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The lower right canine was gone. The socket was fresh; the blood in it had clotted on the surface but not gone properly dark, the way it would've if the tooth had come out hours before death. It had been pulled while Cleo was alive, or in the moments after.
Idonea took her fingers away. She didn't stand yet. She closed her own mouth, deliberately, and held it closed.
Three of them, three open mouths, three teeth. The first she'd not known how to see. The second she'd refused. The third was making her see it whether or not she wished to.
She tried to recall if there was anything off about Cleo, but came up with nothing. Idonea sighed and looked up at the chapel. They hadn’t let her enter it.
With the other Templar hovering so close, she dared not tap into the Current. But she now wanted to go inside that building.
Idonea stood and dusted snow from her clothes. “There’s nothing more here.”
Alcaeus remained silent at her side while they headed back towards the cottage.
She walked stiffly. The cold hadn't gone into her bones the way it should have. Her body was doing something else with itself, holding heat in places it ordinarily would not.
She didn't look at her father, or not look at the lamps. She walked.
The first two had sigils. This one did not. The first two had been done with care. This one had been done with speed. The first two had been arranged, placed, displayed. This one had been killed where she stood, and left where she fell, because she'd been about to leave and there hadn't been time.
The killer hadn't had time. The killer was someone for whom time was a finite resource. Someone whose schedule could be interrupted. Someone who'd been here in the village and had needed to kill here, in a hurry, before something else happened.
Not a daemon, for a daemon does not have a schedule.
As they neared the empty fountain, something tugged at Idonea, and she followed that instinct.
Idonea halted. “Give me a moment.”
It didn’t take long for Idonea to locate the device. But it wasn’t the same as when Lysander had shown her, when they had completed it.
The middle copper tube was missing, wrenched free with deliberate force. The remaining pieces had been left in disarray, wires bent. Someone had sabotaged the device.
Alcaeus stepped forward. “What is that?”
Idonea lifted the damaged device from the fountain.
“It was supposed to warn us,” she said. “But someone made sure it never could.”
Someone here. Colour drained from her face.
“Lysander made this?” he asked.
Idonea handed the device over to him. “Yes. I infused the daemon’s signature into it. It was meant to keep them safe.”
Alcaeus turned it over in his hands. “You’re sure?”
Idonea took a deep breath. It wouldn’t do her any good to blow up yet again in his face. “Someone did this. There is someone here that wants us to fail, working with this daemon.”
He frowned. “No one is daemon-marked.”
“One doesn’t need to sell their soul to work with a daemon,” she said, hands curling at her sides. “All it takes is a motive. A fear. A secret that corruption can feed on.”
Her mind, against her will, laid things side by side.
Three bodies, each missing a tooth. The wounds done with a blade by someone who'd taken their time. Except this last one, which had been rushed because Cleo had been leaving. Someone in the village. Someone who'd been able to enter a Lodamante-warded cottage. Someone who had a key, or who knew about the hatches. Someone who hadn't been at Arina's body when she'd been screamed for, who'd arrived late from her own house, composed in the way of a person practising a face. Someone who'd been at her window the night before, watching the snow, watching Idonea cross with Lysander beneath. Someone whose hands she'd never seen.
Idonea drew a breath. She didn't say the name to herself. She didn't need to. The name arrived before she could stop it. Elzhbeta.
Lidiya had been at Arina's body too, glassy and quiet, with dirt under her nails. Lidiya knew the chapel basement, and Lidiya let Edik into her larder for a long time and they hadn't been making bread.
