the tour. They ordered additional batches of forty-eight boxes while on tour, drop-shipped to various hotels. I have records that all were delivered and are accounted for in the manager’s accounting database, along with the original twelve boxes. When they got home there was one box in the studio, unaccounted for, no shipping label.
“Things get lost or misplaced on a tour. Even expensive musical instruments and electronic equipment. But there is never extra stuff just appearing; the manager insists it was not present when they left on this leg of the tour. I’ve tracked every single sale and accounted for all the shirts, including two full bins on the RV. And then there’s the mystery box.”
She looked up. “I’ve verified that the shirts are official tour shirts, not a knockoff. Some unknown person put that box in the swag room, at some point during a twelve-week tour, while people were all over the property. Dozens of people. Not one of them was a death witch or an evil magic practitioner. Not that death witches advertise, since the U.S. military complex and a dozen foreign enemy combatant states would want them, find them, take them, and they would end up dead or disappeared.”
“How would anyone get to a death witch?” I asked.
“They’d set off a sleeping-gas bomb—assuming anyone was still alive—after she went to bed, and walk out with the witch wearing null cuffs.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. You know, for a child raised in God’s Cloud of Glory, you are the epitome of innocence.”
I made a face at her. “So we are nowhere?”
“We are nowhere.”
“Well, dang.”
The microwave dinged and I brought in plates and slices and sat. I pulled up research on death magics. There wasn’t much. All magics worked differently for each witch, depending on the individual, her element (earth, air, water, etc.), her power level, her training, and any previous coven affiliation. Death-magic witches didn’t associate with covens because a coven would stick her in a null room and leave her there until she rotted. Death-magic users were not blood-magic users. Blood witches used the usual methods of working energies, but powered with blood sacrifice. Death-magic users were a group all their own. Death was raw black magic—not worked with math and focals, and always a curse. It was a direct interaction with life forces and earth forces and something darker, more predatory.
This . . . this death and decay . . .
My mind went still, remembering it under my fingers, in the land at Stella’s farm, in the body of Erica. I made a fist, my fingers still not completely healed, thinking. The Green Knight had recognized the magics and attacked instantly.
Death and decay was oddly familiar. To the Green Knight and to me. Where had I encountered it before? When a demon had been summoned and tried to rise to Earth? When the salamanders bred?
Minutes had passed. JoJo was scanning multiple files and photos and her hands were clicking and clacking all over multiple keyboards. I said, “Jo?” She grunted; I took that as permission to continue. “I wondered what I would feel if I tried to read Erica. In the hospital.”
Her hands went still. “You didn’t.”
“I did. That was part of the reason I spent so long in the null room. I didn’t get much from the read.” I described the awful, burning cold sensation when I touched Erica’s bare flesh. “I’m wondering what I’d get on a deep read on Erica’s body. And now I’m wondering what I’d get on a deep read on a dead body.”
“No. You will not do that, girl. You get me? No. People are dying,” she added, as if I hadn’t noticed.
“I’m not planning on trying it. But what if I could read who the culprit is. I’ve never read that deeply into a magical working on a human body, but I’ve followed magic through the land. What if I could track a magical working back to the originator? What if I could do it through the air, so I didn’t grow roots? What would that do to law enforcement? To a case?”
JoJo had never been able to resist a puzzle. She pulled on her left earrings, five gold hoops that dangled up the curve of the ear. “Under current law it couldn’t be used in court, and it’s possible that it could be ruled as a form of magical attack. It might also be contested as a loss of civil rights if you did that to a suspect. There would be no