“You think the victim was a witch?”
“There’s what looks to be a summoning circle. That doesn’t get there by Mundane means.”
Saga took a note of this before looking around the shelves. “Should webe wearing gloves or something?”
“Are you not?” Avery had slipped on a pair of black doeskin gloves herself.
“No?”
“Then I suggest you be wary about touching anything.” Avery knelt by the nightstand and began to sift through its contents.
Saga opened the closet with her jacket acting as a barrier between her fingers. “I think I found where all of Valentina’s stuff might be.” She gestured to the carefully labeled cardboard boxes.
“I’d wager that’s Rachel’s handwriting, not Valentina’s.”
“Should we open them?”
“We should get someone from Inspector Lahiri’s team to retrieve them. We’re far too few as we are, and I can’t imagine carrying all of those boxes between just the two of us.”
“Can’t we just open them now?”
“I’m sure there’s some delightful bureaucratic reason why we can’t without proper paperwork,” Avery answered. She focused on the vague outline of shadow around the bed. “This circle around the bed was unbroken, but it looks raised—possibly salt or ash? It wasn’t drawn, something was used to make it. The question is… Was it keeping something in? Or out?”
“Could we just ask Rachel?”
Avery glanced at Saga to see if she was joking. She was not. She didn’t know. Of course she didn’t know. Why would she know? “No.” She paused, then explained. “Unless we are certain she’s the caster, we should avoid showing our hand. The council hired me to investigate this without exposing our presence.”
“Mmm.” Saga nodded. “How’s that going for you?”
Avery shot her another look and spied a small grin spreading on Saga’s face. “Not great.” Her own lips involuntarily pulled at a smile, then pressed together in an attempt to quash it. She cleared her throat and caught sight of another shadow—fainter than the others, more a distortion of reality than anything, atop the sheets. “Something else was here. But the echo hasdeteriorated too much for me to tell exactly what. I’d wager it was something living. Those signatures tend to fade faster.”
“So she did summon something?”
Avery shook her head. “I don’t know. And I don’t know how the collection of herbs figures into it. Some sort of sacrifice? Spell components gone wrong? And if so, how did they make a switch without any marks on the body?”
“In mummification Ancient Egyptians inserted a hook through the nose to remove the brain, perhaps another similar tool could be employed to…” Saga made an uncomfortable gesture like she was thrusting a stick or a poker. “You know. Stuff something else in its place.”
Avery winced at the unpleasant sensory chill that ran through her imagining what that process might entail. “To what point or purpose?”
“Motive is your department, feytective, I’m just offering what I know could be scientifically possible.” Saga pondered over this a moment longer. “What about thermodynamics? Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered… Maybe that messisour victim’s brain. Just…transformed.”
Avery’s thoughts fell into place like tumblers in a lock. “Fates.” She straightened abruptly. “Perhaps it is a brain,” she whispered. Then, to Saga, just a few decibels louder so she could hear. “Saga, what if thisisa brain?”
“Yeah, that’s what I literally just said…”
“You’re suggesting transfiguration, I’m…” Avery gestured to the shadows. “Can you sketch this?”
“I think I can do you one better.” Saga reached into her pocket and pulled out a small box. She raised it up, aligned it with the scene before her, then tapped it. “Oh good. Magic can be captured digitally. Sort of.” She then turned it around, showing a nearly perfect replica of the bed, and the faint shadows. The shadows were perhaps a little harder to see than with the naked eye—perhaps a little blurrier and if you didn’t know what you were looking at, you probably wouldn’t notice it—but it was good enough for her purposes.
Avery closed the distance between them, her eyes growing wide. “Whatis… Does this take photographs?”
“It’s my mobile, but it can take pictures.” Saga’s head tilted to the side. “Have you never seen a mobile phone before?”
“I only half understood what you just said, as ‘mobile’ seems to have taken on a much different meaning than last I knew.”
Something dawned on Saga at that moment. “So when you said you’d been out of London for a while…”
Avery smiled sheepishly. “I wasn’t lying. I was out of everywhere for a while.”
