“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.