into my brain, but for some reason I wanted, needed, to say the words, to confess my crime. But I didn’t. My need to unburden would, in turn, burden my friend with my sin and evil. And then she would have the additional burden of turning me in for a crime that could never be proved. So for now, I kept it to myself.
She grinned at me. “You ever need help going after the churchmen, I’ll help you bury the bodies.”
“Bury,” I murmured. “I have no need to bury bodies.” The land itself took care of that.
T. Laine looked at me oddly.
“Change of subject,” I said. “Have you asked for help from the national witch covens or whatever they’re called?”
T. Laine snorted in derision. “Bunch a pansy asses. They wouldn’t even take my call.” She scowled and said, “I mighta burned some bridges recently, when we were trying to locate the Blood Tarot.”
T. Laine had a temper. I had heard that it could sometimes be spectacular, though I hadn’t seen evidence of it yet. Innocently, I said, “Oh?”
She laughed. “Yeah. Well. Okay, so a few weeks ago I called the acting leader of the United States Council of Witches for help with closing the hellmouth and shutting the demon away permanently. She refused. I reminded her that spells used against humans fell under witch council purview. She refused again. I might have used some colorful language. She hung up on me.”
I tried not laugh, but I couldn’t hold it in.
“Right. Yuck it up,” she said ruefully. “Ten minutes are up. Let’s go be read again.” She stood and rapped on the door. It opened in a slit of blinding red sunset, shockingly bright after the dim lighting of the windowless room. Squinting, I followed, one hand on the wall and then on the less-than-sturdy railing to keep from falling and tumbling to the ground.
T. Laine and I stood together in the center of the circle and the coven pronounced us clean. I went back to the laptop and stood over it, my hand on the cover, thinking. Recently, after the Blood Tarot case, I had confessed most everything to Rick LaFleur, Soul, and FireWind. Everything except that I had a sentient tree and sentient land and that I’d killed people. And had bloodlust. If I revealed all that, I could go to jail. It was getting hard to keep track of who knew what.
I opened the laptop, signed in, and converted paper notes to files, then went back to interviewing victims of the death whatever energies, talking to them through tent walls, fleshing out the timeline, tracking the band’s movements and gigs—which meant music shows and events—on their tour. And not thinking about the fact that so many people knew various parts of my secrets.
THREE
Over the next hour, the sunlight failed and the landscape and security lights came on. Mosquitoes appeared. Unit Eighteen made progress and learned things, not all of them good.
The not-so-wonderful part had started when the driver of the vehicle transporting Stella’s housekeeper—the one in the cooler with the null pen—started feeling sick outside of Farragut. The vehicle itself broke down minutes later on I-40. The rubber parts of the engine and tires disintegrated all at once in a massive failure that nearly resulted in an accident. Within minutes of the near accident, the cooler cracked and dissolved, slopping the contaminated human remains all over the back of the vehicle, which was now on the shoulder of the interstate, surrounded by caution cones and Highway Patrol officers and a biohazard vehicle, all keeping way back.
T. Laine feared it would start breaking down the interstate there and the foundation of the house here, and then the energies might begin to leak into the ground beneath. That situation tied up T. Laine and the witches, trying to figure out how to contain or neutralize the energies that were destroying everything they came into contact with. There was no way to safely transport dead bodies, not without time spent in the null room and we needed it for the living.
To figure out how to fix the death whatever energies, T. Laine requested a visit inside the house by the entire coven of the Nashville witches. This would use up almost all of the unis, until the delivery in the morning, but Lainie convinced everyone it was necessary. I would be joining them in the basement studio to video and photograph everything, though my presence was more along the lines of