In the null room, T. Laine took over the interrogation, concentrating on the spell Jason was using to call Rick and the spell Loriann had inked into Rick’s flesh, and how they interacted. She was getting the particulars, the nitty-gritty. It was a magic/mathematics dialogue on a level I couldn’t follow, about workings with energy. There were phrases like “potential energy versus kinetic,” which I Googled to refresh my stagnant brain. I’d had magical energy classes in Spook School, but it had been a while. Potential energy is stored energy, like chemical, gravitational, mechanical, and nuclear. Kinetic energy is doing work—like electrical, heat, light, motion, sound, magical, gravitational, or mechanical energy. Kinetic energy is all about movement. In magical workings, forms of energy can be transferred and transformed between one another and between matter. I understood only enough to know that if a witch mixed the wrong kind of energies together things could explode, or transform in the wrong ways. There had been horror stories, which I hoped were apocryphal.
As the conversation turned even more theoretical, Jo and Tandy worked on traffic cameras from the day the Blalock girlwas kidnapped, trying to find and track the van. I hid in my cubicle and called the Nicholson house. I needed to talk to my mother, which almost never happened. Needed to think for just a minute that normal, whatever normal was, might be part of my life someday. Instead, Mama was busy putting the little’uns to bed and handed off the cell to Mud.
“Hey, Nellie,” Mud said. “Sam done offered to give me a puppy. And before you’un say no, she’s a twelve-week-old, house-trained springer that some townie done gave to Sam, but he don’t want her. Can I have her? Please, please, please?”
Mud had lapsed back into church-speak in the time she had been with the family, and that would make it hard for her to fit in at school, but dialects and teen angst would have to wait. I tilted the cell to the side so she couldn’t hear my sigh. My vampire tree had killed Mud’s last puppy. I waited for Mud to use that to get her way, but all she said was, “I think you’un should let me keep her. You’un always know when company’s coming up the road, but I don’t. If I’m gonna be a latchkey kid, I’ll need protection when I’m there alone. If’n I have a dog, I’ll be safer.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, knowing I was already lost. And knowing that Mud would need child care, that she wasn’t safe on the farm alone. Knowing that Larry Aden and his kind would always come hunting us.
“Her name is Charade. Cherry for short. She’s a tricolor and she’ll be getting spots on her nose. And she loves me already.”
“Springers have to be exercised. A lot. They’re high-energy dogs.”
“I can set me up an agility course out back a the house. And she can run with the werecats!”
“The werecats might eat her,” I teased.
“You tell Occam I’ll hit him with a rolled-up magazine if’n he hurts my dog.”
I chuckled at that image. I’d felt the same way before. “When I get some time off, we’ll bring her home for a few days and see how she does. But if she’s not really house-trained or can’t get along with the cats, including our friends, we’ll have to take her back or find her a new home.”
“Friends?” The silence was so intense that I thought the call had been dropped, and then she said, as if figuring it all out, “Wereleopards. Deal!”
“I’ll see you as soon as this case is over,” I promised.
“I forgot to say! SaraBell’s in labor. Love you!” She ended the call.
“Love you too,” I said to the empty air. SaraBell’s in labor. Sam was getting ready to be a daddy. I was getting ready to be an aunt. A small smile formed as it hit me. SaraBell didn’t want a dog around her new baby. I had just been backed into a corner by a preteen manipulator. “You little scamp.”
“Nell!” Tandy shouted. “Get in here! We got the van!”
I sped into the conference room to see photos on the screens overhead. On one was grainy security camera video. It was the van that been stolen to pick up the Blalock girl.
“They trolled the streets in neighborhoods all around, looking for prey. We have multiple sightings from those doorbell security cameras,” Jo said. “Those devices are ridiculously easy to hack. A tech-savvy burglar’s wet—Ummm. Sorry.”
I didn’t know what she had been about to say and I didn’t ask.
Tandy said, “According to the crime techs, the AC in the van wasn’t working and at some point, it got hot inside and the window went down. And we got this.”
The security footage began to move. Leaning from the passenger seat was a young man. “Who?” I asked.
“This is from Loriann’s laptop,” JoJo said, putting up another photo. “Jason Ethier. He was in the van with the group of nonlocal vampires. Maybe was with them from the beginning. I’m sending this to Occam and Rick. They need to know it. And to T. Laine,” JoJo said.
“Tell her to hold it,” I suggested. “Don’t share it with Loriann. We might need all this later. Or... she might not know her brother is vamp-ridden.”
“Vamp-ridden?” Jo asked.
“A church term. It’s one they use for blood-slaves, and it’s based on spiritual possession, like demon-ridden.”
“The church of God’s Glory does exorcisms?” Jo asked softly.
“A few. And no. Never on me. I left the church before I’dhave been old enough to see or participate in one. But I’ve heard tales.”
Overhead, JoJo, tech whiz extraordinaire, followed the van through the neighborhoods near where Raynay was taken. The unit had received more files via e-mail from Alex Younger and I put them on the screen. They were titled Godfrey of Bouillon_1, Godfrey of Bouillon_2, Godfrey of Bouillon_3, and Godfrey of Bouillon_4.
I opened the files to the overhead screen and began scrolling through the information, which was presented in bullet points with footnotes and links to more information on the Internet.
