Flakes of iridescent ice crystalized in the air and began to fall, dusting the Cruce-gilded floors of the abbey. The temperature dropped sharply and a six-light segment of the hall’s torchères went out. The prince in the Highlander was displeased, affecting the environment.
“Jada, he sifted in!” Brigitte exclaimed. Then mouthed silently around his back, Our wards didn’t work, what the fuck?
“At ease,” she told her first in command, which meant “hold your weapons for now.” Christian wasn’t who or what he’d been before his time on the cliffs. Though he’d been largely unconscious for the duration of the ride back from Germany, she’d seen enough to know something had changed him, tempered his wildness and madness.
There was a sudden commotion as more sidhe-seers joined them in the hall. She allowed herself a moment to bask in seeing the corridor of the grand old abbey lined with self-possessed, well-trained, heavily armed women, as it always should have been. Each face was a life, with a family, a vivid story, and she’d already made a significant dent in committing them all to memory.
Christian glided down the hallway toward her, part muscled Highlander, part sleek, dark Faerie, majestic black-velvet wings trailing the gold floor, and despite having been trained to stand their ground, a few of her sidhe-seers peeled back.
She didn’t fault them. He was formidable. She made a point of never underestimating either enemy or ally. His treatment of her now would define which one he was. His transformation seemed to have halted midway, leaving his skin golden, not white-blue, his lips pink, not blue-black, but he had the long midnight hair, muted tattoos, and majestic wings of a hauntingly beautiful, deadly Unseelie prince.
But his eyes! She fixedly avoided staring into them, blurring her focus slightly, absorbing his face as a whole with no clear features. His gaze leaned more toward Fae than human and she knew she would weep blood were she to meet it directly.
In faded jeans and a cabled Irish sweater split down the back to accommodate his great midnight wings that arced high and swept wide, he personified wolf in sheep’s clothing. At his throat, a torque writhed, glinting, not an adornment but rather part of his flesh and quite possibly bone.
He’d saved her once from what she’d thought would have been a hellish decision. She’d known nothing of hellish decisions back then.
“Dani, lass,” he said quietly.
“Jada,” she corrected.
He studied her, from hair to boots and back again but with none of the sexual heat she’d once seen in that sometimes-black, sometimes-whiskey gaze. With her slightly unfocused gaze, she noticed his eyes widen, narrow with anger and that all-too-familiar rejection, then go void of all emotion.
Oh, yes, trapped in unending pain, he’d learned control. Learned to pull his feelings back and box them so they couldn’t turn into fuel that would burn a person alive.
One did. Or didn’t survive.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I bring no quarrel to you or yours. You’ve my thanks and a favor owed for seeing me off that cliff. I would speak with that one.” He jerked his head toward Ryodan.
She inclined her head, granting permission, wondering what had brought him here tonight, if they might work together toward common goals.
Christian stalked past her to the bastard that could still knock her out of freeze-frame. “What the bloody fuck did you do with my uncle?”
Before he’d been captured by the Hag, so many years ago for her, Christian would have stormed these halls and tried to kill Ryodan for the slightest offense, real or imagined. He was now demonstrating forethought and patience.
She didn’t tell him to save his breath. Ryodan would never answer. No one interrogated that man, certainly not a walking lie detector.
“Precisely what I said I would do,” Ryodan said mildly. “I brought him back.”
Christian went still, mining the comment for its true ore. After several moments he growled, “Truth. Yet it was not his body you gave us. Explain yourself.”
Ryodan never explained himself.
“There were countless bodies in that chasm. I thought I recognized the plaid,” Ryodan said.
She narrowed her eyes. He was behaving uncharacteristically, this man who did nothing without a complex agenda. What was his game?
“It was our tartan,” Christian allowed after a pause. “Yet not our kin. Where the bloody hell is his corpse?”
“I have no other knowledge of his corpse. I suggest your clan search the chasm thoroughly. Perhaps I missed something.”
Jada studied Ryodan intently. “ ‘Perhaps I missed something’?” If he had, which she found quite frankly impossible, he would never admit it.
“Did that already. Sifted straight there. None of the bodies belonged to my uncle.”
“Perhaps there’s a fragment of Faery splintering the chasm. There were many caves and a fast-running river. Perhaps you didn’t search well enough.”
Nor was he a man who liberally employed the word “perhaps.” He was being questioned—questioned, mind you, which was only one of several oddities here—by one of the Keltar who, on a good day, got under his skin and on a bad one he wanted to kill, yet hadn’t used so much as a single “fuck” or made one aggressive comment. Even his body language was bland, relaxed.
“Did you do something with my uncle’s remains?” Christian demanded.
“I did nothing with Dageus’s remains.”
Jada mentally pinned the elements of their conversation—and absence of elements such as hostility Ryodan should have been exuding—on a structure of sorts in her mind: words here, body language there, subtext sprinkled throughout. Remains, he’d said. Corpse, he’d said. And all his answers were ringing true to the lie detector.
There was a subtle yet significant difference between truth and validity. Ryodan’s responses were tallying up on her structure as valid.
But not true.
There was something here…she just didn’t know what.
She moved to join them, folding her arms, legs wide like them. “Do you know where Dageus is right now?”
Ryodan turned and locked eyes with her. “No.”
“Did you do something with Dageus the night we killed the Crimson Hag?” she pressed.
“Of course. I fought beside him.”
“Did you do something with Dageus after we left?” she rephrased.