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But it didn’t disguise the scent of blood.
I rounded the large table and froze. Behind me, Giguhl cursed and Rhea gasped. The bodies lay in thick, oily pools of blood and gore. My head swam from the overpowering stench of dirty, coppery blood and sandalwood. Counting the bodies took three tries. I didn’t breathe again until I was sure there were only four. I hated to feel relieved not to see Adam among the carnage. I knew each of those Pythian Guards. They had families and friends who would mourn them. I would mourn them, too, once I was sure my sister hadn’t also murdered the man I loved.
Rhea rushed forward to check for signs of life. I didn’t say anything, but I knew she wouldn’t find a pulse among them. Finally, she stood, her expression stoic and her skin pale. “Dead. All of them.”
I acknowledged this with a curt nod. “Spread out.”
“What exactly are we looking for?” Giguhl asked.
“Evidence that will lead us to Adam. And anything that can explain why the f**k she’s suddenly turned into Lizzie Borden.”
We dispersed, each heading to a different area. The last time I’d been in the Star Chamber was when I found the canvas left by Lavinia with the word “checkmate” written in blood. She’d left it for me to find after she’d kidnapped Maisie. Now, just a few months later, Lavinia was dead and Maisie was a killer.
Lavinia’s canvas was gone, but other works of art filled the space. Ranging in size from small pieces of painted paper to huge canvases on easels, they represented the manifestations of my sister’s subconscious.
Before Maisie had lost her mind, the paintings had a sort of Chagall dreaminess to them—lots of swirling colors and fantastical images. But now, every canvas I saw looked like evidence one might gather for a commitment hearing. Monstrous forms with sharp teeth and claws. Daggers and guns and other weapons. Lots of red slashing through every picture like blood spatter at a crime scene. No wonder Maisie hadn’t allowed anyone in the room. One look at these canvases and there’d have been little doubt my sister had completely lost her fragile grip on sanity.
A small canvas near the window caught my eye. I frowned and approached it, my palms sweaty. Giguhl came up next to me, his claw on my arm, as if the contact would protect both of us from whatever dark magic waited on the canvas.
The image was about the size of a hardback book. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the odd technique Maisie had used to render the image. From far away, the shapes came together to form something resembling a male face. The features seemed to be carelessly tossed across the bone structure, leaving individual elements to lie in unorthodox spots. The nose, for example, appeared where an ear should be. The eyes and mouth were reversed.
I moved closer and noticed that in addition to the decidedly Picassoesque composition, the image was composed of thousands of tiny dots. I wracked my brain for the art term for the technique. Pointillism? Yes, only creepier than any Seurat I’d ever seen. In the eyes, the dots of blue and yellow butted against each other so that when you backed up they combined to form vibrant green.
Despite the unorthodox composition that fractured the features, the green eyes and the thousands of bloodred dots that formed the hair told me whose face this was.
But it was a detail higher up on the image that made clammy fear spread across my skin. On top of Cain’s head, Maisie had painted two large, red antlers.
I looked up slowly, my heart thudding in my chest. “It’s Cain.”
Rhea frowned. “How do you know that?”
“He’s visited me in my dreams, remember?” Pointing a finger to the horns, I said, “Just as I suspect he’s visited Maisie’s.”
Rhea frowned and came in for a closer look. “Cain is the white stag?”
I started to respond, but another grouping of canvases across the room caught my eyes. “Shit,” I breathed. Raising a hand, I pointed them out to Rhea and Giguhl. It appeared my sister was building herself quite the themed art show. The title of these particular images might be something like Murder: A Retrospective.
They were all there. The human’s broken body hanging out of the garbage. The mage suspended from hooks like a side of beef. The twin to the glove we’d found at the Vein crime scene was pinned to the canvas’s upper corner.
But it was the last piece of art that made bile rise. It was a triptych. On the left, Orpheus bent over the table in a puddle of black. On the right, Tanith exploding like a supernova. And in the center…
I wiped the sting from my eyes and forced myself to look at it. Really look. Because in the center, my twin had painted Adam. His golden head hung low over his chest, but there was no mistaking the Hekate’s Wheel just under his navel. Worse, his body was strung up and covered in angry red slashes and bite marks.
“Gods, Sabina,” Giguhl said. “We’ve got to find him.”
“If it’s not already too late,” Rhea said in a dead tone.
“It’s not too late. We’ll find him.” But tears sprung to my eyes even as the denial burst from my lips.
In the next instant, magic rippled through the room. I ducked down, prepared for attack. Giguhl and Rhea put their backs to mine, forming a defensive circle. But no blows—magical or mundane—came at us.
Instead, a female voice began humming from somewhere across the room. My gut went cold. The sound seemed to come from behind a massive canvas. The position of the easel it rested on blocked our view of the person standing behind it. But I knew it was her.
My sister had finally decided to join the party.
“Maisie?” The humming continued as if I hadn’t called out.
I flagged down Giguhl and pointed for him to approach from one side while I would take the other. To Rhea, I held out a palm, telling her to stay put.
“Maze?” With careful steps, I picked my way across the floor, past the bodies of the four dead mages, and toward the right-hand side of the canvas. When I came around it, I gasped.
Maisie was nude. Her right hand gripped a large paintbrush soaked with crimson, which she methodically scraped back and forth across the painting. More red—paint or blood?—streaked like wounds across her torso.
To distract myself from the panic rising like vomit in my throat, I looked up at the image she was defacing. The painting was one of the few left over from Maisie’s pre-trauma days. She’d originally shown it to me just after my vision quest. The one where I found out I was a Chthonic.
The image showed a female that Maisie claimed was me flying through the night above a garden. The painting was supposed to prove I was the prophesized “New Lilith” who would unite all the dark races. Rhea believed that our victory in New Orleans, where members of all the dark races fought with me to defeat Lavinia and the Caste of Nod, was proof of that prophecy but I still wasn’t convinced. After all, tonight’s drama had thoroughly destroyed any chance at peace.
