Grave Destiny

by Kalayna Price

  Falin looked to Nori. She nodded. “Stiofan is beyond healing. His heart is missing.”

  A frown tugged at the edges of Falin’s lips, but he nodded.

  “And Kordon?” Dugan asked. There had been mostly sorrow in his voice before, but now his tone sharpened in anger. Nori turned her large, insectlike eyes on him. A thin membrane passed over her eyes as she regarded him, but she didn’t answer. He scoffed, shaking his head. “Of course, your healer didn’t even check. He wasn’t your court.”

  “He’s also our suspect,” Nori said.

  Dugan glared at her before returning his attention to the small goblin. He cocked his head to the side, a quizzical expression crossing his face. He reached out for something hidden from my view by the sprawled body.

  “I said not to touch anything,” Falin barked as Dugan lifted a dagger from where it had been half hidden under Kordon’s third arm.

  The Shadow Prince frowned at Falin, his hand stalling, the dagger only halfway lifted. “You said not to touch the body.”

  “You’re really going to argue semantics. This is a crime scene. Don’t touch anything.” I could almost hear Falin’s teeth grinding as he spoke. “Now your prints will be on that dagger.”

  Dugan resumed his motion, lifting the dagger and examining it. “It would already have my prints,” he said. “It’s my dagger.”

  That stopped whatever Falin was about to say—which I’m sure would have been to kick Dugan out of the scene. He lifted an eyebrow, regarding the prince.

  “Yours? How long has it been missing?”

  Dugan frowned. “I didn’t realize it was until I saw it here, but it is definitely mine. It’s a handsome blade, commissioned for me as a gift. Unfortunately, its beauty is all it has going for it. It has never held an edge well and it is poorly weighted. I keep it on display.”

  “Somewhere public?” Falin asked.

  Dugan’s frown deepened. “No.”

  Agent Nori’s wings released a shrill keening of alarm as they rubbed together. “So, your fae. Your dagger. And you compromised the scene? The queen could demand your head for less.”

  “Nori,” Falin said, her name a warning, but he didn’t look like he disagreed with her. He turned to Dugan. “Put the dagger down, back up, and don’t touch anything else or you’ll be held accountable for interfering with the investigation.” He gave the other fae an appraising look as if he could find guilt physically on his person. “We will discuss the dagger after I finish with the scene.”

  Dugan set down the dagger and backed away from Kordon’s body, but while he made a point of lifting his hands as if in surrender, his movements as he rejoined me in the doorway were too casual. He seemed to be making a point of moving slowly, his steps easy as if he were trying to convince everyone present that moving away from the body was his own idea. Falin scowled but didn’t say anything more to him.

  After studying the scene from the doorway a moment longer, Falin walked a careful circle around the goblin’s body. He studied the floor, the blade Dugan had replaced, and the sword in Kordon’s back, never touching any of it. Finally he turned to the other body. He couldn’t get too close to the bed and the body on it without tracking through the blood and contaminating the scene, but he walked up to the edge of the blood pool. I didn’t follow, but Nori did.

  She hovered a foot off the ground, her wings buzzing as they kept her above the blood pool. “As you can see,” she said, hovering near the head of the bed and gesturing to the body, “the goblin must have been in a rage. I haven’t counted all of the knife wounds, but there are at least two dozen.”

  Falin looked away from the body and studied his agent. “And how did this go down? What do you guess were the series of events?”

  Nori blinked, an iridescent membrane sliding over her large insectlike eyes, and then she glanced between the dead goblin and the dead Sleagh Maith. Her lips pressed into a thin line as she studied the scene.

  From his post beside the door, the guard cleared his throat. “Isn’t it obvious? Stiofan was surprised and overwhelmed, as he must have been asleep when the attack began. The goblin was vicious and rabid, but Stiofan was able to reach his sword. He plunged it into the goblin, driving it away, but he succumbed to his wounds. The cowardly goblin tried to run away, but the blow Stiofan delivered proved fatal.”

  “That’s certainly how it is meant to appear,” Falin said.

  “But you are not convinced?” Dugan asked.

  Falin glanced at him. “What do you see?”

  The Shadow Prince grimaced. “It does appear as he said.”

  Falin grunted, and then he met my eyes. “What is wrong with this scene?”

  “Besides the lack of Kordon’s blood?” I let my gaze drift over the prone figure on the bed. There was no lack of blood there, and the murdered fae definitely didn’t look like he was sleeping. One leg hung unceremoniously off the bed and his face was contorted with pain; both arms were flung over his head as if he’d been trying to ward off blows or maybe like his wrists had been pinned over his head. And blood. There was so much blood. And his torso—I couldn’t even look at the mess that should have been his chest. I let my gaze move on quickly.

  I focused on the goblin again—he was much easier to study. I walked the same circle around him Falin had. I didn’t want to look at the sword protruding from his back, but I forced myself to study it, simultaneously trying to trick my brain into accepting that I was looking at something else, something less gruesome.

  There was a small amount of shiny dark liquid on the back of Kordon’s tunic where the sword had entered, but not nearly enough. I’d shed more blood from skinned knees before. There was no blood on his hands or arms, not dark goblin blood nor bright Sleagh Maith blood. The blade of the dagger was slick with shiny red blood that looked as if it might have been spilled only a moment beforehand, but there wasn’t a drop on the hilt. The goblin was barefoot, but there was no blood on the soles of his feet. I frowned and glanced back toward the bed without actually looking at the body lying on it.

  “There are a few scuffed footprints leading from the bed in this direction, but he has no trace of blood on his feet. Neither his blood nor the noble’s,” I said. “Is the sword pinning him to the ground enchanted? Could it have frozen his blood on contact? Could that be why there is none of his blood around him?”

  “Possible, and we will have to test the blade for enchantments, but Stiofan was not known to own any enchanted weapons.” Falin continued to watch me. “What else?”

  This felt rather like a test, but it was in my contract that I’d be helping with the investigation, so I scanned the scene again. “If Kordon was vigorously stabbing the winter noble, how did he end up with a sword in his back?”

  “He was obviously running away,” the guard insisted.

  I let my eyes dart to the figure on the bed once more. “No. Stiofan has a dozen or more wounds and was clearly overpowered. Why would the goblin have suddenly decided to turn and run? Also, the noble’s arms aren’t extended like he’d delivered a blow or fumbled for a weapon—they are up, over his head. Which means driving a sword through the goblin wasn’t the last thing he did.”

  “Don’t judge fae based on mortal fragility—many can take much more damage than a human,” Falin said, but despite the correction, he had an odd note of pride in his voice, as if my deductions had impressed him. “But in this case, I have to agree with you. Goblins, while they heal well, aren’t particularly durable, and unless his individual anatomy is unusual, that sword pierced his heart. It would be instantly fatal. He wouldn’t have been able to continue an attack, let alone flee across the room.”

  I nodded. “And you said Stiofan couldn’t be healed because his heart is missing?”

  “Magic can heal and mend mortal wounds, but it can’t regrow missing body parts,” Dugan said. He was watching me with curiosity. />
  “That’s not what I’m getting at. Where is the heart?”

  “The goblin must have eaten it,” the guard said, sounding sure in his conviction.

  I shot him a frown. “So you’re assuming the goblin was in a battle frenzy that resulted in two dozen stab wounds and eating an organ. Then he cleaned his hands and the hilt of his dagger—but not the blade. And then Stiofan rammed a sword through his back, at which point the goblin turned and fled but paused at the edge of the blood pool to wash his feet?”

  “Perhaps he was betrayed by an accomplice?” Nori suggested. “Look at the voids in the blood splatter.” She gestured toward the blood on the curtains and then to the bloody sheets on the bed.

  Falin leaned closer, but I made no attempt to approach the bed or look for any pattern in the blood. I might be assisting in the investigation, but I had my limits. I’d let them tackle that one.

  Falin made a sound and then pulled back, scanning the room again. “It does appear that either something was removed—and I see no evidence of that—or there was at least one other person here at the time of the murder, likely helping to hold Stiofan down.”

  I frowned at Kordon’s body. “Then one way or another, we are missing a killer.”

  Chapter 4

  Nori and Falin continued to study the blood splatter and Stiofan’s body, but I retreated back to the doorway. I’d seen more than I wanted already, and I was starting to feel a buzz in the back of my brain from the panic I’d been suppressing for too long now. At least my stomach hadn’t joined the game yet—getting sick at a crime scene was never good. The fact that the air held the same sweet scent the winter court always seemed to smell of instead of decay helped. I’d spent time trying to identify the scent of the court before, but I couldn’t quite place it all. It was part evergreen and part clean snow, but there were also floral scents that I couldn’t identify. Not that any of that information helped with this case, but it did provide a momentary distraction.

  I expected more FIB agents to arrive. This scene should have had people flagging evidence and taking pictures so that everything could be bagged and taken elsewhere for processing. But no one had walked through the doorway. We’d been here a while now. Someone should have arrived by this point.

  I tried to wait patiently, but after ten minutes I found myself shuffling my feet and tapping my toes. By the time Falin finally walked back to the doorway, I’d given in and begun pacing. Dugan had spent most of the time watching Falin and Nori as they discussed and analyzed the scene, but more than once I’d caught him watching me, his gaze assessing. I doubted I measured up to whatever scale was in his eyes.

  “Can you sense anything about the bodies?” Falin asked, looking at me.

  “Magically?” I shook my head. “No land of the dead here, remember? They could be constructs and I wouldn’t be able to feel the difference until we get them back to mortal reality.” Though, while it wasn’t widely known, my planeweaving ability allowed me to see through glamour as long as Faerie hadn’t accepted the glamour as real, so maybe that was what he meant. Or maybe he was being very literal and he actually meant sense as in my ability to sense magic. I was more closely attuned to witch magic, though I’d started sensing more fae magic in the months since the Blood Moon. The Aetheric plane was thin in Faerie, and the energy tended not to like the fae, so it wasn’t common to find witch magic in Faerie. That didn’t mean it couldn’t be here, though. I just hadn’t thought to look for it.

  I cracked my mental shields, tentatively at first, and then letting the opening widen slowly. I didn’t have to worry about grave essence assaulting my psyche as soon as I opened my mind here; in fact, most of the planes I normally interacted with simply didn’t exist here or were too thin to make much impact. No rot or decay touched anything in my vision, and no wind or chill whipped out to surround me. The Aetheric plane technically existed here, but only the thinnest, horribly faded wisps of raw magic trailed sporadically through the air. Whatever plane souls existed on when still tied inside a body existed in Faerie, but the collectors’ plane didn’t, leaving the souls trapped in bodies that never decayed. With my shields fully open I could see the soft glow of silver emanating from deep within all of my companions as well as the butchered body on the bed. The goblin held no shimmering glow.

  I frowned, narrowing my focus. Different souls looked different to my mental sight. Human souls emitted a happy golden-yellow light. Every full-blooded fae I’d met thus far emitted silver-ish light. Feykin, those of mixed blood but who favored their mortal heritage, tended toward blue colors, though their colors were a bit more amorphous, sometimes seeming more silver and other times gold enough that if I wasn’t paying attention, I could mistake a feykin for human. I’d never specifically looked at a goblin soul before, but I should have sensed something inside the body. Even the creatures from the land of the dead who had no soul in the way a living creature understood it, I could sense as darkness. But the goblin was empty.

  I opened my shields wider, stretching my senses. The body looked real and it didn’t change in my vision as if coated with glamour. I didn’t sense any spells on the body either, though the dagger by his third hand had some sort of enchantment worked into it. The dagger’s magic was fae in nature and while I could feel something was there, I couldn’t begin to guess what it might be. There was no trace of magic on the body, though, no runes or glyphs either.

  I must have been staring at the body too long, because Falin stepped closer to me. “Alex?”

  “So, a few possibilities. One, goblins don’t have souls—unlikely. Two, that’s not a body—possible. Three, something that eats souls, or at least that can pull them out of bodies, is loose in the Winter Halls and took Kordon’s soul but not Stiofan’s—possible, and I wouldn’t dismiss it, but I’m leaning against it because why take one and not the other? Or possibility four, Kordon didn’t die here and at some point his body was outside Faerie long enough for a collector to find him and remove his soul.”

  Falin stared at the body. “And you think that last possibility is the most likely?”

  “It would be the easiest to explain. Souls don’t come out of bodies easily.” I hesitated. “Though we have run across a few methods that didn’t leave much evidence,” I said, thinking about the soul bottles the necromancer had been using last month. “So we definitely can’t dismiss that possibility.”

  “Anything else?”

  I forced my gaze to sweep over the room and even skitter over the body on the bed. Nothing else looked or felt strange to my senses. Any glamour in the room had been fully embraced by Faerie because nothing changed in my vision. Well, except the guard. With my shields open, I could see most of his face through the shadows, which answered that question about the shadows being magical, but it shed no light on the scene. When I closed my shields and shook my head, Falin turned to Nori.

  “Take the sword and dagger to the lab for further examination. On the way, tell the guards we need someone to transport these bodies to the entrance—we will be taking them to the mortal realm.”

  Nori nodded, but Dugan cleared his throat.

  “My fae should be seen by a healer and an attempt to revive him must be made before his body is taken to the mortal realm.”

  “He’s not in there,” I said, because even if his body could be healed, there was no soul left to bring back.

  “As you say,” Dugan said, giving me a curt but polite nod. “But I still insist healing be attempted before the possibility is lost by taking his body to the mortal realm.”

  Falin regarded him a moment before saying, “You do realize that if he is revived, he will have to be questioned. Under the circumstances, the queen will likely do it herself.” What he left unsaid was that she’d likely do that questioning in Rath, her torture chamber. Whether the goblin was guilty or not, he might not walk out again.

  “Did you not determine he could n
ot have done this?”

  “We only determined that he couldn’t have done it alone,” Falin said, emphasizing the last word.

  Dugan frowned. “He is my citizen and I still insist.”

  “Fine.” Falin turned to Nori. “Secure the weapons and then send for a healer.”

  She nodded and flew to the corner of the room where a small black messenger bag was stashed. She pulled a couple types of evidence bags and a pair of surgical gloves from the bag before heading toward Kordon’s body. She slid the dagger into a manila evidence envelope. Then she bagged the hilt of the sword. When she tried to pull the sword from Kordon’s back, she fluttered into an odd upside-down U shape, her wings pulling her up but her arms not moving when the sword refused to budge. She tried again, with about as much success.

  “Sir,” she said, panting from her efforts.

  Falin stepped forward and gave the sword a good tug. It lifted a few inches but didn’t pull free of the goblin’s body. Falin frowned. Kneeling, he lifted Kordon slightly, peering under him.

  “The sword has been driven not only straight through him, but several inches into the floor as well,” Falin said.

  “So he was already prone on the ground when the blow was struck,” Dugan said, his scowl not aimed at anyone present, but turned inward, likely with murderous thoughts directed at whoever had pinned his friend to the floor.

  “Anyone else getting the feeling that wasn’t the blow that killed him? Or like he wasn’t even alive when Stiofan was murdered?” I asked as Falin pulled the sword free. He handed it to Nori. I frowned. “Shouldn’t you take photos or something before moving the bodies and removing evidence?”

  Falin only shook his head as he leaned over the body, examining it. “Faerie doesn’t like technology. Digital cameras won’t turn on. Older mechanical cameras will at least function, but while I’ve tried various types of film, I’ve yet to find anything that reliably can be developed. At best they show ghosts of images, blurred and blown out, but most of the time nothing at all appears on the film.” He rolled the goblin over. The small form moved as a solid unit, stiff, arms and legs remaining exactly in the same position as when he was on his belly. “We must examine everything we can here, immediately, and note it as well as we can. Now that the occupant of this room is dead, Faerie may preserve this room as it is forever, or once we leave, Faerie may take this room and we may never find it again. Same with any physical evidence—Faerie could at any point move it or give it to a new owner.”