The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

"Pretty bad," I said. I hesitated before I went on, but after all, I'd just pulled the information from his files. All the same, I lowered my voice: "Three soulless ones bom within that circle in the past year."

Three?" His face went suddenly haggard as he made the skin of the cross. Then he nodded, as if reminding himself.

"Yes, there have been that many, haven't there? I talked with the parents each time. Thatfs so hard, knowing they'll never meet their loved ones in eternity. But I hadn't realized they were all so dose to that accursed dump."

An abbot does not use words like accursed casually; when he says them, he means them. I wasn't surprised he hadn't noticed the apsychia cluster around the dump. That wasn't his job. Comforting bereaved families was a lot more important for him. But the Thomas Brothers collected the data I used to draw my own conclusions.

"Elf-shot is up in the area, too," I said quietly.

"It would be." He got up from behind his desk, set heavy hands on my shoulders. "Go with God, Inspector Fisher. I think you will be about His business today."

I didn't even twit him about turning One into Three, as I might have if I'd come out of his scriptorium with better news. Blessings are blessings, and we're wisely advised to count them. I said. Thank you. Brother Vahan. I just wish I thought He was the only Power involved."

He didn't answer, from which I inferred he agreed with me. Wishing I could have come to some other conclusion, I went out to my carpet and headed over to the Devonshire dump. I drove around it a couple of times before I set down.

Scout first, then attack; the army and the EPA both drill that into you.

Not that I learned much from my circumnavigations. You think dump, you think eyesore. It wasn't like that. From the outside, it didn't look like anything in particular, just a couple of square blocks with nothing built on them, nothing, at least, tall enough to show over the fence. And even that fence wasn't ugly; ivy climbed trellises and spilled over inside. If you wanted to, you could probably climb those trellises yourself, jump right on down.

You'd have to be crazy to try it, though. For one thing, I was certain catchspells would grab you if you did. For another, the ornaments on the perimeter fence weren't just there for decoration. Crosses, Magen Davids, crescents, Oriental ideograms I recognized but couldn't read, a bronze alpha and omega, a few kufic letters like the ones that lead off chapters of the Qu'ran… Things were being controlled in there. Things you wouldn't want to mess with.

They weren't being controlled well enough, though, or babies around the dump wouldn't come into the world without souls. I dribbled a few drops of Passover wine onto my spellchecker, murmured the blessing that thanked the Lord for the fruit of the vine.

The spellchecker duly noted all the apotropaic incantations on the wall… and yes, there were catchspells behind them. But it didn't see anything else. I shrugged. I hadn't really expected it to: its magical vocabulary wasn't that large.

Besides, if the sorcerous leakage from the dump was so obvious that anybody with a thirty-crown gadget from Spells 'R'

Us could spot it, Charlie Kelly wouldn't have needed to send me out to look things over. Still, you'd like things to be easy, just once.

There was a parking lot across the street from the entrance.

I set my carpet down there, chanted the antitheft gear before I climbed off it I do that automatically; Angels City has had big-city crime for a long time. Leave a carpet unwarned for even a few minutes and you're apt to find it's walked with Jesus.

I crossed in the crosswalk. They still call it that here, though in a melting pot like Angels City it also has symbols to let Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Parsees and Buddhists, and several different flavors of pagan (neo and otherwise) get from one side of the street to the other in safety. I don't know what you're supposed to do if you're a Samoan who still worships Tanaroa. Run like hell, I suppose.

The entryway to the Devonshire dump projected out several feet from the rest of the wall. A guard in a neat blue denim uniform came out of a glassed-in cage, tipped his cap to me. "May I help you, sir?" he asked politely, but in a way that still managed to imply I had no legitimate business making him get off his duff and step outside.

I flashed my EPA sigil. At a toxic spell dump, that effectively turns me into St. Peter - I'm the fellow with the power to bind and loose, at least. The guard's eyes widened. "Let me call Mr. Sudakis for you. Inspector, uh, Fisher, sir," he said, and ducked back into his cell. He grabbed the phone, started talking into it, waited for his ear imp to answer, then replaced the handset in its cradle. "You can go in, sir. I'll help you."