Chelle sighed and closed the doors behind them. “We were out patrolling when Vander caught the scorpling’s dust trail. What were you doing?”
Grayson set the wrench back on the worktable. He took deep breaths, willing his heart to calm. He didn’t need Luc showing up right now. If Luc could sense that Grayson was no longer in danger, perhaps the gargoyle would turn right back around for the abbey.
He crouched to pick up Chelle’s silver star. “I, ah … I was taking a walk.”
Chelle propped a hand on her slim hip. “And this is where you ended up?” She took a suspicious glance at the dead bodies.
Grayson set his jaw. He didn’t want to admit the truth, but there was no excuse he could give that would make sense.
“I smelled them,” he said softly, gesturing toward the carriage with the razor-edged star. “I tracked them.”
Chelle stood still, her frown frozen in place. Vander crossed behind her, heading toward the bodies.
“Their blood, you mean?” he asked.
Grayson nodded, his throat cinched tight.
“Well, there’s a lot of it,” Vander said casually. He crouched by the boy’s body, careful to keep his boot soles out of the surrounding pool of blood.
Chelle watched Grayson as he left the workbench and extended his hand. He half expected her to take the weapon back and immediately fling it at him. She only tucked it inside her red sash and appraised him in silence.
“The slashes at his wrists are deep,” Vander said evenly, as though he worked with dead bodies all day instead of books. “They look self-inflicted.”
“And these two?” Chelle asked, nodding toward the adults in the bench seat.
“I doubt either of them would have had the fortitude to cut their own throats,” Vander answered. Chelle made a sickened sound when she saw the gaping dark smiles across their necks.
“The boy’s parents?” Grayson asked. Vander shrugged.
“All I know for certain is that he was a Duster.”
Grayson stood back, staring at the boy’s body with new interest, unable to trace the demon dust that Vander could so plainly see.
“You’re sure it’s his own dust? What about that thing? The scorpling?” he asked.
Vander stood and pushed up his spectacles again. “The boy’s dust is a different shade from the scorpling’s.” He circled the boy’s still frame and ran his hand soothingly along the horse’s trembling haunch.
“What is it?” Chelle asked, apparently seeing some conflict in Vander that Grayson didn’t.
“Constantine. He has a student who killed his entire family a few nights ago. And now …” Vander crossed his arms, circling back around the pool of blood. “It looks like another Duster might have done the same thing.”
“But the scorpling,” Grayson said, picturing the spiked tail. Could it have made clean sweeps across two throats and then the boy’s wrists?
“It’s nothing but a bottom feeder,” Chelle replied. “That thing was here for the dead flesh. It didn’t kill them.”
Grayson didn’t know this boy at all, but the fact that he was a Duster—or had been one, he supposed—made him a little less of a stranger. It made the boy something much closer to Grayson himself.
“We can’t stay here,” Chelle announced.
“What, we’re just leaving them?” Grayson asked.
Chelle pulled her cap lower. “Before the police are summoned? Yes. Definitely.”
She was right, of course. None of them had any right to be there, and no clear reason, either. Grayson didn’t need to attract any attention from the police, French or English.
“Did you drop anything?” Chelle asked.
Grayson saw his coat lying on the floor near the workbench. He scooped it up and then helped them scatter a few armfuls of hay around the stable floor where their shoes had made slushy footprints.
“Thanks,” Grayson said as Vander checked up and down the mews to be sure they wouldn’t be seen leaving the stable.
“For what? Making sure you weren’t implicated in a triple murder?” Chelle asked, eyeing his coat.
They slipped outside, dragging their feet in a messy line so no specific prints would be left behind.
“No,” Grayson answered. “For saving my life. Gabby said you were pretty good with those stars.”
Chelle snorted. And even though it was a snort, she somehow managed to make it lovely. “They’re called hira-shuriken. And I’m better than ‘pretty good.’ ”
“She also said you were extremely insecure,” he replied.
Chelle scowled at him from under the short brim of her cap as they turned out of the mews, away from the dead Duster.
Had he lost control? Had the boy’s anger overrun his senses? Grayson could understand, if so. It made him shiver with nausea. Perhaps this boy just hadn’t been able to get away fast enough to simmer down. As they walked toward the Seine, Grayson wondered how many more Dusters were out there, perched on the edge of a killing spree.
CHAPTER TEN