Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4 )- Faith Hunter Page 0,127
was his good-cop voice, one he used when he was about to get someone to say something they hadn’t intended to say. “You were going to use me, weren’t you? And the binding you inked into my skin.” Rick leaned toward Loriann. His face looked sad, like a TV father disappointed in his child.
JoJo whispered someone should have sex with her again. We were all focused on the screen.
“How did you figure that out?” Loriann whispered. Rick didn’t answer.
“Yeah. How did you?” Jo muttered. “Been nice to know that too.”
“He’s guessing,” Occam stated, reading body language with cat communication skills.
Loriann reached for the ring that was no longer on her finger. She made little turning motions where it used to lie, as if she twisted the ring. “During the original ink-spell casting?” she said, as if reminding Rick of the torture but not having the guts to call it what it was. “I put … bindings into your ink. A binding to keep you from talking. A binding to Jason. To protect him if he ever needed it. To save him. But I didn’t have any of Jason’s blood to create a link to find him through you. So no.”
Tandy texted Uncertain.
“Why bind me?” Rick asked, as if unsurprised.
“I had to. In case I was killed before Jason was freed, and you managed to get away. I had to make sure you would save Jason.”
“You could have asked,” Rick said, in that same quiet tone. “Said please. I’d have protected your brother even without a spell forcing me.”
“Right. But I didn’t know anything about you then. All I knew was that I might die and someone had to save my brother.” Loriann lifted dark eyes to Rick. “Then it was over and Jason was safe and … I didn’t need the bindings. And I didn’t know of a way to undo them.”
Tandy texted a single word. Lie. That was interesting.
“And now?”
“And now, you have a blood tie to Jason,” she said fiercely. “When he calls you, you have to answer. And you won’t be able to hurt him, no matter what he’s done or what he’s doing when you find him. No matter what he does to you. And I can follow you to him.”
True.
JoJo was cursing steadily under her breath. Occam’s eyes glowed cat-gold. He was silent, that deadly stillness of the predator waiting to pounce. I just sat, thinking of what I might do, what legal and illegal boundaries and rules I might push or break, if I was trying to protect Mud. I would never have done what Loriann Ethier had done. But I understood.
• • •
On the screens, Rick left the null room and disappeared into the dark of the building. Tandy raced to the conference room. He shook his head at JoJo’s questions and said to Occam, “He needs you.” Occam took off after Rick, moving in a burst of were-speed. To me Tandy said, “I had to get out of there. And I think I can read her from here.” He dropped into a chair and pulled his cell, watching the screen. “She’s wide open. No shields at all.” He shivered with leftover null-effects and glanced at the coffee pot. “Please?” he asked. I got up to make a pot. “Thanks,” he said.
In the null room, T. Laine took over the interrogation, concentrating on the spell Jason was using to call Rick and the spell Loriann had inked into Rick’s flesh, and how they interacted. She was getting the particulars, the nitty-gritty. It was a magic/mathematics dialogue on a level I couldn’t follow, about workings with energy. There were phrases like “potential energy versus kinetic,” which I Googled to refresh my stagnant brain. I’d had magical energy classes in Spook School, but it had been a while. Potential energy is stored energy, like chemical, gravitational, mechanical, and nuclear. Kinetic energy is doing work—like electrical, heat, light, motion, sound, magical, gravitational, or mechanical energy. Kinetic energy is all about movement. In magical workings, forms of energy can be transferred and transformed between one another and between matter. I understood only enough to know that if a witch mixed the wrong kind of energies together things could explode, or transform in the wrong ways. There had been horror stories, which I hoped were apocryphal.
As the conversation turned even more theoretical, Jo and Tandy worked on traffic cameras from the day the Blalock girl was kidnapped, trying to find and track the van. I hid in my