I doubted that it was a pleasant experience, although the man appeared relatively clean, except for spots where it looked like the fey had been throwing him around the basement floor. But there was something unsavory about him. The stench of dark magic, Louis-Cesare had always said, but Ranbir was supposedly a dark mage, and he’d smelled like sweat and fried chicken. Not like . . .
“He’s dead,” I said, finally placing that smell. It was the same one that the fey had been giving off upstairs, only fainter. And underneath a boatload of cologne that only made it worse by contrast.
“Yes, I’m dead!” Jonathan snarled, some of the old fire coming back into his eyes. “That damned Pythia—she killed me! She killed me twice!”
“Apparently she needed to do it a third time,” I said, feeling dizzy. I looked at Louis-Cesare. “Is it him?”
He nodded.
“Tell them,” Efridis said, looking at Jonathan. “Tell them what you have done.”
And, immediately, there was a change of demeanor. From outraged pride to groveling pathos. “Please, Lady, we can make some kind of accommodation between us. I can help you—”
“You’ve ‘helped me’ enough. Tell them!”
It was not a request.
But Jonathan seemed confused and vaguely petulant. “I can’t confess if I don’t know what I did!”
“Don’t know?” It was almost a yell. And it was accompanied by a lovely, manicured hand reaching down, grabbing the huddled figure by the hair, and jerking him upward. “What you did, was to butcher our people. What you did, was to make monsters out of our dead! Desecrating their bodies and endangering their very souls!”
“Oh.” Jonathan swallowed. “I’m . . . sorry?”
She just stared at him, her face a mix of shock, disbelief and revulsion. I took my chance. “How are you still walking around?”
He scowled at me. “I could ask you the same thing. Louis-Cesare should have been able to battle his way through that, but not you. I sent repeated burst of magic at you; those things should have eaten you alive.”
So that was why we’d suddenly been so popular, I thought, and barely refrained from kicking him.
But he noticed, and his expression sharpened. “I bet your bitch sister is having fun in Faerie, if she’s still alive. I bet—”
He broke off with a scream, probably because Efridis had just torn out most of his hair. She did not seem to be in a good mood. And Jonathan, however much pain he was in, knew it.
“Tell us what you did!”
“All right, all right!” he glared up at her. “I was doing an experiment—with permission, of course. King Aeslinn lost a lot of fey at the recent battle over his capitol. I asked if I could have some, for an experiment I wanted to run—”
“Some . . . what?” I asked.
Those creepy, colorless eyes turned to me. “Bodies. What else? He said yes.”
There was a change in the air of the room suddenly. I couldn’t have said exactly what it was, as no sounds were uttered that were audible to me, and nobody appeared to have moved. But there was an element of menace that hadn’t been there before.
Jonathan felt it, too.
“I’m not lying!” he said, sending his eyes around. “He said it. He said he didn’t care. And how was I supposed to know about your religion?”
“You’ve lived in Faerie long enough,” Efridis hissed.
“But I don’t pay attention to those sorts of things! I was there to get godly tech, to help with my experiments. As far as I knew, they were just dead bodies. Stronger, more resilient, but dead, all right? I wasn’t—I didn’t mean—”
“What in the hell were you doing with them?” I asked.
Jonathan looked annoyed. “The obvious, I should think. I am, as you can see, very dead. That puts me in a bit of a bind. Luckily, I had already started the aforementioned experiments, to see whether fey could make decent zombies. The answer is no, by the way—”
“That isn’t all you were doing,” Efridis said. “You changed them.”
“Yes, well, that’s what experimentation is. I was trying out different possibilities. Fortunately, I had put a bit of my soul into several, to see if I could control them. It didn’t work very well, but it meant that, once I died, there was a tiny bit of me still around. But it’s very little. I basically had to make a zombie out of myself in order to—”
“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”
Jonathan waited.
“You put the bits of soul . . . from the fey experiments . .