The Bone Palace - Amanda Downum [42]
He might have asked her, but the bed was empty beside him, save for the ghost of cinnamon in the wrinkled sheets and a strand of black hair wrapping his fingers like a fetter.
CHAPTER 5
Isyllt woke alone, tired and aching, to an insistent pounding on her door. A cursory inspection revealed a dark bruise scabbing on her inner thigh—a delicate nip instead of a full bite. Only a taste taken, since she was already weak. A few stray drops of blood spotted her sheets.
“Sand and saints,” Khelséa said when Isyllt opened the door. “You look terrible. More terrible. You did something stupid, didn’t you?”
“Probably.” The smell of spiced meat wafted from one of several bags the inspector carried, and saliva flooded Isyllt’s mouth. Her courses always left her craving meat and greens and this was many times worse.
“What did I tell you about that?”
“Believe me, you don’t want to know about some of the stupid things I do.”
Khelséa unpacked her bags, producing lanterns, rope, a map of the sewers, a small arsenal of weapons including an extra pistol loaded with spell-silver, and lunch. Isyllt fell on the food, but shook her head at the proffered gun.
“I’m hopeless with them,” she said around a mouthful of spiced mutton and spinach. “And magic has better aim.” She stopped short of licking the last of the grease and yoghurt from the wrapping, but it was a near thing. Khelséa’s eyebrows rose in eloquent disbelief, but she slipped the spare pistol into her own pocket rather than press the matter.
Isyllt washed and traded her dressing gown for leathers and boots—older, well-worn ones this time, since she wasn’t about to lose another good jacket to the sewers. The high collar chafed her wounded shoulder, but she stopped herself before she numbed the bite. Some things ought not to be forgotten. Last night’s souvenir, however, she was willing to ignore.
Khelséa puttered in the apartment’s tiny corner kitchen when she emerged, and the air smelled of jasmine tea. Watching the other woman, Isyllt almost wished she didn’t live alone. She and Kiril hadn’t cohabitated since the first few days after he found her; they’d spent so much time together it hardly mattered. She hadn’t had anyone else to make her tea—or to make tea for—since she was fifteen and living with three other girls in a leaking tenement attic. They were too poor most decads to afford tea, anyway.
A pity, she thought wryly as Khelséa handed her a mug, that she didn’t appreciate women that way. And even if she had, the inspector’s taste ran to plump and pretty and not remotely self-destructive. Her latest lover was a seamstress.
“Do the other vigils know you’re misadventuring with me?” Isyllt asked, letting the warmth of the cup soak her hands. The sun had reemerged an hour past noon, leaking like watered honey through the curtains and pooling along the dusty baseboards.
“This is my day off.” Khelséa grinned, a quick flash of white. “Gemma is always telling me I need more hobbies.” She leaned back in a chair and stretched her legs in front of her. “My autopsist knows—the one who saw the ring. In case we don’t come back.” She shrugged aside the possibility of death, and her wealth of braids—twisted into one forearm-thick plait and wrapped with brown yarn—rustled against her jacket. “Do you have a plan?”
Her surname, Shar, meant “sand” in Assari, and foreign inflections still colored her vowels. Not for the first time, Isyllt wondered how a woman from the deserts of Assar ended up working for Erisín’s Vigils. One day, she resolved, she’d ply the inspector with enough wine to get an answer out of her.
“Go back to where I was attacked and track them from there, I suppose. One of them is called Myca, but I doubt that’s enough to summon with.” Vampires, like prostitutes, were unlikely to use their birth names. And the true names of demons were nearly impossible to determine, anyway. Binding a foreign spirit to flesh, living or dead, changed both irrevocably.
“The one who bit you?”
“No, that would be too easy.” The bond of the wound