The House of Shattered Wings

Selene went for bluntness. “I don’t take the deaths of dependents lightly, and you know it.”


Claire did not bat an eyelid. “I’d hate to see what you do when you take things lightly, then.”

“It’s abundantly clear that you need our help,” Guy of Harrier said. “With Silverspires’ declining status—”

“We’re not dead yet,” Selene said, more sharply than she’d intended to.

Claire’s thin, self-satisfied smile was more than she could bear. It was because of the three of them—Harrier, Hawthorn, and Lazarus—that she was here now; that she had to defend her House’s failure to protect its guests, to justify why her wards and magical protections had failed to stop whatever roamed the House.

“The young man is involved, isn’t he?” Sixtine of Minimes asked. “The Annamite, the one they found in Samariel’s bedroom.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Guy said. “He’s human, nothing more. How could he do this?”

“He’s human, yes,” Claire said. “It just means he has no innate magic. With the proper artifacts, a bit of angel essence—”

This was too much for Selene. “You know we don’t use angel essence in this House.”

Claire’s gaze was frank, untroubled. “Oh, don’t you?”

She sounded as though she meant something specific, but Selene wasn’t about to let Claire catch her off balance. “I have no interest in your games.” They needed to find the means of murder. Shadows. A dearth of magic, or an excess of it, Madeleine had said; and Aragon had confirmed, once given access to the other bodies Claire had been keeping.

Not that it helped, of course. Neither Selene nor anyone in the House knew of any creature, weapon, or spell that killed that way. She had Emmanuelle digging into the archives; and of course Aragon was examining Samariel right now, trying to find something, anything that would get them out of this mess. Selene said, “If the question is whether a human could have done this—then the answer is yes. Everyone here—human, Fallen—is a suspect.”

There was silence, in the wake of her words. Then, as what she had said sank in, a babble of protestations rising to a deafening pitch: “—surely you don’t mean—” “—this is an outrage—” All things she had expected and counted on. She raised a hand and cast a spell of dampening: a cheap trick, but one that never failed to have its little effect. All sounds around her hand gradually sank to a murmur, in a spreading wave of silence.

“You came here,” she said. “All of you. You forced your way in, claiming you would help us find our attacker, and then you have the audacity to complain when someone else dies. I know you. I know you all—Guy, Claire, Sixtine, Andre, Viollet.” A further shocked hush. She had them now; she had to seize the moment, while they were still cowering in fear, and gazing suspiciously at their neighbors. If she could break their fragile alliances . . . “None of you are above killing to further your plans. None of you would weep if Silverspires paid reparation for your murders, and sank into obscurity.”

Silence spread in the wake of her words. Then someone clapped: slowly, deliberately, the sounds echoing under the stuccoed ceiling of the ballroom, each one as sharp and as penetrating as a bell tolling for funerals.

“Such a pretty speech,” Asmodeus said in a slurred voice. He detached himself from the pillar he had been leaning on; and came forward, toward Selene, blowing the acrid smell of orange blossom and bergamot gone sour into her face. She didn’t flinch. One could not afford to, with Asmodeus.

Once, he’d moved like a sated cat; now his movements were still fluid, but quickened with a manic impatience. He had taken off his horn-rimmed glasses: he held them in one hand, toying with them absentmindedly, except that Asmodeus never did anything absentmindedly. The gaze he turned on Selene was still amused, but underneath it all she could guess at the controlled fury.

“You’re drunk,” she said, coldly. “Go back to where you came from.”

“My lover’s deathbed?” Asmodeus’s smile was terrible to behold, sharp and fractured and incandescent. “Let us speak of Samariel, shall we? Humans expect to die in their beds; Fallen do not. Should not.”

“You know I don’t condone what was done to him,” Selene said. “We are looking into it.”

“You’re investigating? There’s no need for investigation. The culprit was found, surely.”