Grave Destiny (Alex Craft, #6) - Kalayna Price Page 0,19

the sight of the Shadow Prince. Then he sprang into a flurry of action. An icy blade zipped through the air, leaving a trail of frost in its wake. Just as quickly, Falin was there, his two long daggers crossed, catching the blade before it completed its path toward Dugan’s head. Not that the prince looked caught unawares. His own sword was out, bleeding shadows into the air around it.

“Stand down,” Falin commanded.

The guard drew back but didn’t sheathe his sword. His cloak hid everything but his mouth and chin, which revealed only that his lips were curled back, exposing gritted teeth that were far sharper-looking than a human’s, but he obeyed his knight.

“The Shadow Prince is a guest here to observe,” Falin said, and then glanced over his shoulder, not at me, but at someone beyond me.

I hadn’t noticed the sentry on the left-hand side of the doorway when I’d entered. She was the complete opposite of the hooded and ice-armored guard. She wore a very modern black pantsuit that was fitted to her wasp-thin body. Her short black hair was slicked back on her head, except for two small antennae that hung forward just above her forehead. I couldn’t actually see the dragonfly wings that kept her lifted a foot off the ground—they were only a blur of movement as she had to keep them in continuous movement to hover in one spot the way she was—but I was familiar with them because I recognized her. Agent Nori, one of Falin’s FIB agents.

“Sir,” she said, tilting her head toward her boss and studying him with multifaceted eyes.

I scanned the room, wondering if there was anyone else I’d missed. If one FIB agent was here, preserving the scene, shouldn’t more have been here working it? Or at least waiting for Falin so they could start working the scene? But no one else was present. No one living, at least.

Now that Falin was no longer directly in front of me, I could more or less see the entire room. My gaze skittered over the prone figure on the bed and the copious amounts of blood surrounding it. Another figure lay sprawled on the floor only a few feet ahead of me, as if he’d been running for the door and almost made it. I’d known before walking in that there would be two bodies, but it was slightly unnerving to realize that I’d been standing so close to one and hadn’t sensed it. With no land of the dead in Faerie, grave essence didn’t reach for me. I couldn’t feel bodies. I wasn’t used to that.

As a general rule of thumb, I didn’t like blood. Hell, I didn’t really like dead bodies either, though they were often unavoidable in my line of work. But the small body only feet in front of me didn’t trigger an immediate need to look away, no rising nausea or panic. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t feel him, so my mind could dismiss him as something other than a body. Without contact with the land of the dead, there were no obvious signs of decomposition, so he looked like he could be sleeping—if anyone would sleep facedown on a floor made of ice. There was also remarkably little blood—though the sword sticking out of his back was a pretty clear sign of the violence that had killed him. Or maybe it was easier to look at him because he was so visibly inhuman.

The fae were a diverse people. Some looked nearly human, but many more were wildly different. He was on the humanoid-shaped-but-obviously-not-remotely-human side of the scale. He was the size of a child; I’d guess no more than three feet tall. His skin was green and rough-looking, like an alligator’s. He had no hair, at least none I could see from this distance, not even on his eyebrows. But the most unusual thing was the fact that he had three arms: one on his left side and two on his right. Make that the second most unusual thing. The most unusual was how pristine the floor around him was despite the sword jutting out of his back.

“Do goblins bleed?” I asked, scanning the floor between the small body and the bed. There was a lot of blood close to the bed and I didn’t look at it too hard, but only a smudge or two of blood was near the goblin’s body.

“Yes,” Falin said, his eyes making the same journey mine had. “Their