Frowning, I rinsed my mug and got out creamer and honey. “She didn’t say. Didn’t hint. Just that she had it.”
“What did it feel like?”
“It had power. Like a faint vibration of magic. T. Laine might have gotten a lot more off of it, but it wasn’t my kind of energies, so I didn’t get much beyond that. Except the deck was comprised of two different sets of cards. The face cards, the ones she called the Major Arcana, were older, the inks deeper, and the energies on them were heavier.”
“The Major Arcana were from an older deck?”
“That’s what I got from the limited amount of time I touched them.”
“PsyLED needs access to the deck.”
I knew what my boss wanted from me in reply, some kind of deferential agreement. FireWind had been alive for a lot of years, working in the military, as a cop, had been a hunter and a guide, a warrior in the Old West, probably other things he had never told anyone. He still carried expectations of acquiescence to authority. Which I wasn’t good at providing. And since I wasn’t on the clock, I decided not to be good at acquiescing today.
I said, “Yeah? I think that’s a good idea. Whyn’t you’un walk up to Ming of Glass’ clan home at dusk, knock on the door, and politely ask the MOC for it.”
Aya burst out laughing, which re-formed his face into a study of delight. Aya laughing was always a surprise, because he didn’t laugh or even smile often. He changed the subject. “There is a tree growing on your land, at the church where you grew up,andin the pot you carry. The one you carry in a pot grew incredibly quickly when you were attacked. And you talked to it when you threw it into your trunk. Have you learned any more about it?”
“It eats meat. I call it a vampire tree because of that. And I talk to all plants.”
He made a soft “Mmmm” sound and changed the subject. “According to what we have so far from the PM, there was no vampire saliva in the wounds of the man we collected at Ming of Glass’.”
“Okay. That all we got right now?”
FireWind didn’t reply, letting a silence build between us, his eyes not on the screen but on the traffic. Eventually he said, “No. CSI retrieved three kinds of hair from wounds deep in the body. Two of them weregwyllgi.”
Everything inside me went still. There were two results to the inbreeding in the church, two different mutations that plagued the families. One branch—the Nicholsons among them—mutated into plant-people. Some families mutated into Welshgwyllgi, also known as devil dogs, or Dogs of War. We had fought and killed and captured a lot ofgwyllgi, sending the young ones to the Montana werewolf pack to learn how to control their shape-shifting and their desire to hunt and kill humans.
FireWind said, “I am concerned about you taking part in this case. You are too close to it. You’ve been injured already. I want you to take the rest of the day off, and when you come in for your next shift, limit your time spent on it to checking facts and Clementine’s voice-to-text notes.” More gently, he said, “Understood?”
“Yes,” I said, my voice wooden. Unexpected nervous laughter started to rise in my chest at the thoughtwooden, but I smothered it down.
“What happened on your land twenty-seven minutes past?” he asked.
Before I thought it through, I said, “What happened in the horse pasture at Stella Mae’s ranch when you danced with the stallion?”
Our last major case had involved investigating the death by paranormal means of country music superstar Stella Mae Ragel, and I had seen the big boss display some unexpected gifts, standing in a corral in the middle of the night and…charmingmight be the best word for it…charming a very feisty stallion into loving him.
“You were there? That night?”
“Yes. Passive magic. Dances with horse. Like in that old movie with Kevin Costner but with a horse instead of wolves. So far as I’ve been able to find out, it isn’t magic that comes with being a skinwalker.”
“Perhaps it’s an Indian thing,” he said. “Isn’t that what you white people say about my kind? That we can commune with animals?”
“I’m a farmer. I commune with the land. Tit for tat. So let me remind you I’moff the clock,” I said, letting him hear my anger in the words. “If you’un wanna chitchat, you can wait until we’re at the office. Or you’un can call for a visit, moon in the night sky or not. But unless it’s an emergency, how ’bout you’un not bother me again on mytime off.”
“You do have a waspish tongue, Ingram.” It could have been in insult or condemnation but he sounded amused.
I quoted from Shakespeare, “ ‘If I be waspish, best beware my sting.’ ”
Aya chuckled softly, the small camera catching his black brows rising. “That passage ends on a randy note. Shakespeare was at times indelicate.
“I won’t block you from reading the case files, including the COD when the forensic pathologist files it. Enjoy your day off, Ingram. And perhaps reread that scene before you quote it to the wrong person.”
The call ended in a snarl of hope and dissatisfaction on my end. Hope, because FireWind wasn’t blocking me from knowing about the case; dissatisfaction, because FireWind had been teasing me about my Shakespeare quote. What had I said?
To keep from thinking aboutgwyllgihair on a DB picked up from the clan home of Ming of Glass, I carried my mug to the coffee table in front of the sofa and rummaged around for my copy ofThe Taming of the Shrew. I flipped around until I found the pertinent lines and read:
petruchio:Come, come, you wasp; i’ faith, you are too angry.
