“An hour ago.” Amelrik’s face pales. “That’s around when we saw Leif.”
Cedric stares at him. At both of us. Then he says, “It wasn’t him.”
“Cedric—”
“I was with him. I can vouch for him.”
Amelrik cocks his head. “You weren’t.”
“Yes, I was.”
“Not when we were following him,” I add.
“You were following him?!”
“He was acting weird,” Amelrik says. “And maybe you trust him, but I don’t. And Virginia’s right—you weren’t there when we saw him.”
“That’s because…” His eyes dart back and forth, like he’s thinking really hard about something, or maybe trying to come up with an excuse. “I was meeting up with him.”
Amelrik raises his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah? Where?”
Cedric jiggles his leg restlessly against the barstool. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Because you weren’t really there.”
“I was.”
“But you conveniently can’t remember where you were or what you were doing, right? And now you’re back here, and he’s not.”
Cedric scowls and looks down at his hands. “Can’t you just trust me, Amelrik? If I say he didn’t do it, then he didn’t.”
“I wish I could,” Amelrik says, “but people are getting killed, and I know he was in the right place at the right time. And you’re not giving me anything to go on.”
“I’m giving you my word. That would have been enough once.”
“Yeah,” he says, “it would have. But that was a long time ago. A lifetime ago. And things have changed.”
The first thing that hits me when we get to the scene of the crime is the smell. The body’s been taken away, but there’s still so much blood mixed with the snow. My stomach drops as we approach, and my hands start to shake.
We’re on a narrow side street off of Denton. The buildings are crowded together, making the space feel even smaller than it is. There are also laundry lines above us, running between the apartments on either side of the street. It’s a small space, and it’s deserted—the exact opposite of the busy, open marketplace where I watched a dragon rip apart my mother. But the memories come flooding back all the same.
Amelrik makes a face, covering his nose with his hand. I can’t even imagine what it must smell like to him. Then he looks over at me. He drops his hand and touches my arm. “Virginia.” His voice is soft. “You don’t have to do this.”
He said that already, before we left the inn. But there’s no way in hell I’m letting him solve a murder without me. Even if just seeing where the crime took place makes me feel like I’m going to throw up.
I remind myself that this woman wasn’t my mother. And what happened five years ago… that wasn’t my fault.
“I’m staying.” I try to say that as firmly as possible, even though my voice shakes a little.
I kind of expect him to argue, since if I look even half as bad as I feel right now, well… I can see why me being here might be a bad idea. But he just nods. Then he sniffs the air, disgust and curiosity mingling on his face.
“What?”
“The blood’s too strong, the dragon smell too faint.” He shakes his head. “A lot of people have been here recently. I can’t tell anything more than that.”
Like who the murderer might be.
It started snowing not long after we left the inn, and now it’s coming down faster, slowly burying the scene. Soon it’ll cover up all the blood, but it’ll cover all the footprints, too. As is, it’s already obscuring the ground, but it looks like there was a lot of commotion here. A struggle, maybe, with something large. But any dragon footprints have already been buried or stomped out of existence by all the onlookers who must have been here earlier.
Amelrik stretches his arms and rolls his shoulders, a pained expression on his face. His wings must be aching, because of the snow. He told me they never healed right, after his mother broke them, and that even in human form they bother him whenever it rains. Or whenever he thinks about what happened, but I’m guessing it’s that first one, especially since it’s snowing pretty hard right now.
He points to something on the ground. “Look at these claw marks.”
They’re huge. I imagine them ripping through flesh and what it must have felt like. How quickly someone could go from being perfectly fine to feeling only pain, their blood suddenly everywhere, their insides broken and exposed.
I push those thoughts away. “The dragon must be full grown.”
“Yeah, and”—he gestures to the street we’re on—“look at this place. It seems kind of cramped, and those clothes lines are pretty low.”
“You think a dragon wouldn’t fit here?”
“No, they would, but it doesn’t seem like an ideal place to transform.”
No, more like an ideal place for a murder. It’s secluded enough that maybe no one would see, but close enough to the main road that it would still get used sometimes. Was the killer just waiting here until someone wandered down this street alone?
“But that’s not what I was getting at,” he says, gesturing to the claw marks again. “There’s something off about them. They don’t look right.”
“They look like claw marks. Really big claw marks.”
“Don’t you think the angle is weird? Or… or maybe that’s not it.” He frowns. Then he bends down and digs something out of the snow.
It’s a single purple scale.
We share a look, and I know what he’s thinking, but I say it out loud anyway. “Elder clan.”
“And Leif’s from the Valley.”
“He could be from Oak.”
“Maybe,” Amelrik says, not sounding very convinced.
A window slides open above us. Then a woman with blond curls piled on top of her head leans out. “I saw the whole thing!” She says that like she’s actually happy about it. Like witnessing a brutal murder brightened her day.
“What happened?” I ask, shouting to cover the distance between us.
“Well”—she takes a deep breath before launching into her story—“I was just bringing the laundry out, and I told myself I’d better get the clothes on the line in case it started snowing, because you never know.” She holds her hand out, catching a few flakes, and laughs. “See? Anyway, I was just bringing the laundry out and I heard this horrible scream.” She tuts to herself and puts a hand to her chest. “Just awful. And I looked down, and can you believe it? There was a dragon in the street! And a woman dead on the ground. Of course, I didn’t know it was poor Patricia Brown from up the road at the time, but oh, it was just dreadful. And the dragon was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen! Big, jagged horns coming out of its head, and it was breathing flames all over the place. It’s a miracle the buildings didn’t catch on fire!”
“Or the body,” Amelrik mutters, a note of disbelief in his voice.
“And then what?” I ask her. “Where did it go?”
“It flew off, of course.” She says that like it’s obvious. “I was so scared, I ducked down past my window, afraid that it would see me. But it just took off before anyone else could catch sight of it, because everyone heard the scream, you know, and it wasn’t long before the street was full of people.”
It flew off? I look up at the laundry lines, which do not look like a dragon tried to fly through them earlier. And dragons don’t have horns, or at least none of the ones I’ve ever seen have.
“What color was it?” Amelrik asks.
“Color?” She blinks. “Oh, it was green!”
“Green? You’re sure?”
“Oh, yes! Well, greenish, or maybe blue, and its eyes were blazing, like a demon!”
Someone shouts at her from inside the apartment. She ducks her head back in for a second, then says, “That’s the pie done! I’ve got to go!” Then she disappears back inside.
Amelrik waits until she’s gone, then scoffs. “She didn’t see any of it. She pr
obably wasn’t even home.”
“She got the color wrong. And the thing about the horns.”
“And the flying. I mean, no dragon took off here. But even if it had, other people would have seen it. And the barrier would stop anyone from flying very high. And I highly doubt anyone was breathing fire. It doesn’t smell like it, at least. And either way? Her story doesn’t add up.”
The East Westford Winter Festival is taking place not far from the murder scene—which sounds kind of gruesome when I say it like that, actually—and we wander over to it on our way back. Well, more like Amelrik spots something interesting in the crafts section as we’re passing by and takes off.
He’s faster than me, and I’m distracted by all the dessert carts. The smells of chocolate, warm, cinnamony apples, and sweet vanilla fill the air. And even though I’ve never been here before, it’s a familiar mixture, reminding me of the winter festivals we used to have back home. But I haven’t been to one in a long time, and the only holidays I’ve celebrated since leaving the barracks six months ago have been dragon holidays, and none of them were like this, not even Flame Night.
Though I have to admit the barbecue was pretty amazing. And it didn’t hurt that me and Amelrik spent the rest of the night kissing and grinning stupidly at each other and pretending it wasn’t all just going to come crashing down the next day, when his father inevitably said no. I mean, part of me really thought there was a chance he wouldn’t. Just a teeny, tiny, really dumb part of me that wanted to believe.
I catch up to Amelrik at one of the crafts booths. He’s staring in awe at a wooden castle, his whole face lit up. “This is just like the one me and Cedric used to play with when we were drac—” He catches himself. “When we were kids.”
“You had a toy castle?”
“Well, no. Odilia had it, technically.” He rolls his eyes. “She didn’t care about it, but she knew we did, so she lorded it over us. We’d have to go to the woods and pick blackberries for her or go to the kitchen and sneak her some extra dessert. We let her think it was really hard to get, but usually the cooks just gave it to us. Eventually she got tired of it and let Cedric keep it in his room, but she always made a big deal of how she was just loaning it to him and that really it was still hers. And it looked an awful lot like this one. It’s even the right color.”
“It’s gray. Most castles are.”
A wistful smile crosses his face. “It had a couple of wooden people in it, and a horse, and a catapult. But we needed more characters, so we tried to make our own. One of the wooden people was the king, and then there was a knight, and then…” He squints, trying to remember. “We made a princess out of a potato. And then forgot about her for too long. She smelled so bad. And then—” He suddenly winces and rolls his shoulders again for about the tenth time in the last few minutes, ever since it started snowing so hard.
I give him a look. “Maybe we should—”
“I’m fine.” But he says that too quickly, and he doesn’t look fine. His face is pinched, like he’s in pain, and he’s standing kind of awkwardly, with his shoulders hunched.
“We should still go back,” I tell him. “It’s getting pretty cold. And maybe you’re fine, but my hands are freezing.” The rest of me isn’t exactly warm, either, though I may have borrowed that lady’s really warm coat again, which certainly helps. But my mittens could use an upgrade.
He stares longingly at the wooden castle for a moment, like now that he’s remembered it, he doesn’t want to leave. But then his face twinges, and he stretches his arms out and rolls his shoulders again. “Okay. Let’s—” He starts to turn away from the booth, then stops. He sucks in a breath.
No, he sniffs the air.
His shoulders go stiff, and not from his wings this time. “Virginia.”
“What?” I move closer to him, as if I can smell what he’s smelling if I stand in the same spot. But all I can pick up are the food carts—more desserts, and the smell of woodsmoke and roasting meat that makes my stomach rumble a little.
He leans in and whispers in my ear. “There’s a dragon.”
“What? Where?”
“I don’t know. Nearby. It’s…” He sniffs the air again and heads off, not even finishing that sentence.
He makes his way through the crowd, following the scent like an invisible thread. I hurry to keep up with him, my heart pounding.
There’s a dragon here. A murderer. In this busy festival that might as well be a marketplace. And suddenly I’m not hungry anymore.
My thoughts race. The attack happened pretty close to here, not that long ago. And now the dragon who did it is at the festival, just like us, as if nothing happened. And we’re about to chase them down. What if they transform? Sweat prickles along my back. I tell myself I can cast the binding spell now. Even if I’ve only successfully done it once, and that was months ago. But I can, and I’m not going to let this dragon hurt anyone else. Not me, not Amelrik, and not any of the other people here.
My hands are shaking and my palms are damp. And I’m so distracted by my thoughts that I actually smash into Amelrik when he turns a corner and suddenly comes to a stop.
He’s gaping at something. Shocked.
It’s Cedric and Leif. Pressed against the back of one of the booths. Kissing.
Except “kissing” is putting it lightly. It’s more like making out. Cedric’s fingers are caught in Leif’s hair, and Leif has his hands under Cedric’s coat. And presumably his shirt.
A rush of shock hits me, because this is not what I expected to find. But what I did expect to find was a vicious murderer, so I also feel pretty relieved. Well, unless Leif still is the murderer, but even if he is, he’s obviously too distracted right now to kill anyone.
Amelrik grabs my hand, and we duck back around the corner before they can see us. He swallows. “I had no idea.”
“That your cousin liked boys or that he’s with Leif?”
“Either one. He never said, and I didn’t…”
“Come on.” The snow’s still coming down pretty hard, and I really am getting cold. I point us in the direction of the inn, because if I don’t want to freeze to death, I should probably keep walking. “Well, I guess now we know why he doesn’t want to marry Rosalind.”
Amelrik’s face looks pinched again, though I can’t tell if it’s from his wings or the situation or both. “I don’t know anything about him.”
“Is it a big deal? Him being with a boy?” I’ve heard it’s illegal in some places, but at least in the five kingdoms it’s only frowned upon, though more so by some than by others. And… I try to remember any dragon couples I’ve seen back at Hawthorne clan, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen two boys together. Or two girls. But then again, everyone’s usually in dragon form, so I’m just guessing anyway, since I can’t actually tell them apart.
“No. Maybe. It’s… complicated. My father won’t like it.”
I snort. “Your father doesn’t like anything.”
“He loves opera. And word searches. And my mother.” He scrubs his hands against his face. “Don’t tell him I told you that.”
“Yeah, I’ll keep it to myself in one of my many conversations with your father, the king, who hates my guts.” And I notice he didn’t include himself in that list, though I let it go.
“Cedric was my best friend, and I… I should have written to him. All this time, I was avoiding him, and now I don’t even know him.”
“Yes, you do. People don’t change that much.”
“I was an idiot, thinking it didn’t matter, that I’d see him again and it wouldn’t be like any time had passed. But it did. Of course it did. And now he’s mad at me, and keeping secrets, and…”
“And you’ll never make princesses out of rotten potatoes again?”
He nods, a grin tugging on one side of his mouth, though it doesn’t actually stick. “The potato wasn’t rotten when we started. But, yeah. All that is gone. We’re not kids anymore.”
“You alr
eady weren’t.” Even before we saw him with Leif.
“I know, it’s just… I guess I didn’t realize it before. Not really. And now… now what if it’s too late?”
12
THE PARTS YOU NORMALLY KEEP HIDDEN
We come downstairs after eating lunch and taking a nap. It’s still only early afternoon, but the inn’s started to fill up more, and all the seats at the bar are taken. I don’t see Leif, but Cedric’s sitting at a corner table, writing in his book again.
I head straight for him, because even though he looks up and glares at us, like us sitting with him is the last thing he wants, I figure we’re going to do it anyway.
Cedric presses down extra hard on his piece of charcoal. Bits of it break off and smear inside the book. “I don’t care if there aren’t any other tables, you’re not sitting with me.”
I think this time maybe he does mean both of us, though I’m not the one who accused Leif of murder. I just pointed out that Cedric really hadn’t been there, or at least not that we’d seen. But the bitter look on Cedric’s face makes me hesitate. That and the fact that not that long ago we saw him in the middle of something he probably didn’t want us to see, even if it was sort of in a public place.
Amelrik sits down anyway, ignoring Cedric’s protests, and I follow his lead.
Cedric scoffs. “I mean it, Amelrik. I’ve said all I have to—”
“I’m sorry.” He exhales, like it’s a relief to finally say it.
Cedric blinks at him. “Sorry for what? For not trusting me, or…” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. You had your chance. And as you can see, I’m busy. So go away.”
“I’m sorry for not writing to you. It was stupid. I… I realize that now.”
Cedric makes a hmph sound. “Great. You finally realized what an idiot you are. You still can’t sit here.”
Amelrik clenches his jaw. “Cedric, I’m trying to say that I—”
He drops his charcoal and slams his hand on the table. “I know what you’re trying to say! But you can’t just stop talking to me for so long and then say you’re sorry and expect that to mean anything. Especially after what you said earlier. And you were right, things have changed. I thought you were my best friend, but obviously you weren’t. You’ve made it clear you didn’t care about me then, so why should I think it’s any different now?”
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