Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,39
grease and yoghurt from the wrapping, but it was a near thing. Khelséa’s eyebrows rose in eloquent disbelief, but she slipped the spare pistol into her own pocket rather than press the matter.
Isyllt washed and traded her dressing gown for leathers and boots—older, well-worn ones this time, since she wasn’t about to lose another good jacket to the sewers. The high collar chafed her wounded shoulder, but she stopped herself before she numbed the bite. Some things ought not to be forgotten. Last night’s souvenir, however, she was willing to ignore.
Khelséa puttered in the apartment’s tiny corner kitchen when she emerged, and the air smelled of jasmine tea. Watching the other woman, Isyllt almost wished she didn’t live alone. She and Kiril hadn’t cohabitated since the first few days after he found her; they’d spent so much time together it hardly mattered. She hadn’t had anyone else to make her tea—or to make tea for—since she was fifteen and living with three other girls in a leaking tenement attic. They were too poor most decads to afford tea, anyway.
A pity, she thought wryly as Khelséa handed her a mug, that she didn’t appreciate women that way. And even if she had, the inspector’s taste ran to plump and pretty and not remotely self-destructive. Her latest lover was a seamstress.
“Do the other vigils know you’re misadventuring with me?” Isyllt asked, letting the warmth of the cup soak her hands. The sun had reemerged an hour past noon, leaking like watered honey through the curtains and pooling along the dusty baseboards.
“This is my day off.” Khelséa grinned, a quick flash of white. “Gemma is always telling me I need more hobbies.” She leaned back in a chair and stretched her legs in front of her. “My autopsist knows—the one who saw the ring. In case we don’t come back.” She shrugged aside the possibility of death, and her wealth of braids—twisted into one forearm-thick plait and wrapped with brown yarn—rustled against her jacket. “Do you have a plan?”
Her surname, Shar, meant “sand” in Assari, and foreign inflections still colored her vowels. Not for the first time, Isyllt wondered how a woman from the deserts of Assar ended up working for Erisín’s Vigils. One day, she resolved, she’d ply the inspector with enough wine to get an answer out of her.
“Go back to where I was attacked and track them from there, I suppose. One of them is called Myca, but I doubt that’s enough to summon with.” Vampires, like prostitutes, were unlikely to use their birth names. And the true names of demons were nearly impossible to determine, anyway. Binding a foreign spirit to flesh, living or dead, changed both irrevocably.
“The one who bit you?”
“No, that would be too easy.” The bond of the wound coupled with even an untrue name might have been enough to use, but not only one or the other. “I’d almost rather search for Forsythia’s ghost first, or for someone who knows her story.”
“But—”
“Yes, but.” She grimaced at the dregs of her tea. “We don’t have time for that.” Stolen royal goods would always take precedence over a murdered prostitute. Part of her wanted to argue, but the calendar was against her—it was already Hekate, and the rain and chill that wrapped Erisín would be snow in the north. The king and his forces were already decamping or would be very soon.
Which wasn’t need for so much haste that she shouldn’t talk to Kiril first. Khelséa might be better prepared than she and Ciaran had been the first time, but there were still a dozen dangers in the sewers. A dozen reasons to seek his advice. And the only reason not to was the set of his shoulders as he’d turned from her, the warmth of his hand on her skin and the chill of its absence. The foolish pain of rejection and loneliness that could still prick her to tears years later. Whenever she thought she’d finally moved past it, a touch or glance would undo her all over again. How many more years would pass before she was free of it?
“All right,” she said, taking a last swallow of cold tea to rinse away the bitter taste in her mouth. The light cooled and greyed again, and they had little enough of it to waste. “Let’s go.”
They didn’t enter through the Garden’s access this time, but by one in Harrowgate that Isyllt judged to be closer to the place where she and Ciaran had been