Page 45 of The City Of Fractured Memory

The air within is cold and still. Too still.

My eyes sweep the hall and I see a toppled vase, a shattered teacup, and a faint trail of footprints, half-dried, leading toward the stairwell. Small. Barefoot. Vesper’s.

“Vesper?” Xavier’s voice cracks through the silence, raw with panic as he sprints up the stairs to her bedroom. “Vesper, it’s me!”

No one answers.

I crouch, tracing the edge of a bloody footprint with my finger. The blood is dark, but not congealed, so it must be recent. Within the last hour possibly, maybe two. I rise and follow the prints until they stop abruptly in the middle of the hall. Other than the dropped tea cup, there’s no sign of a struggle, though. No drag marks…nothing.

“She’s gone,” Xavier whispers as he slowly trudges back to the bottom of the stairs. “She’s–”

“Not dead,” I interrupt, forcing the word out with confidence I don’t feel. “If she was, there’d be more blood. Maybe…maybe someone took her?”

Stryx tilts her head, nostrils flaring. “There’s magic resonance in the air. Old magic.”

My stomach turns. “Someone used magic to get her out?”

Stryx shrugs, her mouth a grim line. “I don’t know, but either way, I don’t think she left by choice.”

Xavier grips the doorframe until his knuckles whiten, his breath shaking. “Riven,” he says darkly. “He said he’d make it worse. If he’s hurt her, I swear–”

I place a hand on his arm, though my own fury burns beneath the surface. “We don’t know that yet. He’s been with us at the crime scene and this blood is too recent. I don’t think it was him this time, Xavier. But we will find out.”

He narrows his eyes at me as he steps away from my touch. “You seem quick to defend him,” he accuses, his eyes flashing.

“I am not defending him,” I growl. “I get that you’re upset, I am too, but we need to relay the facts here, or we’ll get nowhere.”

A knock on the open door stops us from saying anything further we might regret, and the three of us spin round to find a disheveled looking man standing on the doorstep, an unconscious young woman with long black hair limp in his arms.

“Vesper!” Xavier cries, lurching forward to take her into his arms from the man I assume to be his neighbour. I immediately check her pulse, sighing with relief when I can feel it. It’s weak, but present.

“I went out lookin’ soon as I sent the moth to ya, Detective,” the man says to Xavier, still panting slightly from carrying her here. “I found her not three streets away, was worried she was a goner, eh.”

“Did you see anything else?” Xavier presses him frantically, clutching his sister close. “Was anyone else here?”

“I’m ‘fraid not, Detective. All I saw was the door open, was sleepin’ before that, you see.”

Xavier grits his teeth, giving him a curt nod. “Thank you, Heston, I owe you one.”

The man trudges back across the street to his house, leaving us to figure out this mess. It doesn’t make sense. If someone took her, why would they have left her in the street mere minutes away?

“Has anything happened like this before?” I ask Xavier, following him up the stairs as he carries Vesper back to her bed. “Could the curse have done this?”

He nudges the bedroom door open with his hip and takes her to the bed, sliding her gently under the covers. “No, she’s barely left this bed in months.”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence this happened now, when these murders are going on,” Stryx murmurs from behind me, fixing her stare on Vesper’s limp body.

“You think it’s connected?” I ask, the same thought having just crossed my mind too.

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I know you don’t trust gut feelings, Octavia, but that’s what mine is telling me.”

Xavier looks up at us both, his expression dark. “If it is connected, then you can be sure Riven’s involved somehow.”

Given his sister is currently clinging to life in front of us right now, I figure it’s probably not the best time to remind him we can’t jump to conclusions about the Governor, so I change tack.

“Stryx and I have a new lead that could give us a direction to follow. We’ll go back to the Archives, see if there’s anything else we might have missed. You stay here and look after Vesper.”

He tenses. “New lead?”