“Yes,” he said. “I’ve already collected all the trace evidence that was on her… um… on her clothes and skin. Not that there was a lot.”
Pally settled his fingers on the girl’s skull and closed his eyes.
“It seems as though the winter tree has withered.” He murmured the Enochian prayer in a soft, reverent voice.
Madoc grimaced but crossed his arms and waited. Enochian piety had never come easy to him. He’d been raised as a weed in the local church garden, an example to point to when they preached original sin and a cautionary tale for young girls with an eye for the boyar’s guard, but it was still the faith he fell back on when he was in need. Madoc absently reached up to tap the worn medal under layers of leather and silk.
Like his father’s old gift, the silver stung, but he’d grown used to the itch.
“So?” Took interrupted as he pushed open the door to the morgue. “Are we sure this is Nora Aron?”
Madoc turned to gesture at him to shut up, but his brain tripped up on itself as he saw Took back in full uniform. InMadoc’slivery, essentially, since he’d been the heart and the head of the Biters since they were conceived. Took had always looked good in black, pared down so you could enjoy the broad shoulders and the harsh taper down to lean hips, the lack of any design element or color to distract from the earnest, corn-fed good looks and salt-blond curls. He looked even better now that Madoc had touched and kissed everything that lay under that fitted cotton and kevlar.
The ache caught at Madoc’s heart and his balls at the same moment, but he couldn’t decide which was stronger, his satisfaction to see Took back in uniform and back at work or the desire to take the uniform right off him again.
Before he had to decide, Pally tossed a black, dangerous glare toward the interruption, but it turned to an expression of delight as he saw Took.
“Bennett,” he said with a slow, sweet smile. It was a rare expression to see on Pally’s face, and Took looked surprised. They had always worked effectively together, but they had never been friends. “You’ve come back to us.”
“I was—”
Pally walked briskly across the room and pulled Took into a rough, affectionate embrace. He kissed him on the cheek.
“For every one lost to sleep, we raise another,” Pally said. “Are you well, brother?”
Took stood awkwardly, arms at somewhere between “I surrender” and “awkward aunt hug.” He gave Madoc a confused, slightly terrified look over Pally’s shoulder.
“I’m… better than before,” Took said. He sounded nearly as surprised by that answer as he had the hug. “Not well, yet, but getting there, I guess.”
Pally nodded and stepped back. Then he slapped Took on the shoulder and gripped it in slim, elegant hands that could punch through brick.
“The first decade is hardest,” he said.
Madoc bit the inside of his cheek and held his tongue. What Pally had just said was a lie, and they both knew it. The firstdecadeswere the hardest—whether you were born or turned—as your mortal friends and family aged and died and the world changed around you as though it were made of quicksilver and ideas.
Eventually you either got used to it or you let it end you, mired down in some dark hole or strung up by a mob wielding pitchforks.
No one ever told that to a newly fanged Anakim. They still imagined the passage of time as mortals, and a hundred years of slow misery seemed like a lot.
“It’s better than the alternatives,” Took said with a flash of humor, but it faded as he glanced toward the slab, and then his eyes narrowed as he registered the details of the body. “That’s not Nora Aron.”
Forrester, secluded firmly on the other side of the table, away from the fangs and the hugging, cleared his throat.
“Actually,” he said in an uncomfortably tight voice. “According to dental and hospital records, she is. Nora Elizabeth Aron, six years old at the time of her death and unvaccinated on religious grounds. Based on a cursory external examination, she died of either blood loss from a penetrating stab wound to her stomach or asphyxiation once she entered the… ah… lockbox?”
Took ducked from under Pally’s grip and stalked over to the slab. He studied the girl briefly and then gestured briskly for Forrester to pull the sheet back. Pally made an offended noise under his breath, but Madoc silenced him with a hand on his arm.
“That looks relatively shallow,” Took said as he studied the livid red slit that cut a crooked line across Nora’s flat, almost translucent stomach. “It might have nicked her stomach or—” He paused to angle an imaginary knife over Nora’s stomach to map out where the point would end. “—possibly her intestines or liver?”
“Well, yes,” Forrester said with a touch of pique at his role being usurped. “The main problem here was blood loss, not damage to the organs. It looks like it was inflicted from behind, possibly during a struggle, since I found blood on her that didn’t seem to come from her injuries. At that point she managed to get away, fled, and somehow accessed the lockbox. Without treatment the blood loss would probably have killed her on its own. However, there are also signs of asphyxiation on the body as well as—”
Forrester gripped the girl by shoulder and hip and lifted her up. There were dark, smoldered singe marks on her back, spread across her shoulder blades like wings and cupped around her hips like hands.
He went to lower her back down, but Madoc stopped him with a quick gesture. He joined Took at the slab and bent down to study the marks. The blistered cracks on her elbows and raw meat on her knees and the heels of her feet where they had pressed against the hot metal of the box. The long vanes on her back looked like something else, the edges curled by heat but worked down under her skin.
When Madoc traced along her shoulders, he felt no damage to the skin.
“Does that look like a burn pattern?” he asked.
