The Drowning City - Amanda Downum [125]
“Forsythia.”
Not a real name—at least she hoped it wasn’t. Not many mothers branded their daughters with a prostitute’s name at birth.
Isyllt dipped a finger into the gaping wound, licked off coagulated blood and fluids. Khelséa grimaced theatrically, but the captain’s nerves and stomach were hard to upset.
Cold jellied blood, bittersweet and thin with rainwater. No trace of illness or taint, nothing deadly save for the quantity spilled. The taste coated Isyllt’s tongue.
“Forsythia. Are you there?”
No answer, not even a shiver. Isyllt listened till her ears rang, but heard nothing. Her power could raise the corpse off its cold table and dance it around the room, but no ghost lingered to answer her questions. She sighed. “A clean crossing. They never stay when you need them to. She might be wherever she was killed, though.” She nibbled the last speck of blood from under her fingernail.
Gently she pushed back Forsythia’s kohl-smeared eyelids. Rain, she wondered briefly, looking at the ashen streaks, or did you have time for tears? Her reflection stared back from death-pearled eyes. She rested her fingers on the woman’s temples, thumbs on her cheekbones; the black leather glove on her left hand was stark against pale skin. The woman’s soul was gone, lost on the other side of the mirror, but memories still lingered in her eyes.
Isyllt hoped for the killer’s face, but instead she saw a sunset. Clouds glowed pink and orange as the sun sank behind the ragged skyline of Oldtown, the colors burned into Forsythia’s mind. The last thing she saw was that jeweled sky fading into dusk, then a sudden pressure of hands and blackness. Much too quick for death, even as quick a death as this must have been.
Isyllt sighed and looked away, the colors of memory fading into the white and green of the mortuary. “She was grabbed off the street, somewhere in Oldtown. Maybe the Garden.” Death must have come not long afterward; she hoped the woman hadn’t suffered much. “What else do you know?”
“Nothing. There was nothing but rain in the alley, and no one saw anything.” Khelséa rolled her eyes. “No one ever sees anything.” She pushed away from the wall, shaking back her long black braids. “Do you have any magic tricks for me?”
“Nothing entertaining.” Isyllt turned toward the back of the room, where tables and benches were set up for students and investigators. “Will you bring me gloves and surgical spirits? And a dissection plate.”
The captain opened a cabinet against the wall and removed thin cotton examiner’s gloves, a bottle, and a well-scrubbed tin tray. “What are you doing?”
“Testing for contagion. Someone touched this before she did.” She sat down, stripping off her left glove. Her scarred and claw-curled hand, bandaged or gloved for nearly two years, was corpse-white beneath. She tried to ignore it as she scrubbed her hands with cold spirits; she was mostly comfortable with only seven working fingers by now. She wiped down the tray as well, then tugged on the white gloves and set the ring on the tin. Already contaminated, of course, but every little bit helped. It was much easier to test for transference—be it of skin, hair, blood, or energy—with a suspect at hand, but she could also tune the ring to react to the presence of anyone who had handled it recently, and even seek the person out, at close enough range.
Closing her eyes against the bitter-sharp alcohol fumes, she touched the ring lightly. She could have managed a more sterile space in her own workroom, but this would serve. Tendrils of magic wrapped around the gold, resonated through the stone. Mages used sapphires and other such gems to hold energy—the cut and clarity of this one made it ideal for storing spells.
The taste of the spirits crept over her tongue, stinging her palate as it sharpened the spell. Alcohol, like her magic, was clean of living things, anathema even to disease and crawling necrophages.