Not that it helped, of course. Neither Selene nor anyone in the House knew of any creature, weapon, or spell that killed that way. She had Emmanuelle digging into the archives; and of course Aragon was examining Samariel right now, trying to find something, anything that would get them out of this mess. Selene said, “If the question is whether a human could have done this — then the answer is yes. Everyone here — human, Fallen — is a suspect.”
There was silence, in the wake of her words. Then, as what she had said sank in, a babble of protestations rising to a deafening pitch: “—surely you don’t mean—” “—this is an outrage—” All things she had expected and counted on. She raised a hand and cast a spell of dampening: a cheap trick, but one that never failed to have its little effect. All sounds around her hand gradually sank to a murmur, in a spreading wave of silence.
“You came here,” she said. “All of you. You forced your way in, claiming you would help us find our attacker, and then you have the audacity to complain when someone else dies. I know you. I know you all — Guy, Claire, Sixtine, Andre, Viollet.” A further shocked hush. She had them now; she had to seize the moment, while they were still cowering in fear, and gazing suspiciously at their neighbors. If she could break their fragile alliances… “None of you are above killing to further your plans. None of you would weep if Silverspires paid reparation for your murders, and sank into obscurity.”
Silence spread in the wake of her words. Then someone clapped: slowly, deliberately, the sounds echoing under the stuccoed ceiling of the ballroom, each one as sharp and as penetrating as a bell tolling for funerals.
“Such a pretty speech,” Asmodeus said in a slurred voice. He detached himself from the pillar he had been leaning on; and came forward, toward Selene, blowing the acrid smell of orange blossom and bergamot gone sour into her face. She didn’t flinch. One could not afford to, with Asmodeus.
Once, he’d moved like a sated cat; now his movements were still fluid, but quickened with a manic impatience. He had taken off his horn-rimmed glasses: he held them in one hand, toying with them absentmindedly, except that Asmodeus never did anything absentmindedly. The gaze he turned on Selene was still amused, but underneath it all she could guess at the controlled fury.
“You’re drunk,” she said, coldly. “Go back to where you came from.”
“My lover’s deathbed?” Asmodeus’s smile was terrible to behold, sharp and fractured and incandescent. “Let us speak of Samariel, shall we? Humans expect to die in their beds; Fallen do not. Should not.”
“You know I don’t condone what was done to him,” Selene said. “We are looking into it.”
“You’re investigating? There’s no need for investigation. The culprit was found, surely.”
“Philippe?” Selene forced herself to laugh. Emmanuelle had been right: in the end, she couldn’t be sure what Philippe could and couldn’t do; and among the strange magics he could call on, perhaps one of them had the power to end Fallen lives. “I’m not in the habit of condemning people on hearsay. Unlike you.”
“We’ve gone past hearsay,” Asmodeus said, gravely. He dwarfed her in size; and the power that ran through him limned him in gray light, almost drawing the outline of wings, reminding her of Morningstar at his angriest — when she hadn’t been quick enough with his lessons, or when she had forgotten the wards that kept them all safe. But, compared to Morningstar, Asmodeus was pale and insignificant, a candle to the unclouded sun. She could handle him. “Discovering an attack is not the same as being the attacker. Even so, I’ve had him confined to his room.”
“Like a disobedient child?” Asmodeus laughed. “Not enough.”
Selene stood her ground. After all, she’d had plenty of practice. “Until I find otherwise, that is all I will do. Rest assured that if I find him guilty, nothing in this world will protect him from my vengeance.” She said this with a lightness she didn’t feel; after all, the young man had absorbed one of her strongest spells and emerged unscathed. She very much doubted he would come meekly or quietly.
“Not enough,” Asmodeus said. “Not timely enough. I have taken my precautions already.”
“Precautions?”
“You were always too squeamish, Selene. The House has far better holding facilities than rooms with guards. Confined to his room?” He snorted. “As if that would ever be enough.”
“You—” Selene took in a deep breath, forced herself to speak quietly. “You’ve moved him to the holding cells.” They hadn’t been used in almost twenty-five years — even before Morningstar disappeared, he had been mellowing, and whatever he had been doing down there had ceased. Selene remembered, with icy clarity, going down there to clean them up; finding sharp instruments on which blood had dried like rust; and breathing in the stale odor of body fluids.
“As I said—” Asmodeus smiled. “Your master had many flaws, but he wasn’t squeamish.”
“Neither am I,” Selene said.
“Then prove it to me.”
“This isn’t a contest,” Selene said. But it was, and Asmodeus had won the first round: he had broken her authority in her own House. “And I should think you’ve done enough, haven’t you? Or perhaps you want to hop over to Lazarus, too, and see if you can improve their wallpaper?”
Claire’s head came up sharply, but she said nothing. Nevertheless, even drunk or on whatever drugs he was on, Asmodeus was smart enough to recognize he couldn’t push things much further. “I’ll leave you to it then,” he said, bowing very low.
Yes, leave her to it. As if she had the faintest idea what to do next.
* * *
MADELEINE sat by Samariel’s bedside. She wasn’t sure why, in truth — she’d gone in to talk to Aragon, and the doctor had irascibly wandered off, looking for some instrument or another; and she’d been struck, all of a sudden, by how terribly alone Samariel must be. It was exceedingly foolish: he’d had no need of her while alive and would probably have mocked her at every opportunity, and he was Asmodeus’s lover. By staying there she was making sure that, at some point or another, Asmodeus would wander back in and find her; and then she didn’t know what would happen, when the knot of fear in her belly spread to all her limbs, and she stood in front of Elphon’s murderer, of the Fallen who had turned Hawthorn into a bloodied ruin. The smart thing would have been to get up and slip away while Aragon was gone.
But she couldn’t bring herself to do so. She sat in the chair she’d pulled up — the same chair she’d have used, in other times, to collect an entry toll — and watched the dying Fallen. It was unclear by what miracle he clung to life; the thing in the bed seemed hardly human-shaped anymore, the body slick and fluid in a way no body should be, with just the ghost of its old face staring up at her — with dark, bruised circles under his eyes and the bones of the face bulging from beneath the translucent skin.
Nurses and orderlies slipped in and out of the room, bringing clean sheets, taking soiled cloths and charts away — coming with syringes and injecting their contents into Samariel, though it made no difference to the husk on the bed.
Madeleine had a nascent headache, perhaps a side effect of having used Morningstar’s orb. It hadn’t been angel essence, but the sheer power that had coursed through her had been like nothing she’d felt before. In that moment, she’d been quite ready to believe Claire when she said all angel magic would kill magicians bit by bit; and now she had the magician’s equivalent of a hangover, with her tongue stuck to her palate, and a set of drummers that had taken up residence in her brain on a more or less permanent basis. Perhaps she should ask Aragon for an aspirin, though she could imagine his face if she did so.