A Local Habitation

Alex stumbled to a halt a few feet in front of us, his hands hanging limply at his sides. They weren’t singing arias now; for the first time since I’d met him, they were motionless. “It wasn’t like that.”


“Three people are dead, Alex. Two of them were already dead when we got here. What exactly was it like?”

“I . . .” He stopped, shoulders sagging, and sighed. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything. I didn’t know anyone else was going to get hurt.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Who told you not to talk to me?”

“Only one woman here with the authority.” Alex quirked a small, bitter smile. “You want to know what’s going on, you talk to Jan.”

“All right; I will. Take us to her.”

To Alex’s credit, he didn’t argue or try to defend himself further. He just turned, gesturing for us to follow, and led us down the hall.

We’d been searching the buildings of the knowe for almost half an hour, forcing me to admit that Colin’s killer or killers left us nothing to find. There were no footprints or signs of forced entry; all the blood was on Colin himself, and there wasn’t much blood even there. He hadn’t struggled at all. Whatever happened to him, it happened fast. His skin was under the front seat of my car, where no one would tamper with it, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant, if anything. Who kills a Selkie and doesn’t take the skin? I had three victims, a crime scene that told me nothing and offered escapes into two barely connected versions of reality, and a Countess who said nothing was wrong when she knew that people were dying.

There wasn’t enough coffee in the world to make this bearable.

Alex led us to a closed door, where he knocked. “Who is it?” called Jan from inside.

“Alex,” he said. “I have Sir Daye and her assistant here. They’d like to speak with you.”

There was a pause—long enough that I began to wonder whether the illustrious Countess O’Leary had decided to go out the window—before the door swung open to reveal Jan, looking utterly weary, standing on the other side. “Okay. They can come in. Alex, if you could . . . ?”

“Got it,” he said, with a sardonic half-salute. “This is a discussion we peons don’t need to be a part of. Quentin, Toby . . .” He hesitated. “I’m sorry. That’s all. I’ll see you soon.” Not waiting for us to reply, he turned and walked rapidly off down the hall.

I watched him go before turning to Jan, not saying a word. She stepped out of the way, letting us pass.

The office was Elliot’s, according to the nameplate on the desk; like all the offices, it was located in what I was coming to recognize as the knowe’s main building. It was as tidy as I would expect a Bannick’s office to be, with carefully sorted baskets of paper sitting atop the filing cabinets and a small collection of bonsai trees on shelves around the room. There were several blank spots on the walls, showing spaces where frames had recently been removed. Elliot himself was sitting on a folding chair to one side of the desk, shoulders slumped, still looking shell-shocked.

Jan closed the door behind us, starting to pace almost immediately. She was so clearly her uncle’s niece when she moved that way that it was hard to see how I’d ever been able to miss it. “We found the first body last month,” she said, punctuating the words with a sharp gesture of her hand. “We thought—oak and ash, we thought it was Dreamer’s Glass. We thought it was just some kind of screwed-up scare tactic gone wrong.”