Blackbird Broken (The Witch King's Crown #2) - Keri Arthur Page 0,13

it was neat, with only a cup and plate sitting on the sink drainer. Jules, it seemed, lived a fairly solitary life.

I headed upstairs. There were three doors off the small landing. One was a bathroom, the other a box bedroom. Mo was in the third one.

“Did you find—” The rest of that sentence died on my lips as I entered the larger bedroom.

She had found the source of the smell.

It was a man.

An old man.

One who’d obviously been dead long enough for his stomach gases to release and his skin to discolor.

I wrinkled my nose and tried not to breathe too deeply. Even so, the smell was bad enough to have my stomach churning. “I’m guessing that’s Jules Okoro?”

She waved his wallet. “According to this, it is.”

“He’s not what I expected. I mean, he looks to be in his mid-seventies, and that, in turn, begs the question—how old was the nurse Jackie spoke to?”

“She’d been retired a few years, so at least late sixties.”

“Which makes her younger than him, and that’s impossible if she was working at the hospital when he was born. What’s his age according to his license?”

“Thirty-six.”

I blinked and looked at the figure on the bed again. “Either he had some sort of degenerative disease, or something else was going on.”

She dropped his wallet back onto his bedside table, then squatted beside his bed. I remained exactly where I was. Getting any closer might just have last night’s pizza making a grand reappearance. “Well, that right there could be part of the answer.”

“What right where?”

She motioned toward his head. “His ears have a very slight point.”

Which suggested he was a halfling—the offspring of a dark elf and a human. Elves, I’d recently learned, had a long history of stealing human women in an effort to refresh their own bloodlines. The resulting halflings were generally hermaphrodites, and while they didn’t inherit the dark elf ability for magic, they did gain their ability to manipulate the weak willed. Like Tris, perhaps.

“Why would his being a halfling explain his advanced age? The other halflings we’ve come across didn’t appear to have this problem.”

“Because they were half human.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“There’s been plenty of conjecture over the years as to why few witches were ever taken by the elves, but it wasn’t until the discovery of a severely emaciated corpse outside a discarded Darkside gateway that we got a possible answer. There appears to be a gene incompatibility between our two races that results in multiple autoimmune diseases and premature aging. Whether it happens to all witch-elf offspring or only some is unknown.”

“Do you think it was a coincidence—a simple matter of opportunity—that a woman from a previously unknown branch of the Okoros was taken?”

“I doubt it. It’s pretty obvious someone out there knows a whole lot more about the lineage of the Okoros than we do.”

Someone who had the missing family bibles, perhaps? “But why would they even bother? They’d have to know a halfling would never be able to draw the sword.”

“They lose nothing in trying.” She nodded toward Jules. “The price for this poor soul was a short and painful existence, but who knows how many other siblings he has running around Darkside or even here? Siblings that perhaps aren’t as afflicted as he?”

“It still doesn’t alter the fact that Darkside can’t touch the sword.” It killed them if they tried—a fact we knew from a legendary battle that happened in the days before Uhtric closed the main gate. His horse had been cut from beneath him and in the fall, his sword had slipped from his grasp. The dark elf who’d tried to claim the blade had been instantly incinerated.

“Full elves, no. But half-breed witches able to trace their lineage back to Uhtric? That’s an unknown.” She made a frustrated sound. “It would, however, seem I’ve been very lax in my duty.”

I frowned. “I think if anyone is to blame for this mess, it’s the Blackbirds. They’re the protectors of King and Crown, after all, and they all but disappeared centuries ago.”

She grimaced. “That might be true, but I’m a mage. With Mryddin locked in his cave and Gwendydd in Europe, it falls to me to hinder Darkside developments as best I can.”

“Then maybe it’s time you dug Mryddin out of his cave. It’d certainly be handy to have an extra mage about if the main gate is opened.”

Her expression held a tinge of wistfulness. “As much as I’d love to, he’s