Marlowe started to squawk something, but Mircea held up a hand. “Tell me,” he said quietly. Louis-Cesare moved to the door, making sure that we had a moment of relative privacy.
“Elyas tried to buy the rune before the auction, but was told he’d have to bid for it like everyone else. When Ming-de won, he was furious—”
“A great many people were,” Marlowe said resentfully. “The auction was obviously rigged.”
“Yeah, only Elyas wasn’t going to take that lying down. He went to the club, killed the fey and took it—”
“Raymond saw him?” Mircea asked sharply.
“No, he smelled him. You can ask him if you want details, but there aren’t many. Basically, the fey showed up, Ray left him alone for a few minutes, he returned and the guy was dead. Elyas’s scent was in the air, and the necklace was missing.”
“How lovely,” Christine said breathily, her face alight. She’d come in so quietly that even the vamps hadn’t heard her. I saw Marlowe start.
She didn’t notice, being too busy gazing raptly at the carrier. The cold electric light sparked a fountain of prisms off the intricate surface, bathing her face with rainbows as she leaned closer, seemingly mesmerized. And before anyone could stop her, she’d picked it up.
“Drop it!” Marlowe barked.
She looked up, eyes wide and startled. And the carrier slipped from her fingers, hitting the desk and sending dancing beams across the dead man as it rolled toward the edge. She stared at it. “Je regrette! I did not mean—”
“You foolish girl!” Marlowe looked like he wanted to shake her. Christine transferred her gaze to him, looking part-mortified, part-confused.
“No harm done,” Mircea told her, and caught the heavy disk with a handkerchief.
“No harm done?” Marlowe demanded. “You’ll never get anything off it now!”
The supernatural community didn’t usually check fingerprints, because there are plenty of things that don’t leave any. But a good clairvoyant might be able to get something off the thing, if not too many people had touched it in the meantime. It was why I’d been careful not to handle it.
“That remains to be seen,” Mircea said mildly.
Christine backed into the wall, looking like she wished she could melt into it. She seemed on the verge of tears again. Louis-Cesare came over and led her to a chair. “?a ne fait rien.”
Marlowe looked disgusted. “Oh, no. Not important at all. Just one less piece of evidence that might have exonerated you!”
“This held Naudiz?” Mircea asked me, wrapping it securely in the square of linen. “You are sure?”
“Originally. Ray saw it when the fey first arrived, but it was empty when I took it off Elyas’s neck. There’s a space in back where the rune should be, but there’s nothing there now.”
He frowned. “But . . . did Elyas steal an empty carrier, or did he succeed in stealing the rune and was killed for it tonight?”
“If he’d had the rune, he wouldn’t be dead,” I pointed out.
“Not necessarily. I have seen other runes from the same set. If this one functioned similarly, then it had to be cast in order to function. Wearing it alone, particularly when not touching the skin, might not have been enough.”
“If he was fighting for his life, I think he’d have cast it!”
“But was he?” Mircea nodded at the body. “He did not die in a fighting pose and there are no wounds on the body other than the ones that killed him. It appears that he was caught off guard.”
Marlowe nodded. “If he knew his attacker or did not expect to be assaulted when surrounded by his family—”
“They never do,” I muttered.
“—he might well have chosen not to use the stone. It is a talisman with a set amount of power at its disposal. Exhausting it for no purpose would be foolish.”
“Unlike wearing it around his neck while somebody killed him,” I said sarcastically. Louis-Cesare had said that Elyas liked to take risks. It looked like he’d taken one too many.
“Whether the rune was stolen last night or tonight, it gives us something to offer the Senate,” Mircea said. “Anyone at that auction is a suspect—”
“And at least one who wasn’t,” I added reluctantly. I didn’t know how the hell I was supposed to tell them aboutsubrand without landing Claire in the middle of this. But they had to know. The ice-cold prince of the fey was probably the prime suspect.
Mircea had been putting the carrier in his suit pocket, but he paused at my tone. “Dorina?”
I got a reprieve because Muttonchops took that moment to return with the list of party guests, and everyone crowded around the desk. “Was anyone on this list at the auction?” I asked Ray.
“It doesn’t have to have been someone who was invited,” Marlowe pointed out.
Muttonchops shook his head. “On the contrary. We had someone on the door. No one who was not on that list would have been allowed in. Other than Louis-Cesare, of course, who was expected.”
“What level?” Marlowe asked.
“What?”
“What level of master was acting as doorkeeper?”