Page 38

She has reminded me.

Standing over a fresh corpse, with three hours of someone else’s death in my nose, I am thinking about the heat of a mouth I have not yet been given, and the wrongness of that—the sheer inconvenient vitality of it—is the most alive I have felt in years. I should be appalled.

I am, instead, delighted. It’s rather my failing across the board.

Wren Halloway. Three hours dead, give or take the margin of a body’s last warmth. I was conducting the morning audit of my new temporary office when the call came down, which is its own small comedy.

Transferring a mortician onto the premises of a mental institution—permanently, with an office and a budget line—is the most damning admission Blackthorn has ever failed to realize it was making. Does a sane facility require a resident undertaker?

Only if its residents are dying at a rate that would alarm the public, were the public ever permitted to count.

But the public never counts.

Blackthorn’s reputation is a sacred, gleaming thing out there beyond the cliff—a discreet, expensive sanctuary for the unwell of good families. No one out there knows the depths of what howls down in these locked and watched dark places.

And if they knew that something as rare and dreadful as the woman currently radiating sugar at me were kept here, filed under lunatic, dosed and counted and underestimated—they would lose their collective mind.

I nearly have, and I’ve been in the room ninety seconds.

I let my gaze travel her, unhurried, head to bare-ankled foot. She is, by every measure I keep, attractive in the dangerous way certain orchids are attractive—the ones that smell of carrion to lure what they need and are exquisite all the while.

Doc has clocked it; I can read it in the unnatural rigidity of his stillness, the discipline of a man holding a leash on himself with both hands. I wonder, idly, whether Riot has caught it yet.

The thought answers itself. The obsessive brute has almost certainly already pleasured himself raw to the mere fact of her existence and called it Tuesday.

I set the admiration down—gently, the way you set down something you fully intend to pick back up—and arrive at my point with the bright efficiency that unnerves people most.

“The woman’s death,” I announce to the room, “is not at the hands of Genevieve.”

“Vex,” she corrects, sweet and immediate.

I turn the full force of my smile upon her and sweep into a small bow, courtly and ridiculous over a corpse.

“Silas Crowe. Mortician.”

“And why,” Detective Hale cuts in, her voice as flat and scentless as the rest of her careful nothing, “would anyone in this room defer to a mortician’s opinion on cause of death?”

Ah. The redhead with the granite jaw and the blockers and the desperate, gleaming need to be the most credentialed person in any room she enters.

I do adore a challenge.

“Mortician,” I repeat pleasantly, “is the hobby, Miss Hale. The retirement. The little garden a man tends to keep his hands occupied once the serious work is behind him.” I tip my head, and I let the warmth in my voice stay exactly where it is while I let the warmth leave my eyes entirely. “The serious work being a decade and change consulting for agencies that don’t put their names on doors. The bureaus with three initials and the offices with none. The quiet cleanup after deaths that were never going to be ruled deaths—statesmen, financiers, the occasional head of state, the people history actually turns on, all of whom required someone who could read a body the way you read a confession and tell the difference between what happened and what was meant to look like it happened. I have closed cases your department isn’t cleared to know exist.”

I hold her stare while I say it, and I keep holding it after, sweet smile fixed. It’s like watching the granite take its first hairline fracture.It always does.The hardest exteriors are simply the ones with the most pressure built up behind them, and I have a gift for finding the seam.

“That’s a great deal of unverifiable theatre,” Hale says, recovering admirably. “Classified work no one can confirm. How convenient.”

“Isn’t it,” I agree warmly. “Though you could verify a little of it, if you wished. Make a call to the field office you transferred out of…yes, I know you transferred, the posture is unmistakable, the chip on the shoulder is regulation issue…and ask the senioragent there what name makes the room go quiet. I’ll wait. I’m very patient. It’s a requirement of the trade; the dead are never in a hurry.” I watch the small flinch she can’t quite swallow, the confirmation that my guess landed dead center, and I gentle my voice, because cruelty without elegance is just noise. “Or we skip the references and I simply show you. Which, mercifully for us both, takes less time than your skepticism.”

“But credentials are tedious,” I sigh, releasing her. “Far simpler to prove it. May I?”

I turn from the detective to the swan, the beautiful questioned thing at the center of all this misdirected suspicion, and I let my smile soften into something just for her.

“Vex, was it?” I hum, savoring the single syllable. “Come hither, my Sweet Peony.”

She coos, a delighted little sound from low in her throat, as though I’ve selected her personally for passage on the ark while the floodwaters rise around lesser creatures.

She skips to me.