Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4 )- Faith Hunter Page 0,157

her spine and dampened dark half circles beneath her arms. She backed away. Stumbled. Caught her balance and turned to me. Raced close. I looked down at the psy-meter 2.0. It was bouncing all over the place, all the levels, jumping up and down.

“Son of a witch on a switch,” she cursed. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m pretty sure no one has ever seen that before and lived to tell it. Except Jason.”

Uncertain, I said, “That was a demon’s hand, wasn’t it?”

“Holy hell and back again, yes.” T. Laine opened a bottle of water and poured it over her head, splashing us both with the icy contents. She gasped and shivered once and opened a Coke, which she drank down, crushing the plastic bottle to force it down her throat fast. She burped. Burped again as the Coke’s carbon dioxide bubbled in her stomach.

I saved the reading, turned the meter and the cell off. Carefully, I asked, “Did you free the demon?”

“No! I’m adventurous, not stupid. The blue powder is part of a … let’s call it review working. It lets me see recently executed spells. Once. It’s like a delayed reflection; it triggers nothing, the demon is still trapped. You get the video?”

“Whatever my cell managed to capture.” I walked to the edge of the circle and bent to look at the blue talc. A few grains had spilled to the side and I gathered them up, without touching the circle itself. The powder felt oily and coarse and rough all at once. I carried it back to the tree and put it in a paper evidence bag.

T. Laine said, “This spell drained the blood from every farm animal on the property and a human and, if we guessed right, the vampires that were sacrificed in the circle.” She caught her breath and stared out over the stockyard. “Demons suck dill pickles. Come on. PsyCSI is working up a paranormal scene in New York. They won’t get here until tomorrow. Let’s get out of here before we further contaminate the crime scene.”

• • •

As she drove back to HQ, T. Laine talked as if her mouth had lost its brakes, the words pouring out nonstop. She needed to talk, the vocalization a result of what she had seen and the huge coffee she had downed on the way. And the Coke. I couldn’t forget the Coke. I was exhausted, thinking about the earth and communing with it, using a pinch of bluish powder. On the way I got a text from Sam.

Larry Aden’s first wife came to see my baby. She spotted Mindy and was caterwauling about how Mindy was supposed to be hers. I feared it might attract the Jackson crowd so I took Mindy and the dog to your place.

My sister and her dog were alone at Soulwood. Alone.

I needed to get there, but we had to tell FireWind what we had discovered and write up our end-of-day reports. The new boss met us at the top of the stairs. I touched my cell open and handed it to him. A video was worth a thousand words.

I cleaned up in the locker room and followed the sound of their voices to the break room.

FireWind and T. Laine were studying a drawing on the table. Lainie said, “This is Tandy’s rendition of Rick being spelled by Loriann when she tattooed the tat magic. Tandy was finally able to get him to talk about it some.”

The drawing was pencil on lined paper, depicting a barn and a straw-covered floor. There was a black marble square in the middle of the open floor and an iron ring, and shackles. There was a crack and a small broken place in the stone. Something about the shape of the broken place drew my attention and it took a bit to figure out why. When I did, my brain began to put things together.

To the side of the huge black stone crouched a female figure, her hands busy. And upon the black square stone a naked man was stretched, arms and legs spread. Rick. The tattoos unfinished, dark smudges.

“Rick finally got around to describing the inking. It was … pretty horrible,” Tandy said.

“Okay,” I said, putting the page down. I didn’t want to see the event of my boss’s torture. First torture. He’d been attacked and tortured by a werewolf pack too. And by Paka. Rick LaFleur had been beaten by life so badly it was hard to comprehend how he got