He glanced at the rest of us, who to a man sat silent with stupefaction, and wet his lips. “That is, assuming you were taking the myths and legends of old as writ, which under the circumstances, it seems you are.”

My neck creaked as I glanced toward Gary. “Remind me to keep a cultural anthropologist handy for, you know. Everything.” He waggled his eyebrows and I turned my attention back to Sandburg, trying not to stare. Trying not to stare at him, and trying not to stare at the museum’s marble floor, where Jason Chan’s lifeblood had been smeared in a circle around the cauldron. “Okay. Two more questions. One—could you in theory break down a ward put in place by somebody like Brigid by doing a blood sacrifice in someone else’s name?”

Sandburg opened his mouth and closed it again, looking around at the rest of us like he was just realizing this wasn’t a game. “I’d think a single sacrifice would lack the necessary power. Maybe a single willing sacrifice, because it’s assumed willing sacrifices have more…”

“Mojo,” I supplied into his silence. “I think we can trust Jason wasn’t a willing sacrifice. So it’d take more than one?” I didn’t want to say Redding’s name aloud, as if doing so would spell his doom. Except Suzy said he wasn’t dead yet, so he hadn’t been sacrificed to free the cauldron.

“If I were participating in a ritual to break a goddess’s binding, I would probably spend years building the groundwork.” Sandburg spoke very carefully, an awareness that he was offering us the rope to hang him with in his words. “I would wait for an opportune date, one associated with my patron, and I would make repeated offerings in order to weaken the spell so that at the appropriate hour a final sacrifice would shatter it.” His voice tensed, gaze jumping from me to Billy and back again. “I, though, would be acting and speaking metaphorically. You understand that, don’t you? This is…hypothetical.”

“Hypothetical but useful.” I thought of the pigtailed little girl I’d seen once or twice, and drew a deep breath. “Second question. Would a goddess show herself in the form of a child? A little girl?”

“A maiden form is usually represented as older, a young woman rather than a little girl. That said…” Sandburg relaxed marginally as neither Billy nor I leaped up to slap cuffs on him. “Who’s to stop a goddess from appearing any way she wants?”

A tiny surge of relief cleared my blood and my thoughts. “That’s awesome. Anybody know how to summon a goddess and ask for her help in laying the smackdown on her enemy’s cauldron?”

“Not her enemy.” Sandburg regained a shred more equilibrium and sniffed a bit prissily. “Her opposite. Two beings at diametrical points of a power structure aren’t inherently antagonistic. They can merely be balancing forces, one capable of growing too powerful without the other’s influence. And no,” he added as we all went back to staring at him, “I don’t know how to summon Brigid. It appears that would be your domain.” A small circle of his hand indicated he meant all of us when he said your.

“Right,” I said after a minute. “I guess it is.” The problem was, I only knew one person who did goddess-magic, and that was a witch for whom I’d almost ended the world a few months ago. She wasn’t exactly high on my list of people I wanted to contact again, and even if I’d been willing, I didn’t know if her goddess was the same as the one I needed here and now. I desperately wanted a handbook that cross-referenced things like worldwide names for the gods and goddesses whose domains were more or less the same. If there was any kind of justice in the world, they’d be different names for the same being, though I didn’t know why there should start being justice at this late date. Cernunnos and Herne were the same guy by a lot of people’s reckoning, but I had empirical evidence to the contrary. Still, as a research tool, it’d be very handy. Somebody’d probably written one. I’d have to search Amazon, assuming I lived through the next three hours and twelve minutes.

Out loud, and in an attempt to shut off the free association my brain had tumbled into, I said, “You’re taking this well.”

Sandburg gave me a small smile. “I’m really not.”

Oh. Apparently my brain should’ve just kept going with the research thing. Billy, sounding like the voice of grim patience, said, “Did you get anything off Chan?”

“Only that his migraines got worse around the cauldron, right up until the night he died.” I outlined what Jason’d told me about the encroaching darkness he’d noticed, then spread my hands. “Short of calling up a goddess, I don’t know what to do. And I don’t have 1–800-GODDESS preprogrammed into my phone.”

I got a round of dry looks. Okay, okay, I guessed I didn’t need it preprogrammed if I could spell “goddess,” but jeez, tough crowd. Billy, though, broke my discomfort by muttering, “Melinda does.”

“You cannot seriously be suggesting we get your pregnant wife involved in a death-cauldron scenario.” I spoke before thinking, but even if I’d thinked, I’d have said it anyway. Melinda’d had a traumatic enough pregnancy, thanks to me. Adding more stress to the final week of waddling was the last thing I wanted to do, even if the rational part of me recognized it was Mel’s choice. This was not about rationality. This was about Joanne Walker, Reluctant Shaman, getting all puffed up and out of sorts over the idea of her friends diving headlong into trouble just because she was in the middle of it herself.

In Billy’s defense, he didn’t look thrilled about the idea himself. On the other hand, that didn’t stop him from saying, “Know anybody else on speaking terms with a goddess?”

“I don’t,” Gary said, “but if you’re offerin’ introductions, that’s a social class I ain’t familiar with.”

I glowered at him. “You’re not helping.” He gave me a toothy white grin with no repentance in it at all. Sandburg watched the three of us like we were the final match in an exceedingly complex game of Ping-Pong. “Sonata, tell me you’ve got another solution. Any other solution.”

She shook her head. “My strengths lie in communicating with the dead, Joanne. I have no special relationship with any god.”

I could feel the enamel on my molars wearing thin. A Herculean effort unclenched them just far enough to grate, “This goddess Mel’s on speaking terms with…Is she on speaking terms with her?” I nearly backed up to try vocally capitalizing the “she” in that sentence, then decided if Cernunnos didn’t get a capital H when I referred to him as “he,” then a goddess didn’t get one, either. Not from me, anyway.

Besides, Billy followed my pronouns easily enough, shrugging a shoulder in response. “She says she does. I see dead people and my police partner heals with a touch. Who am I to argue?”

There was a certain logic to that. Not an irrefutable logic, perhaps, but I didn’t think I had the moral high ground to refute it. Bizarrely, that reminded me of Morrison’s dyed hair, and therefore of Morrison, and I spent a few seconds wondering what he’d do in my position.

Truth was, he’d do what he already had done: he’d use the resources available to him, whether he liked it or not. Billy and I lived eyeball deep in a paranormal world, so Morrison’d set us loose to play cop in that world because we were the only ones who could. If asking Melinda Holliday to chat up her patron goddess was the surest bead we had on finding the cauldron, then he’d already be halfway to their house and annoyed at me for wasting time.

Even in my hypothetical situations, he ended up annoyed with me. It was good there were some constants in the universe. Time flowed in one direction, light traveled at 9.46 trillion kilometers per year, and Captain Michael Morrison was always irritated with me. I sighed. “All right. Okay. You haven’t installed a pool at your house, have you, Billy?”