and FireWind hijacked her here instead. She’s still downstairs and she says it’s magical, but not like any magic she’s ever seen before. Something different and real bad. Hence our backup.”
T. Laine Kent was Unit Eighteen’s resident witch, and doing readings had become one of her specialties: reading DBs—dead bodies—reading crime scenes, and reading other magic users. Using a seeing working, along with a psy-meter 2.0—the highly sensitive, upgraded model—and her field experience gained at some really awful crime scenes, she could detect and identify blood magic, dark magic, and Blood Tarot spells better than the rest of us put together.
Occam pulled his phone and read his notes, his face losing its humor, his voice all cop-emotionless. “Along with local hazmat, Kent initiated CBRNEP workup.” It was pronounced ky-ber-nep, but CBRNEP was the crime scene protocol for chemical, biological, radiological/nuclear, explosive, and paranormal materials, a protocol developed by the Center for Domestic Preparedness. “So far, we’re clean on chemical, radiological/nuclear, and explosive causation. Still holding out on biological, para, or combo.”
My eyes met Occam’s and his one good eyebrow lifted in agreement with my thoughts. Biological causation would be bad. A combo would be terrifying. PsyLED brass and the military had been creating response strategies involving militarized magical energies coupled with all the other elements of CBRNEP. None of the scenarios had resulted in manageable outcomes.
Occam went on. “Kent doesn’t have a probable COD yet, but the drummer, male, and bass player, female, who started feeling sick in the basement, are on the way to UTMC-Knoxville for monitoring in the para ward.
“The coroner and Putnam County medical examiner are on-site, down there now with T. Laine, dressed in blue unis, each holding a null pen, debating how to transport the other two bodies. Current plan is to find some null biohazard HRPs for transport to UTMC. Otherwise it’s possible the bodies will be fully decomposed by the time they get there.”
Everyone, alive and dead, was going to Knoxville. It would be handy to have all the victims—patients and DBs—in one place. Even more than sixty years after the paras leaped out of the para closet, medical professionals who treated or worked on paranormal creatures were few and far between. UTMC had long been on the cutting edge of para studies.
I drew a little circle in the air with my finger. “And why does your face look like that? So unhappy underneath the cop-face mean.”
“As soon as the sheriff arrived, he called in the local FBI. The feeb SAC took Catriona in for questioning. In cuffs. She was gone before T. Laine got here.”
“Why in handcuffs? Because she’s a witch?”
“Witch. Woman. Foreigner. Young. Pick one. Or pick ’em all. From what I gather, the special agent in charge of the local FBI office hates most everyone.”
Tennessee PsyLED and FBI had not healed our professional relationship since the state’s FBI director had been outed by us as a gwyllgi—a devil dog. Not that they wanted a devil dog in charge, but the FBI embarrassment of having a deadly paranormal creature under their noses and giving them orders had been hard on the whole department. Now it was tit-for-tat at the higher levels of the state organization. The younger feebs seemed okay, but upper management and the older entrenched agents were often a problem. Occam nodded a greeting over my shoulder.
Before I could turn, T. Laine said, “Your hair is gorgeous. I officially hate you.”
The hate comment meant she was jealous of my hair—which had gone a strange shade of metallic scarlet a few months back and become wildly curly, thanks to my becoming a tree for a while. The color and curls were fading now, but T. Laine still had hair envy. I stepped at an angle to include her.
Lainie looked tired, her skin pale, purple smudges beneath her dark eyes, and her dark bobbed hair was snarled and squashed flat from the elastic strings of a bio face mask. T. Laine needed another witch in the unit to share the witchy duties, but witches who were willing to go into law enforcement were rare as hen’s teeth.
“Update, to make sure we’re all on the same page. I drove here and tested the site,” she said. “It isn’t a typical witch working or curse. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Just looking at the scene, it fits some of the parameters of a death working but falls totally outside on the psy-meter, and it’s everywhere downstairs, especially in the swag storage