Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,64

was any time at all, because no soul in residence = dying! And while necromancers’ souls are a little more flexible than most, that universal law doesn’t change.

“Water,” I said hoarsely.

Mircea helped me up, and they gave me a glass. It was the same one I’d had before, and it was still chilled. So not away so long, after all.

I drank it down, almost finishing it before wiping a hand across my mouth.

“He didn’t want to be here,” I said, remembering that old wood-paneled music room, the one I’d never been in. But it had been lovely: faded carpets on polished wood floors, beautiful antique instruments, lovingly cared for, the smell of flowers . . .

He should have been back there, composing some pretentious new composition. He should have been nibbling on his pens—he’d liked to chew on his pens, he’d had a cup of the mangled things on a table. He should have been—

Somewhere else.

“None of us wants to be here, Lady,” the old soldier told me. “War is a terrible thing, and anybody thinks otherwise was never in one.”

“Hey, Cass!” Billy called, before I could respond. “Check it out!”

He was hovering over another corpse, which had landed on its stomach, but the head was to the side, so I guess he could see the face.

“Is it him?” I asked, and I said it out loud, because fuck it, that’s why. Billy nodded, and I walked over. The face was dead now, and mushed strangely against the floor, almost like it was trying to form a puddle. A puddle of flesh, I thought, and shuddered.

But he was right; it was the same guy.

“That’s the one,” I said, to whoever happened to be listening.

I guess it was the old soldier, because he came over and turned the body on its back. That wasn’t a great move, because the man who everyone crowded around to see appeared to have been split in half—at least the upper body had been. The face had separated into two parts, which explained why he’d looked like he was melting into the floor. And because there didn’t seem to be much in there to hold him together anymore.

The chest had been vacated, too, with a bunch of raw, red flesh visible through a half-shredded breastplate, along with the insides of some ribs. But the sides of the armor were still kind of keeping it intact. The head didn’t have that advantage, and it was just . . . floppy.

I should have been losing my lunch, or running off somewhere, possibly screaming. But my brain seemed to have switched off my emotions, and a weird sort of numbness had overtaken me. Or maybe that was Mircea. He had a lot of mental gifts, and he had a hand on my shoulder that felt unusually weighty.

Anyway, I didn’t react, even when the old soldier literally pulled the man’s face back together.

Whatever glamourie the vamp had been using had gone with death, so he was pale as milk, although he’d probably been that way in life, too. He had a patchy red beard but no mustache, a mop of red hair, and a mole on his temple like a very misplaced beauty mark. I focused on it because it was easier, and because that was how I knew we’d found our man.

“He killed the other one,” I said, gesturing at the head. “Decapitated him when he was entering the tent, out of nowhere.”

“For what reason?” the consul asked.

I shook my head, but stopped because it made me feel dizzy. I drank more water. “No idea.”

“No idea?” It was sharp. “What did you see?”

I opened my mouth, and Mircea’s hand tightened. Okay, yeah. We had company.

“The ground,” I rasped. “As his head bounced across it.”

“And what else?”

“Nothing else. That’s all he saw. Then that guy”—I pointed at the redhead—“staked him through the heart, and that was it. He didn’t know why he died, so I can’t tell you.”

“Can you tell us anything else, any detail?”

That was Mircea. He sounded tense, because yeah. Somebody was slaughtering his army before it even went to war. And his boss was glaring at him like this was all his fault.

It looked like he wasn’t having any better of a day than I was.

“He was surprised,” I said, remembering that brief surge of shock, and not just the physical kind. “They knew each other.”

“They all knew each other,” the officer told me. “They’re part of the same squad!”

“I think . . . I think that