by Carol A Park
She was now between him and the back door. She glanced over his shoulder to see Lann dart in and block the door she had come through. Xathal followed and skirted the wall, heading toward the woman chained at the other side of the warehouse—and the unfortunate Judoc.
Elidor seemed to know what was going on behind him. He gave her that cold, mirthless smile he so excelled at. “You’re too late,” he said.
“Even so, I can keep you from doing it again.”
“Still a marionette? You could do so much better.”
As he spoke, he was turning so that he drew ever-closer to the unguarded door. In a face-to-face confrontation with Elidor, the odds were with him. However, he was favoring one leg. She could tell as he moved. It might be enough to give her an advantage.
Her eyes went to Lann. If she could pin Elidor, could he come to her aid fast enough to take over?
Her left palm tickled, and his eyes flicked down to it. She became dimly aware of an ache in her upper arm where he had stabbed her; his blade had caught the flesh and nothing more, but it hurt, and it was bleeding.
She didn’t dare tear her eyes away from him long enough to look at it, but she had seen that look in his eyes before.
Maybe she had another advantage.
She lifted her left hand and turned it so that the blood ran across it instead of dripping onto the ground, hoping it would distract him as it did once before.
And it almost worked. Unfortunately, in the same moment that she stepped closer to him, preparing to launch, anger danced across his eyes.
She recoiled instinctively, but she had been preparing to attack him, not flee herself.
He dove toward her, grabbed her by the wound in her arm, and dragged her up against himself.
She bit her tongue to keep from crying out as she struggled to free herself from his grasp, and Xathal shouted from across the warehouse, as if in a belated warning. Lann drew his sword and ran toward them, but it would be too little, too late. Elidor’s had sheathed his dagger, and his other hand was already closing on her throat.
Yet he didn’t constrict it any further. Instead, he met her eyes. His fingers dug into her hurt arm, her own blood seeping out around his hand as it sought a way beyond the compress.
“Well,” she whispered. “You have what you wanted. Don’t tell me you’re having a spasm of conscience now.”
Without warning, and right before Lann reached them, Elidor let go of her throat, curled his fingers around the necklace there, and shoved her away from himself, hard. The chain snapped, leaving the rest of it, including the rose pendant, in his hand. She landed unceremoniously on her rear, and by the time she scrambled to her feet and ran to the door, he was gone.
Lann skittered to her side. “I thought he had you, Da,” he said. “What happened?”
She put a hand to her throat and shook her head.
She had no idea.
She glanced over at Xathal. The old Watchman was kneeling at the side of the body of the woman, his head bowed.
Ivana waved off Lann’s attempts to tend to her arm. Meanwhile, several other Watchmen appeared at the warehouse door. One of them cursed and ran to Judoc’s body.
Ivana walked toward Xathal.
Xathal rubbed his eyes. “It was all in vain, I’m afraid. We were too late for her, lost Judoc, and didn’t catch him. And so close, too.” He looked up at her. “I assume, at least, you had a good look at his face? His back was to me.” He sounded weary. This investigation was wearing on him, no doubt.
“I would recognize him if I saw him again,” she said. “We can have a sketch made when we get back.” She knelt next to him, and together they looked down at the body of the ill-fated young woman chained to a wall.
There were many ways in which the murder returned to the theme of the earlier crimes. The victim was a young woman—Fereharian, of course, which was the single commonality. And her wrists had been slit again. But this time, she had been chained to the floor and wall. Literally.
A series of metal loops were bolted into the floor and wall at the far end of the warehouse. The owner used them to chain boxes together, either to discourage theft or to keep them in place.
Xathal was talking with the warehouse owner outside while Ivana continued to examine the body by the light of several lanterns, the wound on her arm now cleaned and wrapped snuggly with a fresh bandage.
Elidor had used the chains to bind the woman to both the floor and wall. She sat propped upright, both ankles chained to loops, but, curiously, only one arm chained. Had that been when she had interrupted him? Or when Judoc had interrupted him perhaps?
Ivana ran her fingers along the chains. They weren’t tightened excessively. Merely enough that the woman wouldn’t be able to escape them. And yet her skin was raw and angry everywhere the chains crossed her flesh, evidence of a struggle against her bonds.
Ivana sat back on her heels. So the victim had been alive when Elidor had chained her, however briefly. That made sense. The amount of blood suggested that the woman had died from the slit wrists right there in the warehouse.
Ivana hoped that Elidor wasn’t about to take a turn for the more macabre. If she had to start cutting down bodies from slaughterhouses or examining blood paintings…
Well, she probably didn’t need to worry about that. If he was following a course dictated by her own life, he was running short on subjects.
Ivana peered closer. There were shallow slices on the woman’s forearms. Similar to the scars that she herself bore, but these were fresh. One other victim had had cuts like this, but they had been all over her body, not only her forearms.
Ivana’s knees were starting to ache and her feet tingled from crouching in that position for so long, but she couldn’t tear her eyes off those cuts.
“Well, what do you think?” Xathal asked from behind her. “Does this give us some clue as to where he might strike next?”
She stood to face him. “I think this is by far the strangest yet. In some ways, a return to earlier crimes, and yet in others, a departure.”
Xathal nodded. “No bed. And why the chains?”
Ivana kept those thoughts to herself. She had told Xathal that she had obtained information on where the killer might strike next, and, given that they had no other options, he had followed her lead. He knew nothing more.
Xathal continued his questions. “Do we know who she was? Where he found her?”
By way of answer, Ivana lifted the woman’s chin, as her head had lolled to the side, and as she did so, the woman’s hair fell to one side, revealing a crimped ear.
“A slave,” she said. Ivana didn’t know unequivocally that her sister was dead. She had been alive the last time Ivana had seen her. Screaming for Ivana not to abandon her.
Her hand went to her throat, where her sister’s necklace had rested not even fifteen minutes before.
Ivana pressed her lips together and stood up. That necklace wasn’t supposed to matter.
Xathal moved around to look, ran a hand over his face, and then shook his head. “Well. A new kind of nobody.” He sighed and bent down to examine the woman’s other ear, neck, and face.
Ivana stood up and stared at the corpse. Something niggled at the back of her mind, like two pieces of a puzzle that seemed like they ought to go together, if she could just turn them the right way.
Those cuts.
“Why is one arm free?” she murmured.
“I assumed you—or more likely Judoc—interrupted him while he was chaining her.”
A plausible explanation, yet it still bothered her. The cuts on her arms were fresh, not crusted over as they would have been had he tortured her first and then brought her to the warehouse. He’d begun to chain her, had been interrupted by Judoc, and after dispatching him, had commenced with his torture before he had finished restraining her?
Why would he leave a possible way for her to gain an advantage, however small?
She moved to the other side of the woman to lift
her arm. She turned the hand over and pried open the stiff fingers. Of course, her hands were covered in her own blood, so there wasn’t much to observe.
From the vantage of behind the woman, Ivana peered again at her cuts. She frowned and crouched down again. “Can we unchain her?” she asked, fingering one of the locks.
“Well, I suppose, if you’re done with your initial observations. Let me go get help.”
Xathal disappeared out of the door.
She didn’t need help, but she was in no hurry. She had no urgent reason to reveal to Xathal that she could pick locks. So she waited, unmoving, until he returned, her mind whirling.
She waited while he and one of the other Watchmen fretted over the chains and locks, and then called in yet another Watchman. Finally, they freed the victim’s arm, and while they worked on her ankles, Ivana pushed the body forward a bit and moved behind it. She crouched down again and laid the body back against her own chest so it didn’t fall over.
She turned the woman’s right forearm over. There were cuts, but they weren’t as consistent. As though they had been made by someone else, like she might expect.
She then held her arms out in front, as if they were the woman’s, and pretended to draw a knife across her forearm with the woman’s free hand—her right hand. They were exactly as they should have been had the woman made them herself.
She stood up, and the woman’s body fell to the floor. She hardly noticed.
Burning skies. Burning skies!
Of course.
His spying on her had never been about voyeurism in the ordinary sense. He had been watching her harm herself.
And then she had stopped. True, that had been years ago, but she had caught him still watching her not even a month ago. Watching, waiting, and hoping, perhaps?
It might very well have taken years for the loss of his sick fantasy to finally erode his self-control until he had finally snapped. And perhaps knowing he couldn’t kill or injure her, he had lashed out at others who looked like her—at least initially. Perhaps the first ones had been his initial frustration. And then he had evolved to trying to recreate a bit of where he had watched her, in her bedroom.
But then what was the point of all of this? Why allow her—ask her!—to take this job? She had felt all along that perhaps he was waiting until the end, playing some game, where the final kill for him would come full circle, back to himself.
But if that were the case, why had he left her alive? He could have killed her today, and he didn’t.
There was no one left. Her father. Her mother. With her sister, the last of those she had once cared about had been taken from her.
She jerked her head up. No. There was one other.
Rhianah.
Had she ever mentioned the child to him? Her father, her mother, yes, even her sister, but…
She closed her eyes, straining memory. It was so many years ago.
Yes. Yes, she had. When she had been training with Da Lavena.
“Do you have something?”
Xathal’s words jerked her out of herself. His voice was curious, perhaps a little nervous.
Well, she had just been cradling a dead body.
“Yes. The next victim will be a baby.” Xathal paled, but she continued on. “I want you—you personally—to scour the temple records for recent births in the area. Concentrate on the second district. Fereharian women only. The more recent, the better. I want a complete list, as soon as you have it.” If they could narrow it down to one or two women, they had a real chance. They wouldn’t have to spread out their resources so thin and could have a large enough team prepared to take him down—and save the next victim.
She couldn’t tell Xathal anything about how she knew who the next victim would be, of course. That would expose more than just Elidor to Watch scrutiny, and the Conclave would deny involvement with her faster than a bloodcrab could snatch a fisherman from his boat—and then probably have her eliminated.
Xathal was staring at her. He hadn’t moved a muscle since she had issued her—she was sure from his perspective—random pronouncement and bizarre orders. She expected a flood of questions, but perhaps he had grown to accept her taking charge. After all, her last mysterious lead had turned out correct.
“Why only the second district?” was his only question.
That, at least, she could justify. She crouched and drew an invisible square with her finger. “The locations of the murders were fairly random and spread out at first,” she said. “But once we started investigating, and he began his game, the murders have been on a trajectory.” She pointed to the rough location of districts on her invisible map. “Fifth district. Fourth district. Third district.”
“The next is the second,” Xathal said.
She stood up. “Correct.” Also, their own district, which made a certain amount of sense, if this was his last move. “We have a week. I want your report much sooner, so we can plan.”
“Da, might I ask…?”
“No. It’s a suspicion, and a strong one.” She turned her eyes on Xathal. “Do it, and I think we might just win his game.”
Sometimes it still seemed strange to simply walk through the front door of a precinct. Ivana had spent years working under the nose of the law. To be working with them was, in some ways, the ultimate charade.
Xathal had no idea his “special investigator” was a killer herself.
The man at the front desk nodded her into the back. They recognized her by now.
This was the end of her time in Carradon—and likely Cadmyr itself—and hopefully not because Elidor would see to it himself. She was now recognized by far too many people who might one day investigate other more off the record jobs. Not to mention, while Xathal and the Watchmen hadn’t seen Elidor’s face yet, if the Watch managed to arrest him, people would. And someone would eventually make the connection with the man Ivana had lived with.
But would the Conclave simply move her somewhere else? Other possibilities had flitted through her mind.
For instance, perhaps this was their final job for her. Perhaps they intended to discard her, seeing her usefulness as at an end. Worse, perhaps they would view her as a liability, and once Elidor was dealt with, have her eliminated as well.
Regardless, her time in his house, in this city, would be over soon. It wouldn’t hurt to be prepared for a sudden flight.
“You wasted no time, I see.” Xathal was already standing next to the door of the meeting room. She entered and he followed, closing the door behind them for privacy.
Ivana settled down in a chair next to Xathal at the small table in the room.
“What do you have?” she asked.
He plopped a thin stack of papers in front of her. “As you requested. A copy of all recent Fereharian birth records kept by the temple in the second district.”
“A copy?” she asked, untying the twine holding the sheets together. “I hope you didn’t delegate this task.”
“No. I did it myself, as you asked. Frankly, there weren’t that many. Fereharians are a relatively small percentage of the population in the second district, and then you were asking for an even smaller percentage of those.”
Xathal fell silent, watching and waiting while she paged through the dozen or so records and separated them into two piles: definite no, and maybe.
Seven went into the “no” pile because the mother was married. He had, thus far, been as accurate as he could be, given what he knew about her past and, no doubt, given his options. He wouldn’t choose a child whose mother was married, not when he had several others to choose from that were closer to her own situation.
She hesitated over the five that were left. Had she mentioned the gender of her child? She didn’t think so. Still, it had been an off-hand comment, and she wasn’t certain of that. Either way, she had better not use it as part of the criteria.
She set two more aside. The mothers were both older than she was now by at least a decade, let alone than when she had
given birth. He could do basic math. He knew how long she had been with him. He would know she would have had to have been young.
That left three. She spread them out in front of her, side by side.
Their ages were sixteen, nineteen, and twenty-one.
Their children would be six months, nine months, and several weeks, respectively.
The fathers were all listed as unknown.
She rubbed a hand over her face, and then slid aside the middle woman. The child and the mother were older.
That left the sixteen year-old with the six month old, and the twenty-one year-old with the newborn.
Would he choose the child closer in age to the one she had lost, or the woman closer in age to herself?
She closed her eyes. It would be the younger child. The victims he had chosen so far had all been attempts to mimic the people whom she had lost, and she had specifically mentioned that she had lost the babe soon after she had been born.
She set aside the sixteen year-old and stared at the paper in front of her. It made sense to her now, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be wrong.
She put a finger on the paper and slid it toward Xathal. “I think it’s this one,” she said. “His next victim, that is.”
Xathal stared at the record as though it were a bloodbane. “How do you know? I still don’t—”
“I don’t know. Not for certain.” She slid out the other two women, her second and third choices. “These are two other possibilities. Have someone survey all three options, so that we can gather a bit more information. But we don’t have a lot of time, so it needs to be done quickly. And I cannot stress enough, discreetly.”
Xathal stared at her. “Survey? I thought the point of this was so we could protect potential victims.”
Ivana stared at him incredulously. “Do you want to catch him?”
“Of course I want to catch him.”
“Then the last thing you want to do is put anyone under obvious Watch protection. If you alert the victims, you will alert him. Then he’ll choose another victim—one we don’t have under protection—and not only will someone else die, but we’ll lose another chance to trap him.”