“Yes. He is the tree. And, like the tree, I think that there is no way to kill him.”
“You’ve tried to kill the tree several times,” Tandy stated.
“Fire. Axes. Chain saws. A bulldozer that the tree ate. It can’t be killed. It’s the cockroach of plant life. I have a feeling it would survive a direct hit by a nuclear bomb.” I smiled to show I was joking, but part of me wasn’t joking at all.
I swiveled in my chair and took in the screen where FireWind and Lainie could be seen working in the null room, the deck of cards on the table. Knowing Tandy had the comms in his ear, I asked, “What have they discovered?”
“Whatever working is making the Death card turn up first, no matter what, doesn’t work in the null room. They’ve done five readings and it never showed up in the patterns that T. Laine laid out. The other energies of the deck are equally muted. In the null room, the cards are mostly just cards.
“T. Laine is calling in another witch. They’ll experiment on readings inside and outside of the null room.”
“Thank you,” I said again.
Before I could react, his eyes went wide. Into the mic that sent feed to HQ’s speakers, he said, “FireWind.”
The door to the null room opened and FireWind walkeddown the hallway with that ground-eating stride, his black braid swinging.
“We have a message from a Lieutenant Colonel Leann Rettell, DO, from the office of General David Schlumberger, U.S. military. Schlumberger heads the joint military version of PsyLED. She’s on her way here.”
Rettell was a medical doctor who worked for the military on paranormal events. She had helped us with the slime mold case.
“Why?” FireWind asked. “What cases do we have open that the military might be interested in?”
I said, “Maybe they discovered that the vampires are acting odd.”
“But why send a doctor?” FireWind asked.
“Don’t know, sir.” Tandy turned the screen to allow Aya to see the email. “Maybe they think there’s a biological component? Whatever their thoughts, Rettell is on her way to Knoxville. She’ll be here at dusk.”
Dusk was when vampires woke. I wondered if there was a correlation.
ELEVEN
As a probationary agent, I had learned that law enforcement was mostly paperwork and that there was always a backlog of it. Having retrieved the Blood Tarot, I had a lot of paperwork to attend to. I had been searching for the missing deck of cards for months, and there had never been a hint that Ming had gotten her hands on it. Now that we had it, I had to wrap up our reacquisition in terms as legal as possible. It was harder than I thought, because I knew that while “finders keepers” wasn’t a real thing, “possession is nine-tenths of the law”wasa real thing. Ming had possessed the deck.
Upon the advice of the director of PsyLED, who had followed up our actions with a backdated order from Homeland Security, Occam and I had taken it. Legally, Unit Eighteen was as safe as we could be, under those circumstances.
Then, Ming’s house had burned down, which would have destroyed the deck anyway.
All that could cause problems, so I had to “jot and tittle” every line of paperwork.
Once I completed the Blood Tarot casework, I read through Clementine’s notes on several meetings and made some minor corrections. As I slowly typed with my index fingers, my hands felt better and better and I was ready for lunch, which Occam brought in from a local salad and soup place after his crow adventure.
So I could eat more easily, Occam removed the bandages and I got a good look at the damage wrought by the tree. After contact with Soulwood, which had taken place in my mind, my wounds were mostly closed over and no longer leaking a bloody fluid. The evidence of the roots that had traced under my flesh and along my bones was less pronounced. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but having the bandages offmade eating easier. After lunch I joined Occam in his cubby and helped him write up the crow event, which he had first called a crow convention.
“It’s called a crow gather,” I said.
“That’s a thing?” he asked.
“Country-girl stuff,” I said. “Roosting gathers are common in winter to keep warm at night. Daytime gathers are usually smaller, and often involve a crow funeral. Butbigdaytime ones? Like, really big ones like you saw? Those are rare. The church calls them a congregation of crows.”
“There had to be hundreds of crows,” Occam said. “When I got there, they were all shouting and screaming and chasing away humans. I watched from a distance, downwind so they wouldn’t smell my cat.” He grinned that wonderful lopsided grin and said, “And I didn’t eat a single crow.” His smile faded. “But here’s where it gets weird, Nell, sugar.”
“Crow gathers are often weird, cat-man.”
“One crow took a perch on a dead limb, surrounded by all the others, and it started croaking and clicking and making all sorts of sounds I didn’t know crows could make.”
“Oratin’ to them,” I said.
