“Thanks, Mom. I don’t know what to do with crying chicks. Evan is so much better at that stuff,” Fen said with clear gratitude.
“How long have you been kept out of the gardens?” It was time to go talk to some gnomes, after I put in a request with my brother.
Casey stood in the living room where the paintings now sat side by side. Four of them. He was staring at them as though trying to find the differences. He turned when he heard me enter. “Hey, Kelsey. I brought all four of the paintings in here. I think you can see they’re all pretty similar. Also, I don’t think it could have been Jade. I saw her last night. Do we have the time of death yet?”
“It wasn’t Jade.” Jade had no reason to kill her guardian. She was a dumbass kid who was messed up and traumatized, and she’d made a mistake. “I want you to take samples of the paint and have Eddie pop you to my brother’s. Don’t come back until you know what’s in that paint and you have a clear time of death. There’s something in it, and those gnomes know. I want an accounting of where their little asses were last night and the night of Alvis’s death. Now Fen, when did they start refusing entry to wolves?”
A lot of things were coming together in my head.
“Last year.” Fen smoothed a hand over his head, pushing back his thick, dark hair. “I always got along with the gnomes. They’re cool. The new dude is scared, though.”
“Because he was attacked by wolves,” I prompted.
“Yes. According to the primals, Elrin requested asylum roughly a year ago. He was brought to the nest to recover from his wounds,” Casey explained. “I could pull up the report. There’s always a report.”
“I need you to figure out what’s in the paint. According to Relda and Jade, there was something bioluminescent in the paint that came from plants in the gnomes’ gardens.” I stared at the paintings. They were quite similar, as though they were painting from the same instructions. The moons in the paintings seemed to glow from within. “I’m worried there’s something more than bioluminescent plants in that paint.”
Casey had already pulled a plastic bag and a small knife out of the kit he’d brought with him. He moved to the first of the paintings, scraping off a bit of the paint on the edge of the moon. “What are you looking for?”
“Belladonna. Henbane. Mandragora. I want you to look for anything that could be in a witch’s ointment.”
Fen’s eyes had gone wide. “So you really think it was Jade? Damn. Like I knew I could stop her if I wanted to, but if I really thought she was a killer I probably wouldn’t have played so much Xbox. Or offered her a beer.”
He shouldn’t be offering anyone a beer. That was a lecture for another day. “No, I don’t think it’s Jade, but I think someone knew she was making witch’s ointment and knew why she was doing it. Or they could have put the idea in her head. The point is someone wanted her to make that ointment. They knew about its hallucinogenic properties.”
“So they wanted Relda to hallucinate?” Fen asked.
“I think they wanted her open to suggestion.” I wasn’t a scientist and I wasn’t a witch, and this was where it would have helped to have Liv on the team. Instead I had to wonder if Liv was the one out there pulling strings. I was pretty sure I needed to make sure those strings got cut and fast, but I had to know what was going on. “Jade said Relda seemed obsessed with the painting. She kept coming back to it. What if there’s something in the paint that calls to these painters? She would stare at it for long periods of time and say she was contemplating what she wanted to do next. What if someone was whispering to her through the paint? What if that’s what Luna’s hearing? She can hear something coming through the painting but she’s never touched the paint so she can’t hear the exact words. It’s at such a high frequency that Relda and the others didn’t realize it was coming through and influencing them at all.”
Casey’s head came up. “Are you thinking sleeper agents?”
Fen suddenly got real serious. He might not know the word lackadaisical, but he damn straight understood what a sleeper agent was. “I should go and get Dad.”
“That’s fine. You should update him, and this evening you should take the chance and call Sasha. But first off we need surveillance on anyone who was taking that class.” I wanted to see if anyone else had been affected by whatever that paint was doing. I wanted someone watching every single one of them to make sure they hadn’t been convinced to commit some kind of sabotage. “And we need to collect all the paintings.”
My mind was working overtime. There was a ton of sabotage that would work in the Under. They were uniquely vulnerable to someone poisoning the ventilation system. Fires could wipe out whole sections before people could evacuate. There were any number of horrors that could be brought down on the primals and all the knowledge stored here.
“We need to lock down the library.” I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I knew when you had something as precious as ancient knowledge, someone better protect it.
Casey nodded. “I agree. I’ll let the head of security know before I go to Texas. They keep the part of the library that houses the oldest books and artifacts locked during daylight hours, but I’ll put a guard on it, too. Hopefully I’ll have some answers for you in an hour or two. I can help Nate run the tests.”
Because he was a smarty pants when it came to anything technical. I was so lucky to have Casey with me. “You do that. I’m going to talk to that gnome. I’ll have Evan run down those reports. Fenrir, I need you to go and find Rose. I’d like to have Luna tell me if all the paintings hum for her. I want to know how many paintings we’re dealing with and how many I’ll need to destroy.”
After I figured out what was really going on.
“I want to help.” Jade stood in the hallway with Evan at her side. “I’ll stay with Evan. I promise. But I want to help you. You can even put some wards on me so I can’t hurt anyone. Relda crafted some for the security team. I’ll go right now and let them spell me.”
I wasn’t going to put her through that. I looked to Evan. “Can you handle her?”
Evan nodded. “I assure you I’m far better at physical combat, and I genuinely believe her. Kelsey, I’ve known Jade since we were kids. She didn’t do this, but she might be able to figure out what’s going on. It almost certainly involves witchcraft. She’s not the strongest caster because she’s never really been able to practice, but she knows the theories and academics behind witchcraft.”
“All right. Go to the town hall and get me any records you can surrounding how Elrin came to the Under. I need the list of students from Alvis’s class you got yesterday,” I ordered.
“Sure,” Evan agreed.
Jade wiped the tears from her eyes. “I know the woman who runs the records room. She’ll give us anything we need.”
Casey had collected all of his samples. “I’ll go by the security office and have them lock down the library, and then I’ll have Eddie take me to Dallas. I’ll be back as soon as I have the information we need.”