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“Yeah, that’s who I meant,” Felix says. “Doesn’t he look like Tingle from Zelda?”
Kain flips the page again to a photo of a broken body sprawled over some rocks—a body that had to be the same individual as in the previous image.
“Oh, crap,” Felix whispers. “He’s another victim.”
“We found Ryan dead just a few hours after we found Tatum,” Kain says. “And before you ask, he was the only elf on the Council, and he wasn’t merely Tatum’s lover. He was her husband.”
I rub my temples. I’m only on the second murder victim, and my head already hurts. To focus on something this brain-intensive, I’d need a full night’s worth of sleep, something I haven’t had in four months. “Is it possible the elf killed the succubus out of jealousy and then killed himself in grief?” I ask. “Humans commit this sort of murder-suicide all the time, don’t they?”
“That’s what we thought,” Kain says, “until the next murder.”
“Right,” I say, remembering that there were four. I picture the broken body on the rocks. “So you think someone pushed the elf?”
“It seems so,” Hekima says.
“Except that makes no sense,” Kain says. “Ryan was extremely paranoid. I don’t think he’d let an enemy ambush him like that.”
“So maybe it was a friend,” I say. “Did he have many?”
“One,” Kain replies with a scowl.
“Leal?” Hekima asks. “But he—”
“It’s feasible he could’ve done the deed before,” Kain says.
Hekima raises his arms. “Do you want me to play out that theory?”
“Please,” I say, and Kain nods.
Hekima shoots us with his mojo again, and we find ourselves on top of a cliff with the elf’s back to us. A man with wild gray hair dressed in a white lab coat approaches the elf from behind. The elf spins around and aims a drawn bow at the newcomer.
“Leal,” he says with a hint of a smile. “You startled me, old friend.” He lowers the bow and turns his back to the newcomer. “I come here when I feel unsettled. It’s almost—”
The gray-haired dude pushes him over the cliff, and we’re back in the meeting room before the elf strikes the rocks.
Kain looks thoughtful. “I don’t know about this. Why would Leal kill his closest ally?”
Why indeed? “Maybe I could go into his dream to find out?”
Kain sighs and turns a few pages in his folder. There’s a picture of a balding man in a white coat, a dove sitting on his shoulder as if he were a pirate and there were a parrot shortage.
“I don’t mean to disrespect the dead,” Felix says, “but he totally looks like Dr. Wily from the Mega Man games.”
Or any mad scientist, for that matter.
“The next image is disturbing,” Kain says. “Take a deep breath.”
I do as he suggests, and he turns the page.
Puck. The slab of meat in the photo is barely recognizable as a man.
Felix makes a strange wheezing sound. Did he just faint?
I drag my gaze away from the horrible image. “What could do that?” I ask Kain.
“The doves,” he says.
I blink at him uncomprehendingly.
“I think he means like in the Alfred Hitchcock movie,” Felix says in a thin voice. I guess he didn’t faint, after all. “You know, The Birds?”
Kain turns to Hekima. “Can you show her a simulation?”
Before I can say thanks but no thanks, I see an intact Leal standing in a lab filled with cages of white birds. Without warning, the doves become agitated. One manages to break through the cage, followed by another and another.
Leal looks at the freed birds with no fear. “What spooked you, dears?” he asks in a raspy voice.
This is when a dove dives and pecks him in the eye.
He screams, clutching his eye, but another bird is already diving for his face again. More doves leave their cages and join the attacking horde (or dule, as a group of doves is called). Some of them hurt themselves in the process, but that doesn’t seem to stop them.
“Enough!” I snap. “I get it.”
Instantly, the blood and gore are replaced by the meeting room.
“Sorry,” Hekima says, “I didn’t—”
“It’s fine.” I force a smile, ignoring the nausea twisting my stomach. “I did need to know what happened.”
Kain and Hekima wait as I even out my breathing. And hey, a benefit of not having eaten in a day is that I can’t puke—one of my least favorite activities.
“Is there someone on the Council who can control animals?” I ask when my voice is steady enough. “On Gomorrah, we call people who can do that—”
“Gemma.” Kain flips a page in the folder.
A long-haired beauty stares at me from the photo. She’s dressed in all leather and stands on high heels.
“This one looks like Bayonetta,” Felix says, his voice back to normal. “She’s this kickass video game witch who—”
Kain flips to the next page, and Felix makes a gagging sound. My stomach roils too. Though arguably not as bad as the prior image, it’s still pretty gruesome.
