of soybeans, the knee-high plants swishing as we moved, grasshoppers flying up, most moving slow, nearly dead from the poison I felt/smelled/tasted as we walked toward the water.
When the moon rose, it might be bright enough to see something, but for now, my flash was a thin beam on the plants of the field. I sent my awareness into the land as best I was able without touching skin to earth. The land wasn’t dead. It was full of nutrients and organic matter from the last flood, thesoil rich. Despite the current moderate drought, the soy was healthy, putting out lots of bean pods, not that I would eat anything from this land. The pesticides that were killing the grasshoppers and other critters that attacked soy had been absorbed by the roots and leaves and into the bean pods. I closed my eyes as I walked, feeling for the life in the ground. Even amid the poisons, I could feel the magic in the land, tendrils twining around and deep. Black magic.
Occam gripped my shoulder, jerking me back. “I forgot you can’t see in the dark,” he said. The cats had stopped. I hadn’t. I’d almost stepped across a witch circle. I had been so involved with my thoughts, walking with my eyes closed, the magics flowing up through my boots, I hadn’t even noticed the soy had ended. That was stupid.
“Thanks,” I said, not sure how I felt about Occam watching over me so closely. And then he released my shoulder and walked away, following Rick, the two of them walking widdershins outside the circle, sniffing the air for scents humans might miss.
“Anything?” Occam asked.
“Something sour, like sickness. Dead cat.” The boss shrugged.
The twenty-foot-wide circle, drawn with what looked like powdered white chalk, studded with crow and buzzard feathers, was a witch circle unlike any I had seen in Spook School. Instead of a pentagram inside a circle, which created a pentacle, this one had angles like the spokes of a wheel. In each of the spokes, there were shapes that might have been runes drawn in the dirt. The spokes connected to a smaller central circle, maybe three feet across, and in the center of that was a dead black cat, blood all around, soaked into the ground. It was hanging upside down from a makeshift wooden tripod, its throat slit. The cat had been sacrificed.
Bloodlust rose up in me, demanding, insistent, needing.Feed the land. Soulwood, so recently invoked, wanted the blood.
“I was driving,” Rick said.
I yanked back on the need, holding it down, trying to smother it.
“I felt something... happening inside me,” he continued,halting, his voice growing raspy, “like a moon-calling, but... different. I pulled over, secured my weapon, shifted, and I woke up there”—he pointed—“lying near the circle, but outside it. And—” He stopped, shook his head, and looked around, his eyes puzzled and perhaps a little bit sleepy. He looked bewildered, as if he had woken up in the middle of sleepwalking.
Occam paced to Rick. He didn’t touch Rick but stood close, looking slightly to the side, cat-like.
Rick said, “That’s a black-magic circle. On the bank of a river, a dead black cat in the center.”
“Yeah, Hoss, we see that,” Occam said, his tone kind. “Anything else you need to tell us?”
“I... I don’t know.” He stared at the dead cat. “My cat grabbed the gobag holding the blanket and my old cell. I ended up here. But I don’t know how I kept from being drawn into the circle.”
Rick must have felt the death of the housecat in the circle and tracked it by... I had no idea.
He shook himself, more dog-like than cat-like, his silvered hair flying with the motion. Sounding more like the senior special agent I knew, he said, “Black magic isn’t illegal in the human world, except for the cruelty-to-animals part. We need to report this. This could indicate a psychopath, a serial killer, trying out her skills.”
“Statistically speaking,” I said, remembering my studies from PsyLED Spook School, “black-magic users don’t usually become serial killers.” Rick turned his attention to me and I gave a tiny shrug. “It’s a new course for continuing ed. The Statistics of Magic. It isn’t the death or the torture that witches want, it’s the power that the deaths bring.”
“That makes a weird kind of sense,” Rick said. “I can barely smell death on the cat. No release of bowels or urine on the air.” To Occam, he said, “It hasn’t been dead long. Maybe three hours?”
Occam lifted a thumb, an ambiguous agreement. “Maybe less. After sunset.”
A good six feet from the edge of the circle, I continued widdershins around it, stumbling in the dark, taking photoswith my camera, the flash too bright, shocking in the night, but revealing the runes in the ground, in the spokes of the wheel. Keeping busy kept the bloodlust at bay, but I shouldn’t have—wouldn’t have—drawn on Soulwood had I known about the cat.
Occam said something that was lost on the night air.
