whatever; I was getting nowhere; I was feeling marginally gripey; and I was wondering when Tandy would arrive. He was the unit’s empath and was normally present at questionings, but he was nowhere to be seen yet. Not that anyone was telling me anything. I might no longer be a probationary agent, but it was taking far too long for the stigma to wear off. Hence the gripey.
I worked until T. Laine called to me. “Ingram? Your turn to be read by the witches.”
The air had cooled in the late afternoon, but it wasn’t cold enough to create the shivers that suddenly quivered along my bones and pebbled my skin. My feet felt leaden as I crossed the lawn. It was all I could do to step through the witch circle and not run before Astrid could close the circle behind me. I was all kinds of self-conscious and crossed my arms, holding my elbows as I took a place in the middle of the witch circle. The coven and T. Laine looked at me. That was it. They looked at me as the wind cooled, sharpened, and blew through the horse farm.
Standing in the chalk circle, witches looking me over, brought slivers of odd memories to the surface, one of me standing in the middle of a circle, long ago, as someone decided I wasn’t a witch. The next memories were an overlapping batch: the sound of a man’s voice as he demanded me for his bed; the same man reaching for me in the greenhouse; the smell of fresh-baked berry pie on the air where I hid in the kitchen as that voice informed Daddy for the third time that I was “ripe” and that he wanted me; the fear that clotted my heart as my father calmly said he would think about it. I had been twelve.
“Nell?”
I flinched and looked up. Tried to focus past the memories and into T. Laine’s dark eyes. Dark hair, nearly black, caught the wind, tangled in her eyelashes. I caught a breath and it sounded strange, squeaky. My arms were aching and my fingers were stiff as I peeled them off me. I was shaking.
“Nell?” she asked softer. “You okay?”
I nodded before I thought. Because no. I wasn’t okay, and my friend knew it. “Memories,” I managed. “Bad ones.”
She gave a slight head tilt that meant she heard me, and that others were listening. She took my arm and led me from the circle, away from the witches. “We should have a girls’ night out and blow off some steam.”
“I don’t know how to blow off steam,” I said, blinking away the dryness that burned my eyes. “Churchwomen don’t blow off steam, we—they—redirect it.”
“I’ll bet they do,” she said, sounding grim. “But you broke that mold. You, JoJo, Margot, and me? We’ll have a few, maybe do some line dancing, and indulge in girl talk. Soon. For now”—she glanced at the driveway—“you need time in the null room. You’re covered with what we’re currently calling death energies.”
My heart went all aflutter. Death energies was more specific than death whatever. Death energies sounded like a new thing. Not witch magics. Not . . . not anything I understood. I couldn’t go home with death on me. I might harm my sisters, could damage Soulwood.
“So am I,” she continued. “The coven wants us both inside the null room for ten-minute segments, with readings in between, to see how long it takes to break down the energies on nonhumans. We can talk.”
“I don’t want to talk,” I said.
“Then we can just sit there in silence. Come on.” She plucked at my sleeve and I followed her to the portable null room trailer, up the back ramp, and inside. Someone shut the door behind us, leaving me with T. Laine and six chairs. She pushed me to one and took another, sitting. She glanced at her watch and back up to me. I had been afraid we’d be in the dark, but there were lights in the ceiling and someone had run in an extension cord.
The cold of the null workings impregnated into the plywood walls of the six-by-twelve windowless trailer sent sharp shafts of ice into my veins. “I get that witches know I’m not human,” I said. “They got seeing workings. But it seems odd to use me as a test subject, as I’m the only one of my species on-site.”
“Null rooms are easier on us than on Occam, and they already tested