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