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Dragon's Teeth
Dragon's Teeth
Dragon's Teeth
Ebook402 pages6 hours

Dragon's Teeth

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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Few things in Stonefort are what they seem. This includes death. Someone is dumping mutilated bodies in the small Maine fishing village, victims of ritual murder, in places that even the town's secretive natives find hard to enter. And ghosts walk the streets – Kate Rowley's dead daughter, body never found, Morgan sons “lost at sea” with memorials lichen-crusted by decades in the private graveyard around Morgan's Castle. The Land of the Dead touches the land of the living, and ancient curses call for blood. Stones talk, to those willing and skilled enough to listen…
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 6, 2013
ISBN9781937776510
Dragon's Teeth
Author

James A. Hetley

Contemporary fantasy author James A. Hetley lives in the Maine setting of his novels The Summer Country, The Winter Oak, Dragon's Eye, and Dragon's Teeth. Place names, events, and people have been changed to protect the author from lawsuits. The weather, on the other hand, can't sue for libel and is real. He also writes as James A. Burton, with new fantasy novel Powers out in May 2012 from Prime Books. A self-employed architect, he specializes in renovation and reuse of older buildings. Some of those also show up in his stories, playing themselves. Other diverse connections to his writing include black belt rank in Kempo karate, three years in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, a ham radio license, and such diverse jobs as auto mechanic, trash collector, and operating engineer in a refrigeration plant. His wife, a professional naturalist, provides advice on the realistic limitations of dragon behavior. Unlike many other writers of fantasy, he does not have a personal cat to supervise and critique his work. However, neighborhood cats pursue him for professional-grade chin-scratching services.

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Rating: 3.5294117647058822 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Conclusion of the 'series' balancing out the Haskell's and Morgan's power by giving Kate some much needed backstory and support.It turns out that the aztec bojum from the last book managed to absorb some of Kate's Stonefort power and use it to transfer his awareness to the nearest free body, that of Kate's deceased daughter Jackie. However she's only just ambulatory and he needs a lot more power to complete his embodyment. A ritual sacrifice at moonrise would do the trick. Meanwhile the Morgans have trouble of their own, the next generation rebels as children will, Gary's hooked up with a totally inappropriate girl, and Catherine's off playing with the desert tribes - in addition to not learning her Morgan abilities. The two plot lines look like they ought to align given that Ben manages to acquire an ancient aztec stone blade alive with a blood drinking spirit.Slightly weaker than the previous book, it lacks the cohesion between plot lines that would make it great. The characters are all fun and well written. It's great to see Kate come into her own, and Jane makes a wonderful counterpoint, but the interaction between the Morgans and Haskells needs to be stronger than Catherine. There's a few jumps in the timeline which obscure critical interactions which doesn't help, and rushes through others that could have given more weight to the impact. Kate's inheritance being just one example that could have been more impressive rather than a duex et machina at the end. The Morgan storyline is not strong enough to support a book, but it interferes too much with the Haskells this time around. Worth reading, but not the highlight of the series.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Well, it's better than Dragon's Eye - there was at least one character I liked and could somewhat identify with. That it was the feral cat Jane…is interesting. I liked Caroline, too, and Gary when he stood up to his family and his father. But it's still a funny mixture of blow-things-up and native (for several values of native) magic, plus some dealings with the underbelly of modern life. Overall - interesting story, glad I read it, not going to read it again (probably) nor seek out any more sequels. Not bad but didn't grab me.

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Dragon's Teeth - James A. Hetley

Bio

Chapter One

Something smelled wrong.  Kate Rowley wrinkled her nose, sorting through truck-cab air for the difference.  Flinty, the sharp dusty semi-ozone tang she got when her mason's hammer struck sparks from a piece of granite she was shaping for a wall.  That smell didn't belong in the autumn woods.  Nobody had been striking sparks from stone in this forest for at least a hundred years.  But that's what she smelled, strong enough to reach her inside her old truck, like she was standing downwind from a quarry drill.

Kate slowed and then stopped on the narrow woods road, consciously setting the nose of her green Dodge stakebed at the head of a slope.  She switched the ignition off and set the brake and listened to the snaps and ticks and groans of cooling machinery, the only sound.  No jays, no crows, no chickadees — not even the rustling of dry leaves in the wind.  The trees, the dirt, even the stone seemed to be watching, listening, waiting.

She sniffed again, window down, nose sorting through stale cigarette smoke and oil and hot metal and cold morning coffee for whatever troubled her.  It had vanished.  She heaved the door open and climbed down, the old springs and shocks sighing with relief to be rid of her bulk.  She tended to think of her weight in tons — an eighth of a ton sounded heavier than two hundred and fifty pounds. 

And that estimate was being kind, assuming she'd lost weight in the hospital.  Kate had quit stepping on scales a couple of decades back.  Not that she was fat, just big.  She stretched the kinks out of her spine and straightened to her full six-foot-six height.

And then winced.  Week in the hospital, two months in bed and then gimping around with a cane.  Bullet wounds, shoulder and hip, mostly healed now but they still bothered her when the weather changed or she spent too long in one position.  Like sitting in the truck.  Still, the physical pain hurt less than her memories.

A raven croaked omens down at her from above the sun-dappled tunnel through ancient fat birches and maples yellow with the bloom of Maine autumn, a single lane leading down into a hollow dark with cedar.  Dry brittle weeds stood tall between the ruts, broken off where her truck had passed.  Nobody had driven this road for days, maybe weeks, and she was supposed to meet a man about an addition to his house?

Kate shook her head.  The last pavement was two miles back, the last power and phone a mile beyond that.  She'd lived in Stonefort for forty years, most years never even been out of Sunrise County, and she'd never driven on this road before. 

She reached in behind the truck seat and pulled out her tattered Maine atlas, thumbing through to the local page.  She measured distances by the scars on her finger and compared them to the scale.  Even the dotted line of a jeep trail stopped a half-mile in from the Haystack Road.  She'd assumed her map was out of date, a new road, developers selling off back land.  Wrong.

She checked her notes again, scribbled from the phone call.  Followed the turns on the map, winding inland from Stonefort Village and its harbor nestled between curved points of land.  No, she wasn't lost, rare though that would have been.  The notes sent her on another half mile into blank white space, then said turn left into a driveway.  The only driveway she'd seen in the last fifteen minutes had been the front porch of a fox den.

No money to be made here.  That voice on the phone had been playing a prank.  But Kate wore two hats.  The hardhat of carpenter-and-stonemason-turned-contractor said to find a space between the trees, turn around, and write the morning off as a nice drive in the September woods.  The part-time cop hat with the tarnished shield said bullshit. 

She was still in Stonefort Township, still in her territory as town constable and general all-around nosy fishwife, paid by the selectmen to follow gossip and know about anything odd or illegal that happened over several hundred square miles of moose and antisocial people who'd barely heard of government and didn't much care for the concept, mister man.  She ought to find out what was at the end of a road that didn't show up on her map.

A road that somebody used, often enough to keep the scrub cherries and alders from taking over, and that looked like it had been here for decades if not centuries.  She knelt and dug at the roadbed, finding cool coarse washed gravel of a made road, not the scraped dirt of loggers swamping out a clear run at their prey.  Something definitely smelled fishy.

She climbed back in and cranked the truck, crossing fingers on both hands, and the engine roared to smooth life and then settled into a purr, surprising her again.  Not even a cloud of oil smoke in the rear view mirrors.  New engine, old habits.  And the mirrors weren't cracked anymore, either.  Kate shook her head. 

Alice Haskell.  That girl knew what was good for you, and did it whether you wanted it done or not.  Hey, Charlie, could you hitch a ride out to Ayers Island and bring Kate's truck back on the ferry?  Here's the keys.  While you're at it, rebuild the bastard from winch to tow-hitch.  Probably would have cost less to buy a new truck, but Kate had turned that down.  Twice.

So Alice went around to the back door, applying the magical touch of Haskell money.  Stopping her was like trying to argue with a glacier. 

Kate called it Haskell money out of habit, less than a drop in the bucket of a considerable fortune.  Alice seemed to think of it more like a trust fund for her tribe, and apparently Kate had become an honorary Naskeag Wabanaki when she moved in with Alice. 

Anyway, Alice had handed her back the keys when they both got out of the hospital, done deal.  Take it or leave it, and a contractor needed a truck.  One that could haul its rated load of a full ton of lumber or Sheetrock for the first time in ten years was a real plus.  It even started and stopped when she asked it.

She eased the truck into gear, the clutch smooth and reliable and strange, and used the engine to brake her down the slope, four-wheel-drive and low range engaged.  Only a fool explored roads like this faster than a walk.  Washouts lurking under drifted leaves, high-centered rocks sitting in ambush, bog holes that looked like innocent puddles from a recent rain — the Maine woods had their ways of eating old roads and careless trucks.  And she didn't feel up to limping the miles back to civilization for a tow.

Down in the hollow, those cedars were old, old and tall and straight-grained and heavy with fragrance, and someone should have fed them to a shingle or clapboard mill a century ago.  Headed up the far slope, the truck rumbled into a grove of thick-boled white pines that would have left a timber merchant drooling, three and four feet through and the trunks shooting up fifty feet clean to the first limbs. 

Hairs stood up on her forearms and the back of her neck.  This road was a time-warp into another century.  She pulled up to another crest, an opening with mossy old oaks to the south and blueberry barrens rising away to the north, and stopped.  Blueberry land usually meant dry fields, sand and gravel and bare rock, should be a safe place to turn the truck.  Her odometer and the phone message said there should be a driveway . . . .

She sat and studied the sweep of low bushes red and purple with the touch of autumn, the stone outcrops scattered on the crest, the clear blue sky.  Something still set her teeth on edge.  There was a lot of commercial blueberry land tucked away in the wilds of Sunrise County, but those roads showed up on the map.

Kate grimaced, shifted, winced again, shifted again — settling into a position that minimized the aches from her hip and shoulder.  Wounds from her own gun, fired by her own daughter.  Half of the ache was memory.  She couldn't forget.  Kate shook her head and fumbled for a cigarette.

Jackie.  She stood in the middle of the trail ahead, a faint and wavery ghost, tall and muscular with short blonde hair like her mother and grandmother, a teenage scowl glooming her face.  Kate kept seeing her daughter around town, all the places she'd used to be, all the places Kate expected her to be.  Memories of pain and failure, haunting Kate.

The damnfool child had run away from home.  Moved in with friends, Pratts, an old Stonefort family with mucho money from the import/export business.  Drugs.  Turned out Jackie had been involved in that for years.  Not using, selling.  Kate had been too busy keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads to see the signs.

Alice had gone out to the old Pratt place on separate business of her own, and Kate ended up there because of a vision of fire and death right out of one of Alice's Wagnerian operas.  End result, the brat shot Alice in the back, turned and shot her mother, then ran 'round a corner and got her own self killed in a shootout with a rival drug gang.  Kate concentrated on lighting the cigarette, hands shaking the flame on her late ex-husband's battered Zippo.

Let's hear it for the modern American family.

The first cigarette in an hour or so, she drew deep and held the nicotine in her lungs like the kids held each toke of their demon Weed.  She couldn't smoke in the House, Alice's house. 

Not that Alice told her she couldn't.  She'd quit her nagging when Kate moved in, dropped her standard RN's coffin-nail rant about the threats of lung cancer and heart disease and yellow-stained teeth and smoker's breath in their kisses.  Not that there'd been much of that, the condition both of them were in.

And the House didn't seem to mind her smoking, either.  Rather otherwise.  That was the problem. 

The House, the Haskell House, ancient home of the Haskell Witches, much more aware than any pile of stone and wood ought to be and with some very strong opinions on the way the world should work, seemed to consider tobacco sacred.  And anyone who crossed its worn oak threshold lived by the House's rules.  It had unpleasant ways to enforce them.

Sure, Kate could light up a cigarette any time she wanted.  As long as she offered smoke to the four winds and to the spirits of earth and water and sky, that is, and muttered some phrases in Naskeag that she half understood.  And then dealt with the spirits that the smoke and words woke out of their ancient sleep.

Kate grimaced again, took a last long drag, and stubbed out the butt.  Then she shut off the ignition, opening the truck door and climbing down, wincing as she stepped wrong and put all her weight on that hip.

Kate felt that sense of watching again, something or someone this time, different, hostile.  Before, it had just been . . . watching.  Waiting.  Neutral.  But she couldn't see anything out of place, uphill or down, field or woods.

She studied the woods.  Glacial till, all right, boulders poking through the dead leaves to make humped lines and shadows and corners under the broad oaks. 

Right-angled corners.  Kate blinked and shook her head until her brain reset.  Glaciers didn't leave straight lines and right angles behind when they headed back to Canada for another load of rocks. 

She was staring at abandoned buildings, probably the reason for the old road.  Abandoned buildings of thick stone masonry, worn down to waist-height or lower by centuries of Maine winters and by old-growth oaks splitting the walls.  Small buildings, one- or two-room houses, maybe four rooms if they'd originally stood tall enough for an upper floor, and small sheds or barns likewise built of stone.  Not like any Maine farm she'd ever seen.

She stepped off the road and shuffled through dry leaves, nosy-poking, as much curious mason as cop.  She knew Maine construction.  The only thing like this she'd ever seen in these parts was Morgan's Castle back in Stonefort.  And that heavy plain stone tower was older than any history book would admit.  If you believed Alice, it dated back to Welsh refugees from Edward the First.

The nearest wall felt cold and damp, mossy, flakes of lime plaster stucco and mortar crumbling at her touch and rattling down into the leaves.  The stones slept.  To Kate, they felt almost as if they had been left by the last ice age, no memory of the men that laid them.  Alice said that stone and wood liked Kate, that they wanted to please her.  More of her magical mystical bullshit.  Kate just paid attention to grain and gravity.  Knowing her materials didn't count as witchcraft.

She moved along the wall to a corner, estimating distances with a practiced eye.  Yes, two rooms, if it had been a house.  Two small rooms.  No sign of a chimney, so it might have been an outbuilding.  Or maybe they just used a smoke hole in the roof. 

Her foot dropped out from under her and she jolted down to mid-calf depth, fire stabbing through hip and shoulder.  Black dots swam through her sight.  She leaned against the stone and panted, sweat cold on her forehead and tears stinging her eyes.  Then she stood up, slowly, carefully, painfully.  Fox or woodchuck hole, hidden by the fallen leaves.  She rocked her weight from side to side, listening to her body and hating what she found.

Step by limping step, she eased back out to the road, pausing halfway to lean on an oak.  She didn't dare explore the rest of the ruins.  Not by herself, not in her condition.  If she fell into the old privy, odds were she wouldn't be able to climb out. 

She wasn't used to being careful, and it galled.  She'd been hurt before, hurt bad and damn near killed, and it hadn't taken her this long to recover.  She was getting old.  Old like those stones, weathered, silver hairs scattered through the blonde.

Then a picture flashed in her head, and she knew where she'd seen stonework and a farm like this before.  In a book or magazine, Irish farmsteads abandoned since the Famine, a Scots crofter's cottage fallen to ruin, fishing villages on out-islands in the Hebrides, left open to the wind and winter when all the children moved to the mainland and the cities.  Only difference was the trees.  Those out-island photos showed bare heather and grass.

Walking seemed to ease the pain in her hip, and she couldn't face cramming herself back into the truck.  If she sat for an hour right now, most likely her body would seize up like a rusty winch.  And something about the high field drew her, those stones on the crest of the blueberry barren.  The spacing looked regular, as if they related to the ancient farm.

She climbed, slowly on the stiff incline and stiffer hip, and felt strength flow back into her from the land.  She belonged to this place, belonged to all of Stonefort.  Her body had grown from its land and sea.  So her people had only lived here for a few hundred years, as opposed to maybe a thousand for the Morgans or ten thousand for Alice's Naskeag ancestors.  That was still long enough that she could lay claim to the title native in Maine lingo.  Long enough for the stone and dirt to know her blood.

Something fluttered on the crest of the ridge, flashing white or silver in the breeze.  Trash?  Here?  Then another thought shot across her mind, and she froze — nearly turned back to the truck to get her gun and badge.  Dopers grew marijuana deep in the woods, scattered plants or whole fields of the demon Weed.  That might explain occasional traffic on an abandoned road.  And those fields usually had guards or booby traps protecting them . . .

But they'd had frosts already, even a hard freeze.  Bird season started next week, thousands of blaze orange snoops wandering through the Great North Woods looking to commune with nature through the barrels of their shotguns.  Any dopers would have harvested their pot plantation long ago.

Besides, she was more than halfway there.  Her hip didn't want her to climb down and then back up again.  And she couldn't see any tracks through the brown grass and mounded purple swathes of blueberry bushes.  Not even a deer trail, or the swirled and matted beds they'd leave.  Odd.  She sniffed.  That flinty tang was back, sharp through the mixed hay and earth and cinnamon of the barren.

 The stones sat there on the crest, rough glacial boulders, unshaped, showing about half her height above the ground, obviously moved and placed by men.  And then forgotten — gray and yellow lichen blotched them and some bore a hairy thatch of grass and heather.  As she climbed closer, they curved away from her and formed an arc, perhaps a circle.

The stone-smell closed in on her, a pressure against her skin like simmering anger.  Kate felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck.  That flashing came again, beyond the stones, rattling, the sound of plastic sheeting in the wind.

Something lay there, long, narrow, wrapped in builder's poly, displayed on a flat boulder or outcrop of ledge centered in the curve of stones.  Kate stopped and stared, suddenly chilled in spite of the clear sun on her back.  That shape reminded her too much of a body bag waiting for the medical examiner's meat wagon.  She'd seen them all too often, car wrecks and drownings and the occasional domestic.  She'd seen one just two weeks ago, her ex dead of a lifetime of whiskey and she'd found the body when he hadn't answered his phone for two days . . .

But she was a cop.  Not a cop in favor with the county DA right now, but still a cop.  She shook her head, watched her feet to avoid stomping on any clues, and crossed the last twenty or thirty feet to the center of the stone circle.

A body, fresh enough it didn't stink.  Wrapped in several layers of poly sheeting, six mil by the look of it, tied in place with green nylon net twine circling the bundle at six different points.  Nude body, apparently, or flesh-colored underwear, lumps in the plastic looked like female.  She didn't touch anything to find out more.  And then she reached the head.

Blonde hair.  Cut short.  Damned tall body for a woman, broad shoulders like Kate's own.  The ridge faded around Kate, and again Jackie flashed across her blurred eyes, face teen-age sullen.

They'd never found her body, after that shoot-out and fire at the Pratts' place.  Found blood and bone and brain tissue spattered across the gravel, but they'd never found the body.

Kate was sitting.  Her back leaned against something cold and rough.  Blueberry bushes prickly under her butt and against her arms through the sleeves of her work shirt.  Stone, stone at her back, stone solid and reliable, guarding, she'd never get shot from that direction.

Kate stared at the cell phone in her hand.  Left hand, missing half the index finger from a second's carelessness with a power saw.  Call in.  Nine-one-one, report to dispatch, easier than groaning to her feet and limping back down the ridge to her truck and the police radio under the dash.

She felt the chill of those hostile eyes again and looked up.  Jackie.  Jackie standing by the tree-line, calm, weighing, nodding, then fading into nothing like a proper ghost.  Kate's vision blurred, black dots swirling into a tunnel, and she blinked tears away.  The edge of the field stood empty again, bracken and grass and blood-crimson blueberry bushes undisturbed.

Her right hand made its own choice and poked at the buttons for a memory number, memory number one, Alice, cell phone in her car or at the hospital or wherever.  Anywhere except the House.  Cell phone wouldn't work in the House.  House didn't like it. 

Get her out here before the sheriff or the state patrol, closest real cops.  Too many things wrong.

Chapter Two

Alice tucked the foil blanket tighter around Kate's shoulders, gently forced her lover's head back down on the improvised pillow of a wadded-up jacket, and checked her temporal pulse again.  Still weaker than normal, even lying in the grass with her head downhill.  Then Alice looked up, glaring at the state trooper.  Wescott, according to his nameplate.  Not local.  Both good and bad sides to that.

"Shit, yes, I touched the body.  I used sterile gloves and left them lying on top of the plastic wrap in case they picked up any forensic goodies.  In my professional opinion, as a registered nurse specializing in ER trauma and as an EMT, my patient needed to know that corpse was not her missing daughter.  Life-or-death, extreme clinical shock.  Now fuck off!  I'm dealing with a medical emergency here."

A mix of code words and crude emphasis, shorthand that should penetrate even the thickest rote rule-book cop skull.  State troopers weren't dumb, none of them.  Even if they sometimes acted that way. 

And he could see her industry-standard EMT crash bag and her photo-ID from Sunrise General clipped to her shirt pocket and the stethoscope draped professionally across her shoulders.  Badges of authority, added to the command voice.

And since Wescott wasn't a Stonefort boy, he wouldn't know Kate was about as fragile as one of those boulders in the stone circle.  Alice was just buying herself some space.  Yeah, it sounded cold and calculating.  Her lover lay under her hands, pale and clammy and her blood pressure down around sixty from shock, and the Haskell Witch subprogram had taken over Alice's brain, manipulating people and weighing which of their buttons to push. 

It worked.  The cop left, shaking his head. 

But that trooper would be asking some damned awkward questions if he ever found out that Alice landed on the crime scene at least half an hour before the nine-one-one call.  That she'd studied the wrappings and the knots on that do-it-yourself body bag before untying and opening it up to find out what was inside, to look for clues that the Medical Examiner would never understand.  Photographing stuff with her digital camera.  And then closing everything back up and matching all the original knots, including the botched ones.  Whoever had wrapped that package wasn't a sailor or a fisherman.

Kate opened her eyes and stared up into nothing, unfocused, blue sky reflected in sky-blue eyes.  Alice glanced over at the cops and forensics guys, checking just which way they were looking, and then bent down and gently kissed her on the forehead.  She fed power through her hands, feeling it drain out of her own body and wake up the ache in her back and chest.  Do much more of that and she'd end up on a gurney herself.  But Kate's eyes came back into focus, and her pulse strengthened.

Just lie there.  That wasn't Jackie.  Just lie still and let the earth give you strength.

Kate shook her head, slowly, as if it hurt.  They never found her body.

Alice nodded.  "They never found any of the bodies.  We know people died at the Pratts' place.  We know people died in that cigarette boat that blew up and sank out in the bay.  No bodies, anywhere.  But that girl wasn't Jackie.  Big kid, maybe, but three or four inches shorter than either of you, most likely a couple of years too old, and she wasn't a natural blonde.  Brown roots."

Not to mention the nipple ring and a couple of raunchy tattoos.  But Kate didn't need that level of sharing.

And the kid's heart was somewhere else, along with four or five liters of blood.  Bled dry like a slaughterhouse pig, but not by slitting her throat.  Big jagged hole in her chest, with a tiny razor-sharp flake of obsidian imbedded in the cut end of one rib, a flake that Alice had left in place for the M.E. to find and puzzle over.  Anyway, the shadowy perp hadn't killed that girl here.  But the stones still felt angry.

Kate wrinkled her nose.  Sooner or later we're going to have to talk to them.

Sooner.  The ground seemed to throb under Alice, Maine granite sending code to the base of her spine where she squatted in the grass.  "Talk to them here.  That'll cut down on the awkward questions."

"Huh?"  Kate hoisted herself up on one elbow, blinking as if her brain fuzzed with the move.  Then her skin flushed slightly from its pale, waxy color.  Blood pressure rising.  Good, even if it was her temper.

"Talk to them here, Alice repeated.  But you may have to bring the Forensics team back again tomorrow.  They'll have a hard time finding the place without you.  Harder time remembering what they've found.  They'll have trouble recalling anything they didn't write down or photograph."

Kate's skin reddened further, almost back to normal, and her eyes narrowed.  She sat up.  "They'll have a hard time finding the place?  Remembering?  You been getting into the scheduled drugs at the hospital?"

You'd think the girl would start to believe in magic, the things she's been through.  "The stones like you.  Damned if I know why, but they wanted you here.  You.  Then you called me, and then you called dispatch.  If you hadn't been here, if the stones didn't know you, none of us could have found this place.  Can't you feel it?" 

That Power crawled over Alice's skin, helping her help Kate.  But it focused on Kate, only using Alice because she was available.

Kate frowned.  Feed it to your roses.  Somebody called me.  Set me up.  Since when do rocks use telephones?

Silicon, kiddo.  Silicon and germanium and gallium and a bunch of other minerals.  And copper and aluminum and gold.  That's what they make computers out of.  Computers and radios and cell phones.  And rocks.

The Power flowing through this place nearly stood Alice's hair on end.  She couldn't use it, it wouldn't feed her magic, but by the Jesus she sure could feel it.  Couldn't use it except to help Kate.

Kate shook her head and rolled her eyes.  Crazier than a shithouse rat.  And you ain't even pretty.  Damn good thing you're rich.  Weren't for that, they'd have tossed you in the nut bin before you were out of diapers.  But her face softened while she spoke, fond smile lines tugging at the corners of her mouth and eyes. 

Alice felt her heart twist around in her chest.  The big ox wasn't going to die on her.  The big, scarred, numb-as-a-stump-but-she's-good-with-her-hands ox who didn't believe in magic wasn't going to take her magic away.  Besides that personal thing, the House needed her.

Kate shoved over onto her hands and knees, winced, and then stood up, swaying.  Alice didn't try to help her.  With the difference in their sizes, the best she could do was stand by and try to break the fall if Kate passed out.  The shock wasn't an act.  Kate really had thought she'd found her daughter's body.

But as for acting . . .

Just tell them what we talked about.  I got here a few minutes before the first cruiser, you don't know the exact time.  I was closer when I got your call, nothing suspect there.  I peeled enough plastic back to see that the corpse wasn't Jackie's.  By then, you'd flopped on your face in the blueberries and everything else is fuzzy.  Trust me, they won't ask a lot of questions.  The stones won't let them.

"Shit they won't.  DA tried to get the town to fire me.  State cops won't talk to me on the radio, always just out of range when I transmit.  MDEA and the Feds think I ratted out that drug raid over at Tom Pratt's, because Jackie was there and I'd heard ahead of time the raid was going down.  That left 'professional courtesy' stinking like a week-old roadkill skunk.  I turn up with a murder in the puckerbrush, you think they won't sniff it up one side and down the other?  'Specially if I'm the only one who can find it?"

That flinty smell had returned, the first thing Alice had noticed when she got out of her car.  The stones own this place.  They say what will happen and what will not.  Trust them to protect you.

Kate looked like she'd bitten a lemon.  "Lying to cops.  Interfering with a crime scene.  I used to be a cop, dammit!"

Still are.  You're just exactly the kind of cop that Stonefort wants.  That's why the selectmen didn't fire you.  And you aren't lying.  Just not telling everything.  Nobody ever does.

Not that the town selectmen would ever fire the Haskell Witch's lover.  All of them came from old Stonefort families.  They knew.  And even without that, foreigners like the DA could go to hell.  If it came to a vote, more than half the town would decide to blow up the Salt Hay Bridge and ignore Sunrise County, ignore Maine, ignore the rest of the Boston States.

Kate limped away, over to the clump of uniforms hovering next to the stone circle.  Alice winced, sighed, and shook her head.  Those wounds lingered.  It seemed almost like Jackie had rubbed poison on the slugs before she fired.  The kid had sucked life from her mother since before she was born, and now she continued from beyond the grave.

If she had a grave.

Wescott intercepted Kate, fancy folding aluminum clipboard in hand, got to get those forms filled in.  She settled herself on one of the boulders, moving carefully, shoulders slumping.  She still didn't bend very well.  Then her back stiffened and her shoulders drew back as the land fed strength to her, free gift.  That girl didn't believe in magic?

Alice rubbed her eyes, shuddered, and opened them again, hoping the scene had changed.  It hadn't.  She'd seen this stone circle in a nightmare the House had brought her more than once.  A nightmare of Kate standing behind that stone altar with a bronze knife in her hand, Kate dressed in some Medieval get-up of baggy handwoven wool trousers and pullover wadmal top and a garland of mistletoe around her straw blonde hair, and the sacrifice lying naked on the stone was also Kate.

The House remembered things.  The ghosts that haunted the House remembered things.  Alice had never stood on this ridge before, but some ancestor had.  Had seen sacrifices here, had seen blood soaking into that stone.

And that scene was Kate.  If Kate thought she had to do something, she did it.  Whatever it cost her.  You'd get farther trying to talk gravity into giving up.

Another uniform split from the group by the stones and headed across the field, brown and tan instead of blue-gray, a sheriff's deputy.  Questions for Alice.  She made a show of gathering up her gear and repacking the crash bag, slow, precise, setting things so she wouldn't have to search the next time she needed nanoseconds.  Stripped off her gloves.  Tucked them away for bio-waste disposal.  Tobacco stink invaded her space, another smoker, cigars this time.  Cheap cigars, rum-soaked crooks.  Alice looked up.

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