Ritual Magic

TWELVE

THE San Diego International Airport handled fifty thousand passengers a day. It cozied up to the ocean without being quite on the shore; international flights came in over the water. And it looked, Lily thought, pretty much like every other airport. Lots of glass, lots of concrete, lots of cars jockeying for position on that portion of the concrete designated for passenger pickup.

She swerved in front of a bright yellow muscle truck to snag a spot by the curb. The pickup’s driver didn’t appreciate her vehicular dexterity. He leaned on his horn. She did not shoot him the finger. FBI agents don’t do that sort of thing. Besides, she didn’t need to. She’d won. He’d lost. Ha ha.

The white Toyota following her lacked a parking spot. Mike was driving it, with Todd riding shotgun . . . well, not literally shotgun. Todd had a Smith and Wesson M&P9. Nice weapon, if a bit large for her hand, but not a shotgun. Mike stopped smack in the traffic lane, forcing the line of cars to veer around him. Those drivers didn’t appreciate him, either.

She could have let Mike drive her. Probably should have. But she’d wanted to be alone. Just for a couple-three hours, she’d wanted to be alone. Being alone in San Diego traffic might not be optimal, but it was better than nothing.

After five hours’ sleep, she’d woken up to another twenty-seven reports of possible victims. Ackleford—who’d apparently not even gone home last night, grabbing a nap on the couch in his office—had flagged those cases she needed to check out personally. The rest fit so well in terms of symptoms and time of onset that she could skip them for now. She’d checked out six victims this morning before heading to the airport to pick up Karonski. Four of the six got added to their victim tally.

Her mother was still at Sam’s lair. Her sister Beth had arrived and was staying with their father, who still wasn’t speaking to Lily. Her sister Susan was staying with him, too. Susan was speaking to Lily. She’d had plenty to say, mostly about how Lily had stabbed their father in the back and how it was all on Lily’s head if Mother didn’t do well following Sam’s so-called treatment.

Lily had suggested Susan yell at Grandmother, too. Susan had hung up.

Rule had just left Clanhome, according to the mate bond. Headed for St. Margaret’s Hospital, according to the text he’d sent. He was bringing Nettie with him. Nettie Two Horses was Rule’s niece and age-mate. She was also a physician, healer, and shaman with ways of examining patients not available to her medical colleagues.

Rule had spent the morning at Nokolai Clanhome handling a disciplinary action. Discipline was one of his duties as Lu Nuncio, and there were a pair of young Nokolai in need of formal rebuking. His father would have let him reschedule, but Lily had told him not to bother, not on her behalf, at least. Then she’d had to persuade him she wasn’t playing martyr by urging him to follow through with his duties. Rule didn’t really understand her need for time alone. He accepted it, but he didn’t share it. Lupi don’t feel crowded by the presence of other clan.

Lily glanced at the dash clock. Five till noon. Karonski’s flight was on time, so he’d be out PDQ. Alone time was almost up. She sent Karonski a quick text so he’d know where to find her.

She could easily have delegated picking up Karonski, but she wanted to talk to him without other ears around. He’d want to talk to her, too. Ask questions. Ruben had briefed him, but the key word there was “brief.” However competently you deliver a verbal report, you’re summarizing. To spot a pattern, you need to dig down into the details, and when Lily talked to Karonski just before his flight was called, he hadn’t yet read her report. There’d been a last-minute snafu with the case he was passing to his trainee that had kept him busy. By now, though, he would have read it and the various reports attached to it.

Maybe he’d spotted something that had eluded her. Maybe not. Either way, he’d have questions.

Lily pulled out her iPad. She, too, had reports to read. And questions. Maybe something in one of the new batch of reports would nudge her in the right direction. There was a pattern, some commonality that linked the victims. She just hadn’t spotted it yet.

Halfway through the transcription of an interview with the daughter of victim twenty, she got a nudge . . . a teeny little poke that set up a vague itch between her eyes. She frowned and skimmed back through a couple other accounts . . . and called up the database someone at headquarters had set up. It held the basic stats about all the victims. A quick sort of that database turned the itch into a quiver, like a bird dog on point. She switched to her browser and asked Google for some statistical data. It obliged.

Knuckles rapped on the windshield. She jumped, wished she hadn’t, and popped the trunk. She opened her door and started to get out.

“Sit, sit,” the man who’d knocked on her windshield said. “The day I need help with my bag from someone I outweigh by a hundred pounds, I’m retiring.” He wheeled his suitcase back toward the trunk.

He didn’t outweigh her by a hundred pounds. Seventy, maybe, and alas, not all of it was muscle. Abel Karonski looked like he’d been born middle-aged and rumpled. Rumpled hair, shirt, skin. The hair was brown and thinning on top, the skin was pale verging on pasty, and the shirt was white with a reddish stain not quite covered by his tie. Strawberry jam, probably. For breakfast Karonski liked to have a little toast with his strawberry jam.

She felt as much as heard his suitcase thump into the trunk. A moment later he slid into the passenger seat and slammed his door. “Any word on your mom?”

She shook her head and started the car.

“You want me not to talk about her?”

“I’m trying to keep all that stuffed away. Stay focused on the job. It helps if I can focus on the job.”

“Okay.” He patted her shoulder. Karonski wasn’t a toucher, so from him, that was a hug. “So tell me why you were thinking so hard you didn’t see me until I banged on the windshield.”

Lily put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. This was made easier by the way Mike’s Toyota blocked oncoming traffic. “I finally noticed something. Maybe you already spotted it. All forty-six of our likely or confirmed victims are adults. Twenty have adult children. Twenty-two of them are fifty years and up. That’s almost half. In the general population, only one in nine people is over fifty.”

“Huh. That means something. I don’t know what, but something.” He chewed that over and nodded. “Schools. I didn’t see any mention of them in your report. Have you asked what grade school or middle school the vics went to?”

Excitement fluttered in her gut. “That’s good. That’s a good possibility. I’ve got some info on colleges, but they didn’t all go to college. We didn’t ask about lower grades.”

“You drive. I’ll call Ackleford.” He took out his phone. “We headed to the Bureau’s office?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I need to let you know that . . . Ackleford. This is Karonski. I’ll be there in fifteen or so. I know you can’t wait to see me again, but . . . heh-heh. Good to know you’re still the same shining wit I remember, though what you suggest is anatomically impossible. Listen, I’ve got something for you to do to fill the empty minutes till I get there.”

Lily listened to Karonski’s instructions with half an ear as she began winding through the concrete maze that led away from the airport. After a pause Karonski shook his head and said, “My, but you do get cranky when you’re short on sleep. Just how short are you?”

She’d tried to send Ackleford home earlier. He’d waved her off.

“That’s what I thought,” Karonski said. “After the press conference . . . hell, yeah, I’m holding a press conference. One thirty. Ida’s arranging it, so you don’t have to sully yourself by talking to any damn reporters. Once that’s done, I’ll try to struggle on without you while you catch some shut-eye.” A pause. “Because I want you on nights, that’s why.” Karonski glanced at Lily, his eyes crinkling with amusement. “Because I’ve got other shit for her to do. Yeah, yeah, but I’m the son of a bitch in charge, so you’ll have to live with it.” Another pause. A chuckle. “You do that.”

“He wouldn’t go home when I told him to,” Lily said.

Karonski put his phone back in his jacket’s inside pocket. “You’re genetically compromised in his eyes, being as how you lack that magic Y chromosome. In spite of that, he damn near complimented you. Wanted to know why I didn’t leave ‘that Yu chick’ in charge nights, seeing that you’re halfway competent.”

“You actually like him, don’t you?”

“Smartest asshole I know. He’s pissed because he didn’t think of the age slant or about checking where the victims went to school. Made it hard for him to argue that he was doing fine on almost no sleep.”

“So why are you holding a press conference? The piranhas of the press haven’t tumbled to the story yet.”

“Two reasons. First, they’re tumbling, even if they haven’t put anything on the air yet. Ida’s fielding calls about that bulletin to the hospitals. Won’t be long before someone opens his big, fat mouth to a reporter. Second . . .” His voice turned grim. “We’ve got to. Your mom lost her memory back to when she was twelve. That’s the most years any of the victims lost, with the possible exception of the one who’s in a coma. Maybe that’s what went wrong with her. Maybe she lost too many years. Even if that isn’t what happened, what if there are others like her? We need people to check on their friends, their relatives, their neighbors.”

“Hell.” Lily’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “People who live alone. I didn’t think of that. I didn’t think.”

“Yeah, so take a good thirty, forty seconds and beat yourself up about that. Or you can do like Ruben and save it for a later brood, when you’ve got more time for that sort of thing.”

So Ruben hadn’t thought of the possibility, either. That was some comfort. But Lily knew she’d missed that horrible possibility because she was distracted. Because it was her mother who was the first victim. Her mother who’d lost the most . . . so far. “I’m glad you’re here. What did you have in mind for me, since you want the Big A in charge at night?”

“You tell me.” Plastic crinkled as he opened a pack of peanuts. “You’ve got your own investigation to handle.”

“Right now, I don’t have anything. Nothing the Bureau can’t do better and faster. The only angle I can see is to keep looking for what connects the victims, and that takes manpower. That’s the Bureau’s thing.”

“Guess you need some thinking time, then.” He crunched down on a handful of peanuts. Chewed, swallowed. “Heard from the coven yet?”

“They didn’t learn anything at the restaurant, which isn’t surprising. Whatever spell or rite caused this wasn’t performed there, so there weren’t any traces from it for them to find. They’re going to work with one of the victims, though. She’s Wiccan, so she isn’t weirded out by having witches chant over her. They hope to find out something about what was done to her. What caused all this.”

“You don’t sound hopeful.”

“If Sam doesn’t have a clue, is the coven likely to figure it out?”

“If this had been a magical attack, I’d say no. If it’s spiritual, like the dragon and Seaborne say . . . Lily, you’ve got to stop thinking of this the way you would a magical attack.”

“I don’t have a way of thinking about spirit.”

“Spirit is . . .” He flopped his hand back and forth. “It can be good. Can be evil, too. I’m betting this shit lands on the evil side.”

“Do you believe in evil?”

“Yep. Do you?”

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Evil like the devil? Not so much. Evil like some—some vile, insentient force? Maybe.” She thought about it. “Death magic. The way that feels . . . I guess I do think evil is real.”

“If evil exists, then good does, too.”

“Do we have to talk about this?”

“Yes. Have you thought about the fact that your Gift doesn’t protect you from spiritual energy?”

Her mouth opened. Closed. Her stomach went hollow. “No. No, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You’ll need to draw on what you know about good to protect yourself. Religion is no guarantee of protection, but it helps. You don’t have a faith, a spiritual practice, so you need to think about what you do believe in. What you know in your gut about goodness.” He crunched down on another handful of peanuts. “Do dragons have a spiritual practice?”

“I—I don’t know. The subject hasn’t come up.” She thought that over, frowning. “Sam said spirit was capricious and personal and universal. That it was often spoken of in terms of good and evil. He said he couldn’t define it and didn’t understand it.”

“I like him.”

“What?”

“The dragon. He’s arrogant as hell, but too smart not to realize that and allow for it. In my branch of Wicca, we call spirit the great mystery. Buddhist koans point toward spirit. That’s all you can do, point in the general direction. You can’t corral it in words. You can’t use spirit the way you use magic or electricity. You can channel it, but you can’t use it, and to channel it, you have to submit to it. Not surprising Sam doesn’t understand spirit. Dragons are not good at submission.” He glanced at her, his mouth twitching up. “You aren’t, either. Plus, you want rules. Spirit doesn’t follow them. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? What does that mean, not exactly?”

“Probably what your dragon meant when he called it capricious. There’s what you might call guidelines—religions are full of ’em—but they don’t come with guarantees. You can follow the hell out of the guidelines and get a different result from one time to the next.”

Great. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Cullen said we need a saint. Drummond said I was supposed to get one. I may have found him, but I lost him again.”

“That homeless guy in your report.”

“Hardy. I don’t know if that’s his first name or last.”

“He hummed ‘Mother and Child Reunion’ at you.”

“And how did he know that song would fit? God told him?”

“Not impossible.”

“I am so not happy with the God-talk.”

“Then call it spirit instead.”

“Which can be either good or evil . . . though I still think the simplest explanation is that Hardy’s connected to the bad guys, and that’s how he knew about my mother.” She brooded on that a moment. “That’s where I need to start, I guess. I need to find Hardy. Whether he’s a saint with a mysterious source of knowledge or a bad guy, he knows things I need to know.”

“Glad you got that figured out.” More rustles from the plastic bag. “Damn. That’s all my peanuts. We’d better have lunch delivered PDQ. Don’t have much time. Mexican okay with you?”

“Fine, but I don’t see—”

“I don’t intend to talk to the press on an empty stomach. You shouldn’t, either.”

“Me? You don’t need me to—”

“Sure I do.” He tossed her a heartless grin. “Your face is better known than mine. Prettier, too. You’re gonna be right beside me at that press conference.”