by Faith Hunter
“Oh now,” she breathed. “This thing here—” She pointed. “You may have something. But . . .” She curled her index finger down and stepped away from the photo on the screen. “I’d rather no one had ever found that.”
“Why?”
“Because that there”—she pointed again—“is a witch working. And it will point at us, damn it all to hell ’n’ back.” She called, louder, “Lainie girl. May we trouble you for a bit of time?”
T. Laine stood slowly, found her balance, and made her way from the stoop to the fence. “What?” she asked, her tone breathless and curt at all once.
Etain jutted her chin at me. “Show her.”
I angled my tablet to her, showing the photos of the box of T-shirts, taken over the course of the day. “Inside the T-shirt box.”
T. Laine flashed through several and narrowed them down to two she thought interesting. She went back and forth between photos, whispering comments about spoons and sex, which made Etain smile wryly. Finally she looked at Etain, her eyes wide in a face that was still too pale. “It’s a trigger?”
“Aye. A witch-made trigger, I’m thinking. A trigger not a one of us would be willing to touch, for fear it might be weaponized to explode.”
T. Laine said, “I’ve been operating on the idea that because the energies weren’t typical witch energies, it meant witches weren’t involved in the creation of it. Death energies, yes, but no witch energies, no witch workings or curses. Yet now we have a trigger that is probably a witch-made device and working.”
“Or we may not. This thing might be something other than a trigger. Everything in that basement is disintegrating,” Etain said, “including the maybe-trigger, maybe-not-a-trigger.” She looked into the night, her attention on her coven, watching the latest member with compassion, but also with a good dollop of amusement, as the woman vomited into the grass. Etain chuckled under her breath as the witches tried to get over their reactions to the stench, all breathing deeply, one lying on her back, facing the sky, breathing through her mouth, making little erp sounds.
“Trigger?” I asked. “Like a handgun trigger?”
“Ummm.” Still talking to Etain, T. Laine said, “Okay. So . . . the death whatever energies were in the box, but contained? Perhaps with a secondary null working over the shirts to protect them?”
Etain shrugged, her black T-shirt barely moving in the dark. “That theory weighs with a bit of logic, since the T-shirts have decomposed more slowly than anythin’ else.”
“Either the band left the box here, untouched,” T. Laine said, “or it came after the band left for the tour. But it couldn’t have come through the mail prepared to detonate. If this thing is a trigger, it was carried in and positioned on-site. It would never have survived shipping intact.”
“It woulda been tilted and turned over at some point, and the death woulda begun spreading,” Etain agreed. “But it’s far more than death energies.”
“But why didn’t Stella or her housekeeper come downstairs in the two days before they died?” T. Laine asked. “She had a brand-new studio. You can’t tell me they didn’t come down here.”
“Coming to admire is different from coming to work,” I said. “And she had been away from her horses for weeks.”
Something tickled at the back of my brain and I frowned. “It’s death and it’s decay.”
“A double whammy,” T. Laine said, shoving her hair up and away from her eyes.
Etain’s mouth opened in an O and she shook her head. “I never saw such a thing.”
“Explain, please,” I said.
T. Laine waved a hand to shut me up, saying, “We’re brainstorming.” To Etain she said, “A double whammy. The energies—we’ll call them death and decay, for now—were fully released when the box was opened. But if the condition of the studio is an indication, it had been leaking for some time, the energies accumulating above the shirts but not harming them.”
“Against the laws of physics, unless the shirts were beneath a barrier of some sort,” Etain said. She pronounced it “barer,” but with a strange burr of sound. It took a moment for me to figure out what she meant.
“Yes. Right,” T. Laine said. “So maybe a ward over the shirts, keeping the energies above them until the energies accumulated enough inside the box to begin to waft out. Then moving out of the box, and along the floor, like some gases are heavier than others and stay at ground level.”
“Until they are stirred up by passing people. A witch created that trigger,” Etain said, sadly, “and most likely the barrier.”
“Yes,” T. Laine said, her fingers sliding from photo to photo. “I agree. Could be a witch-for-hire who made amulets charged with a one-time working without knowing how they might be used.”
“We can hope. No self-respecting witch woulda done something like this, killed and injured all these people.”
T. Laine grunted. “I’ve been in law enforcement long enough to disagree. There are evil people everywhere. I think I’ve got it figured out.”
Etain leaned in to hear better.
“The person who set the trigger—as opposed to the person who designed it—inserted a silver wire between the paper sides of the cardboard lid, with the wire’s other end trailing down through a tin lid and into a glass jar. There was a hole punched through the tin lid and the wire rested in the bottom of the jar, bent into a triangle. There was likely an amulet there, though we didn’t find one.”
“Here.” I leaned in and paged through my pics to the jar with the clear, pale green liquid in the bottom. “Can an amulet be made of liquid?”
“Well. Wouldja look at that.” The witches exchanged glances. “Mind if I show this to the rest of the coven?” Etain asked T. Laine.
“Might as well,” T. Laine groused. “I’m going to get canned for letting the coven take part in trying to stop the working and therefore messing up a potential crime scene anyway. Because God knows, if that’s a trigger, this is clearly a crime scene.”
“Unless the death and decay is something different,” I said, “and unrelated to the trigger and the box of shirts. We have a theory, not indisputable results.”
T. Laine blew out a hard breath and slapped at a mosquito, looking out over the dark grounds, frustration etched into her face.
“What if it isn’t a curse?” I asked. “What if it’s just nature speeded up.”
T. Laine stared at me, her expression intent. “Go on.”
“We all die and decay. What if this is just normal, natural things speeded up?”
“That . . . makes sense,” she said.
“Astrid,” Etain called out. “Come ’ere. The earth spriggan has a photograph of what might be a peculiar trigger amulet.”
“Earth what?” I said, startled.
“Spriggan.” She looked me up and down. “But you’re too pretty be a spriggan. More a sprite, I’m thinking. What? You can’t tell me ya didn’ know.” A line formed between her brows. “A sprite is a supernatural, like a fairy or elf. An ethereal entity. You did know?”
“I was called a yinehi by a Cherokee woman. She said I smelled of earth and the little people. Or a brownie.”
“Well then,” she said, as if that explained everything. “But y’re no’ a brownie.”
“What’s the difference between a spriggan, a sprite, and a brownie?” I asked, curiosity shooting through me. Curiosity and hope. This woman might know what I was.
“A brownie is a household paranormal who does chores in return for a safe place to live and food to eat.”
I stilled. That sounded like what I had been when I lived with John and Leah Ingram.
“Spriggans are bug-ugly haints. Sprites are fairy creatures.” She tilted her head. “Yeah, so you’re a sprite.” She took the laptop from my fingers and showed Astrid. “Greenish liquid.” She pointed to the last photo. “Do you
be thinking the bottle burned and the liquid was used up in the energies?”
“Interesting,” Astrid said. “A trigger. This may explain everything.”
“Not to me,” I said, wanting to return to fairy creatures and sprites, but the conversation had moved on. I would have to add those terms to the list of research into what Mud, Esther, and I might be.
“If it’s a trigger, then it was set to discharge, if you will, when the box was opened,” Astrid said. “However, before the lid was opened, some of the liquid amulet could have evaporated through the hole in the lid, coating the silver wire, which is why we’re seeing the low-level but widespread decay and then the fast-acting decay later. The curse slowly entered the air and the first women who went to the basement this morning breathed it in for, what? Over an hour? Then died. The ones present when the box was opened got the highest concentration of the energies, but for a much shorter time.”
“Monica Belcher got the pure dose,” I said.
“When Belcher opened the box,” T. Laine said, “she was hit with massive energies.”
“A preservation working, to keep the box and the shirts in a form of stasis,” Astrid suggested. “A preservation working could have been calculated to not break down the shirts or the box until the trigger was activated. If a witch did this, if it was a witch-made trigger, it’s a very sophisticated, layered mechanism.”
“But the shirts are still breaking down more slowly than anything else in the room,” I said. “Things were breaking down before the box was opened. So . . . it’s in the air.” Dread filled me.
“You’re saying that death and decay was in the air we were breathin’,” Etain said.
“Breathe in and out,” T. Laine commanded me. She looked me up and down, using a seeing working as I breathed. Etain joined her, both of them silent. “I missed it. You’re right,” she said to me. “It’s in us, small odd little magics on each exhalation.” She looked around. “So that means those of us who spent the most time in the basement need more null room time. It’s magic, but I don’t know what kind.” She shook her head. “Maybe it’s speeded-up nature, like you said.”
“It’s glad I am that I’ll be spending more time in the null room, then,” Etain said, “but ma sister is in jail and has no access to the null room and she was down there, in the basement.” She looked at her watch and blinked away sudden tears.
“I’ll find a way to get her a null pen,” T. Laine said. “We also need to find a way to get the T-shirts and the potential trigger into the null room,” T. Laine said, “along with what’s left of the bodies. We could put them in coolers, but there’s no way to carry all that safely up the stairs.”
“Open the French doors and back the trailer inside the basement,” I said. “Shovel it all into the null room.”
“Well, slap me silly,” Astrid said, whirling and striding away, her black skirt flaring wide.
“What just happened?” I asked Etain.
The girl laughed. “That meant we witches should ha’ thought of it, though I never knew there were doors down there. I thought it was all windows. Come on. Let’s get your cowboy and go stand in the null room again together. Like a threesome but without the fun. Maybe he has a brother?”
“No,” I said. “He doesn’t. And he’s taken and we aren’t interested.”
“No ring on your finger says different.”
I scowled at her, my very best churchwoman scowl, and Etain grinned.
“I’m teasing you. I admit it’s mostly to keep ma mind offa ma family. I promise not to poach on your man. Or on you, though you’re cute as a bunny when you frown.”
* * *
* * *
All the witches agreed that death and decay wasn’t witch magic, not that local law enforcement understood the difference. They were more prosaic. If it walked like a duck, paddled like a duck, and quacked like a duck, it was a duck. As stars came out, small groups of deputies, investigators, hazmat people, paramedics, witches, and band members spent crowded half-hour intervals in the null room to remove any lingering traces of the energies we had breathed in, potential internal effects that didn’t register on an outward scan of our bodies with either a typical seeing working by the witches or use of the psy-meter.
Etain got her wish and the three of us spent a crowded half hour together in the null room with the other Nashville coven members and T. Laine. A very uncomfortable half hour. The Irish witch seemed to have come to a conclusion and might have been flirting with me. She tried flirting with T. Laine, who rolled her eyes and told the young witch to find greener pastures, whatever that meant. And then, as if she couldn’t help herself, Etain looked from her watch and her cell and once again eyed Occam.
While she made eyes at my cat-man, I went green in the deeps of my heart, jealousy green. That jealousy poked at old memories, old sorrows like bruises on my soul, reminding me what it had felt like to be married to John. In the eyes of the church we had been wed, but I had known that Leah was his wife for real, the woman he loved. Sharing his bed. Being the female head of the house. Even though I hadn’t loved John in a romantic way, even though I hadn’t wanted his physical attention, I had always been the second wife, the lesser wife, the wife who came to them with nothing—or so I had thought—a beggar with no way out.
That lesser position had created feelings in my twelve-year-old heart I hadn’t understood then and still didn’t now—a strange type of impotent jealousy built of enforced subjugation and insignificance. It was the recognition of lack of power and lack of value and importance in our shared household, in my small world.
Etain was clearly an inveterate flirt, perhaps made worse because her family was in trouble and she was distracting herself. Her flirting likely meant nothing to her, but in my mind she was indeed poaching on my cat-man. And in a small way, I hated her for that. And hated myself for hating her because I knew the jealousy was a weakness inside me.
After our half hour of enforced close proximity and my greenness, Etain and the others took off to do witchy things and Occam and I went to my car. Silently, I shared a packet of commercially packaged salmon jerky and some of my homemade fish-flake protein bars made for the werecats. After the stench of Stella Mae’s house and the uncomfortable time in the null room with a witch who was looking for a companion or two to break into the county lockup and then spend the night with, I wasn’t very hungry. I nibbled. The salmon was pretty good. The protein bars needed more salt and I’d adjust the recipe next time. Occam added a packet of ketchup to his and thought it was delicious. Cats. He grinned at me in the dark, his scarred face pulling up on one side. “You should try it,” he said, knowing what I thought of ketchup. “It’s good on eggs with Tabasco, good on burgers, good on anything.”
I made a face that said plainly, Gross, and he laughed. And added another packet of ketchup to the bar.
As we ate, we watched the witches back the null trailer around the house and inside the basement entrance where T. Laine and Astrid, wearing all the null pens and the very last two unis, would attempt to shovel the T-shirts inside. The hope was to break the death and decay so the coven could study the suspected trigger, prove this to be a crime scene, prove the deaths were intended and not an accident.
I discovered later that the energies in the T-shirt box were so powerful the shovel fell apart halfway through the chore. The bodies were mostly mush and bones scraped into coolers and tossed into the trailer with cut scraps of carpet from where they had lain. After handling the remains, the two witches also had to sit in the trailer. Astrid and T. Laine emerged deathly ill from the stink, but free of contamination, and once they were free, the coven sealed the null trailer and set a twelve-hour timer to completely deactivate the shirts, carpet scraps, and bodies.
As we ate, deputies and witches ran around like ants. Overworked paramedics took the last of the patients to UTMC. Law enforcement changed out shif
ts except for us; we had no replacements. Official vehicles drove away. Etain flashed across the driveway, modern and trim and everything I wasn’t. I looked down at my hands in the dark: square, hardworking hands, calloused from gardening, hauling dirt, splitting wood, and shoveling snow. My woody nails. Occam said, “I reckon we should go see what’s happening, but”—he took a deep breath—“I’m too tuckered out to care right now, Nell, sugar.”
“I don’t care either,” I said, because I was busy thinking about the green footprints tracking through my soul. As I watched Etain dart across again, I was aware that Occam watched me.
Occam pushed the vampire tree’s crate to the middle of the dash, out of the way, and said, a soft cat-purr in his voice, “I love you to the full moon and back, Nell, sugar.” Which was exactly the right thing to say.
It reminded me that Occam had given me his heart and my own melted. But . . .
“You got something on your mind, woman,” he said softly, the entire state of Texas in his drawl. “Spit it out.”
I frowned, thinking. There were so many things that could or might get in the way of our relationship. Simple things like me being jealous. Or growing leaves. Or him being moon-called and needing to mate with a female werecat. Did he want that? A werecat woman?
I swiveled in the seat to face him, bending one knee under the steering wheel. “I come from a polygamous background, Occam. Jealousy was a prevalent and pervasive problem, and some men used it to keep their women in line. I understand that a lot of men need to feel attractive to younger and prettier women, and I know I ain’t a cat-woman and that you might want one someday. And I know that mating urge might, or could, maybe, be stronger than usual in you right now since you been so puny looking for the last few months and I—”
Occam coughed out a cat laugh, stopping my words. “Nell, sugar, forgive me for interrupting, but I gotta say this before you say anything that might be the beginning of our first argument.” He leaned in slightly and took my chin in his hand, turning me to face him. He stroked along my jaw with the pad of his thumb, his fingers heated and gentle. He held my gaze with his. Something that might have been lust filled his eyes and they glowed pale gold. His voice a cat growl, he said, “Puny looking? I looked like a horror movie for the last few months and it never bothered me one whit.”
