“That is perfectly reasonable.” Avery nodded, accepting this. “You’ve endured a lot for one day. I should take you home.”
“No. We still have so many questions.” Saga turned to Esteri. “The first victim’s brain was missing. In its place were a number of herbs, all of which relate to cognitive function, wrapped in straw. Avery’s divination revealed that something similar may have happened to my grandmother’s heart.”
Esteri’s expression clouded over. “Your killer is stealing the organs by switching them outmagically?”
“And then trying to stage the deaths as something else,” Saga confirmed.
Avery held up a finger to make an addendum to Saga’s statement. “We don’t know if they’re activelystaging itper se.”
“But Valentina was found in her car,” Saga insisted.
“And Saoirse seemed to have a heart attack, but both rituals clearly took place beforehand while the victim was sleeping. The spell appears to have some sort of time delay.”
“Well, there’s your motive for sedation or even binding magic. Perhaps your first victim had also been sedated,” Esteri suggested.
“Coroner didn’t find anything,” said Avery.
“Medicine is not as precise in this day and age as you might hope,” Saga interjected. “I mean, definitely more so than it was two hundred years ago but… A lot of times when looking for foreign substances you haveto perform specific tests in order to identify them, and even then you’re usually narrowing it down to the family of alkaloids. I might be able to tell you aconitum was present, but I might not be able to decipher the species it came from—that may narrow it to the genus, but that still leaves hundreds of possible plants used. If the coroner didn’t know to look for it, it might not have shown up. Or, it might have been out of her system at the time of her death. The whole point of giving your spell a trigger for a later time would be to throw off suspicion of foul play, right?”
“Or to keep yourself safe if there was a risk of danger when it went off,” Esteri agreed.
Avery took this in and then posed to Esteri, “Could magical transfer work at a distance?”
The tulikettu bit her lower lip thoughtfully, and Saga imagined that if her vulpine earshadbeen present, they would have been lying flat to match her expression. “It depends on a few factors—the power of the mage, the precise spell, and if the trigger was dependent on the victim or an external act by the caster.” She shrugged. “They might have had to follow their victim at a certain distance in order for the spell to work. Sympathetic magic can be very tricky on its own, and I’ve never seen it used in such a way. I know that poppets, if bound properly, can be used effectively regardless of the distance between the target and the caster. Perhaps this straw brain acted as a poppet?”
“I’veneverseen a poppet used for literal object transference like this,” said Avery.
“There’s a first for everything.” Despite the warm surroundings, there was something deathly eerie about that acknowledgment.
“Could you look into it?” Avery sounded pleading.
“You want me to try removing someone’s brain or heart from their body?” Esteri scoffed with a laugh. “Are you volunteering?”
“Es, I don’t know that world like you. Could you ask around? Dig something up?”
Esteri waffled silently. “I can. But I don’t think you’re going to find thatinformation through regular channels. It isn’t exactly a council-sanctioned practice.”
Avery gave a resigned nod. “I don’t suppose Bimo Shinwell is still kicking around?”
“I know he’salive,” the fox-fey said. “But I can’t speak to which side of Blackthorn he’s currently breathing on.”
“Blackthorn? Aren’t they a company that specializes in things like energy conser…” Saga’s voice trailed off as she made the connection. Blackthorn was sponsoring Avery’s stay. Avery had been released from some sort of confinement… “Is it secretly a prison?”
“Blackthorn is the surname of the royal bloodline. A variety of establishments carry their name, the correctional center being one of them,” Avery explained.
“Okay…” Saga tried to remember the number of places she saw that name around town. There was a library donated to the city, a research facility on the campus of King’s College—she was fairly certain they had a monopoly on solar panel production in the country. She put a hand to her head. “So, who’s Bimo Shinwell?”
“A small-time criminal I used to enlist for information on occasion,” said Avery, trying to sound casual. “Harmless if you had a good head on your shoulders—always arrested or assaulted for his petty get-rich scams, depending which side of the law caught up with him first. But he’s clever. He hears a lot. For the right price, he’d let you hear it too.”
“Were you planning on bribing him with free breakfasts at Hudson’s?” Esteri sipped her tea knowingly.
Avery’s jaw tightened. “So you heard about that.”
Esteri merely smiled, cryptic, clever, sly.
“Would Fiore…”
“I can ask.” Esteri didn’t make Avery finish her request. “But I can’t guarantee anything.”
