Trail of Dead (Scarlett Bernard #2)(38)
“No. Well, yes”—she smiled a little—”but I understand why you’re asking me. Scarlett doesn’t know all that much about magic. Why would she? But it’s not supposed to be something that one can understand, not completely. Every culture in every society in history has had its own ways of interpreting the existence of magic,” she said. “Greek and Egyptian gods, demonology, Kabbalah, astrology; I could go on and on. It’s all one thing, one vast and incomprehensibly complex…thing. We use the word magic because it’s vague and powerful, but maybe it’s the force of creation, God, Mother Nature, mysticism, whatever. Whatever name you give it, however you want to see it, it’s always been here.”
“Wait, that makes no sense,” Jesse objected. “How would these different humans across time and space know the same spells and stuff?”
She jerked her head impatiently, like she’d been waiting for that question, and now that he’d asked he had disappointed her. “It’s not about spells. It’s not about how you manipulate magic, but the manipulation itself. Look at it this way: magic is too big and too wild to be a part of us. Witches need a system, a context, in order to understand it, though it doesn’t really matter what the specific system is. How is that different from religion?”
“But…” he sputtered. “If I’m getting this, you’re suggesting that a witch in California can say abracadabra and a flame shoots out of her finger, but a witch in Japan can, I don’t know, click her heels together and the same thing will happen?”
She held up her hand again, in a wait, stop gesture. “You’re looking at this wrong. Magic isn’t a single trick. It isn’t finite at all.” She tilted her head and took another sip of the soda, thinking. “Okay, look. If I go to the beach with a gallon bucket and fill the bucket with ocean water, I can do lots of things with that water. I can use it to splash someone who’s hot, to build a sand castle, to soak my feet. Now, will that bucket of water that I took make a difference to the ocean, in the grand scheme of things?”
“No, not really.”
“What if I brought a hundred of my friends, and we each took a gallon of water?”
“No. The ocean is still too big.”
“Right. Now, I have a bucket, but maybe one of my friends has a pitcher, and one has a big plastic baggie, and one has a giant seashell, and so on. It doesn’t really matter what we use to transport the water, and it doesn’t matter if we wade in and scoop it up, get in a boat and skim the surface, or wait for the tide to come to us. We all have our own methods, passed down from ancestors or completely made up. What matters is what we do with the gallon of water.”
He thought about that, and glanced over at Kirsten. She was perfectly composed, sitting with her hands folded and her legs crossed at the ankle. They might have been discussing the Napoleonic Wars or the price of gasoline. “I can see why you’re their leader,” he said, impressed.
She laughed, a low, musical sound. “Well, thank you.”
“Whenever I talk to Scarlett about this stuff, and we get too deep into theory—or get to something she doesn’t know, probably—she just says ‘It’s magic. The smartest people in the Old World don’t understand the half of it.’” He realized he was smiling to himself.
“Well,” Kirsten said, taking another sip of her soda, “I don’t disagree with that, either.”
Abusing his police light helped them make record time, and within an hour and a half of leaving Dashiell’s Jesse found himself facing exits for San Diego. Kirsten called ahead for directions, and when she hung up she said, “The storage facility is half a block west of the temple.”
“They don’t keep things on-site?”
Kirsten shook her head. “They used to, but the collection became too large, and safety became a concern. Beth Israel is still a temple, and there are people in and out at all hours. Rabbi Samuel was the one to propose moving things to the storage facility nearby.”
“Sort of a hiding in plain sight kind of thing.”
“Yes,” she said, and added wryly, “For all the good it did.” She frowned again. “Of course, we’ll have to move everything now. Too many people—especially Olivia—will know about it before this is over.”
Jesse squirmed a little in his seat. She was also talking about people like him and Scarlett. Kirsten saw them as a liability, and he couldn’t entirely blame her. From her perspective, telling a null and a human cop the location of a warehouse of secret witch artifacts must seem like giving terrorists the key to the president’s secret bunker. “Who found him?” Jesse asked, to change the subject.
“His assistant, Alice. The rabbi stayed late last night, which was pretty typical of him, but he was supposed to be in early this morning. When Alice got to the office she couldn’t find the rabbi but saw his car was here. She had the sense to see if the storage keys were missing. They were, so she went over there.” Jesse glanced over at Kirsten, whose face was suddenly troubled.
“What?” he asked.
“I don’t…I mean, I know you know what Scarlett does with crime scenes, that sometimes allowances have to be made to keep our way of life a secret.”
Jesse looked at her again, but Kirsten’s face was set now, and she stared straight ahead. He understood. “What did Alice do? Did she move the body?”