Page 36

I know that laugh. I’ve known it for years, in better suits and worse circumstances, and the recognition arrives with the weary fondness of a man who hears his oldest, most exhausting friend pull into the drive.

We go back further than anyone in this building would believe of a director and a volunteer undertaker—back to a city, a wager, a long correspondence about the architecture of monstrousness that began as my research and became, somewhere in the years, the closest thing to friendship either of us tolerates.

He has read every private paper I’ve never published.

I have stood in his cold beautiful workrooms and watched him make the ruined dead lovely again and understood that we were two instruments tuned to the same impossible key.

If Riot is the blade and I am the hand, Silas is the thing that comes after—the careful, smiling craftsman who arranges what’s left. The institute thinks it invited a soft-spoken funeral artist to soothe the violent ones.

The institute, as ever, has no idea what it has invited.

“The writing is on the fucking wall,” the voice announces, high and bright and gleefully masculine, ringing off the tile. “Literally.”

Every head wrenches toward the sound.

The guards at the corridor’s mouth fall back without being told to, parting like a curtain, and there he is—tall and leanand pale as good candle wax, dark hair swept back from a face built for either a pulpit or a wanted poster, dressed with the immaculate, slightly antique care of a man who spends his days making the dead presentable.

His eyes are a warm, too-bright amber, dancing with a thrill that no part of this scene warrants, and his smile is the sweetest thing in a room that contains a corpse, all teeth, all welcome, the grin of a boy who’s been handed exactly the present he asked for.

His scent arrives a half-beat after the smile, and it’s the strangest, loveliest, most disquieting thing the air in here has held all day: cold white lilies and warm beeswax, a base of myrrh and graveyard cedar, the clean chemical sweetness of an embalming room reimagined as something a person might choose to wear, and under all of it, absurdly, candied violet—a funeral made into a perfume.

Where I smell of a library and Riot of a building mid-burn, Silas Crowe smells of the beautiful, ordered hush that comes after the fire’s gone out.

“Behind the body,” he goes on, gliding into the room as though it’s been thrown for him, gesturing with a long pale hand at the wall the techs have been carefully photographing without comprehending. “You genuinely can’t read hidden code in blood? In criminology? A shame. A waste. That ought to be the second lecture, Criminology one-oh-one, right after they teach you which end of the swab is yours. Though, honestly, an episode of Dexter should have covered it. Any season. Although—” he pauses, a finger to his lips, abruptly absorbed in a debate with himself, “I’d argue he went soft far too early. The fifth season? The seventh? They let the poor man develop feelings, and a story about a monster is only worth telling until the monster wants to be loved.”

He blinks out of it, surveys the stunned room, and lets his gaze settle, last and longest, on Vex—cataloguing her in asingle sweep, the pink-and-violet hair, the mismatched eyes, the dangerous stillness under the orange—and whatever he finds there makes his grin climb to something I can only describe as reverent.

“The power of a beautiful, vicious woman,” he murmurs, to no one and to the universe, “truly is a phenomenon that warrants formal study.”

Then he’s crouching at the wall behind the body, unhurried, heedless of the techs bristling around him, one long finger hovering an inch above the spatter without touching—tracing a shape only he appears to see.

“Look at the cast-off,” he says, almost crooning, as though the blood is a poem he’s reciting to a slow class. “Arterial spray doesn’t lie down in rows. It doesn’t curl back on itself like a signature. This was painted after. Someone dipped and drew—here, and here—a little mark tucked under the higher splash where a careless eye slides right past it. That’s not a frenzy. That’s a hand that wanted to be understood, and chose to be understood only by whoever was clever enough to look twice.” His amber gaze flicks up, bright and terrible. “Your patient was arranged, Doctor. Posed and signed. Murder, dressed for its own funeral.”

The room goes colder than the bleach.

Because a posed, signed, deliberate killing is the precise opposite of the impulsive lunatic the administration has been so eager to convict, and even Hale—flinty, scentless, superior Hale—has the grace to go still as the floor drops out of her tidy theory.

But I’m not watching Hale.

I’m watching Vex, who has gone very quiet, all her bright performance banked down to a single point of focus, her mismatched eyes fixed on that little hidden mark in the blood as though she’s reading her own name.

She sees it. Understands it.

And the smile that begins to curve her mouth has nothing of the lunatic in it at all—it’s the smile of an artist recognizing a rival’s brushstroke, a chess player who’s just been shown her opponent’s opening and found, at long last, that the game might be worth her full attention.

Then those amber eyes swing to me, and the welcome in them spreads wide and warm and entirely too knowing, the look of a man arriving at a party he’s certain was thrown in his honor.

I exhale through my nose.

I raise two fingers and settle my glasses, the gesture I hide behind when there’s nothing left to do but accept the inevitable, and I resign myself to introducing the final, grinning, blood-literate piece of an equation I’ve been assembling without quite admitting I was assembling it.

“Everyone,” I say, “this is Silas Crowe.”

“Charmed,” Silas breathes, to the room, to the body, to Vex most of all.

He sketches a small bow in her direction, courtly and absurd over a homicide.

“I’ve heard such things. The fire. The curtains.” His grin sharpens to a point. “I confess I’ve already drafted three arrangements for your eventual funeral, on the off chance you let me. Calla lilies, naturally—too obvious, I threw them out. I’m presently torn between black hellebore and something that bites back.”