In the Air Tonight (23 page)

“What’s a sabbat?” he asked. He’d heard the word, but he wasn’t sure what it meant, and apparently he needed to know.

“You should take Wiccan 101, dude.”

“Just catch me up,” Bobby ordered, then added, “Please.”

“There are eight sabbats—celebrations, feast days, gatherings. They’re seasonal and solar. There are four major sabbats.” Todd held up a finger. “Imboic.” He added an additional finger for each one. “Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain. Four minor.” He continued on the other hand with four more fingers. “Yule, Ostara, Midsummer Eve, Mabon.”

“And what happens during these celebrations?”

“Not what most people think.”

Bobby lifted an eyebrow. “What do they think?”

“Naked dancing. Orgies. Human sacrifice. At the least we must kill a chicken, maybe a lamb.”

“You don’t?”

“Harm
none,
” Todd said. “We sing, dance, eat, chant. It’s like church in the forest. You should come.”

“In the forest?” Bobby fought a shudder. He liked his church in a nice cathedral, with lots of candles and Latin. Although, remove the cathedral, and the dancing, add a ton of trees and the two were probably very similar. Too bad he had a thing about trees.

“What happens if the high priestess dies?” Raye asked.

Sadness flickered over Todd’s face before he answered. “There’s a ceremony in the place they felt most at peace. Probably the clearing where we hold our sabbats. In days gone by, the body was wrapped in a shroud and consigned to the earth. No casket. The sooner we return to the mother the better.”

“Is that even legal?” Bobby asked.

In most cemeteries, a grave liner, or vault, was required to keep the ground from settling and creating a very unappealing pockmarked appearance. Cemeteries preferred to look like the front lawn of heaven’s golf club.

And wouldn’t bodies buried in the soil without protection contaminate not only the ground but the groundwater? There was a reason folks died young back in the day, and that might be one of them.

“Cremation is common now,” Todd said. “We’ll spread Annie’s ashes in the clearing instead, though—” Todd frowned. “Usually the high priestess presides.”

“Who’ll take over?” Bobby asked. Power and prestige were always on the hit parade of motives.

“We’ll elect someone. Usually it’s the person with the most experience. But not always.”

“Person?” Raye repeated. “Not woman?”

“Most leaders are women. Wicca is a very feminine religion. The goddess, right? But some covens elect high priests. Many of the larger ones have both a high priest and a high priestess.”

“Who do you think will take Anne’s place in your coven?” Bobby needed to have a talk with whoever that was.

“I haven’t been involved long enough to guess.”

Bobby handed one of his cards to the kid. “Let me know about the funeral arrangements.”

“You wanna come?”

He didn’t want to, but it was standard procedure in a murder case. Sometimes the murderer showed up at the funeral of his victims. Anne’s wouldn’t. But as there was more than one killer, there was probably someone pulling the strings. Maybe that person would show. Stranger things had happened.

What he really needed to do was attend the maniac’s funeral. However, the way things were going, he doubted he’d be able to make a quick trip to Ohio. He should get in touch with local law enforcement, ask someone to take photos. Although the FBI was probably all over that already, or they’d better be.

“Why would anyone want to kill such great ladies?” Todd wondered. “They were healers, helpers. Everyone loved them.”

“Not everyone.” Raye’s eyes widened as if she hadn’t realized she’d said it out loud. “Mrs. Noita was kind of cranky. Some of the kids called her a witch.”

“She was a witch. You think kids killed her?”

“No.” Bobby cast Raye a quelling glance. The information about the
Venatores Mali
was not information he wanted to get out.

“How’d Mrs. Noita die?”

Bobby hesitated, but as the generalities had already been reported in the Sunday paper, he went on. “Throat cut.”

“Bloody.”

“Very.”

“Was there anything odd about her death?”

“I like to think, or at least hope, that every murder is odd,” Bobby said. But the kid was right. “It was pointed out that she should have died more quickly than she did.”

Todd nodded. “Blood magic is the most powerful kind of magic there is.”

“What’s blood magic?” Raye asked.

“Using blood in a spell makes that spell not only personal but permanent. Blood magic binds through life and death and eternity. It isn’t used unless there’s no other choice.”

Though Bobby didn’t believe a word of this, he still got a shiver. From the way Raye hugged herself she had too.

“The results of a blood spell are stronger. They can’t be undone.”

“Why not?” Raye’s voice was just above a whisper.

“A fire witch would burn the blood, an earth witch would drop it onto the dirt, a water witch would disperse it into the water, and an air witch would release it to the wind. You can’t unburn something. Once liquid sinks into the earth, it can’t be drawn out. Blood becomes one with the water and once the wind blows past it’s irretrievable.”

“You think Mrs. Noita used blood magic?”

“To delay death from a wound like that, she would have had to use something. Did you find a magical instrument near the body? Maybe an athame?”

“Which is?”

“Double-edged knife.” Todd moved to the glass case, opened the back, reached in. “Like this.”

The weapon appeared normal enough—for a weapon. Silver blade, honed on both sides. It was the two sides that drew Bobby’s interest.

“Are there any athames that are squiggly?”

Todd’s lips twitched. “That is not a word I’d have thought would come from your mouth, dude.”

“Me either.” And it wouldn’t have if he hadn’t heard it from Johnson. “Are there?”

“Not so much anymore. But I have seen one.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

Bobby peered through the glass top of the case. He didn’t see any squiggly knives.

“Dude,” he said, and Raye coughed.

“I didn’t say it was here.” Todd indicated the display with the tip of the knife he still held then lifted it toward the ceiling. “Annie had it at her place.”

“Why?” Bobby asked.

“To cut herbs, draw a sacred circle.” Todd shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Ms. McKenna used an athame in her spells?”

Todd shook his head as he returned the knife to the case. “Fire witches use athames. Annie was an air witch. She would use a wand.” He moved to another case, where a selection of amazingly different and intricate wands was displayed. They had carved wooden handles, onyx, amethyst, crystal. In the corner of the case equally elaborate cups had been grouped.

Todd tapped the glass above them. “Chalices for a water witch.” He frowned. “Come to think of it, Mrs. Noita wouldn’t have used an athame. She was an earth witch. Her instrument was the pentacle.” He pointed at the wall where several necklaces were displayed, each with an amulet bearing the five-pointed star. “Used to call spirits.”

Raye, who’d been leaning close, peering at the designs on the amulets, stepped away.

“Also to invoke the goddess,” Todd continued, then shrugged. “But mostly for protection.”

“Protection again,” Bobby said. “Did they hang them over the door, in the trees?”

The kid’s gaze sharpened. “You should have found one hanging around Mrs. Noita’s neck.”

Mrs. Noita’s neck, chest, pretty much everything had been covered in blood. But not so much that Bobby couldn’t see a marked lack of a pentacle.

“It wasn’t.”

“Might be why it didn’t help.” Todd chewed his bottom lip for a second. “She wouldn’t take it off. Maybe it was torn off in the struggle. It has to be there somewhere.”

Bobby decided not to mention that Mrs. Noita’s “there” wasn’t there anymore, along with most of Mrs. Noita. The guy was having a hard enough time as it was.

“What are these?” Raye asked, lifting a ring from a box atop one of the cases.

“Also pentacles. Men aren’t big on necklaces.”

“Ever see a ring with a snarling wolf?” Bobby asked.

“Wasn’t a ring.”

Bobby and Raye exchanged a glance.

“The athame with the curving blade has a snarling wolf carved into the handle.”

“Is that common?” Bobby asked.

“Carvings, yes. But they’re usually runes and such.”

Bobby almost asked what a rune was, then decided to keep his eye on the ball. “No wolves?”

“That was the only one I ever saw. Witches are associated with cats. Wolves?” He lifted one shoulder. “Not really. But after Annie showed me that athame, I did a little research. There was one group that used a snarling wolf as their symbol.”

Raye’s breath caught. Bobby set a hand on her arm to keep her from speaking.

“A particular coven?” he asked.

“No. A bunch of witch-burning bastards from the seventeenth century.”

Bobby’s fingers tightened as Raye leaned forward. “What were they called?”

“
Venatores Mali,
hunters of evil. They hunted witches with the blessing of some Scottish king. Their symbol was a snarling wolf, which was seen as a great hunter in many cultures. The Norse often wore wolf skulls on their heads when they went a-viking. A lot of the Plains Indians did the same.”

“The Scots?” Bobby asked.

“Apparently they carved the wolf into their implements of torture.”

“They did?” Bobby couldn’t remember any of that from
Braveheart.

“Maybe it was just the
Venatores Mali.
”

“Why would the symbol of a witch-hunting society be carved into the hilt of a witch’s ritual knife?”

“Christians liked to appropriate everything pagan. There’s a reason our sabbats fall near Christian holidays. They put the holidays next to the sabbats.”

Bobby must have looked skeptical because Todd continued, “You think Jesus was born on December twenty-fifth?”

“Yes?”

“No, or at the least, no one knows for sure. The Bible is vague about his birth, oddly specific about his death. Part of that is because they weren’t really birthday-party people back then. One of the few references to the time of year among the apostles’ writings was ‘shepherds watching their flocks.’ Flocks would have been corralled in December. If you take the Bible literally, that means Jesus wasn’t born in December.”

“Pretty slim,” Bobby murmured.

“My middle name, dude. A lot of experts think the early Christians needed to offset the sabbat of Yule and decided December was a nice place to plop Christ’s birthday. Get the common people to confuse the two and pretty soon you’ve got a congregation instead of a coven.”

Bobby felt vaguely sacrilegious, and he wasn’t even the one plopping Christ’s birthday in any old place.

“What does this have to do with the wolf on the ritual knife?”

“Why stop at appropriating pagan holy days? What if a witch hunter took the athame off one of his victims and carved his crest into it, thus changing a peaceful pagan ritual knife into a Christian tool of torture?”

“Interesting theory.”

“It’s a little more than that,” Todd said. “I found mention of a squiggly knife in a seventeenth-century text.”

“They actually used the word
squiggly
?” Raye asked.

“Even better. There was a drawing, which matched Annie’s athame.”

Bobby got a chill. “What did Anne have to say about that?”

“She didn’t seem surprised.”

“I bet not,” Bobby said. He was starting to think Anne had hunted down that athame with the same intensity that the
Venatores Mali
had hunted her.

But why?

Chapter 18

“Why would Anne want an athame when she wasn’t a fire witch?” I asked. From Bobby’s glance, he’d been about to ask the same thing.

“Who wouldn’t want it? It was probably worth fifty thousand dollars.”

“Fifty thousand for a knife?” Bobby blurted.

“Not just any knife. If it was the same one, that athame belonged to Roland McHugh. The founder of the
Venatores Mali.
”

My breath caught.
Uh-oh.

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“You notice no one’s come in since you did?” Todd indicated the books lining the walls of the shop. “I got nothin’ but time to read them.”

Bobby rubbed his eyes. “What else do you know about the
Venatores Mali
?”

“I never heard of ’em before I saw that carving on the athame. They were a
secret
society.”

“They were burning people on the orders of King James. You’d think someone would have kept records.”

“If they did, they hid them well. The only information I found was in diaries. McHugh scared everyone, including his followers. He was obsessed with witches, and once on the trail of one, he didn’t stop until they were ashes.”

I got a shiver, which was silly. McHugh had been dead for centuries.

“All of the witch hunters and black-robed inquisitors were fanatics,” Bobby said. “It was kind of their thing.”

“For McHugh the hunt was personal. Sure, he fried anyone he could along the way, but he was obsessed with one witch in particular for the rest of his life.”

“The one that got away?” Bobby asked.

“Unfortunately, no. He burned both her and her husband.”

“End of story,” Bobby said.

“Not quite. The woman was a midwife who attended McHugh’s wife in childbirth. His wife and the child died.”

“That happened a lot back then.” Bobby took a breath, let it out. “Although I can see how the man became unhinged.”

He tried to keep his voice neutral, but I heard what lay beneath. I took his hand, and, though he cast me a curious glance, he let me.

“The problem was that the midwife gave birth to three healthy girls shortly after. Back then, more than twins were rare and kind of witchy, their surviving even more so. McHugh got it in his head that the woman had sacrificed his wife and child so that hers would live. He vowed to find those devil-spawned children, no matter what it took.”