Efridis was looking a little worse for the wear herself. Her usually perfect hair was tangled and wild, and her normally silk clad body was dressed in a woolen tunic and leggings, much like those that the male fey wore. But there was something else, something . . . almost raw on her face. I couldn’t describe it; didn’t understand it.
But it was not the look o
f a well woman.
Which was fair, as she was supposed to be dead.
“Please,” the creature on the floor said plaintively. “Please, I don’t understand. I did all that you asked—”
“And more.” Her voice, too, was a rasp, so different from her usual, melodic tones. She knelt down, and turned his face up to the light. “I saw your creatures,” she whispered.
I gasped; I admit it. Because that was also someone I knew. And someone else who was supposed to be dead.
Jonathan.
I glanced at Louis-Cesare. I didn’t know what expression I’d expected, when he came face to face with his old nemesis again, but it wasn’t that one. He’d looked blank for a moment, and then a succession of emotions had flashed across his face, too fast to read. But in the end, he settled on . . . puzzled.
Okay, I guessed that . . . was an emotion. It wasn’t the one that I was experiencing, though. Not even close.
My hand went to my knife, because I wanted to feel this kill. No easy gunshot, simple and bloodless, at least if you managed to stay out of the splatter zone. No, I wanted—
And then I stopped, my hand still on the hilt of my weapon, because I’d begun to understand my husband’s expression. This wasn’t the man I remembered. That man had been frighteningly talented, brash, more than a little crazy, and above all, scary. This . . .
What the hell was this?
He looked more like the shambling, possibly-zombies outside than anything I remembered. His face was sallow and heavily creased; his eyes sunken and dull; his hair thin and gray, as if he’d aged decades since we saw his body in the Circle’s dank holding cell. That had been the man I remembered; this—
“No,” I said, the word bursting out of me on a puff of air, a single, visceral reaction.
Efridis glanced at me. “Yes, he hurt you, too, did he not? You may have him when I am done, if there is anything left.”
I looked at Louis-Cesare. I understood exactly nothing, but I knew he would have at least one answer for me. “Is it . . .?”
He didn’t immediately reply. He knelt down, putting him and maybe-Jonathan’s head on a level, and searched those too-dull eyes. Then he did what I couldn’t have, and leaned in. And sniffed him.
I doubted that it was a pleasant experience, although the man appeared relatively clean, except for spots where it looked like the fey had been throwing him around the basement floor. But there was something unsavory about him. The stench of dark magic, Louis-Cesare had always said, but Ranbir was supposedly a dark mage, and he’d smelled like sweat and fried chicken. Not like . . .
“He’s dead,” I said, finally placing that smell. It was the same one that the fey had been giving off upstairs, only fainter. And underneath a boatload of cologne that only made it worse by contrast.
“Yes, I’m dead!” Jonathan snarled, some of the old fire coming back into his eyes. “That damned Pythia—she killed me! She killed me twice!”
“Apparently she needed to do it a third time,” I said, feeling dizzy. I looked at Louis-Cesare. “Is it him?”
He nodded.
“Tell them,” Efridis said, looking at Jonathan. “Tell them what you have done.”
And, immediately, there was a change of demeanor. From outraged pride to groveling pathos. “Please, Lady, we can make some kind of accommodation between us. I can help you—”
“You’ve ‘helped me’ enough. Tell them!”
It was not a request.
But Jonathan seemed confused and vaguely petulant. “I can’t confess if I don’t know what I did!”
“Don’t know?” It was almost a yell. And it was accompanied by a lovely, manicured hand reaching down, grabbing the huddled figure by the hair, and jerking him upward. “What you did, was to butcher our people. What you did, was to make monsters out of our dead! Desecrating their bodies and endangering their very souls!”
“Oh.” Jonathan swallowed. “I’m . . . sorry?”