What Lurks Beneath (Prihine's Story)

Chapter One

Chapter Two 

Chapter Three

The next time Prihine saw the Shepherds, night had fallen, and Courtshore had transformed into a different place entirely. A cold, unpleasant rain slanted down from tar-black skies; a chill wind plucked greedily at her skirts. Thankfully Lady Rovaque’s promised carriage arrived at her apartments exactly when it was supposed to, meaning Prihine’s new slippers—and the trailing ankle-ribbons she’d bought yesterday, the ones that were so fashionable in the South—weren’t ruined by all the mud and puddling rain. But she had to wonder how the weather would affect the ongoing search for Cordelia Trask. She’d overheard the three Shepherd men commenting on the lack of a blood trail earlier this morning; she couldn’t imagine this latest development would help.

Inwardly, her insides shuddered as she winced away from thoughts of poor Cordelia. Realistically, the young woman had to be dead, didn’t she? Or worse, perhaps she was being held captive in a dank basement somewhere, and they were… well, it was unspeakable, really. Nothing to bear thinking about. Prihine swallowed and flapped her silk fan faster, feeling as if the solitary carriage had gone hot and airless.

Still, no matter what she thought in the privacy of her own mind, she had to keep up appearances, if only for poor Eleret’s sake. Her handmaid was busy comforting her cousin Aida, who had gone practically catatonic over her mistress’s disappearance. Neither of them would be attending Lady Rovaque’s party tonight, but Prihine decided that she ought to carry on pretending that Cordelia could be saved, anyway. One never knew. And if anything, poor Eleret and Aida needed the hope.

The carriage turned ponderously onto Lady Rovaque’s street, and as Prihine stared out into the rain-lashed night, she stiffened. Were those three sullen shadows standing on that covered stoop—? No. They wouldn’t. 

Prihine scrabbled with the unfamiliar latches of the carriage window and, upon lowering it, leaned out and snapped, “Get in!”

Really! she thought with annoyance as she flounced back into her seat with a disconcerted rustle. She’d risked her reputation to squirrel these Shepherds into Lady Rovaque’s party, and they couldn’t have even been bothered to dress appropriately? Where were their parasols? What were they thinking, standing there hunching their shoulders against the rain like a huddle of common peasants? They were going to trudge into Lady Rovaque’s home with sopping uniforms, dripping mud and wet like Prihine had fished them out of a canal? She thought not!

The carriage door opened, and with much reluctant grumbling, the wily handsome one—Chase, she thought—coaxed the broad-shouldered blond and the brooding Ket to climb in. Chase slid lightly onto Prihine’s seat beside her, while Blade and Trouble crammed themselves rather moodily onto the opposite bench. Prihine almost regretted the invitation: they seemed positively hulking! It felt as if the carriage might pop like a soap bubble, it hardly seemed large enough to confine their frames. She was never around men who were so—so—vital, thrumming with so much strength and life that it seemed jarring, almost discordant. She was used to nobles and aristocrats who fit neatly and seamlessly into their surroundings, who could make themselves pretty to look at but unthreatening and sleek. But these three were the opposite. She felt their roughness, the danger of their respective lifestyles, as acutely as if they were holding a bludgeon in each hand.

She took a deep breath against the oppressiveness of their proximity, then said tartly, “You couldn’t have attempted to keep yourselves dry?”

Blade glowered silently at her; Trouble rolled his eyes and pushed the wet golden hair out of his face. Only Chase looked amused. “Didn’t exactly remember to bring rainshades with us when we went on the hunt today,” he returned with a grin. “But you’re right—I did argue for finding some better clothes.”

Prihine eyed them all; Trouble’s formal collar was as twisted as if he’d gotten into a wrestling match with it, and Blade looked more like a cutthroat lurking in the shadows in his dark uniform than he did an officer of the law. “But your argument was unsuccessful, I take it.”

“None of us brought anything fancy enough, and while I could nab us something in a pinch—I thought about doing it at Robbhan Vallinari’s house—that, too, was shot down.” He sat back, looking entirely at his ease as he propped one ankle against his knee, and continued, “Anyway, we were just catching each other up on our day’s findings before we charge ahead into the breach.”

It seemed they’d given up all pretense of trying to keep her out of things, which was just as well, Prihine thought with satisfaction. If they were going to have her help navigating Lady Cordelia’s social circle, they’d better give her all the information she needed to form her own opinion of things. Trouble said, “I went to see the priest, Augur Konstantin Teleus. He holds to the story that the last he saw of Cordelia was at their meeting at his church last night. Some of the nuns who were around at that time confirmed that there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about that meeting; he, Cordelia, and an old widow discussed a local charity drive, and then Cordelia went home. The two of them were never alone together; the widow, who runs the poorhouse, was there the entire time. Trask’s chauffeur confirms that the augur handed Cordelia into the carriage and the driver took her straight home, without making any stops.”

“So there was no argument, nor any sort of heated tryst?” Chase asked thoughtfully. “I sort of wondered if maybe they staged this whole thing so they could run off and be together in peace. If Cordelia’s ‘dead,’ eventually people will stop looking for her, and she and the augur can go away and have lots of babies somewhere.”

Trouble shook his head slowly. “If that’s the case, the priest did a pretty impressive job of acting surprised when I told him Cordelia is missing. But then again, I suppose he would.”

“Who’s the old widow?” Blade asked then, his deep voice like the grate of a whetstone from the shadows.

Trouble shrugged. “Mrs. Vear. I stopped by the poorhouse to talk to her, too, but the assistant said she was out running errands. But the assistant said she came back home at the expected time last night and seemed just fine, nothing amiss. Totally oblivious to anything going on between the priest and Cordelia, anyway.”

Blade grunted; Chase, eyeing him, said, “And how went your research, Spike?”

Prihine saw the Ket’s dark eyes flick assessingly towards her; she stiffened her spine and raised her chin. Blade’s expression didn’t change, but he verbally relented, saying, “I do not believe Cordelia was the first victim of this… perpetrator.”

The carriage fell silent at that. It had pulled up to the front of Lady Rovaque’s building long ago, but the driver stayed quiet, evidently aware that his charge was currently ensconced in a private meeting with the three men she’d just invited into his mistress’s vehicle. After a moment, Trouble said, “You… gonna elaborate on that?”

Blade shot him a sardonic look. “I combed through the City Guard’s records,” he continued, with a distinct note of distaste in his tone, “which took far longer than I would have liked, both due to their lack of cooperation and the disarray of their archives. But from what I could put together… at least nine women, all of Cordelia’s approximate age and build, have gone missing in the last three years. All of them disappeared during the night, all of them under mysterious circumstances. Most were written off for various reasons—running away, purported suicide—but the pattern is there if you approach it with the lens of Cordelia’s disappearance.” He paused for a moment. “The interesting thing is that most of the disappearances are clustered within the first two years. Then the gaps between them grow longer, with the last one before this taking place over nine months ago. Prior to that, they happened anywhere from every two to four months.”

“Huh,” Trouble said. He blew out a long breath. “Well, shit.”

“So a demon or a mass murderer, or both,” Chase said, his leg vibrating against the carriage seat now. “I feel like that reduces the likelihood of Lord Trask or Vallinari or the priest being the culprit, no? I take it the other women weren’t nobles?”

Blade shook his head. “They came from all walks of life, and they don’t seem to have any connection to each other aside from similar descriptions. Their commonality seemed to be their youth and beauty rather than anything to do with their backgrounds.”

“Any of them attend the same church?”

“That wouldn’t be in the files, but judging by their home addresses, I would find it unlikely.” 

“So if all of the disappearances were done by the same person,” Chase mused aloud, “the connection to Cordelia’s top three suspects doesn’t seem to be there. From a personal angle, all three men have a motive to do away with her. But from a larger angle—assuming that this is part of a bigger pattern—it makes less sense that, say, the priest kidnapped or killed nine other unrelated women before turning his sights to someone so closely related to him.”

“Unless it is a demon,” Blade pointed out. “Endarkened logic isn’t our own.”

Chase made a humming sound. “Too right. And why such a large break in the pattern, as well? Nine months without a disappearance—a repentant sinner struggling with their madness? A lack of opportunity? A trip out of town?”

They lapsed into thoughtful silence again, their eyes glinting in the gloom of the carriage like coins. Finally Trouble said, “And you, Chase? Did you get to speak to Robbhan Vallinari?”

The thief smiled, but it was an almost frightening look, an inane grin that instantly put Prihine on her guard. “No,” he returned cheerfully, “the bastard turned me away at the door. Or his butler did, I should say. Said his master wasn’t home, but wouldn’t tell me where he was.” He shrugged. “I took a look around his rooms, anyway. It was the usual kind of thing. No bloody scraps of clothing or Cordelia trussed up like a chicken in the closet.”

Prihine gasped, while Trouble snorted, a half-incredulous sound. If Commander Blade Bronwyn found anything amiss with the idea of his officer breaking in and invading a high-born noble’s house, he didn’t give any indication. In fact, he hardly batted an eye. “You found nothing of note?”

Chase shrugged slightly. “Could be wrong, but I didn’t see anything immediately suspicious. Cordelia certainly wasn’t the only one he was, ah—” He glanced, amused, at Prihine. “—courting. I found lady’s underthings under his mattress. But that’s pretty standard for a Southern noble, eh?”

Prihine could not keep herself from flicking her fan out in a scandalized gesture. Did they talk like this around Lavinet? She didn’t want to seem too sheltered, but to discuss such topics so casually and openly… She considered herself made of tougher stuff than most noblewomen, but this was a bit far!

“Not Cordelia’s things, surely,” Trouble was saying.

Chase laughed at him. “How am I supposed to know, Trubs? It’s not like I ever undressed the lady myself.”

“You were poking around in her dresser all morning.”

“Yes, but that was for clues. I wasn’t cataloguing her lingerie.” 

“Enough,” Blade said then, before Prihine’s fan could flutter any faster. He was looking directly at her now. “So this is a party of the victim’s closest friends,” he said. “With all that you’ve heard, how would you advise us to proceed tonight?” 

Prihine was silent for a moment, thinking on it. Finally she said, her tone high but steady: “I don’t know if—if any of them had a personal motive to kill Cordelia, or any of those other women you mentioned. But I do have experience with living someone who has a demon inside of them.” Even if it made her gorge rise to even think of it. She still didn’t know when or how Turti had come into contact with that loathsome, melting slag-pile of a Faceless Lord. But she did remember when her husband’s awkward, condescending sense of—of accommodation, but also vanity and pride of conquest—changed to a remote disinterest, then to a clammy scorn. She remembered what his eyes had looked like when his own priest questioned his sudden change in behavior one night over dinner… “The Endarkened will show itself most when it senses it’s being attacked.”

Blade nodded approvingly, as if she were a student performing a test in front of an exacting instructor. “And what is the best way to ferret out a demon possessing a noble in a party like this? To make it feel attacked?” 

Prihine lifted her chin again, smirking a little. “You turn all the nobles against each other.”

#

Chase loved a good noble party. The elegant clothes, the light, tinkling chitchat, the opulence and the canapés… It was enough to make him feel downright nostalgic.

Trouble always felt uncomfortable around nobles, he knew, and especially around noble formal parties. They always made him feel clumsy and wrong-footed, his low-born status all too felt in the face of their wealth and polish. He acted like he didn’t care, but he was a street dog through and through. Parties like this made him feel rough and poor again.

Spike, on the other hand, wasn’t uncomfortable: he just hated them. He liked military curtness, a straightforward chain of command; bandying coy words and trying to track fan gestures and double meanings was simply an irritating way to spend the time, for him. 

But Chase? Well. People like these were his bread and butter, his typical marks. He probably spent more time sussing out aristocrats than he did actual criminals. They were his prey. And a wolf never felt uncomfortable around lambs, did he? 

True to Prihine’s word, their hostess of the night—an ebon-haired, dark-skinned beauty named Lady Rovaque—acted as if the Shepherds crashing her gathering had been a part of her and Prihine’s plan all along. Being caught off-guard was passé, and a sign of weakness—so, rather than making a scene, she’d welcomed them with as much delight as if they were the evening’s arranged entertainment, going so far as to kiss them on both cheeks. Well, Chase, anyway. Trouble balked from the display like a gun-shy horse; Blade didn’t come forward to receive their hostess’s greetings at all.

Well, luckily for them, their status as Shepherds was enough to cover any such social gaffes. Half of the nobles in Lady Rovaque’s apartments—there were about twenty-five in all—crowded forward to pester the three officers with dazzled questions, as excited by their sudden arrival as if they were visiting celebrities. The other half were more reserved, and these explicitly asked if their presence tonight had anything to do with “poor Cordelia’s disappearance.” Robbhan Vallinari, a tall young man with the arrogant bearing of a duelist and glossy chestnut hair, was one of these. His butler must have told him about Chase, because he met Chase’s eye from the corner of the room and went white under his healthy Southern tan.

It was a hard thing to gather intel when one was the center of the attention, but luckily, the true guest of honor for the night was some diplomat from the Ivory Isles, a bookish sort with round, gold-framed spectacles and nondescript sand-colored hair. He was clutching his wine goblet like it was a torch and rather desperately trying to keep the nobles’ attention, so inevitably some of them had to turn back and indulge him for the sake of politeness.

The rest went back to discussing Cordelia’s case, and they seemed to have no trouble at all letting Chase listen in as he slid into their conversations with a polite smile and a nod. That was the thing about these aristocrats: if you gave them a diffident, disarming expression and acted a little awed, like it was a privilege to be among them, they quickly forgot about your novelty and filed you away as ‘servant class or other’ again. If you played your cards right, they lost their suspicion fast. That was because they felt safe within the herd, and within the illusion of their own power and superiority; they thought they had numbers and home turf on their side, and if you made yourself nonthreatening, they were all too eager to grade you as less dangerous than you really were.

“The poor dear,” one young lady was simpering. This one had reddish-gold hair and a mincing, nervous demeanor; Chase quickly picked her out as Lady Amintia, one of Cordelia’s confidantes. The ermine-looking blonde next to her had to be Lady Metriss, who kept shooting Prihine looks of faint dislike. “I can’t believe we saw her just yesterday morning. And now she’s—she’s—”

“Steady on, Minti,” the tall redhead Lord Alfern murmured. His gaze kept darting to Chase, who smiled blandly back. “We don’t know anything yet. It could still be that this is a misunderstanding. Cordelia could be totally safe and unharmed, for all we know.”

“Well, I’d have to beg to differ on that account, my lord,” Chase said cordially, taking a sip of his cider.

All eyes turned to him. “What on earth do you mean?” Lady Amintia asked in a dramatic, fearful voice, as if he had recruited her for a part in his very own stage-play.  

Chase blinked and looked around at them all. “Perhaps you hadn’t heard,” he said in a gentler tone. “We, ah, found quite a volume of blood in Lady Cordelia’s room. Wherever she is now, I don’t think she’s totally unharmed.”

Theatrical gasps and cries all around. Several ladies fluttered their fans in distress, looking about to faint. Lord Alfern glared at him like Chase had turned around and pulled his pants down in the middle of a wake.

“Is that why you’re here, then?” another man, Lord Duner, asked. “I heard the prince had called you Shepherds to the city to give a report on Endarkened threat levels. Do you think they’re now targeting the nobility?”

“And are you here to protect us, in that case?” Lady Amintia demanded. “Who is to say none of us will be targeted next?” 

Now here was an interesting digression. Rather than viewing them as potential interrogators, the nobles thought of his team as prospective bodyguards. That might be a nice way of extracting more information than they would normally be willing to give…

“Don’t be ridiculous, Amintia,” weasel-faced Lady Metriss broke in then, her lip curling in scorn. “They’re not here for us, they’re here to find out what happened to Cordelia! She was the one who was taken away. No one’s going to come after the rest of us.”

All of Chase’s focus sharpened on her then; so too did everyone else’s. “And why are you so sure of that, my lady?” Chase asked politely, setting down his iced chalice.

Lady Metriss went quiet again, feeling all eyes turning to her. Trouble, from where he was deep in conversation with the Ivory Isles diplomat, glanced over; Robbhan Vallinari, who so far had done his best to avoid Chase like he radiated a poisonous miasma, crept closer.

Lady Metriss, her pale throat now slowly turning red, squeaked, “Well… well! It wouldn’t make any sense, would it, to go after the nobility! Not as a class! We are all—well-protected, we all employ our own private guards, and… It simply wouldn’t make any sense!”

 “But it made sense for them to infiltrate Lady Cordelia’s home?” Chase pressed lightly.

Prihine had appeared at his side, smelling of a rose perfume that was too mature for her. “And we are all the same to an Endarkened intruder, I’m sorry to say,” she added in smoothly. “Extra security and private guards don’t mean much to the likes of them, not if they decide to set their sights on us.”

I suppose she would know, Chase thought wryly, though he wondered if the details about her dead husband had reached the court of this faraway shore. But he kept his eyes on Lady Metriss. “Does it make sense to you that an Endarkened targeted Lady Cordelia specifically?” he pressed her.

The spindly young woman seemed to shrink beneath the expectant gazes of all her peers, the chalice clutched between her white hands trembling slightly. After an airless moment, she said faintly, “No, of course not.”

But her eyes slid towards Robbhan Vallinari.

Hmmm. Chase kept his expression blank, but inwardly he was cocking his head like a hunting dog. Did Lady Metriss know something about Vallinari, or was she simply operating off of the same (possibly baseless) suspicions Prihine had offered about his relationship to Cordelia? Perhaps it was Lady Metriss’s underthings he’d found in Vallinari’s mattress. Then, what—she was Vallinari’s lover, or wanted to be, and was jealous of Cordelia, so she’d sicced a demon on her to spirit her away? Did she house one herself, and it had finally been driven to kill her hated rival after months of glutting on similar-looking victims? It seemed unlikely, but no more unlikely than the idea of Robbhan himself—possessed or not—going on killing sprees for the last three years, only to culminate in assaulting the one victim who would draw the most personal attention to him…

No, none of it felt right, but he still needed to get a pulse on Vallinari. So he turned blithely to the man in question and said guilelessly, “That reminds me, my lord. I dropped by your manor today, but your butler said you were out. Still, I’ve got to do my due diligence and ask you some questions. You were one of the last people to see Lady Cordelia, after all.”

He felt a thrill of spiteful triumph as all eyes now turned to the rigid young lord, a hungry, calculating light in many of those gazes. Teach him not to answer the door for me, he thought, watching Vallinari scramble to put together an answer. And if he didn’t play nice, well, maybe Chase would press a little more on the subject of the women Robbhan had inviting to his room to dally…

“I—I was at the salle with Duner and Alfern all morning,” Vallinari mumbled then, his long-lashed eyes wide and genuinely startled. The “salle” would be a local school-of-arms or exclusive training hall for young nobles to practice their fencing and dueling. The two friends in question nodded in affirmation of this. “I… none of us heard about Cordelia until the early afternoon.”

Hmm. Chase supposed it was feasible, if they’d been out all day: it wasn’t as if Cordelia’s father would be sending out servants specifically to track them down and tell them what had happened. Prihine had only found out about it so early because her handmaid was cousins with Cordelia’s. “But you did see her last night?” he pressed, pitiless. “That’s what her servants told us, anyway.”

Robbhan’s fists clenched. There was movement to Chase’s left, and of a sudden, Blade was on the outskirts of the conversation, listening in.

“And that is true,” Robbhan said through gritted teeth, “but nothing out of the ordinary occurred, I assure you…”

“Other than your meeting in her drawing room alone,” Chase said blandly. Lady Amintia gave a high, sharp laugh, almost a nervous tic.

“I dropped by for a nightcap,” Vallinari said tightly, visibly mastering himself. His voice went from a defensive growl to a more composed, smoother tenor. “As I have often done with many of my friends. Lady Cordelia is one of my oldest childhood companions. Her father was home, and her servants were close by, in attendance—as I’m sure they’ve told you. There was nothing improper about any of it.”

“I would never think otherwise,” Chase returned silkily. “And she didn’t mention anything unusual, anything that was concerning or frightening her? Anyone strange she’d run into lately?”

Robbhan’s shoulders relaxed slightly, as if relieved Chase’s attention had turned elsewhere. “No, nothing like that.”

“And all was cordial between you? You weren’t upset that she’d snubbed you for her meeting with her priest?” Chase asked innocently.

 Robbhan’s jaw clicked shut, and even Prihine turned and looked at Chase with wide eyes, as if she couldn’t believe what he’d just said. Chase would have shrugged at her, but then Robbhan Vallinari was stepping forward, his balled hands reaching for his belt as if he’d rip his non-existent rapier free and drive it through Chase’s heart. Blade also glided closer, radiating that deathly intent that told Chase his arma was currently firing up.

Robbhan glanced nervously towards Blade’s impassive face, then said to Chase, in the sharp, chastising tones of a man reprimanding a dog: “What does any of this have to do with anything? Surely you can’t suspect me of having anything to do with Cordelia’s disappearance? She was my dearest—I love her!” Now Lady Metriss winced and looked away, as if he had admitted something embarrassing. “I’ve never harbored ill will towards her in my life. She’s the last person I would ever want to harm. I’d have no reason to hurt her.”

“See, though, that’s the thing about demons,” Chase answered, his tone casual. “They don’t need a reason; they just do. It’s not much use looking for reasons or patterns that you or I would recognize. A demon peers out from behind its vessel’s eyes, looking for its next victim, and who’s to say what determines its tastes? Sometimes it acts according to its whims alone; sometimes it’s inflamed by the emotions of its thrall, coming out uncontrollably in a moment of anger or passion.” He paused significantly, letting that image sink in. The possible argument between Vallinari and Cordelia in the night, his wounded pride, the muttering madness of the Endarkened in his head finally breaking loose… He watched the man’s eyes carefully, waiting for a flash of that inhuman malice. “The demon even scans the faces around it, always on the lookout for anyone who’s guessed the truth about its presence. And those people are always doomed; the demon won’t stop until it’s killed them, regardless of the wishes of its thrall.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice as if he were telling a ghost story. “And you wanna know the worst part about it all?” He glanced expectantly at Blade.

“Sometimes the thrall isn’t even aware of the demon’s existence themselves,” the Ket finished gravely, to the collective gasps and exclamations of the listening crowd. “They don’t remember, they don’t know. The demon takes possession of them during times when their mind isn’t conscious.”

Prihine said with heartfelt horror: “So the culprit could be one of us, and not even know it? He could be as frightened and as puzzled as we are here tonight, while never knowing that he’s the one who—?”

Blade nodded. All Hael seemed to break loose then.

It was always an interesting thing to Chase, watching the civility liquify from a group of nobles, who were, after all, just humans like the rest of them, only better-dressed. Some people found the effect strange and startling, the mask of suavity melting and running off in patches, like watching straight candles warp and drip into macabre messes. Chase tended to find it somewhat satisfying, not in a malicious way, but in a practical sense: a sense of reality ought to be injected into the minds of the thoughtlessly high-handed once in a while. It was good for them to remember their place in the cosmic scope of things, to be forced to abandon their ridiculous protocols and etiquettes and frosty court-masks, if only for the sake of their own perspective and survival. Some people, like Robbhan Vallinari, still remembered the aristocratic veneer and clutched its pieces around him, half-effectually. But others abandoned it straightaway, stripped naked by an alien and unfamiliar sense of fear and doubt.

It was as if they’d lobbed a bomb into the middle of the gathering. Well, Prihine had said it would be effective to sow suspicion amongst them and turn them all against each other; if there was a demon in their midst today, it would certainly be feeling very threatened now. And now handed the idea that any one of them could be the culprit and not even know it, the nobles were sure to scrutinize each other’s actions that much more closely; they could no longer be dully complacent, observers of Cordelia’s tragedy from afar, desultorily speculating on what random stranger had dragged her away in the night and clutching their pearls for the lurid fun of it. If any one of them was guilty, the others would sniff him out, would gather together and assemble the pieces of evidence themselves. A punctured alibi here, a questioned motive there… They could become far more effective investigators of their own social circle than Chase, Blade, or Trouble could ever dream to be.  

And, with any hope, that would also mean they’d offer the Shepherds the guilty party—or at least any useful information about him—up on a silver platter. Time would only tell. 

Chase tried to say as much—“so if you think of anything that would be valuable to us, tell at once so we can capture this monster”—but the nobles were already off to the races themselves, gathering into little huddles and cliques as they fell furiously to their theories and speculation. Robbhan Vallinari wasn’t ostracized, exactly, but the grim, skeptical looks he was given were telling. Lady Amintia fainted outright, and had to be helped onto a settee. Lady Rovaque tried to rally the party, smiling tightly and pretending as if everything was proceeding normally, but a frenetic, concerned air had now invaded her home, an uneasy buzz like a disturbed nest of bees.

Chase guessed he ought to feel a little sorry for disrupting their peace so thoroughly, but Cordelia was missing, and it was possible she was still alive: there wasn’t much time for pussy-footing around delicate noble sensibilities and probing with careful, inoffensive questions. He prowled around on the outskirts of the party for a while, answering inquiries when he was questioned and simply listening in otherwise, watching each noble’s face for that glimmer of something demonic—but it almost seemed as if he and his team had been forgotten entirely. Now all of the nobles’ attentions were fixed on each other.

At some point, Trouble signaled him over, ensconced where he was in the corner with the poor forgotten diplomat from the Ivory Isles. With an expressive jerk of his head, he indicated that Chase should retrieve Blade, too; when the two of them had approached, making the diplomat flatten himself against the grand hearth like a squirrel trying not to attract the attention of three hawks, Trouble said, “What’d you say about the other disappearances, Blade? They were all at night, and—?”

“No witnesses, and no easy explanation for how they had been accomplished,” Blade replied with a frown. “It seemed as if the women had vanished between one corner and the next.” 

“And it seems unlikely that someone could drag full-grown women through the streets without ever once being seen or noticed.”

Blade gave a slow blink in agreement, not even bothering to confirm it out loud.

“No blood trail in the other cases either, nor anything like that?”

“No.”

“What are we thinking, then?” Chase asked in a low voice. “Magic, probably—demon-magic.”

Trouble gave a slow, thoughtful rub of his chin; already his jaw was roughened by gold-glinting stubble. “Tell them what you just told me,” he said abruptly to the diplomat.

The scholarly man’s eyes had gone as round as saucers behind his gold spectacles. “W-well, my main interest is architecture, city design, infrastructure, that kind of thing,” he stammered. Chase didn’t know what he was so scared of: having arrived sometime this afternoon, he was the only party at this gathering that could be truly considered innocent. “I was just telling Vice-Commander Alder here that—that Courtshore has the most fascinating aqueduct system. Its sewers and how they deliver freshwater to the city’s residents are utterly fascinating. I came over hoping to study some of that system—with permission, of course—in hopes of bringing back ideas to my own country… but to my disappointment, I’ve found that they’ve been under reconstruction for the past several months. Totally impassable.”

Chase remembered seeing the laborers and maintenance workers on several street corners, the onslaught of water flooding out of some of those pipes. “How long have they been under repair?” he asked alertly.

The diplomat blinked. “Nine months, I believe. Dashingly long time, but it’s a massive undertaking for the city, and…”

Nine months. And that was the last time a woman had disappeared before Cordelia. Chase turned to Blade, who had clearly already drawn his own conclusions, because he gave a tight nod at Chase’s look. 

“Well, I think we know why the killer stopped for so long,” Chase said aloud, thinking it through as he talked. “They were using the sewers to get around. They’d snatch one of their victims, drag her into a manhole… of course no one would see them. And if those pipes go throughout the whole of the city, they could move around like that, totally undetected, for years. Until the system closed up for repairs and got flooded with workers and scaffolding. That’s why they stopped for these past nine months.” 

“Question is,” Trouble murmured, “did they do the same thing with Cordelia? Because those aqueducts are still closed up by construction.”

“We don’t know,” Blade said flatly, already turning to leave. “But we need to begin a search of the sewers. Now.”