Etain took several, her teeth crunching the first. She lifted a water bottle from the third fence rail, swished her mouth with water, swallowed, then crunched again, and swished some more. “Brilliant,” she said.
“Your sister is with the band, right?” I asked.
“Aye. Besides her lovely voice, Catriona’s a whiz with traditional Irish instruments. Stella Mae hired her for some sessions last fall and she fit in with the band like a hand in a glove. Stella asked her to join the band for the whole tour. Cattie was ecstatic. I’ve never seen her so happy.” She opened a new mint and put it on her tongue, this time sucking slowly.
“What does she play?”
“Both kinds of Celtic harp, tin whistles, the bodhran, which is like a wide, flat drum. The Irish bouzouki, which is a bit like a mandolin, but not. Fiddle, a-course. Banjer and guitar. She can also play piano, organ, most anything. Cattie’s got all Da’s musical talent and only a little of Ma’s magical. I got none at all of the musical and the greatest part of ma mum’s magical.” She looked at me, her expression droll. “I was always jealous that she got the gift of music and I didn’t. And she was jealous that I had more magic than she did. Fought like two cats in a sack, we did, when we were young.” Her amusement fell away. “And now she’s in the hands of a cop with a heart full of witch hatred.Icould zap him.She’sat his mercy.”
“We’ll do our best to keep her safe.”
“I’ll owe you.”
“Just part of the job. But I do have a question.” I held out the tablet with the pic of the T-shirts. “Are these T-shirts the tour tees? Like the one you’re wearing?”
Etain studied the pic, which was grainy and out of focus. “Looks to be. Why do you ask?”
I sighed and shrugged, putting the tablet into my pocket. “I was hoping they might be something else. Something unexpected.”
“Like a clue. Evidence pointing to a murdering death-practitioner.”
“Something like that. Since it isn’t witch magics, I don’t know what to look for.”
“It doesna match anything I ever felt either, but I know it’s death.”
The side door opened and three witches raced from the house, two of them falling to the ground and gagging. Three more witches followed but simply sat on the narrow side porch, heads in hands. T. Laine came out last and she looked as green as I had felt. Her misery made me feel better, which likely made me a bad person.
“How about this?” I showed Etain the photos of the green glass bottle and the later ones, where the glass was blackened.
“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.Deathenergies, yes, but nowitchenergies, 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 littleerpsounds.
“Trigger?” I asked. “Like a handgun trigger?”
“Ummm.” Still talking to Etain, T. Laine said, “Okay. So... thedeath whateverenergies were in the box, but contained? Perhaps with a secondarynullworking 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 thedeathwoulda begun spreading,” Etain agreed. “But it’s far more than death energies.”
