Tandy scribbled something and passed the note to Rick. It read,Too far away to be sure, but I think she’s half lying.
Rick rubbed his eyes and temples as if his head hurt. “Go on,” he said, sounding a lot more cop-like than he currently looked.
“I heard about the Knox vamps being attacked and the witch who’s casting a curse there.”
“Who is the witch?” Rick asked. “What is she casting?”
Loriann said, “I got a look at the photos of the circles and they look a lot like ones I saw on the bank of the Mississippi last December, a month or so before the European vampires were destroyed.” Her voice took on an intensity that sharpened her sibilants, making her next words almost hiss. “Three circles. All created to be cast on the three days of the new moon. The spells are called Circle of the Moon-Cursed, or Circle of the Curse, or more commonly, Circle of the Moon.”
“Ohhh,” I whispered as something seemed to fall into place in my brain. As a curse, it would be cast as anewmoon circle. Curses and new moons had been taught in Spook School, but the course info had been sparse. Curses were rare, against witch law. We had already considered that this spell was brand-new, experimental. If this was the testing phase, then it worked like a pulse of magic and then stopped. Wasthat why Rick was aging slowly—a pulse at a time? If so, then the final, full curse was still to come. It all made sense, but my knowledge of magic lore wasn’t extensive. I pulled my laptop to me and sent my info to the unit. JoJo’s system pinged softly and she shot me a look, nodding once to say she agreed.
I had missed something and looked back up to see Rick’s hand drop. “You know what the spells are,” he said softly to Loriann. Because until now, we hadn’t fully known how to classify them.
“Yes. Maybe. I think so. I don’t know for sure. But I think I can help. I’ve requested to be assigned to Knoxville to assist you. My boss said there’s no crossover with NOPD and KPD or PsyLED Knoxville. But if PsyLED DC asked for me, and offered to pay my salary while I’m there, he would let me go.”
The home office of the Psychometry Law Enforcement Division of Homeland Security was located near the District of Columbia. She was asking for help from the main PsyLED office. She had already worked out the knots in her request. “Go on,” Rick said.
“Soul could ask,” Loriann said. “And I’d be there to help Tammie Laine Kent if you needed spell casting. Since the local coven has gone in hiding.”
Loriann knew alotabout what was happening in Knoxville. A lot about our agents. She’d had access through NOPD CLE channels and she hadn’t wasted the opportunities. She’d done her research. I wondered if she had gotten all that from our employee sleeves or was a hacker like JoJo. Of if she had a contact in Knoxville. And who that might be. Perhaps Margot Racer?
Working at PsyLED had made me a suspicious woman.
I didn’t like that about myself.
Rick promised to talk to Soul, though he didn’t promise to request that Loriann be loaned to the Knoxville PsyLED field office, an oversight I caught even if Loriann didn’t. After the call ended, we sat around the table, three of us silent and thinking, JoJo tapping away like a madwoman, jerking on her earrings between attacks on the tablets and laptop. Rick watched us, the green glow in his eyes diminishing slowly. I caught him reaching up, several times, to rub the mangled tattoos, to touch the amulets hanging around his neck, to rubhis throat, and I wondered if he was aware of the gestures. Abruptly, he turned and went to his office.
Softly, I said, “She has access to the magic in Rick’s tattoos.”
No one responded.
I excused myself and went to my cubicle, where I stuck my fingers into the soil of the plants in the window boxes, trying to decide how I’d research curse circles, tattoo magic, and my boss. Because no matter how much we hid it from ourselves, Rick LaFleur could be a security risk. A big one. Propped against a basil was a small envelope. I tore it open to read a note from Occam.Nell, sugar, no matter what time you read this, you should know I’m missing you something fierce.An unfamiliar emotion, soft yet intense, swept through me, and I tucked the note in my gobag to take home.
THIRTEEN
I didn’t really know what I was looking for, so I started with Rick’s NOPD sleeve, the parts that my clearance level allowed. This was not the same as a personnel folder, but the kind of information that other law enforcement officials had access to. A lot was redacted, but I refreshed my memory on his history.
Richard LaFleur graduated from high school in three years, started university at seventeen in prelaw, and got his degree in criminal justice in two years. He was spotted early on, recruited and fast-tracked into undercover, researching the New Orleans vampires, which was where he met Isleen and Loriann Ethier. At the age of twenty-one he started living on the dark side, where he stayed for nine years, far longer than the one or two years for most undercover operatives. He had been in the public, visible side of law enforcement for only about three years, since he was bitten. His long history undercover explained his willingness to accept JoJo’s less-than-lawful talents. And perhaps my own, much darker, gifts.
I buried myself in research on curse spells, on blood-magic bindings and tattoo magic, and into Loriann Ethier, digging as deep as I could, saving reports to study later. Sadly, the magic stuff looked apocryphal, like boogeyman stories, not like reality. Loriann’s sleeve and social media presence were sparse to nonexistent. I was getting nowhere.
JoJo left to sleep, giving me a wave of her hand on the way past. Rick went into his cage soon after, taking a mattress and a fluffy comforter. The office went quiet. Lights low.
At three a.m. Tandy buzzed my desk phone. “What’s up, Tandy?”
“Get up here. I just heard a report on official police radio frequencies that the body of a young girl has been found in a ditch. Passing motorist, grisly crime scene, according to the chatter.”
I raced to the conference room. “We’ve got voice-to-text,” Tandy said, pointing to a screen that had text across the bottom, dedicating it to KCLE—Knox County law enforcement.
“Is it the Blalock girl?”
Tandy shook his head, his pale skin and Lichtenberg lines picking up the glow from the screens in the darkened conference room. “I don’t know.”
I got coffee for us and waited with him, the volume on the radio chatter turned low, watching the screen. We sipped, listened, read as things were updated, Tandy still tapping away on his tablet, his body mechanics currently a lot like JoJo’s. It made me wonder if he was picking up more than just an intro into information gathering—hacking—from JoJo, but also taking on her personality and habits. I wondered if that meant the empath was losing bits of himself, of his own personality. Taking on bits of everyone else. Wondered if that was common to all empaths or something peculiar to Tandy.
Most of what Margot had put together about missing girls and our suspect would be incorrect if the body was ID’d as Raynay Blalock. There was no way creepy Jim Paton could have taken her, stashed her, banged on her mother’s door, and killed her. The timeline was impossible. And Paton was in custody now. He wasn’t the killer.
Within half an hour, we saw text from the investigator who had taken over the scene, calling for the chief forensic pathologist and the chief medical examiner of Knox County.
