“Permission granted. Keep Occam with you. Record the interaction. Be safe, Nell.” The call ended.
* * *
Together we went to the door and Occam rang the bell. When he tried to step in front of me, protectively, I said, “Maggot should be welcome. Ming wants me to kill her enemy.”
Occam stiffened. Stepped back. And frowned heartily at me. I chuckled, seeing one of my own expressions on his face.
The door opened and Cai eyed Occam standing behind me, and then me. “Does the Maggot come to issue challenge to Ming of Glass? My mistress is not at home. She is traveling to assist Lincoln Shaddock in Asheville.”
Putting as much asperity in my tone as a churchwoman accused of using store-bought canned vegetables, I said, “Maggoty Girl is not stupid enough to challenge Ming of Glass. I want to know what the Blood Tarot has to do with all this mess you vampire people are in.”
Cai’s eyes narrowed, as if trying to unify conflicting data. “Maggot should know that Ming of Glass was visited last night by a federal official from ICE. Brenda Jabroski is a Mithran hater and has decided to confront Ming because my mistress lacksdocumentation. This woman claimed that Soul approved this visit. But I have discovered that Soul is missing. For how long?”
I kept my face from reacting, but the roots buried in my hands twitched.
“Three weeks or more,” Occam answered.
“Jabroski’s paperwork was signed by Soul yesterday.”
Occam dialed HQ and asked, “JoJo, is there a Brenda Jabroski from ICE in Knoxville?” A cold wind blew against us as we waited. Occam asked, “Will you look into the name, a possible affiliation with other agencies, and any people who might have a beef against Ming? Thanks.” He ended the call and said, “There is no Brenda Jabroski with ICE. Someone gave you false documentation and impersonated an ICE officer.”
Cai gave Occam a formal nod, as if at some ambassadorial function. “Thank you. You should know that my mistress has said She Who Guards the Rift is no longer rational. The rift has affected her mind. Soul is delusional, and therefore my mistress believed this treachery.”
The roots in my fingers twitched, but I kept my reaction off my face.
Cai looked back along the entry hall, as if listening to something we couldn’t hear. While his expression and tone had been formal, I realized he wasn’t dressed in his formal attire, but in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt torn at the shoulder. And he was barefoot.
Imperious as that miffed churchwoman, I raised my voice and said, “Cai! I would like to see the Blood Tarot. And we would like to be offered a beverage. Tea for me and coffee for Occam.”
Absently he said, “Sure.” He waved to our left, turned in the direction he had been looking, and wandered away, moving with an irregular gait. Briefly, I met Occam’s eyes and followed Cai into the house, through the wide entrance of the main parlor to the left. It was an ornate room, with upholstered furniture and gewgaws everywhere, probably all antique and expensive. We didn’t sit, but instead stood, our backs to the corners of the room, facing the entrance.
Half a minute or so later, Cai returned and placed the metal box with its leather straps on the tabletop. He held up a finger as if remembering something. “Tea. Coffee.” He wandered away again.
I sat and opened the straps and the box, revealing the deck. I lifted it out. I hadn’t held the deck in my hands the last time. The power of the cards was almost a vibration, something I could feel through my skin. Knowing that, according to the church, I was sinning to so much as touch a magical object, I aped what I had seen Ming and Yummy do. Unfortunately, my hands didn’t have that particular skill. “Can you shuffle the deck?” I asked Occam.
He glanced at the door, seemed to listen to the silence of the house, and sat beside me on the settee. He shuffled the deck, his hands moving better than after he’d been burned. He wasalmost fully healed. When the deck was well shuffled, he placed it in front of me.
Clumsy by comparison, I shuffled them once more and placed them between us. “Cut the deck and ask a question,” I said.
His cat eyes were glowing in the semidarkness of the room. “You know I don’t believe in this hokey stuff.”
“Me neither. Ask a question. A serious one.”
“What’s going on with the vampires.” He stated it, as if demanding of the deck as he cut it.
I laid out a cross pattern face down. Then I placed three cards in the middle and turned the center face up. It was Death.
“Death on top. That’s what Ming and Yummy said happened every time, no matter the question, until I showed up.” I turned over the next card. It was a man, hanging from a tree. If this deck really had some kind of arcane power, maybe that was supposed to be the Green Knight / vampire tree. With a dead man hanging from it.
The next card was three coins. “Any idea what this means?”
“Not a one, Nell, sugar, but I’m calling FireWind. That deck was removed from a crime scene. We might have legal recourse to walk out with it.”
Shrugging, I flipped the other cards while he called FireWind. I had no idea what the cards might mean. I took a pic of the overturned cards, though, so maybe T. Laine could read it or maybe knew a witch who could. Occam finished up the call and said to me, “I’m going to your car. There’s the necessary paperwork in my case. FireWind says that unless they come back and physically take it from us, we can confiscate it.”
“Will that get Cai in trouble?” I asked. “Ming’s crazy. Will she kill him for this?”
“I can write up the paperwork without mentioning his name, but I’m sure she won’t be happy.”
