mind went all sorts of places, remembering T. Laine’s fear that the magic would get into the water table. Would infect the earth itself.
Would Soulwood be enough to defeat that kind of magic? Even with the Green Knight to help? The magics had killed the potted vampire tree, at least enough for Occam to cut it down.
His body still as stone in my peripheral vision, FireWind said, “Oral tales speak of such a creature. The Tsalagi might call it ajasgili.”
I lifted my head to him. His face was both expressionless and full of emotion at once. Grieving and angry, stoic and firm.
He said, “The ajasgili will be very different from the white man’s witches, and I fear this dark magic user will be different from what I might have known once upon a time. Find the ajasgili, the magic practitioner of death and decay. I will seek authorization for extreme measures to shut her down.”
Extreme measures was a PsyLED code word for military. The top brass in PsyLED and in Homeland Security were creating—probably had been for a long time—protocols for every magical eventuality. Worst-case scenarios included intervention by fighter jets, special units with high-tech gear, maybe bombs. Margot was standing still as a marble statue in the corner, reading us all for truth, for lies, for things left unsaid. Her face was sheened with strain, as she followed our words and FireWind’s judgment.
Her voice tense, T. Laine said, “I have a Myer witch family, last recorded in 1902. Either they died out or went underground.”
“Ethel Myer isn’t a yinehi or an ajasgili,” I said. “Ethel didn’t look like me, no wood fingernails, no leaves.” I had a feeling that Ethel would read exactly like a witch, not like death and decay. The trigger in the T-shirts had been created by a witch. “Ethel probably made the trigger. And that means she knows who the ajasgili is. She sent us to the Ames farm.” I stopped, thoughts whirling. “What if Ethel recognized what I was? What if she knew what I was and she sent me to the farm?”
“Why would she do that?” T. Laine asked.
Tilting up a thumb in uncertainty, I said, “Maybe Ethel understood how badly the entire thing had gone wrong. Maybe she thinks her ajasgili is growing very dangerous.”
And they would bomb the ajasgili. For certain, unless—
“What if extreme measures don’t work?” I asked. “Death and decay works on everything except null energies. What if our ajasgili shuts down high-tech weaponry before it’s fired? The power sink I found was the place where she stored her magics when they got to be too much to carry safely. That means that the ajasgili knows how to store, use, and direct death and decay.”
Unit Eighteen were all staring at me. I could feel the weight of their attention, their worries, their fear. I went on, speaking into the silence. “If there was a chance that ambient death and decay magics would cause our semiautomatics to malfunction, why not something bigger.” It was technically a question, but I stated it as a fact.
I could almost hear the frown in her voice as T. Laine said, “Someone sent that man chasing Ingram in his truck. Someone killed a kind old man and forced his body to drive his truck to PsyLED, wait there, and then chase down the first person who exited.”
Occam said, “Someone sent Cale Nowell on a drive in the countryside until he crashed his car. How close was he to his trailer? Could Carollette have been at the power sink, maybe planning to use her kettles, when he came home? Killed him accidentally and made him drive himself away?”
FireWind said, “That makes sense. If the ajasgili is losing control of her magics, then anything is possible.”
I shook my head and lifted a bit of Soulwood soil in my fingers, letting it dribble back into the cabbage pot, my finger leaves rustling. I looked at FireWind. “You were there too, when the truck charged across traffic to kill me.” I sifted Soulwood soil through my fingers. “You knew what I was when you first saw me. When you first took my scent. At Melody Horse Farm, you said you smelled the ajasgili. You had her scent. What if she knew that? What if she heard us talking the night she killed Ingrid Wayns? Or before she killed the stallion? She had access to a witch who might have provided obfuscation charms that let her be there with us.”