Grave Destiny (Alex Craft, #6) - Kalayna Price Page 0,97

look at them. But I would. I let my gaze run over the grass until I spotted one of the heads. It was Lunabella.

It was dark on the hillside. The moon was only half full, and while the glowing moonflowers supplied some light, it was still night. Also, mortal reality touched here, so my eyes suffered more than in pure Faerie. I walked over to the head and knelt next to it.

She had landed facedown in the grass. I didn’t want to touch her, but I couldn’t just leave her head where it had rolled after I’d dropped it. The dead deserved better treatment than that, even if they were suspected of murder.

Cringing, I lifted the head with both hands. My skin crawled at the contact, my stomach twisting. It hadn’t exactly been easy to touch her head at the revelry, but the threat of the devouring fog had been a pretty big distraction. Now I was very aware of the cold blood and cooling skin under my fingers. I just needed to carry it five feet to her body, and then I was calling us even for my dropping her head in the first place. I would have rather closed my eyes and not thought about what was in my hands, but Falin had told me to look at the bodies, so I turned her face upward as I moved.

Lunabella’s eyes were closed, at least, but her mouth hung open, and her hair had tangled badly during either the first roll after her beheading, my rough run through the woods, or her second roll when I’d dropped her. It was matted to her face with drying blood. Around it her skin . . . I gasped, nearly dropping the head again.

Dark purple lines webbed through her face; black lesions bubbled above her skin in places. I stared, trying to convince myself that what I was seeing was just more drying blood. But no, the black and purple lines were under the flesh. Basmoarte. As if in recognition, I felt the tips of my own infected fingers burn with the poison that would slowly kill me. I set her head down above the shoulders of her body where it lay on the hilltop. Then I scuttled back several feet from the corpse. She did not look like she was just sleeping.

I wiped my hands on my skirt, rubbing my skin hard against the material, but the feeling of Lunabella’s blood on my fingers didn’t brush off. Nor did the burn of the infection in my magic as I turned and searched for Jurin’s head. I’d seen it earlier, near where I’d been sitting, but I hadn’t really looked at it. Now I forced myself to look, and I found similar markings of infection. I should have placed his head with his body as well. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. One of the guys would have to collect it before he was returned to the winter court. I was done.

“They both have basmoarte.” I said the words very carefully, fighting back the panic bubbling in my throat. Of course that forced it to my stomach and I went still, unsure if I was going to be sick.

“Yes. With extremely fast onset. Just like what hit you,” Falin said, looking from body to head. “We saw Lunabella less than twelve hours ago and she displayed no symptoms. At the time of her death, the infection was advanced. Her beheading might have been a mercy.”

“Then that is an undeniable tie to the crime scene,” I said, still scrubbing at my hands. “Perhaps she was accidentally exposed. Or perhaps she was double-crossed. Either way, we need to question her and find out what she knows.”

“Alexis, she has basmoarte,” Dugan said, and his tone implied we shouldn’t need to discuss it further.

“So do I.” I yelled it. I couldn’t help it. But I’d already been exposed. What did it matter if I raised a few more shades with it?

“Yes, but remember it is an infection from a wound, not a disease.” Dugan sounded like he was schooling a child, which irritated me. “Kordon was infected near or after death and showed no symptoms. You described feeling ‘a prick’ when your magic was injured. Imagine what would happen if you reached inside a body this badly infected. It would shred your magic, causing dozens of wounds. How fast would it spread through you then?”

Oh.

So raising the shades was out. “How do we confirm they were