“Are you sure this is it?” I asked Occam. “Why so tiny? I mean, I understand that it’s a quick drive to HQ, but most people want big places.”
“Her mailing address is in Richmond. She isn’t here all the time, so PsyLED foots the bill. Cheaper than a hotel, and the security is top-notch.”
“Oh. Okay. I guess that makes sense.” Having two places, or maybe more, since she spent a lot of time in New York, Seattle, Arizona, and Texas, seemed wasteful to me, but that was the frugal churchwoman in me thinking, and I hadn’t seen the financial statements so I knew nothing.
We took the three steps to the small porch and Occam opened the outer door by punching a code on a keypad. I noted the cameras on the outside, one of which pointed directly at us. I resisted the urge to wave. Inside, he knocked at the door of apartment 101 and we waited. When no one answered, Occam punched in another code and we let ourselves into Soul’s home.
The place was empty and, if the dust was any indication, it had been for some time. The thermostat was set to fifty degrees, just warm enough to keep any pipes in the outer walls from freezing. The windows were sealed with top-of-the-line security.
There were no personal items on the counters, no papers, no carry bag. The furniture was minimal: a sofa, one lounge chair, a table and two wood chairs, and a big bed made up neatly with white linens. Two pieces of luggage lay on the bed, the clothes on top with a thin layer of dust. Somebody needed to change the HVAC’s air filters. Not that I’d put that in a report.
Occam pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves and began to go through drawers and the one closet. I couldn’t pull gloves over my bandages, so I caught the tip of a cloth handkerchief and pulled it from a pocket to cover my fingertips. With the folded square of cloth, I checked the minuscule kitchen and even tinier bathroom. There was no food in the cupboards except coffee and powdered milk creamer. Only tiny hotel items like soap and shampoo sat on the bathroom counter. There were no towels, no washcloths. It looked and felt unused.
I pulled open the shower door and got my first indication of something I didn’t understand and couldn’t assign to the averageunused efficiency apartment. On the floor of the shower was a thin trail of what looked like clear, dried fish slime, flaky and half-disintegrated. Pulling on my earth magic, I bent over the clear stuff. With the exposed fingertip of my left middle finger, I carefully touched the crust and my brain was instantly flooded with images. Underwater: fish, sharks, caves. On land: jungle, rivers, the sound of a tiger’s roar, the sensation of prey in my fangs.
I jumped back, finger tingling.
Something caught my attention near the ceiling. A trail of brown, the color of dried blood, started on the wall two feet below the ceiling and swiped up, across the shower ceiling. The spray was about thirty-six inches long, total, and appeared to be that distinctive pattern of arterial blood spatter.
Carefully, I reached up and touched it too. The same weird tingling shot up my arm again. “Occam?” I called. “I found something weird.”
“I did too.” He crowded into the small bathroom, a piece of old paper in his hand. “It looks like a page from a book. See the edge here, where it appears to have been sewn into one of those packets of pages that make up the sections of old books.” He tilted the edge and it was clear that stitches had held the pages in place once upon a time.
“Signatures,” I said. “They’re called signatures.” When he looked at me in surprise, I said, “All the old Bibles in the church are made this way.”
“Sometimes, Nell, sugar, you surprise me with things you know. I sent a pic to HQ and they’re trying to figure out the language so they can translate it. I’m guessing Spanish or maybe Portuguese because there’s the wordsdelanddein it.”
I pointed at the two trails, of slime and blood. “I think I found Soul’s blood. Both her human and her arcenciel blood.”
Occam’s eyes tracked the spray, his face growing hard.
“I touched it with bare skin. It’s not human. I saw visions of undersea stuff. Jungle stuff with plants that were glowing. Heard a tiger roar. Soul can shape-shift into a tiger, right?”
“Yes,” he said, understanding. “We have a crime scene. And Soul is now officially missing.”
We called our buddies at PsyCSI and, while we waited, wewere ordered by HQ to collect small samples of the slime and blood for our own use. “Just in case,” Tandy said.
“Just in case” of what, we weren’t told.
* * *
PsyCSI showed up at the apartment to process a possible crime scene. We left them working, one masked and wearing a blue uni as she collected samples of the clear flaky stuff and blood for the PsyCSI lab. They were also dusting for fingerprints when we headed to HQ.
The new doors at PsyLED Unit Eighteen headquarters were heavier and harder to open, the prehung doors were of a higher grade of steel than before, and the jambs had steel insets built into the walls, like internal bars at a bank that could be locked down. They sounded secure when they closed behind us. After they’d been torn away by vampires, lots of steel seemed like a good security upgrade.
The moment we got inside, Tandy assigned Occam a case over the sound system, so everyone could hear it. “Special Agent Occam. There’s a large gathering of crows in a white oak out near Victor Ashe Park. You need to check it out.” In a rare moment of levity, Tandy added, “Don’t get distracted, shift into your cat, climb the tree, and eat the evidence.”
“I don’t eat evidence,” Occam called out through the mostly empty HQ. “Not often anyway.”
“Go bird-watch,” Tandy yelled back.
We separated and dropped our things, including the vampire tree sprig that I had dug up and stuffed into a pot. Feeling clumsy, I secured my weapon and struggled out of my work jacket. When Occam reappeared, we covered the particulars of our day between us, shorthand or bullet-point style. Because Occam’s car was still at the church, he’d have to take my vehicle and leave me stranded. Not that I could drive, because my hands were still a mess. His absence also meant I was now handling the Blood Tarot deck situation solo so he could—literally—go bird-watch.
Standing at my desk cubby, he pulled up the case’s particulars on his tablet and read softly to me, “A local, walking the greenway, noticed some very un-crow-like activity and reportedit. Parks and Rec and U.S. Fish and Wildlife all agreed it was un-crow-like and called the cops. The local cops verified the weirdness—whatever it really was—and ruled out radioactive contamination.” He looked at me under lowered brows and said drolly, “I doubt I’ll be there long.”
The nation’s atomic bombs had been designed and created in Knoxville, and R&D continued to this day on all kinds of secret projects. That meant there were secret leftover hotspots, and radioactivity was often reported locally. Not nationally. That information fell under national security protocols and the major news carriers were actively dissuaded from carrying the stories. But once Geiger counters ruled out radioactivity at odd scenes, PsyLED was always notified.
This was a common chain of notification, from one department to another until theweird stuff, as the Knoxville PD called it, landed in our laps, whatever it was, and someone had to go check it out. Usually it was nothing. Bird-watching, while amusing, wasn’t particularly strange.
