Kissed by Death - Book three of the Trueborn Heirs Series

by Queen, Nyna

Barthi sniffed again. “Well, you got me there, Forfeit,” he said stiffly. “I can’t tell you what this is.”

  “But I think I know what this is.” Alex’s voice was so soft, Darken needed the confirmation in her eyes to make sure she had truly spoken.

  She had wrapped her arms around herself and her fingers were digging into her upper arms with enough force to leave bruises. She was staring at the crystal inside the liquid with intense repulsion. It reminded him of her expression when she had promised the Duke of Gomorrha her venom.

  Alex raised her head and her wide, bottomless eyes found his.

  “I believe it is shaper skin.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “WHAT?” The sharp question came from Stephane at the same time as Darken snarled, “Shaper skin?”

  Stephane had deserted his chair and was now standing close to his brother, both eyeing the jewel chip as though it was a poisonous snake about to strike.

  Well, perhaps it had been. Or a spider, Alex thought with thick revulsion.

  Only the science geek, Barthi, didn’t seem particularly impressed by her statement. He snorted.

  “Shaper skin, huh? And what would a lady like yourself know about shaper skin?”

  Smartass.

  “Well, sugar, I think wearing it every day might have something to do with it.” Alex leaned over and flashed her true eyes and teeth at him.

  The young man let out a high-pitched scream and fell off the other side of his chair. He quickly clambered back to his feet, holding the chair between them like a shield.

  “You—you’re—” His gaze flickered toward Darken. “S-she’s a shaper?”

  “I daresay she just proved it quite spectacularly, don’t you?” Darken said mildly.

  He turned to Alex and his face became terrifying. “Are you certain about this, Alex?”

  She flipped her shoulders. “Of course, I’m not! How could I be?” She caught her image mirrored in one of the windows against the dark night and frowned at it. “Well, I guess there’s a way to know for sure.”

  “No!” Darken’s deep snarl was so full of malevolence, Alex actually paused. He shook his head, stalking closer to her, all bottled up predator and silky danger.

  “No, Alex,” he said again, his eyes blazing murderously red. “No way! You will not go through that ordeal again to prove this theory. There has to be another way.”

  Despite her horrible suspicion, one corner of Alex’s mouth quirked into a half-smile. “Actually, sugar, I was thinking of comparing a sample of my living skin with the material of the crystal—if that is possible, of course.” Her eyes snagged to Bartholomeus, who was staring goggle-eyed between them. “But I’m glad we’re on the same page in that regard.”

  Before Barthi had a chance to recover, Stephane cleared his throat. “I believe there is an easier way.”

  Alex lifted one eyebrow. “There is?”

  Darken’s brother folded his hands behind his back, looking somewhat sheepish. “Hector told me what you said to him about your skin and destroying it quickly. But, well, to be frank, with everything going on at the time, I, ehm, forgot about it and … well”—he coughed—“when we came back to it, it proved quite difficult, as you had predicted…”

  “Her skin?” Barthi’s voice turned shrill. “What do you mean by ‘her skin’?”

  Ignoring him, Darken leaned forward, focused on his brother. “Where is it now?”

  Stephane sighed. “We didn’t exactly know what to do with it. It’s not something you can simply put into a trash can, is it? So, well, we stashed it in the attic for the time being.” He coughed again and didn’t look at any of them. “In the trunk with Maxwell’s old baby clothes.”

  Darken nodded. “Alright, I’ll get it.”

  Nobody moved or said anything until he returned a few minutes later, carrying her shed, crystalized skin over his arms like some kind of sheer, shimmering piece of folded cloth.

  Barthi almost fainted at the sight of it.

  Alex, too, felt nausea expand in her stomach. She could see the indications of her body’s shape as if it were a transparent, iridescent body suit. Hardened out fully, it glittered with thousands of colors, brilliant and bright in the lights—much like a diamond, indeed. Her gorge rose. Something so beautiful at the cost of so much pain. Automatically, her hand went to her belly where Scarface’s knife had penetrated her skin. A chill ran down her arms and she shivered involuntarily.

  Darken carefully placed her skin on the table, and when he stepped back, his fingers brushed against her arm, warm and reassuring. She searched his face and found everything she was looking for in his eyes: understanding, comfort, love. As if he were the answer to all her questions. He knew what she was going through, and he was there for her. It was all she needed.

  Alex pulled herself together and faced Barthi, whose eyes were fixed on her shed skin as if it might come to life any moment and strangle him.

  “I was hurt very badly a few weeks ago and had to molt,” she told him, knowing there was no way to say this without sounding freakish, so she didn’t even try. “This is my shed skin. Can you verify whether it’s the same material as the crystal?”

  Barthi’s throat worked convulsively as he stared at it, wide-eyed. “It’s dead, right?”

  It took them a while to convince Barthi that the skin wouldn’t rise and devour him the moment he touched it. When he finally set to work, as Alex had prophesied earlier, it proved next to impossible to cut off a piece to properly examine it. Eventually, Barthi used a laser cutter, the kind used to process diamonds.

  Alex strode up and down behind his chair, hugging herself while they waited for him to complete his analysis.

  Please, let me be wrong. Please, let it be something else. Sweet Jester, please!

  The magic in the air evaporated. Alex felt her stomach drop. She turned.

  Barthi was sitting with his hands in his lap, blinking at the wall with huge eyes.

  “And?”

  “It’s not identical”—Alex was about to release the breath she’d been holding for a painfully long time, when he added—“but it is definitely the same material.”

  No! The reality of his words slammed into her with the force of a freight train. She felt as if the floor had been pulled out from under her feet and had whacked her over the head.

  She couldn’t be right. This was a bad joke. It had to be!

  Stephane folded his arms in front of his muscular chest. “You expected this,” he said to Alex, and his eyes narrowed slightly. “What made you think the crystal could be … shaper skin?” He stumbled a little on the word.

  “Don’t you see?” Alex’s voice cracked, close to a scream. Hot tears pricked her eyes, less from pain than from fury. “Shapers. They bring shapers to that gruesome place and there they—they torture them so that they molt and then they use their skin to produce … this.” She waved her hand at the crystal.

  Stephane let out a low, vicious curse.

  Darken’s face lost all expression, its flatness being more frightening still. “Tears turning into diamonds sparkling on a woman’s palm,” he whispered. “It’s all in the Augur’s riddle if you know what to look for. Blayde was right. They make no sense until they finally do.”

  Horror and bitterness mixed inside Alex until she felt nothing else. She spun to Barthi, who flinched.

  “When we shapers molt, at first our shed skin is soft and flexible, a bit like rubber. In the course of a couple of days however, it completely hardens out and becomes, well, that.” She pointed to the crumpled, glittering mess of her shed skin on the table. “I suspect they use the hardening period to process it somehow, to turn it into fake jewels. You’re the science genius here. Does that seem possible, in your opinion?”

  Barthi pushed up his glasses, sucking the inside of his cheek as he considered it, scientific curiosity dampening his initial fears. “From what I’ve seen here, and from what you’ve said, I suppose so. The material has unique qualities,
but it also does have a strong structural resemblance to a diamond, as I discerned. Of course to process this”—he nudged her dead skin with his fingertips—“especially in large quantities, you’d need a lot of expensive equipment… A Sorovian Press would certainly work wonders here, and lots of magic catalysts. You would need a big facility, preferably somewhere remote—the magic needed to process these puppies would be felt miles away.”

  “Like an abandoned prison camp,” Alex said softy.

  Barthi nodded. “Yes, that would definitely do it. It would certainly provide the capacities to keep the subjects under control, wouldn’t it? And they often come with their own crematory. The standard vaporizing unit could be used to destroy excessive materials and the energy produced by it could be used to fuel the Press. An almost self-sustaining system.” He tapped his lower lip and shook his head. “The idea … simply fascinating.”

  Everybody glared at him, and he raised his arms in defense. “In a purely scientific, gruesome kind of way, of course.”

  Darken leaned his hip against the table. “So they used the camp to produce fake jewels made of shaper skin.”

  “And they must have sold them through the Consortium,” Alex added. Suddenly everything fit together.

  “Consortium?” Barthi repeated, looking startled. “As in the Prime’s GemRock Consortium? Could someone finally tell me what’s going on here?”

  “Better for your own good if you don’t know everything,” Darken said.

  The young man seemed about to argue, but Darken pointedly shook his head. “I think it would be best if you left now.”

  Barthi twiddled his fingers and squinted at Alex from the corner of his eye. “I don’t suppose you would come to the Academia for a couple of tests, lady?”

  “Barthi!” Darken snapped.

  “What?”

  “She’s a human being. Not a guinea pig!”

  “But Darken…” Barthi whined. “This is a unique opportunity. Clearly you can understand … the sheer possibilities…”

  “Forget about it.”

  “Take the skin,” Alex said. “What?” She shrugged when Darken frowned at her. “I certainly don’t need it anymore, and here it’s just at risk of being found by someone. Let him tinker with it if he wants to. It’s the least we can do, after he helped us figure this out.”

  “Thank you, milady.” Barthi seemed close to happy-tears. “Thank you so much. Thank you.”

  He bounced on the balls of his feet the entire time they needed to wrap the skin in a bundle of cloth for transport—like some kid who couldn’t wait to get his hands on his favorite birthday present. When it was securely packed up and the young man was ready to go, Darken took hold of his arm.

  “Barthi—one word of what you’ve seen and heard here…”

  “Yes, yes, I know, Forfeit,” Barthi grimaced. “You’ll come for me, and I won’t like it.” He tapped his forehead with a shaky grin. “I have a good memory.”

  Darken nodded and released him. Moments later the door closed behind him as he left into the still heavy downpour.

  ALEX stiffly clutched her coffee mug between her fingers and stared into the flames. Unfortunately, the crackling fire in the open-hearth fireplace didn’t do much to dispel the chill in her bones.

  Right after Bartholomeus Farlow had left, Darken had vanished into his brother’s study to ‘bring Belaris into the loop’. Whatever that meant.

  Alex and Stephane had silently moved from the small parlor to the more comfortable family parlor. While Alex had poured them all big mugs of coffee from the giant thermos they had brought with them from the townhouse in Ciradell, Stephane had lit a fire and then procured a bottle of whiskey from inside a wooden globe and laced the coffee with healthy doses of the golden liquid.

  Alex didn’t protest. If she’d ever wanted to drink herself into a stupor, it was right now.

  As their horrible discovery finally began to settle, the cold, shocked numbness in her slowly made way for hot, boiling fury. A fury that was aimed at a certain person.

  “Roukewood!” She spat the word like a curse and slammed her mug on the table. “I should have known it was him.”

  Cassius fucking Roukewood! Oh yes, she should have known.

  And to think that she had pretended to flirt with the bastard. That she’d let him touch her!

  Shaper-free was his province, yes? Well, now they knew where all the shapers had gone, didn’t they? It all made so much sense now. His anti-shaper campaign. His eagerness to get those freaking shaper regulations through the Parliament…

  Oh, wouldn’t he just love to get them in place? If all of her kind were forced to be registered—or, even better, equipped with some sort of tracking device like dangerous dogs—he would just have to send out his flunkies and pick them off the street one by one to be ferried off to Maria Carvalis. A constant flow of fodder for his sick machinery.

  And the trueborn elite would probably congratulate him on his good job at keeping the shaper population under control, blissfully unaware that many of them were wearing the very skin of those hated shaper-freaks on their ears and necks and wrists.

  Bile rose in Alex’s throat, and she swallowed hard.

  What had happened to the shapers that had been at the prison camp right before it had been cleared out the night before? Was there a mass grave somewhere deep in the mountains filled with the throat-slit corpses of nameless men and women nobody missed? Or had they used the crematory’s vaporizing unit to vanish their traces? Had the shapers been stuffed together in a little chamber and burned out of existence, perhaps alive and aware what was going to happen to them? Had there been children among them?

  Thoughts that were too horrible to follow. Alex shuddered and sipped her coffee, glad for the burn of the whiskey in it. If someone had handed her the bottle, she would have downed it. To hell with the hangover!

  “I should have figured this out sooner,” she muttered bitterly. Perhaps, if they had acted a bit quicker, some lives could have been saved.

  Stephane settled himself in one of the armchairs, holding his mug in front of his body with both hands.

  “For all we know, Roukewood might be a victim of circumstances,” he said quietly. “It’s possible that he bought the crystal at a jewelry shop and never knew what it was himself.”

  Alex glared at him, incredulous. “You don’t seriously believe that, do you?”

  Stephane snorted, his mouth twisting into an expression of severe disgust. “Of course not, but those are the kind of arguments we can expect from the guardaí’s investigation force and the Department of the Interior. Especially if Roukewood is greasing people in the right positions, which we must assume. We cannot become careless now.”

  He gulped his laced coffee and stared ahead, thinking. “Right now, we cannot prove that our ‘crystal’ here ever belonged to Roukewood. We need to focus on the things we can prove.” His fingers tapped the mug in a sharp little rhythm. “We’re assuming that the ‘investors’ who paid money to the prison camp are compensated through their shares in the GemRock Consortium. It’s obvious that the Consortium must be selling the fake jewels in Arcadia, but how exactly are they being distributed? What are the names of the rest of the investors? What is Senator Roukewood’s positions in this enterprise? How could they hide the operation for so long? We need to be able to answer all these question before we bring charges against anybody. There can’t be any gaps or guesses. When we present our case, we must offer ironclad proofs and a close reasoning that leaves no other conclusions than the ones we’ve drawn ourselves.”

  “And that’s what we’re going to give them,” Darken said from the door to the study.

  Small whispers of magic rippled along his outline, leaking out of him in his fury. Against the dark rectangle of the doorframe he seemed to glow. He looked demonic—and beautiful. For a second, Alex forgot her own anger and just marveled at him.

  “Belaris will request some more leave for the coming week.” Darken l
anded in the other armchair with a panther’s lethal grace. “If anyone can connect the dots for us, it’s him. The original company files of the GemRock Consortium might be inaccessible at the guardaí’s headquarters in Crona, but Belaris is confident he can hack into the database of the Department of Commerce and access the limited files stored there. They might not show the entire package, but they should at least give us a detailed overview of the sales and origin of every piece of jewelry that was sold by the Consortium in the past year. I have a hunch that there will be a big number of jewels with a rather dubious origin, and if we can trace some of them to their current owners, with Barthi’s data it should be possible to prove what they really are. Belaris will also procure a list of the company’s official shareholders and will check them for payments to the Bluetail Grand Theater. In a few days, we will be able to swamp the guardaí with so much evidence they won’t have a choice but to open a full-scale investigation.” He glanced at his brother. “Especially if we involve the press.”

  To imagine that she might finally be cleared of her charges in a couple of days… Alex didn’t even dare hope for it. It simply seemed too good to be true.

  “The press, huh?” Stephane rubbed his chin. “Something like that can backfire easily. If the timing isn’t absolutely on point, we will accomplish nothing but shoot ourselves in the foot. This will have to be planned very carefully.”

  Darken flashed him a feral smile. “I have the fullest confidence in you, brother. You know how to handle the press. And we need the backing of the public. Once this scandal is out in the open, Roukewood—and whoever else is involved in this—won’t have a chance to weasel out of it. And if he should find a way”—his irises flared with bright crimson and a deep growl laced his voice—“I’ll kill that sick son of a bitch myself.”

  Alex bared her teeth at him. “Get in line!”

  Darken lifted an eyebrow at her. Slowly, he stretched back in his armchair, a sleepy, dangerous Forfeit smile curling his lips. “I bet I can beat you to him.”

  In the blink of an eye, Alex had vaulted over the couch table and was leaning over his chair, eyes ablaze with blue fire.