Of course, depending on how my ritual went, it might be a moot point.
After looking over Kordon, Falin moved on to Stiofan. I was curious to learn more about Stiofan’s condition after discovering Kordon was in rigor and soulless—he must have been in the human realm at some point—but I couldn’t get past the blood. It was everywhere. Splatters were on the curtains and the inside of the canopy top. Pools of it had soaked into the sheets and the pillow, as well as trailing down to puddle on the floor. I shivered and looked away.
If Kordon had been planted in the court to throw suspicion on the shadow fae, the true murderers did a crappy job. Not only was Kordon suspiciously bloodless from his own wound, but there was no way he could have stabbed Stiofan so many times—let alone rip his rib cage open and remove his heart—without getting absolutely covered in the other fae’s blood as well. Who would believe such a sloppy frame job?
I glanced at the ice guard. He’d believed it. Dugan had taken it at face value as well. The killer likely hadn’t considered that anyone would look deeper. A plausible enough story had been told with the bodies, if the viewer was only looking to confirm the preconceived conclusion of what was presented. It was the small details that made that story impossible. So whoever staged this probably had little knowledge of crime scene investigation.
Which narrows our suspect pool down to almost every fae residing inside Faerie. Maybe most of the older changelings as well. Awesome.
Falin made a sound and I looked his way before my brain caught up with the motion. He held a pillow splattered with blood and was studying it intently as if it held some new secret he hadn’t noted before.
“Isn’t everything over there covered in blood?” I asked. My stomach begged me to turn away, but I forced myself to look, to try to see what had drawn Falin’s attention.
“Yes, but this was beside him, bloodied-side down. That means it was flipped over at some point.” Falin examined both sides of the pillow, and then he leaned forward, studying Stiofan’s head. “I think it’s possible his face was covered with it.”
“So the shade might not have seen who attacked him.” That would suck. I frowned. “That also means we are up to multiple killers. Someone to stab. Someone to hold the pillow and pin his arms.” Or someone with more than two arms. I glanced at the three-armed goblin. But no. Everything indicated he’d been dead before the attack.
Falin had walked in the blood pool to get close enough to examine the body. Nori’s messenger bag had provided covers for his shoes, and he stripped off the now-bloody covers carefully and bagged them before heading back toward us. I frowned. His first two steps, before he removed the covers, now had bloody, vaguely shoe-shaped prints. They were the only recognizable footprints in the room. There were a couple other smudges, but they weren’t large enough or consistent enough to be footprints. So could the killer—or killers—fly like Nori? Or had they cleaned up the scene? I knew there was a technique the cops used to detect residual blood, but I had no idea what it was, only that it involved sprays and maybe special lights. I was guessing if Faerie didn’t like cameras, it would tolerate such techniques even less.
I needed to raise the shades. My head was starting to hurt from all the speculation, so I was glad when Falin rejoined us and said, “I think we’ve learned all we can from the scene.” But then he had to spoil my relief by adding, “It’s time to see the queen.”
* * *
• • •
The guard who had escorted us to the scene earlier had returned to his post, and the two that had been guarding the outside of the door were now collecting the bodies, so we were on our own to find the queen. Not that it looked like Falin needed any help.
He set a quick pace down the seemingly endless halls. My pace was considerably less quick, Dugan getting ahead of me as I dawdled. I didn’t want to get left behind, though—getting lost in these icy halls was not how I wanted to spend my afternoon.
Falin stopped at an archway that looked no different from dozens of others we’d passed. He waited for me to catch up and shot me a thin smile I