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I have quarters?
I follow, panting to keep up—though for a vampire, he’s practically crawling.
We hustle across half the castle to what at one point must’ve been the dungeon where prisoners were kept before being tortured or worse.
“How dreary,” Felix mutters.
That’s putting it mildly.
Kain leads me down a corridor that even the rats must find too depressing to frequent. The place smells faintly like fermented sewage, and I have to fight my gag reflex. With a determined expression on his face, Kain makes a sharp right and stops next to a large cell with an iron ring welded to the wall—always a nice little touch. He makes a gentlemanly gesture, ushering me inside.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter as I step in.
These are my quarters? Instead of a solid door, there are iron bars, exactly like in a prison cell, and there isn’t even a modern toilet. There’s just a hole in the floor with murky muck a few feet down, which looks suspiciously like the liquid that was slushing in the moat around the castle. Major eww.
The only thing that makes this place feel like anything other than a prison cell is a new bed, table, and chair. And the fact that the door isn’t locked with the rusty padlock that’s hanging on the outside. Instead, it actually has a bolt on the inside.
Hekima appears in the corridor behind Kain and peers through the bars disapprovingly. “Are these the best accommodations we can provide? Bailey is our guest, after all.”
Kain sets the folder on the table. “You may have a point. This is where we were going to put her if she was found guilty, but she wasn’t. I’ll see if we can scrounge up something better.”
“Please do,” Hekima says. “Meanwhile, do you mind if I change the scenery?”
Kain and I shrug.
Hekima shoots his showy arc of energy at our heads, and the cell becomes a fresh-smelling, sunlit meeting room. Only the furniture looks the same.
“Right, then.” Kain opens the folder. “Let’s get to the murders.”
Chapter Thirteen
Inside the folder, on the top, is a photo of a striking woman.
“She looks like Lara Croft,” Felix whispers. “Or looked. Past tense.”
“That’s Tatum,” Kain says somberly. “The first victim.”
He flips the page, and I see Tatum’s body lying on the roof of one of the castle’s towers, an arrow in her heart.
“Why don’t I show you what we think happened?” Hekima offers.
More illusions. Why not?
I agree, and an arc of illusionist energy hits my head.
I find myself at the scene of the crime, standing in front of a living Tatum. She smells amazing, which gives me an inkling of her Cognizant type. She takes a joint from her pocket and is beginning to light up when—with a sharp whoosh—an arrow pierces her chest.
“Let me slow that last part down,” Hekima says after she collapses.
This time, I can see the arrow’s flight path. It seems to come from the ground below—an impossible shot.
“When was this?” I ask as the arrow crawls toward the chest of the poor woman.
“Six days ago,” comes Kain’s disembodied voice. “At four p.m.”
“And what can you tell me about her?”
“She was a succubus. The most powerful I’d ever met.”
Just as I thought. That yummy smell is unmistakable. “Do you have any idea who would want her dead?”
The arrow begins to penetrate Tatum’s breast.
“No one,” Hekima says. “Everyone loved her.”
“A bit too literally,” Kain says. “As you can imagine, she had many lovers.”
Right. When one of her kind wants someone, they use their power to make themselves sexually irresistible. This is why I stay as far away from succubi and incubi as possible; they no doubt have countless germs from all those partners, plus they can drain energy from their lovers during intimacy—something that can even lead to death, if they wish it.
No, thanks. I’ll take my dream lovers any day of the week.
I turn away before I can get splattered with illusory blood. “Could a lover have killed her? Murders are often committed by people close to the victim. Maybe someone got jealous.”
The room becomes normal again—that is, it goes back to its guise as a meeting room.
“As I said, she had many lovers,” Kain says. “The pool of suspects is too large.”
I examine the photo of her corpse again. “That arrow. Are you sure your recreation of her death is accurate?”
“We consulted experts,” Hekima says. “I’m sure.”
“But who could make such a shot? There are no elves on this world, so—”
I stop as Kain and Hekima exchange a glance.
“Some elves get plastic surgery to make themselves look more human in order to settle here,” Hekima says.
Huh. I didn’t know that. “Is there such an elf on the Council?” I ask.
“There is, for sure,” Felix whispers excitedly in my ear. “He helped us in a recent conflict.”
I’m about to ask some questions, but Kain flips a few pages in his folder and shows me a picture of a thin man.
