Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)

I woke when a pan clanged in my kitchen. The cats were gone and the smell of bacon and coffee was bright on the air, though, judging by the angle of the sun, it was well after noon and long past breakfast. My sleep schedule had been odd since I’d come back to the fauna side of the flora and fauna biology spectrum, and working PsyLED hours was not helping me to sleep at night like normal people. I snickered softly. Normal people. I was definitely not normal people.

I rolled off my sweat-damp mattress, knowing that at some point in the last year, I had become a spoiled city girl. I’d never survive another summer without doing something about an air conditioner. My bedroom was hot and sticky and so was I. Sleeping, I had thrown off the blanket and it was heaped on the floor at the foot of the bed. I managed to stand on wobbly legs and stripped the sheets. Caught sight of myself in the mirror. I was browner than before. Leaves were growing out of my fingers and my hairline. They were bright and deep summer green, shaped vaguely like the love child of grape leaves and oak leaves. Vines were tangled in my redder-than-once-before hair. My eyes were the green of corn husks, flecked with the darker green of … of zucchini maybe. I was going vegetarian. I laughed.

I knew vaguely who was in my house and if I’d tuned in more closely I could have named them. Most of Unit Eighteen had invaded the living room and kitchen and I couldn’t remember if this was a planned visit or not. Either way I had company and couldn’t go traipsing around in my altogethers. I wrapped a robe around me and trudged to the shower, dropping off the sheets on the back porch, which served as a laundry room, cat romp-room, hammock sleep space, and catchall. Without greeting or even looking at my uninvited guests, I got ready for my day. Showered; clipped my leaves; gooped the ends of my hair; jerked on loose pants, white T-shirt. The weapons harness and weapon went into my repacked gobag, just in case. Slippers on my feet. Because I was not dressing for work on my day off in my own house. Decent, I went to face my home invaders. Though I guess I had to call them visitors since they had cooked breakfast.

? ? ?

“File is ‘LaFleur/Circle,’” JoJo said, referring to the report on our screens, one I hadn’t read yet. “We have a black-magic/blood-magic spell with a dead cat, and the possible presence of vampires at the site either before, during, or after the spell was cast. Rick was called to or attracted to the site, in cat form, though by the time he arrived the spell was ended. Due to the timeline, we haven’t established causality. T. Laine? You’re up.”

“From the beginning … ,” T. Laine said slowly, as if trying to sift out conclusions. She was sitting in my rocker, her tablet balanced on her thigh, with one knee thrown up over the arm of the chair, the other foot bare to the floor, pushing her forward and back. She was dressed in pants that ended at midcalf and a tank top to combat the heat. She had kicked off her shoes at the door and looked perfectly comfortable in my home. “… Rick loses conscious volition, yet somehow drives toward a site where a black domestic cat has been sacrificed in a black-magic ceremony. He shifts to cat, grabs an old gobag containing a blanket and a flip phone, which is perfect for being carried in cat fangs. Goes overland to the witch circle. He doesn’t enter the circle. He shifts to human. Texts for help. Wraps himself in the blanket. Waits for backup.

“Occam was not called to the witch circle, though he was farther away and busy.” T. Laine slid a sly glance my way and then back to her tablet.

I was too much of a tree for my blush to show, thankfully.

She went on with her summary. “Rick is a black cat. Rick has magical cat tats, though not black cats. JoJo has a big-cat tattoo and she isn’t called. And Occam, who is a cat, but not a black cat, wasn’t called to the same spell. I’m not sure what part is coincidence, but I’m thinking causality is in there somewhere. Either way, coincidence is a rare bird.”

I wasn’t certain what birds had to do with cat spells, but I agreed with the coincidence factor. I nibbled on a piece of cold toast, letting the conversation flow through me like a stream, searching for eddies and pools where logjams and detritus of thought had gone overlooked.

Breakfast had been really good, even though it was only microwaved scrambled eggs, toast, and jelly. The washed dishes were piled on the kitchen counter, except for the last of the toast and jelly on a platter in the middle of the coffee table. The work-related tablets and laptops were scattered around, as were glasses of iced cola or tea. Everyone had brought their own drink. I was sipping on my own cold mint tea to try and keep cool. It wasn’t helping much. My single-unit air conditioner had never been intended to chill down a house this big, in daylight, warmed by this many people. John, my deceased husband, may have planned to get more window units, had the children he wanted ever appeared. Living alone, I hadn’t needed them, but Tandy, Occam, T. Laine, and JoJo did.

Rick, our senior agent, was in an interagency conference all day at Knoxville FBI headquarters, with the assistant director of PsyLED—Soul—and with the regional heads of the FBI, CIA, ICE, ATF, the Tennessee and North Carolina National Guards, the state bureaus of investigation from Tennessee and North and South Carolina, MEPS (the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command located in Knoxville), top Highway Patrol chiefs, and Homeland Security. It was a big meeting of the biggest LEO brass from three states, working on creating protocols for potential security and terrorist threats of all kinds, human and paranormal, homegrown and foreign.

Our new up-line man, the special agent in charge of the eastern seaboard, Ayatas FireWind, was at the Pentagon for high-level meetings about vampires. FireWind spent a lot of time on planes, jetting around, dealing with politically delicate paranormal criminal cases, often with the vampires, who seemed to be in an uproar since Leo Pellissier, the former Master of the City of New Orleans and most of the southern United States, was no longer in charge of his Mithrans. We were on our own today. FireWind had run other units and even other regions, but they had been primarily human units. Unit Eighteen was the first largely para unit, and though I hadn’t met him yet, I had gotten the feeling that things hadn’t gone nicely the first few times FireWind was in the office. There was some smoldering discontent in the unit, and clearly they didn’t want to discuss Rick around HQ, where the boss might walk in unexpectedly.

Since electronic equipment allowed us to run the office remotely, and since Occam had hunted as he protected my land all day, the office meeting was here and we were unobserved. It was kinda nice.

T. Laine’s lips puckered and her eyes went distant, still thinking. She said, “Rick seemed … odd this morning. Even for a moon-called beast, he seemed distracted, agitated, preoccupied, and even more distant than usual.”

“It’s not new,” the unit empath said. “He’s been unvaryingly unpleasant inside his own skin for weeks, the way he is on the three days of the full moon. I’m glad he’s not here. He’s throwing off confusing emotions that make my skin itch, and he’s pacing like a cat in a cage. No offense, Occam.”

“None taken, Tandy,” Occam said. “You’re a lightning rod who reads minds. I’m a cat. We all have issues.”

Tandy gave a breathy laugh. He had been struck by lightning three times, which had ignited his empath gifts and left him with permanent Lichtenberg lines on his skin. Issues. True, I thought. Occam had surely done his share of pacing during twenty years in a cage, in cat form. T. Laine was a witch without a coven. JoJo was the Diamond Drill, the highest level of hacker known. I was turning into a plant.

Right now, Occam was stretched out on the sofa, his jeans and T-shirt damp with the heat. He was stroking Cello’s head, the once-feral cat purring and stretching under the big-cat’s hand. “That’s why I called our meeting here. We needed a break from HQ and a chance to voice our thoughts.”

“How far from the circle was Rick when he was called?” I asked. “If he was really called, that is, and it wasn’t coincidence.” We were all dancing around that possibility, that Rick was in danger personally and was also a liability to the unit. “Which side of the river?”

Occam twisted and leaned over the coffee table, punched a key on his laptop, and whirled it around to show us the screen, before dropping back to his lazy position. On the laptop, a small map of Knoxville and the surrounding area appeared, marked with a circle and a dot. The center of the circle was near the river. The dot was tagged as Rick’s car. “I checked that. He was on the same side of the river, and within five miles of the circle as the crow flies.”

“What was he doing?” Jo asked.

“Driving home from dinner and drinks with a hungry feeb,” Occam said, referring to an FBI agent who was low on the food chain. “He pulled over, secured his weapon, and shifted. His cat grabbed an old, mostly empty gobag that contained an old flip phone and a blanket, and went overland.”