dump and several buried foundations, the remains of a small community. Miles away, but still close enough to feel it, was Soulwood, basking under the fall sun, soaking up energy and sunlight. I didn’t call on it, and eased away, back toward my body.
Closer to me were foundations of outbuildings, animal bones from where farmers had slaughtered their meat. Three small dumps were filled with broken glass and pottery and rusting tin cans, a coil of rusting barbed wire, rusting chicken wire, corroding farm implements. I pulled into myself and pushed out again, concentrating on the house and the young woods.
I found the stone circle and wrapped around it, staying outside, tasting and testing the ancient magics within. The circle was composed of rough-shaped oval stones standing upright, each about two feet above the surface and one below. Twelve of them had been set in place, in a nearly perfect circle but not equidistant apart, not clock-like. Four stones were at the primal compass points; others were in odd positions, maybe to match the stars or the moon or the equinoxes. Something witchy. All the stones were the same marble that I had felt below the ground, as if part of the jutting slab had once been exposed and chiseled out and used by the landowners. I marked the location of T. Laine and Occam, who were pacing widdershins outside the stones. There was something within the circle, something warm and sleeping but not dangerous. I would come back to it.
I eased away from the stone circle and found more of the marble. The buried foundations of the burned house were made of the stone, along with the buried hearthstones, cracked and hidden in the tall grass. The long-gone barn had stood on marble stones at the four corners, now buried beneath the ground. The beautiful stone had been removed from the earth and then been reclaimed by it. It seemed fitting. I found more marble near the dry creek, a single large rounded stone that had fallen over.
Near the boundary of the property, I found another circle. This one was newer, perhaps only ten years old, located near a narrow gravel road. Like the others, the circle was overgrown. Or it had been. Now it was laced with death and decay. A thin trail of the energies led off beneath the ground.
I pulled back to my body, wrapped a tendril of Soulwood around my wrist, and followed the trail. It didn’t lead far. The connection circled back to the land near Crossville, where Cale Nowell had lived, where the kettles had been kept, and where the dissolved bodies had been poured. There was a third circle there, buried beneath almost two feet of . . . graveyard dirt and lye chemicals, stones I hadn’t been able to discern when reading from the site itself, due to the intensity of death and decay there. I’d nearly died, trying to read there. Now I was coming from underground, and the circle near Cale’s was obvious, two feet beyond the shed.
Someone had dug out the soil within the circle and filled it in with graveyard dirt. Liquefied bodies had been poured into it, several of them. Three? Five? More? The liquefied bodies and magic had created a strange, dark place. A place of shadows and sparking power, black and deep and murky. I studied it and realized that the place where the potted vampire tree had died was a place to store power. Power that felt a lot like death and decay. A lot like, but not exact. Not quite. The energies had been gathered there, stored there, for years. Perhaps as long as a decade.
I circled around the . . . power sink was as good a term as any. A place where unused power had been sent to . . . what? Do nothing? And then it hit me.
This was more than storage for dark energies. It was a battery for power that could be used to kill.
A vibration thrummed through my connection to Soulwood, and I allowed it to draw me back and back to the small circle on the far edge of the Ames property and then farther, back to my body near the house. I took a breath. Another. Before I allowed myself to stop, I reached out and felt the warm magics inside the stone circle that was so close. I circled the twelve stones. Placed my awareness against the stone at the north point, and