“Got something,” JoJo said. “I just cracked DNAKeys’ HR records.”
“What did you just say?” Soul asked.
JoJo’s head came up from her laptop; her spine went vertical as a two-by-four. Jo wasn’t supposed to be hacking without a warrant. “Uhhh.”
“CLMT2207,” Soul said. “Strike the words beginning at ‘Got something.’ JoJo meant to say—” She gestured to Jo.
JoJo pulled on her earrings, a sure sign of nerves. “I just discovered information in an unsecured database. Right. That.”
“Continue,” Soul said, but there was a bite to her tone. I had seen her dragon teeth, but Soul was scary even in human form.
JoJo said, “Candace McCrory is really Evelyn McCrory. She has a history of paranoia and conspiracy fears. She’s on antipsychotic meds, or maybe she’s off her meds. Maybe the truth is a little less woo-woo and a little more cuckoo.”
I shook my head. “No. I’d agree that Mary Smith was someone who needs meds, who might even have been broken somewhere along in her life. But not Candace. Underneath it all she was . . .” I held both hands in front of me as if holding a large vase between them. “Carrying a burden, but self-confident.”
JoJo tapped her tablet for a moment and said, “Well. Probie’s right. The doctor treating Candace is the same as the doctor treating Evelyn. And he died in 2004.
“So besides creating a mock social media persona, DNAKeys went so far as to falsify and plant HR records for their double agent in two names? Both McCrory identities are false? Why?”
“We did it,” I said. “Shaundell has school and work records and has donated regularly to the ASPCA and rescue groups.”
Rick grunted. It sounded like a cat, all breathy and exasperated. It had to hurt when the bad guys were just as effective as the good guys.
“Elephant in the room,” T. Laine said. I looked at her. I hadn’t heard that one before. And she was looking at me. “Nell read humans back when we had a plague. Why not let her read the kid?”
My eyes slid to the doorway. “That was adults. Is it even legal to read a minor? No. It isn’t right without his parents’ permission.”
“We sniff them,” T. Laine said, “listen to them. How is this different?”
Soul tilted her head. Her platinum silver hair slid forward and she caught it with a hand and smoothed it, as if it was alive. “It is not illegal, evil, or against PsyLED protocols. Nor will it harm the child. Will it?”
I scowled at her. “This feels wrong. Churchmen think it’s okay to do things to children too.”
T. Laine’s eyes went big and startled.
“Just a surface read,” Soul urged. “Just deep enough for us to know if Devin is human.”
Devin Tolliver. That was his name. And they wanted me to invade him. It made me feel squirmy inside and my rooty middle ached.
“Hello? Can I have some water?” a plaintive voice called.
The kid. Awake. I narrowed my eyes at Soul. She tapped her ear, indicating that the child had been trying to listen to us. She made a shooing motion to me. I pushed out of my chair and stood, glaring around the table to show them that I thought this was invasive and a personal assault on the kid. Soul just shooed me on again, hands waving.
I turned on a heel and left for the break room. “Hey, Devin,” I said, going to the sink. “I’ll get you some water.”
“Thanks. Can I have my cell and play some games?”
I poured water into a paper cup and carried it to the couch. The smell of fire was much stronger here, fire and gasoline and scorched hair and something musky and sour like burned flesh. Rather than pull up the upholstered chair in the corner, I knelt on the floor by the couch and gave him the cup. “Your cell was lost in the fire,” I said gently, knowing he had lost much more than a cell phone in the fire that took his aunt’s life.
“Oh,” he said, and I couldn’t interpret his emotional reaction to the mention of the fire. He wrapped his hands around the cup and lifted it to his mouth, drinking the contents down. He blew a breath and said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Devin, may I check your head for fever?” And I felt like a fiend. This was wrong. But if Devin was a paranormal, and if we could figure out what he was, then we might also figure out who was after the Tollivers and killing people. This was important. This was necessary. It was also a rationalization. I hated justifications. Hated them.
Devin nodded. I touched his head. It was unexpectedly cool when I had been prepared for sleep-sweaty and hot. I closed my eyes and let my consciousness flow down through my body and into Devin.
I was met with cool energy, gray and . . . It wasn’t the right word, but he was chatoyant, as if a band of bright light reflected through him, the way light carried through stone. Or, better, perhaps, the way light carried through river water, reflecting on the dappled bottom, gold and green and gray and blue, with faint purple places, all glowing. I followed the light deeper.
I heard the word, “No!”
Devin jerked away from me and I cascaded back into the break room. Tumbled to the side, to the floor. Blinking up at the child.
“No!” he said again. “Stop that! You’re a bad person.” Heat blasted at me. Sizzling, ripping flame. I dove to the side. Rolled to my bottom, sitting on the floor beside the couch. Disoriented enough that I put both hands on the vinyl tile floor, to stabilize myself. “I’m sorry, Devin,” I said. “I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t touch me!” he shrieked. Another blast, this one hotter. Scorching along my skin. Blistering, roasting. I screamed. Smelled burning hair and leaves. Burning me. I rolled away, to the far side of the room. Covering my head. Screaming. Noting in the instant when I closed my eyes and tucked tight that the flames were orange tinged with purple.
ELEVEN
The tingle of magic was everywhere—in the air, on my skin, in my hair, in the breaths I took. Blessed pure air, cold and rich and heavy with moisture and magic, flooded my lungs. I gulped and realized that I was crying. I was hurt. I was burned.
I fought to open my eyes, my lashes gummed together. I opened them a slit, intensely grateful that I could see through the tangled lashes and the tears. My hands were curled up near my face and the skin was weeping, blistered, and stinging. I blinked and looked around. I was in the hallway outside of the break room and T. Laine was sitting on the floor beside me. “It’s okay,” she said. “The fire’s out. The kid’s out. We’re safe.”
I was gasping, hyperventilating, and I knew it but I couldn’t stop. T. Laine’s face was creased with worry; Soul stood in the break room, standing guard over Devin, looking angry and guilty. And worried. And in shock. At herself? At something else? I had a fleeting thought that her emotions were turned inward and had little to do with what had just happened to me. Then that thought slid away with the pain.
“How?” I whispered, and my voice croaked.
“I keep my null weapons charged and on me at all times,” she said. “Remember?”
As the unit’s resident witch, T. Laine had the tools to stop most magical attacks and the ability to use them. “My hero,” I whispered, straining to see into the break room.
The tile where I had been kneeling was smoldering, wisps of smoke still rising. I touched my head and encountered hair, happy it hadn’t been singed. My face hurt and I touched my cheeks. They were burned, blistered, the pain more than I could define. “Ohhh. Oh, oh, oh,” I whispered, blinking. And then I remembered what she had said: The kid’s out. Null spells didn’t knock people out. “You didn’t hit him, did you?” My voice sounded less husky, but it hurt to talk.
Lainie smiled crookedly. “Just with a sleep spell. He isn’t human, but he reacts to magic like one. Can I help?” She nodded to my hands and held up an amulet. “Healing. It’ll take the pain out. Or it should. Now that you’re growing leaves, I can’t guarantee anything.”
I stared
at the amulet. It was a small moonstone wrapped in verdigris-stained copper. I wiped my nose with my wrist and gasped at the bolt of pain that ricocheted through me. “We could try. Probably should try. But I’d rather stick my hands in Soulwood dirt.”
Her smile went more crooked and her expression was both worried and compassionate. My face must be more burned than I thought. It must be bad to make T. Laine try so hard to hide her distress. “We figured you’d say that, so Tandy’s bringing all your plants in from your window boxes.” Having a job to do was important to the empath when someone was feeling strong emotion. He must be suffering my misery almost as much as I was.
JoJo stepped from her cubicle and knelt beside me, holding a bottle of chilled water. I shook my head. “I’m cold,” I managed. “Room-temp water, please?”
She switched it out and placed a blanket over me just as the shivers hit. I think I might have blacked out because someone touched my shoulder and I woke with a start that shocked pain through me like being tased. In the background I could hear cats snarling and screaming, Soul shouting, and maybe the sound of wind chimes, all cut off abruptly. My body stank of fire and pain, and . . . and I smelled rosemary. My eyes were stuck together again, but I got them open and focused blearily on the plants all around me. Without thought, I shoved my burned hands into the soil of two pots and reached for Soulwood.
It was here at my fingertips and yet so far away. I pulled hard on the soil and the life in the plants. Instantly, the soil and the plants were desiccated, dead. I yanked my hands out of the pots and rammed them into two other pots. And then two more. Dropping into the soil and calling on Soulwood, so far away, the land sleeping the sleep of winter. It was dark there, shadowed and cold beneath the sleet that fell again. Two sets of pots later, and many dead plants around me, I felt a change.
In the darks on the horizon, a pale light came awake, deep and deep and deep in the earth. Stretching, curious, seeking me. And we . . . came together. Soulwood wrapped itself around me. The pain eased away.
The healing was the yellow of warm sun after an icy dream, the coolness of a mountain spring spilling down rocks, the touch of velvet moss along bare skin. It was the scent of pine in winter and the feel of roots reaching and spreading, seeking nutrients and water, and sharing life with me. I sighed and the breath didn’t hurt. I realized it had been painful to breathe only when the pain vanished.
The pain in my face and hands flowed away with my breath, like water flowed down a hill, and deep into the earth of Soulwood. Deep and deep and peacefully deep, around rock, broken and splintered, through layers of rounded stone from some ancient riverbed. Home. I was home. The pain fled and faded and failed, waning like the moon. Peace. Healing. Soulwood.
I don’t know how long I was there, but I knew the instant when Brother Ephraim awoke. I felt him stretch and twist and grumble. I focused on the place he had carved out of my home. It was as blackened as always, a place of death, of drought, of forest fire, but it coiled with scarlet snakes full of the poison of hatred and fury, and despite the absence of life as I knew it, despite the death layered atop death, it had life of its own—a life of twisted and bitter evil, sparking and sparkling and electric.
Ephraim stared at me, his charged hatred snapping like whips, hissing like snakes, but he didn’t move. There was something about that snapping heat and antilife that seemed important, something I needed to guard against. But before I figured it out, lightning struck at me, through the ground, through the deeps. Black light blasting at me.
I raised a wall between us, pulling on Soulwood. But the lightning was faster. It struck me, midchest. Midbrain. A blinding electric heat/light, boiling, roasting, tearing into me like the child of lightning and laser. I went blind, slammed away from my body, far, far, and far. Everything went black.
• • •
Minutes . . . hours . . . passed. I struggled awake, fighting the lethargy, the lifelessness, the penetrating and powerful fatigue. I was underground. I was . . . not in Soulwood.
I reached out, trying to find it. But I was lost, deep underground. Worse, I was blind. Disoriented. I flailed, trying to find up and down, trying to find my land. I called to it, but it didn’t answer.
Had Ephraim killed my land? Had he killed me, then stripped my soul away and tucked it into a pocket, like the pocket he had made for himself? I struggled harder, panic filling me.
Then I heard . . . something. I stopped. Holding my panic still. Forced calm into my spirit, breathing, though there was no air, resting though I had no body to calm. Okay, I thought. Okay.
“Neeeellll?” The voice was too slow, too distant. “Neeeellll?” it called again.
This time I found where it came from and angled my consciousness toward it.
“Neeell?”
I raced toward it, through the darkness, through the impossible distance, straining, struggling. Fearing I was losing parts of myself to the expanse of darkness. Struggling on nonetheless.
“Nell. Please come back.” T. Laine’s voice, calling me with her witch magic.
There. It was there. I slung my mind, my spirit, my very soul at the voice.
Back to headquarters where my body lay. And up into the soil of the potted plants.
I sucked in a breath, and my lungs made a now-familiar rubbing, flapping sound, as of air-deprived tires chafing against smooth asphalt. I coughed. Tried to force my eyes open. They were still sticky from the fire, gummed shut, the lashes sealed. Someone placed a warm, wet compress over them. I could hear the distant murmur of voices. Feel the softness of the blanket over me. An air mattress beneath me. I had been taken to the new sleeping room, my fingers still in the potted Soulwood soil that someone had wet down with fresh water. Cool air moved over my lower face and it didn’t hurt to the touch. I was healed. I was whole. Minutes passed as I mentally searched my body. Finding myself restored, recovered. Though rather more leafy than I might have wanted.
“How long have I been out?” I whispered. “How many of my plants did I kill?”
“Two hours, give or take. Ten plants. Two more that look a little wrinkled but will probably live. Another batch are fine. Are you . . . all here? Feeling better?” It was T. Laine, her voice calm and even-toned.
I pulled my fingers from one clay pot and clutched the edge of the compress, easing it off my face. My eyes opened and the first thing I saw was a hand, my hand, with green leaves curling out of the tips of my fingernails. From my thumb, a thin brown vine coiled and curled, tiny green leaves unfurling. “Grapevine,” I murmured. “I’m sprouting.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Lainie said.
I breathed out a laugh at the crudity. “I’m healed, though, I think.” And saved from Brother Ephraim’s assault. He had waited until I was already in some kind of danger to attack. I wondered what he had done to Soulwood but was too much a coward to drop back into the land and look.
“Yeah,” she said. “But things went to hell in a handbasket while you were growing leaves. You need to talk to Occam.” I didn’t respond, and she added, “When you first got hit, he went catty. We got shredded clothes and cat hair everywhere. Place is a mess.”
“No hairballs?” I managed.
T. Laine barked a surprised laugh. “God no.”
I chuckled with her, a breathless, strained sound. “Is Devin okay?”
“Yeah. Still asleep. The senator had flown to DC with his brother, Justin, and so we’re waiting on someone from the child protective services and the kid’s nanny to get here.”
“I hate not being human.” The words startled me.
“If you had been human, the blast might have killed you. Or disfigured you forever.”
“If I’d been human, I wouldn’t have been reading Devin.”
Lainie was silent for a few moments and I managed to focus on her face in the dim light. Pugnacious chin, dark brown eyes and hair. Her mouth wri
nkled in a pursing frown, as if something tasted bad. “Okay,” she said. “I got nothing.”
I laughed again. “Help me sit up. Then water. Then you can debrief me about Occam’s problems.” T. Laine pulled me to my butt on the inflatable mattress. While I drank the room-temperature water that I remembered asking for earlier, she filled me in.
“You know the guy’s nuts for you, right?”
She meant Occam. I shrugged, an embarrassed noncommittal response that said, Yes, but . . .
“He lost it when you got hit. Shifted. Ruined a perfectly good pair of boots and a break room chair. Went at the kid. Pea came at him out of nowhere and cut his face up. Then Rick went catty, pulled into the shift by werecat magic. Talk about ruined clothes. And blood. Pea and Bean . . . well, all I can say is that those little things can freaking move.”
“And Soul?”
T. Laine hesitated. “Not as cool as a cucumber, but she kept it all together. She and the grindys kept the kid safe and threw the cats into the null room to deal with dominance issues in the only way their cats know how. They’re still alive, if a little bloody.”
“And Devin?”
“He’s a pyro of some kind. A firestarter. There’s a couple dozen different kinds of firestarter species in mythology. We think the assassin is a pyro too. So our entire investigation is . . . officially, let’s call it askew. It’s either closer to being solved, because we stand a better chance now of figuring out what the assassin is and the Tollivers are, or it’s really totally bollixed up.”
I frowned. I had heard the word bollocks in a film or two and had looked it up. It was from a German word for testicles, though I had no idea what they might have to do with this investigation. “Bollixed up?”
T. Laine rubbed her forehead with a hand. A slash of blood was dried across it. Blood Spatter 101 class at Spook School had taught me that the droplet had been moving laterally at speed when it hit her. Her hand fell to her lap. Fortunately my bloodlust didn’t rise. She said, “I was trying to find a word that was acceptable to you. I was trying to say the investigation probably just took a major wrong turn and dumped all our potential conclusions into a ditch.”