backseat big enough to stretch out in. At some point he had returned the tiny Fit rental and begun to drive his own, much larger Chevy. Occam took the passenger seat and we waited in the sun-heated car as FireWind and the sheriff talked to the assembled law enforcement officers and personnel. Without turning his head, Occam said, “You okay, Nell?”
“I’m still on a caffeine high so I’m good for now. But I’m’a crash soon, jist so you know.”
“I got your back,” Occam said. “And I picked up a gallon of coffee on the way. It’s in my car.”
“If I didn’t love you before? That right there would make me fall head over heels.”
“Coffee is better than roses?”
“I can’t grow or root coffee, cat-man.”
He was chuckling when FireWind got in, punched the start button, and drove us up to the crime scene tape. Occam got out, held the tape high as we rolled slowly by him, and threaded the tape over the car. I tucked my fingers into the soil of the potted tree and waited as we rolled ahead and around a bushy tree and stopped, mostly out of sight of the gathered cars behind us.
“Ingram?” FireWind said, his yellow-eyed gaze meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror. His expression was piercing, and I had a feeling he was trying to tell me something, but I had no idea what it might be. “Do not get lost in the earth.”
“Ummm. Okay?”
He opened his door and I opened mine and placed my field boots onto the ground. Occam and FireWind filled a gobag with equipment, including cameras, the psy-meter 2.0, small pyramid-shaped plastic markers—yellow for mundane evidence, blue for magical—evidence bags, yellow flags on stakes for marking dangerous places, and P3Es. We dressed out.
“Ambient magic background checks,” FireWind said. He pulled a spiral notebook from a pocket and drew a tiny map of the property. Occam began to test the psy-meter, pointing it at the four cardinal points, at the house behind us, at FireWind for skinwalker readings, at himself for were-creature readings, and at me for plant-people readings, though I was officially classified as nonhuman, paranormal, undifferentiated, plant-people not being a recognized para except among Unit Eighteen and my family.
I reached down and touched a leaf of grass. “Something here,” I whispered. “Something bad.” I stood upright, cradled the potted tree, and put my still-damaged fingers into Soulwood dirt. The tree shivered slightly, its leaves moving. It could have been the wind. But I knew better. The vampire tree was reacting to the strange energies in the land and on my fingertips.
Occam said, “Same odd readings on all four levels of magical energies. I think we got our suspect.”
“If he’s our suspect then why is he dead? He spent years in gen pop in prison,” I said, drawing on the thoughts and deductions I had made while driving. Gen pop referred to general population prisons where humans went, as opposed to being policed by the individual paranormal communities for harming or potentially being harmful to others. Witches policed witches. Vamps policed vamps. And the ones who slipped by were tracked and killed by monster hunters. Few of them ever made it to a human-populated prison system. “They scan everyone for magical energies these days to keep the mundanes safe from the big, bad dangerous paras,” I said, sarcasm in my tone. “If he’s a death-magic user, then how did he get by that?”
FireWind didn’t answer, but pointed to the right. “Widdershins twenty feet and read again.” Widdershins meant keeping the item being circled to the left-hand side, so walking counterclockwise.
Occam and I followed orders, me touching a grass leaf blade while he read with the psy-meter. And then read again in another twenty feet. And so on for a hundred feet in one direction before we retraced our steps and read the land in increments sunwise or clockwise. The earth read the same everywhere. Death energies of some strange kind were in this land. All the trees and the grass were affected, most dying.
I had been part of two previous cases of dark death arts—blood-magic curses and salamander death energies. They were supposed to be rare and maybe for the average law enforcement officer they were. Maybe if I was a deputy I’d never see one, but this was my third. And not a one of them matched the typical death magics theorized and taught in PsyLED Spook School. Not a one.