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