“So I set the whisper link, hmm?” Camile hummed as they began to follow the trail of destruction that wound in the direction opposite Andre.
“I have a whisper link back to Lysip to report.” Leona barely contained a smirk. Yveun Dono’s activation word had been a flesh chilling, guttural growl that she would gladly scream to have echo through her again.
“I wonder with who? You’re quite cheerful for someone who just killed her sister.”
“Don’t play me for a soft fool. I am not Tam.” She brushed off Camile’s not-so-subtle inquiry. Whoever the woman suspected, she was wrong.
“That you are not.” Camile grinned gleefully. “Tell me, how did her heart taste?”
“Like a cherry, and it exploded much the same in my mouth.” Her triumphs were never something she would hide.
“Sybil would—”
Leona held up a hand and Camile was instantly silenced and on alert. The wind had picked up for just a moment. On it she had caught the hint of a familiar scent.
“This way.”
Camile kept up easily with her bounding strides. The further they got from the epicenter of Sybil and the prior Riders’ destruction, the more Fen were about. They scattered like rats, not one putting up a fight before the Dragons once more in their midst.
The smell nearly overwhelmed her as Leona rounded an alleyway. To the eye, there was no sign of the fight that had taken place, but it had surely been bloody. Camile’s talons unsheathed slowly.
A Rider had died here. They both recognized the scent. Layered atop it, almost triumphantly, was the brisk smell of wood smoke, a distinctly Xin smell. Cvareh.
Leona walked through the empty dead end. Magic burned under her feet and hung in the air. A silent memorial for months to come to the Dragon who had lost his life in the spot. She knew the essence of the Rider, Cvareh was easy enough to take note of… But there was one more.
“The third, what is it?” Leona asked Camile.
“It’s…floral? House Tam?”
“Not quite…” There was a heavy floral note, almost like honeysuckle on a hot summer night. But mingled with it was a sharper smell of cedar, like one of House Xin.
Sybil had mentioned Cvareh had help, but she said nothing of another Dragon from House Tam or Xin. That would make this a very different hunt. Leona continued to try to dissect the smell, fighting to peel back its layers. But there was only a trace amount, and the heavy rose smell of the House Tam rider who had perished overpowered the rest of them.
Her sister said there’d been a Fen and Chimera helping him. Leona had smelled Chimera blood thousands of times from the slaves at the Rok estate. Their blood was black for a reason—it was dirty, muddled, rotten. This was clean and sharp, but unlike anything she’d ever inhaled before.
“Leona, this way.” Camile interrupted her thoughts.
Leona followed, giving up the strange third scent for now. Camile was on the trail of the fallen Rider, no doubt picked up by Fen vultures that were already picking the carcass clean. It led them through winding, narrow back passages into the depths of Mercury Town—into the beating heart of the muddled, rotten blood Leona had just been comparing against.
The Fen man who waited at the door didn’t seem surprised to see them. They made him uneasy; she could hear his heart racing in his chest. But he didn’t run from his post, didn’t avert his eyes. Instead, he greeted them.
“We are expecting you.” He opened the door.
Leona strode in fearlessly, claws out and gleaming. Some Chimera and Fenthri guns posed no threat to two Dragon Riders. The only thing that could bring down a Dragon in Dortam was another Dragon.
“Welcome, ladies!” A tiny man clapped his hands. His white skin stretched over his bones, giving him a disturbing similarity to a walking skeleton. Beady eyes appraised them as though they were meat. “When I heard the glider, I just knew you would come and investigate your fallen friend. I just knew.” He waggled his finger in the air. “You see, the most terrible thing happened. I caught two men dragging the corpse of our King’s noble Rider off for harvesting. Now, I tried to get the corpse from them, but they overpowered my men and used this room to—”
Leona hovered over the weak little man, moving with Dragon speed to clamp her hand atop his mouth. Blood beaded around where her claws dug into his cheeks. She could kill him in seven different ways right now and each seemed more delightful than the last. But that would be the course Sybil would’ve taken: kill first and ask questions later. As tempting as that approach was, it had yet to yield results.
“I am not interested in your lies,” she growled. The alabaster-colored wretch’s men seemed to be caught in limbo, unsure if they should engage or leave their master to fend for himself. Leona peeled away one finger at a time before removing her hand. She sheathed her claws and dragged her fingers across the man’s bloody cheek, drawing lines of crimson across the nearly glowing white of his flesh. “You seem like a smart man.”
She was lying.