Jakob must be another doctor, Shironne decided. Kai was going to be weighing her conclusions against his.
Mikael led her to the table. He placed her gloved fingers on the edge and told her how the body had been laid out. He’d maintained a careful distance until that moment, but the sight of the woman’s mutilated form sent a wave of nausea through him.
Shironne felt it echo through her own body. Her breath suddenly went short. She found herself sitting inexplicably on the icy floor, sweat trickling down her back. The sensation began to ease as Mikael fought to bring himself under control.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
He hadn’t known he would transfer those sensations to her: his instinctive visceral response over finding himself dead, because he wasn’t ready to die yet—not quite yet. Someday it would be him on that table, and they would all be relieved that Mikael had finally gone away, but not today. There were things he still had to do, things he had to figure out, someone he had to find.
Shironne shook her head, trying to sort his thoughts from her own. She could hear his mind’s voice rattling on. She wrapped her hand around her focus and used it to force his thoughts away. She held his thoughts at bay, confining them to one small corner of her mind where they howled away like a dog chained in a fenced garden.
“Stop it,” she hissed at Mikael. “That isn’t you.”
Mikael heard her and began repeating her words over and over in his head like a mantra. After a moment, he had himself under control again.
Kai kept his distance, radiating annoyance tempered with a touch of curiosity. Shironne blocked him away with ease. Generally someone related by blood was harder for her to shut out, but the strength of Mikael’s hold on her had surprised her, clouding her thoughts despite her efforts. He’d influenced her, just as he’d feared.
This is why they’ve been keeping me from meeting him. Shironne struggled to her feet, using the edge of the table to pull herself up. Determined to behave normally—despite him—she tugged off her left glove and laid her hand on the body, her fingers coming to rest on the woman’s stomach. The victim’s skin felt cold, blood turning to an icy slush inside. Everything had stalled in its creep toward decay. “She’s frozen.”
“Of course she is.” Kai’s tone indicated she must be stupid not to have expected that.
She’d never encountered a frozen body before. She’d worked for the colonel for years and had never dealt with this. “It’s not that cold outside,” she said. “How did she freeze?”
“The mortuary service puts bodies in a . . . very cold place,” Mikael said. “That’s why this room is cold. Because we’re close to that room.”
There was a room colder than this one? Shuddering, Shironne raised her hand to the woman’s chest and laid it on her right shoulder. She waited, hand pressed there, until a faint impression reached her, the body thawing enough to give up bits of information. “There’s grit in the wounds, a great deal of it, like the gravel on the river walk.”
“They dumped her facedown there,” Mikael confirmed.
From the sound of his voice, he’d risen and now stood a few feet away.
“The same knife as before made these cuts, but there’s so much more blood in her. She didn’t bleed away like the other two.” Shironne tried to sense the frozen body beneath her hand, attempting to reach through the slush for more, to tell how the woman had died. The static nature of the ice in the body frustrated her, holding everything she needed to know in minute crystallized packets, each a tiny wall she had to batter down.
She tugged off her other glove and dropped it while trying to put it with the other in her pocket. She reached across the body to lay her other hand on the woman’s left shoulder, leaning over her to do so.
“What’s wrong?” Mikael asked.
He knew something had gone amiss; it probably showed on her face. “I’m hardly sensing anything,” she said, embarrassed that her voice came out sounding so plaintive in front of her disdainful cousin. “I’ve never touched a frozen body before. It’s all dead. Like wood, kind of. Oh, I know that doesn’t make sense,” she said in answer to Mikael’s unspoken confusion.
“Then forget it,” he urged her. “I think we know everything we need to know.”
“This is a waste of time,” Kai snapped.
Through the skin Shironne could feel the cuts on that shoulder warming under her hand. They’d been made after death, blood oozing but not flowing. A faint trace of iron rested in one of the cuts, catching her attention—barely a sliver. A connection raced between her palms, as if lighting the body for her from within. The woman’s lungs had clenched, simply forgetting to move in their rhythm. She’d ceased breathing long before they’d finished with her.
“That’s why the dream ended so abruptly,” she said. “She died. Her lungs stopped working.” She kept her hands where they were. If she could only thaw a spot or two, she might be able to get a clearer impression.
The woman’s mind had frozen along with her flesh. The memories left behind were brittle snowflakes, crumbling when she attempted to touch them, hardly preserved at all. Her name still resided in the fragments—Iselin Lucas: sentry, lover, and daughter. She’d had dreams and intentions, Shironne could tell, all shattered now. She sorted through the memories, trying to find what had been different about Iselin’s course that day.
Pain. There had been a burst of pain, and then darkness.
Shironne grasped that one memory—an insult to the body far more violent than the pinprick the others had felt, a surprise blow that rendered Iselin Lucas unconscious. “Someone hit her with something, from behind. More like a stick at the base of the skull. It was daylight.”
“She wasn’t killed until past midnight,” Mikael protested.
“I know that,” she answered.
“But that would explain why her wrists were bound,” Mikael said.
“Yes, I remember that from my dreams. They drugged her and then cut the bindings.”
“You shouldn’t do that,” he said. “It’s bothering Kai.”
“Do . . . what?”
He huffed out a breath. “Answering what I’m thinking.”
Shironne heard the difference then. He wasn’t speaking aloud, meaning that Kai had been hearing only half of the conversation. That explained her cousin’s rising irritation.
She swallowed, took another deep breath of the icy air, and turned her attention back to the body. She focused on that last memory, that moment before Iselin lost consciousness.
She’d stopped to talk to a man. No, he’d stopped her.
Shironne dug deeper through the fragile memories, trying to find out why Iselin Lucas had stopped, why she hadn’t fought. She could have. Shironne sensed that in Iselin’s toned muscles—fighter. She was probably one of those fighters Shironne had seen at the summer fair years ago.
A memory surfaced of a Larossan face, trustworthy because he was police and she recognized him. She drew her hands away from the body, the chill seeping through her. “She was stopped by a police officer, and that was when someone else hit her from behind.”
“A police officer stopped her?” Kai asked doubtfully.
“It’s not that simple,” Shironne told him. She’d learned from questioning witnesses for the army that reality was often subjective. “She perceived him as a police officer. That doesn’t mean he was.”
“No,” Mikael said—clearly aloud this time. “We know the killers have had an opportunity to collect at least one uniform jacket from a police officer. And that of an army lieutenant as well.”
And it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between a Pedraisi and a Larossan. “He looked familiar to her,” Shironne added. “I think he was there when she died too, but I can’t seem to find that memory.”
“Find it?”
“The memories close
r to death are broken, I think because of the drug.”
“Nothing you could see?” Mikael asked this time.
She shook her head, frustrated by the lack of further information, the lack of answers. And her hands were dirtied now. Tiny bits of blood, grit, and flesh clung to her hands, warmed by the heat of her skin. While she’d been trying to search Iselin’s mind, before it unfroze, she’d been distracted by thoughts. With her attention no longer on those, the contamination on her skin took precedence. Suddenly it was all she could sense. She stood there, helpless for a moment, breath coming fast. Nausea rose in her belly. She couldn’t reach into her pocket to touch her focus, not with her hands so soiled. There wouldn’t be a basin in this room, or if there was, any water in it would surely be frozen.
I’m coming. A towel enveloped her right hand, the sense of Mikael’s concern wrapping around her at the same time. “I have your gloves. Be still, there’s some frozen blood on your tunic.”
He wiped both of her hands with a moderately clean towel, determined to rub some life back into them. He brushed vigorously at her right sleeve afterward, the one she’d dragged across the dead woman’s chest.
“How did you know?” she whispered. “That I was about to be sick.”
“I felt it,” he returned, tightly controlling his worry. Just as his earlier sickened reaction had affected her, she could apparently make him ill.
“The towel’s not enough,” she said.
“I didn’t think so, but it’s the best I can do on this floor.” He threw the towel somewhere away from her. Shironne heard it land in a bowl or basin and felt his bizarre flash of pride that he’d hit his target.
“Is there somewhere I can wash my hands?” she asked.
“Yes.” He turned his attention away from her. “I’m going to take her back to the office, Kai. I expect it will take a bit, so please ask the colonel to be patient if he’s already back.”
Kai flared with annoyance and then controlled the impulse. “Very well, sir,” he replied, irony crackling in his tone.
The impulse to kick him surfaced in Shironne’s mind. If Melanna had been here, she would have, and then some.
Mikael wrapped a calloused hand around her wrist and yanked her out of the icy room. He hauled her a good distance down the echoing hallway before he slowed, allowing her to regain her dignity.
“Sorry. I thought for a moment you were going to kick him,” he said, amusement returning to his voice.
“I was thinking that if my sister were here, she would have. Please,” she begged, “is there anyplace I can wash my hands?” She shivered, the warmer hall triggering the response, but she didn’t dare rub her contaminated hands against her sleeves to warm herself.
“I don’t know where anything is on this floor save the cold rooms. I can find a water closet on Six Down, if you don’t mind the noise.”
“What noise?” Shironne asked, shaking her hands. She could put up with anything if it meant she could clean her hands. If she could touch her focus, it would help her distance herself, but if she did that now, she would simply transfer the contaminants to the stone and the inside of her coat pocket.
“Calm down,” he said quietly, willing that at her.
It helped, his concern swaddling her like a warm blanket. She took a deep breath, the edge of her panic gone. “So, what noise?” she repeated.
“Six Down is where the sparring floor and the shooting rooms are. During the day it’s very loud, although I expect it’ll be quieter than usual today.” Mourning, his mind said, and something about white ribbons.
“I think it would be a good idea to stop there, please.”
He led her back to the stairs and then up to the next floor. Once away from the stairwell he proved to be correct in his concerns about the noise. They entered another vast room, where perhaps a hundred people moved about, many of them yelling. The air felt different here—humid and warm. She tightened her hold on his arm, confused amidst the chaos.
A wave of emotion struck her then; joy, elation, exhilaration, anticipation, all sweeping past her, like a river grabbing her in its current. Shironne gasped, the feeling overwhelming her as if it might drown her. Goose pimples fled along her skin.
“Don’t listen to it,” Mikael advised. “Just push it to the back of your mind and ignore it.” He thought calm at her, and the drumming in her heart slowed. A vivid memory reached her of the first time Mikael had felt it, the flow of many minds gathered together, willing the same thing and feeling the same emotion. The grip of the emotions in the cavernous room loosened, and she pushed it away.
She recognized it now. She’d felt this before on New Year’s Day when the priests led processionals along the streets. Or when she’d gone with her mother to the summer fair, and the excitement around the melee had drawn her to the railing to watch. “What is this?”
“Ambient,” he said. “It’s what a group can create together, but it can take almost any form. Enough anger, and they’ll turn on each other. It’s very seductive to become one of the mob, to be no one. I forget about it sometimes because I don’t sense it anymore. It’s often stronger in the fortress because it’s enclosed.”
Of course they have a name for it. Shironne squared her shoulders, determined not to let this ambient business get the better of her. “Like a mob?”
“Exactly,” he said. “People get carried away at times.”
In an enclosed place with a lot of people like her, she could see it becoming dangerous quickly, offering a new logic behind the Lucas Family’s usual expressionless demeanor. They had to control their emotions just to get by. Shironne stood there a moment longer, pushing down the external feelings swirling about, and then recalled their reason for coming here. “Water closet?”
He took her there. He quickly described the layout for her, where to find soap and the tap, and then placed her hand on the door.
Shironne oriented herself in the small room. Although he’d described the room for her with words, his mind had also carried in it a mental sense of where everything was, almost a map, much like her memory of her own bedroom at home. Had he intended to give her that memory? Or had she stolen it? Either way, it held true. With one hand she easily found the tap, and water flowed over her fingers. Clean water, she noticed—like that from a very deep well, but not as cold.
Deciding she shouldn’t keep Mikael waiting, she briskly scrubbed at her hands. She discovered that the plumbing worked in the same manner as that in her home. She emerged a few minutes later, hands thoroughly cleansed and her gloves on.
Mikael led her around the edge of the giant noisy room, far larger than the “mess hall” he’d taken her through earlier. He kept her calm, suppressing her emotions by thinking quiet at her. It would have offended her in any other situation, but at the moment she felt willing to let herself be controlled.
She didn’t mind it from him. He wasn’t trying to affect her so much as offering a calm refuge, as if she could hide inside his mind. She could almost do that with her mother, but she’d known her mother her entire life.
“This is a different stairwell,” he said, drawing her attention back to the physical world, “not as wide, but it’s laid out the same.”
They began the long trek upward, and Shironne learned she’d been correct in her expectations. It truly was awful.
She clung to the rails on the wide stairs. Mikael came up slowly behind her, sounding short of breath himself. By the time they’d climbed up to the palace, she felt like a wet rag. “I don’t think I ever want to do that again.”
“We do it all the time. One becomes accustomed.”
“What if you’re hurt?” she asked. “How do you get up and down?”
She could actually tell he was looking at her, deciding whether to tell her something. If she was touching him, she could take that from him, but she wasn’t going to do so.
The Six Families did have enclaves outside their fortresses. She’d heard that before, although she hadn’t ever wondered why. “So they have to leave?”
“No,” he said, the sound of a chuckle in his voice. “They may choose to, though. There are also . . . do you know what an elevator is?”
“Like at the army hospital? The colonel told me it’s essentially a very large dumbwaiter. Do you mean there’s one of those here?”
“Several, actually, although no one’s allowed to use them. They belong to the engineers and they’re very, very old. If you get caught trying to use one, you spend hours running the stairs.”
As punishment, she guessed from his tone. “Did you try it once?”
“No. I find the idea a little unnerving. I don’t care how much my lungs ache. I’d rather trust my feet.”
He didn’t like the possibility of being trapped in a box, Shironne realized. “Well, I still think it might be better,” she told him. “Thank you for going slowly enough for me.”
“I’m just glad I didn’t go up with Kai, because my lungs aren’t working well today. He always runs.” A myriad of joking addendums ran through Mikael’s mind, some made into words clear enough for her to pick them out.
She laughed, having heard what he’d considered saying. She felt, rather than saw, him flush when he realized she’d gleaned his thought about Kai’s eternal quest to impress Elisabet.
“We’d better get back to the office,” he said in an exasperated voice, placing her hand back on his arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Mikael watched from the office windows as Cerradine handed the girl up into his carriage. She turned her head and waved up at him, nearly taking off Cerradine’s hat. Mikael grinned, marveling that she knew where he was standing.
It worried him, what had happened in the cold room. She’d fallen to the floor, evidently sickened by the same impulse that usually made him retch. He’d forced himself back under control, but the fact that he could trigger what appeared to be a physical reaction in her concerned him. He’d never before made another sensitive physically ill—not when awake.
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