Even deeper, it was slow going, reading through the earth. Slow and miserable. I managed to travel through the soil about two hundred feet, and beneath the foundation. I reached the surface, inside the cement-block foundation, searching for wood on the ground that might make it easy to reach the wood that constructed the walls, but the ground beneath the house was wrapped in plastic. Protective plastic was a solid layer from outer wall to outer wall. There was no way in for me.
My comms crackled, Occam’s voice so soft I could barely hear it. “Ingram. I’m going furry. I still hear screaming, and my nose tells me there’s blood, but something feels off. Maintain your twenty until you hear from me.”
“I can’t get anything from the land,” I said, pulling back through the earth. “I’m’a sit in the car and get warm. Don’t freeze when you…you know.”
Knowing I meant when he got naked to shift into his cat, Occam laughed, his voice already a scratchy growl. And then he was gone.
I climbed into the truck and turned it on. The heater blasted out warmth, and I held my hands to the vents. I was shivering,and wished I had thought to bring some thermoses of tea and coffee and something to eat. Occam would be hungry after shifting. Not like FireWind after a shift, but normal hungry. I kept protein snacks in my official car, but I had nothing in the truck.
On a good day, it would take Occam around half an hour to forty-five minutes to shift, scout around, and shift back. During the shifting time he would be totally vulnerable, yet he hadn’t come back to shift near me where I could watch over him. I hoped that meant he’d found a really safe spot, but I figured what it really meant was that he didn’t want to draw any attention to the truck and was protecting me.Stupid cat.
Overhead, a blast of pearly lightning flickered. Using my cell, I looked at the weather station for explanations of the lightning. My cell showed zero bars.
I frowned at the cell phone. Snow lightning was rare, but I’d seen cloud-to-cloud lightning several times now. Odd lightning. Pearly and prismy. I studied the sky again, but the lightning had disappeared.
* * *
Dawn had brightened the skies to dull gray when Occam loped back to the truck, human shaped, dressed, though his coat hung open and his boots weren’t tied. He slid in and shut the door, his face pale in the dim light. He looked mighty hungry, but he didn’t mention that. “Pretty sure the screams I heard are either mic’ed in or are a recording, being played over speakers, probably a battery-powered system.
“My nose and ears tell me no one alive or undead is in that house, but there’s a lot of blood. My nose is less acute than a dog’s, but the vehicles smell empty. I think it’s a trap, though I don’t get the musty scent of C-4 and other plastic malleable explosives, or the fruity scent of TATP.” TATP was a cheap, illegal explosive used by terrorists. “No scent of nitrocellulose or accelerants or even fertilizer. But it could be something nonexplosive, like gas or a biologic.” He shivered once, shaking hard all over, even in the hot air blowing through the heater. “Dang, it’s cold, ’specially for a jungle cat.” He put the truck in drive. “We’ll go back to where we last had a signal, report in, and request backup.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “If I wasn’t with you, would you jist go on in anyway?”
“No, Nell, sugar.” He gave the truck a tiny hit of gas and, slipping and sliding, pulled into the street. “No,” he repeated. “Once I fell in love with you, I realized that I’m not actually ten feet tall and bulletproof. And if I want to be with you for a long time, I can’t rush in where fools and younger men might.”
“Humph.”
He grinned at the note of doubt in my tone and changed the subject, saying, “When we get to a signal, I’ll put the chains on the tires, the back ones at least, so we can be safer.”
I nodded and grabbed the security handle as we slid sideways onto I-40.
* * *
The sleet turned to snow and the city never opened up for the day. Electric trucks were moving from one localized outage to another, repairing power lines; city crews removed fallen trees and hauled away wrecked cars blocking roads. The weather front, which was supposed to have been transitory, had expanded to cover the eastern half of Tennessee and parts of six other states. The bad roads meant that it took time to get the people we needed on-site to check out the house and the vans, and we had to wait.
Not far off I-40, we spotted a dim light in the heavy snowfall. It was a tiny Vietnamese coffee shop that still had power and had opened despite the weather. We were able to reach HQ and report in, and were told by Tandy to stay put. That seemed like an excellent idea to me.
The shop served no tea, but I didn’t care. Their coffee was made and served in a different way from any I had ever tasted, and they offered the most amazing pastries. Occam ate too much, after shifting in the cold. We had a box of coffee and all the remaining pastries boxed up to go for the entry crews when they were finally assembled. Leaving me sipping coffee and writing up our report from the target house, Occam went out and started the process of laying out the chains to get them on the tires. Men’s work, according to the church, and suited to the strength of a cat-man, but it made me feel jist a mite ashamed to stay in the warmth. We waited.
* * *
At ten a.m. we were back at the house, standing in the yard, stomping our feet to restore circulation, and breathing clouds in the whiteout of falling snow. SWAT, with its tech toys and robots, had cleared the exterior, the doors and windows, and the crawl space beneath the house of possible explosive charges. T. Laine had cleared it of both mundane and potential energy triggers that would set off magical attacks.
The screaming from inside had stopped.
Because the neighborhood still had no power, we deduced that the battery on the speakers had finally failed. That was a blessing.
Snow was falling, sometimes in a heavy veil, other times mixed with sleet. The temperature had dropped. It was daylight. It was also dark and dreary and so cold my fingers were frozen inside my pockets. I had raced out of the house without proper winter gear; one set was still in the house and the backup clothes were in a gear bag in the car. Had we been able to take my car, I would have been fine. Instead my gloves and hat and extra wool socks were back at Soulwood. I’d make a point to put a backup bag in John’s old truck.
In the miserable weather, Unit Eighteen was standing with the SWAT team, discussing who should lead the forced entry. Gonzales, the leader of SWAT and T. Laine’s boyfriend, was giving a tutorial on barricades to FireWind, who seemed faintly amused. T. Laine stood in the background, frustrated because the interdepartmental wrangling and males in show-off mode were holding things up.
Rettell had shown up too, in a government car, but she hadn’t joined us. She was sitting in the warmth, her car’s heater going, watching. I figured that since she was military, she had tech to listen in on everything we said while staying warm and dry.
FireWind interrupted Gonzales, turned to T. Laine, and said, “Kent. Is there a working to blow down a door, and can you employ it?”
My head swiveled back to the group.
“Yes,” she said shortly.
