Dorian eyeballed me. “I like the new, more violent you, Kimber. I really do.”
“No sex out here,” Aiko said. “Everything will freeze together.”
The laugh was unexpected, but I was glad to see that maybe, just maybe, Dorian wasn’t going to hate Aiko.
Of course, the shower was definitely a clue there.
I pointed toward the area. “A little farther up there. I was down there,” I hitched my thumb down the hill, “when the general gave the order to fire.”
The scar where the rocks had been was apparent. There was a burned, black stain on the side of the mountain. The other debris around us had come from different sources further up or to the sides of the balcony.
We scrambled up the rocks. Dorian was probing with his magic. “Do you think they could have stepped back and gotten out of the path of the rocks?”
Glancing around at the area, I shook my head. “This is all from that rockfall. It all slid down in one giant rush.”
Dorian turned to Aiko. “Do you scent any blood?”
Surprise flashed across Aiko’s face. He didn’t want to smell the blood of his dead lovers any more than I did. But he complied and took a deep breath. Then another. Then he walked to a new position and sniffed again and again. He did that four more times, then looked at me.
“Nothing.”
“What?” The word echoed.
“I don’t smell anything. Not anything human, vampire, or druid. There is no scent of blood on the air.”
I took a deep breath, then another. Just as Aiko had done, I moved around the area, sniffing the air.
“There’s no blood here…” My own words didn’t make sense. “I saw the mountain slide down and bury them.”
“Do you smell anything else?” Dorian asked.
I scented again. “There’s something…”
“Yes, I smell that too,” Aiko said. “It’s not blood, though. It’s a different scent altogether.”
“Magic,” I whispered. “But not the twins’. The magic smells old.”
“Three millennia isn’t old enough for you?” Dorian shook his head.
“No, this is much, much older than you or the twins. Much older. And not from here…not from S’Kir, either. Gods, I’ve smelled this before. Why is it so familiar?” I shook my head. “Why can’t I smell their blood? I saw this happen, Dorian. I didn’t go insane for nothing.”
He chuckled. “No, my dear. Even if you had just gone on a killing spree, it wasn’t for nothing. They needed those generals gone, so good job there.”
I ran the images of the twins’ death over and over in my head. There wasn’t a moment where I could see a possibility for escape.
There were the bang and flash of the grenade and the boom and sparks of a second explosion as the rocks slid down to cover them.
“I don’t see how they could have gotten out.” I glanced at Aiko. “Isn’t it possible that the blood is just old and doesn’t have a scent anymore?”
“Not really,” Aiko said. “I scented the general’s head, and you saw what that looked like. There should be a small hint of blood, even a month from now. One that a good tracker could pick up. I’m no tracker, but at only a week, I know we should be able find a hint of something.”
“So what the hell are you saying?” I stared at him for a moment and then at Dorian for an equal measure of time.
“It means they may not be dead.”
It took a very long time for those words to be processed correctly by my brain. “Not dead?”
“Not dead,” Aiko said. “There has to be blood, and there’s nothing here. You smell that yourself. Just dust and strange magic that we can’t pinpoint.”
