What did a canceled party have to do with the bad guys’ plan? “Does that really matter for Olivia and her partner?”
“It could,” Kirsten said, excitement in her voice. “The solstice has particular relevance for Lilith, and for the connection between life and death, though I don’t know all of the specifics. Jewish magic has never been a specialty of mine. But if I were summoning power for a big spell, using Lilith’s amulet, involving the dead, and I didn’t have a coven to back me up…yes, this is the night I’d do it.”
Jesse tried to follow this line of thought. “You’re saying it’ll make the witch even more powerful?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
“Can you narrow down the time frame any, based on those rituals?”
Kirsten chewed on her lower lip as she considered his question. “If she were worried about us finding her, she’d go a little early, like ten o’clock, to throw us off. But I’m guessing this witch wants every bit of power she can grab. She’ll cast at midnight.”
Jesse checked the dashboard clock. It was barely noon. “So we’ve got twelve hours.” He restarted the car and turned it back toward the freeway. “Does knowing it’s a golem help us find the witch who made it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said distractedly. “Animation magic is a very unique specialty, and animating and controlling a golem would require an enormous amount of power. I’m not even certain that I could do it. I certainly don’t see any of my witches having that kind of…muscle.”
She sounded so trusting when she talked about her witches, and Jesse raised his eyebrows. “Would you necessarily know?”
Kirsten snapped to attention, looking across the seat at him. “A very good question. A few weeks ago I would have said yes, of course, I know all my witches. But now…” She turned up her palms in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. If one of them really wished to, I suppose she could be hiding her level of power from me.”
They drove in silence for a few minutes. Jesse was trying to process the new information. This golem thing sounded like a cop’s worst nightmare. Even assuming Kirsten could figure out how to kill it, they had to find it first. And if they couldn’t find Olivia, and they had no way of figuring out which of Kirsten’s witches was secretly helping her…“Scarlett,” Jesse said aloud.
“What?”
“Scarlett can gauge power.” He took his eyes off the traffic long enough to meet Kirsten’s. “She told me once she gets a sense of how powerful the vampires and werewolves are, when they come into her…aura, or whatever. I asked her about you guys”—Kirsten gave a short nod, understanding that he meant the witches—“and she said…how did she put it? That you all have a low-level buzz when you’re not trying to use magic, and when you do use it the buzz flares up. She said your buzz is stronger because you’re more powerful than the other witches she’s met.”
“But how does that help us?” Kirsten asked sensibly.
“If we could get the witches together in one place, and if we put Scarlett among them, she’d be able to tell who was hiding power,” he said excitedly. “And she’d be able to neutralize the witch at the same time, and we could use her to find Olivia.”
“That…could work,” she said slowly, her face creased in concentration. “It’s a bit of a long shot.”
“I know,” Jesse admitted, “but the only other things I can think of would be to dig through Olivia’s background to see if we can find a witch connection, or run background checks on all your witches. And we’d need more time for either of those options.”
Kirsten’s mouth turned down at the words background checks. “Let’s do it.”
“Do you have any way of getting the witches together?” Jesse asked. “Do you guys have meetings or something?”
“Not until the first weekend of next month. I could call an emergency meeting, but then whoever it is might just not show up.”
“If she thought the meeting was about something else?” Jesse asked. “Like, you say there’s news about the killer, or something?”
He glanced at the witch and saw that Kirsten’s face had brightened. “I have an even better idea,” she said, with sudden cheerfulness. “I’ll just uncancel the party.”
Chapter 19
I let Sadie hug me again before I left the hospital. As soon as I got out of the building, my cell phone began to ring, the regular old ring-ring sound that meant it wasn’t one of my bosses. I didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?” I said cautiously.
“Oh, thank God. I’ve been calling and calling. Is this Scarlett Bernard?”
I glanced back at the hospital building. I’d forgotten that I couldn’t get reception inside.
“Yes, this is Scarlett.”
“I have a—a problem? Is that the right word?”
I frowned. Most of my cleanup calls happened at night, but a daytime crime scene wasn’t unheard-of. “You’re calling about my cleaning services?”
“Yes, I’m Esther, there’s this vampire and…” She took a sobbing breath. “I think he might be dead.”
I opened my mouth to say that she should call Eli and give him the job, but then I remembered he was dealing with a big cleanup at Hair of the Dog. I shrugged to myself. There wasn’t anywhere I needed to be just then, and it was still my job. “Give me the address. I’ll be right there.”