Watch over him, she thought, to her uncaring, cruel God — the one whose existence she couldn’t deny, but in whom she had no faith. Please, watch over him.
Her fault. Her own fault, for not believing him, for reassuring him that his nighttime experience had been an illusion, that he need not worry about anything; for concealing his fears from Selene because she’d been afraid of being exposed as an angel-essence user.
Coward.
Selene was standing by her side, staring at the corpse; as usual, effortlessly elegant, effortlessly arrogant. Behind her, her bodyguards leaned against the wall of the room; and the nurses were folding used sheets and clearing a table; laying on a tray the scalpels Aragon had used, and everything that had touched Oris. One of them — Pauline, the big woman with the gentle touch — smiled at Madeleine apologetically.
Of course. Of course, the tray was for her, the alchemist of Silverspires. Not one drop of blood would be wasted; the way of life in all Houses, the only one she had ever known. Madeleine took a deep breath, trying to still the trembling of her hands — trying to make the blurred world swim back into focus.
Without warning, Pauline was by her side, laying a callused hand on her shoulder. “You all right?” she asked.
Madeleine shook her head, trying to swallow the salty taste in her mouth. “I’ll — be fine,” she said, and Pauline shook her head.
“Of course you won’t.” Pauline squeezed again — a little painfully, but not unkindly. “Come by the office later, if you want. We have strong stuff.” Alcohol, of course; Cointreau or chartreuse or pastis: a pleasant way to pass the time, but not what she wanted or needed. The ache for angel essence was enough to make her hands shake — she couldn’t afford that, not now. She took a deep breath, and stilled their trembling.
“Thanks,” Madeleine said.
Pauline smiled, and withdrew.
Behind her, Selene and Aragon were getting on; of course there was no time for something so trivial, so insignificant as grief. “He was found in the cathedral?” Selene asked Aragon.
“Arms spread, clothes torn,” Aragon said, curtly. He removed his gloves and surgical mask; the magic that had been surging through him flickered and died, leaving the room a little less warm, a little less oppressive.
It was a small audience for an autopsy: Emmanuelle and Selene were there; and Madeleine, of course. Oris had been her apprentice, her responsibility.
“What did he die of?” Madeleine asked.
Aragon stood ramrod straight, putting her, incongruously, in mind of a soldier reporting to his commander. “Difficult to say. There’s nothing wrong with him, per se. The major organs are intact — everything is clean, or at least as clean as it can be for a Fallen of his age.”
“But he’s dead,” Emmanuelle said, from her place by the door. Her face was set in stone; her skin pale; her hands clenched in front of her, so tight blood had fled her fingertips. It was her, years ago, who had welcomed Oris into the House; who had seen him grow from a naive Fallen into an infuriating apprentice alchemist.
“Yes,” Aragon said. “He is dead.”
“And the pinpricks?” Selene asked. There were dozens on his arms, spaced in some frenzied, obscene pattern, dizzying in its complexity. Needle pinpricks? Except that they were too large for that — each a small, perfect circle of blood that had barely had time to smudge.
“They didn’t kill him,” Aragon said. “They’re too small, and the blood is clean.”
“What are they?” Selene asked.
“They look like snakebites,” Aragon said. “That is, if there were a venomless snake that could reach to man height to strike repeatedly. It’s certainly not a behavior I’ve seen in animals. It could also be a weapon of near that shape, though that raises the question of why it’d be used.”
Snakebites. Bite marks. Claire’s warning. The five deaths.
“Animals can be controlled by spells,” Madeleine said, softly; still struggling with the fact that this was happening. That Claire had been right. She should have passed Claire’s warning on to Selene, but there had been no time; no time at all before Oris died.
“No doubt,” Aragon said. “There is no trace of magic on the wounds whatsoever, though. And, in any case, that’s not the culprit. It’s almost as if…” He paused, shaking his head.
“Go on,” Selene said.
“Fallen are an impossibility,” Aragon said. “Bones that fragile can’t support the body, even if we weigh less than humans. And no back muscle, no matter how strong, would have powered wings; and yet Morningstar wielded his metal wings like a weapon. But—”
“But we have magic.” Emmanuelle’s voice had the sharp intensity of a dagger slipping between ribs.
“Precisely. Magic, in a very real sense, is what keeps us alive. It’s never been proved, of course, but I suspect that lack of magic is what eventually kills us, the Fallen equivalent to dying of old age.”
“And?” Madeleine asked.
“It’s as if he ran out of magic all of a sudden — and his body went into deadly shock,” Aragon said.
“Anaphylactic shock?” Emmanuelle asked.
“Something like that, yes, except that something was taken away rather than added.” Aragon made a grimace; he hated using layman approximations. “And the magic is back now — it’s a perfectly normal Fallen corpse. So it makes no sense.”
“Why not?” Selene asked. “I trust you. If you think that’s the explanation…”
“Yes, yes,” Aragon said. “But there is no spell that has this effect. By their very nature, spells bring magic. They don’t cut it off.”
“Perhaps we don’t know everything about magic yet,” Emmanuelle said, gently.
Or perhaps they weren’t asking the right person. Claire’s dead had been humans, not Fallen, but the similarities were enough to be more than a coincidence.
“He’s not the first,” Madeleine said.
“The first?” Selene’s smooth face creased in puzzlement.
“Claire said—” Madeleine started, swallowed the bitter taste in her mouth—“Claire said there had been other victims.”
“Claire of Lazarus?” Selene’s voice was harsh. “You didn’t tell me you had met her.”
Madeleine shrank back from the cold anger, scrambling for excuses that seemed to have disintegrated. “There was no time—”
“There is always time.” Selene pursed her lips, as if deliberating punishment. “You should have—”
“Selene.” Emmanuelle’s voice was gentle. “You can’t change what’s past.”
By Selene’s sharp gaze, she clearly wished she could. Madeleine had never set herself against her, had never been overly concerned with the future of the House; but standing by Oris’s corpse, she became aware, uncomfortably so, of how little she and Selene had in common. She’d loved — no, love wasn’t the word; one couldn’t love that kind of person — she’d respected Morningstar, who could be kind; who had carried her all the way into the House when she lay wounded and dying. But to Selene he had passed nothing of his random bouts of gentleness; of his amused humor. Merely the arrogance, the overweening pride of all Fallen.
“You will tell me everything Claire told you.” Selene’s voice was clipped, precise.
When Madeleine was done with her halting tale, Selene remained staring at the corpse; though her gaze was distant, and Madeleine doubted she saw Oris at all, except as one of her possessions. “They weren’t Fallen,” she said. “So that can hardly be the explanation. Nevertheless, it is something that should be explored.” She pursed her lips. “Javier is busy with something else, but I’ll ask Alcestis—”