The Seat of Magic (22 page)

I
nspector Tavares arrived promptly at two, making Oriana suspect he shared Duilio's love of punctuality. She felt far more alert than she had that morning; the nap had been a good decision. As she waited in the library, she heard them approaching.

“I have some new information,” the inspector was saying.

“So do I,” Duilio told him. “Although I have no idea what mine means.”

What did he learn while I was napping?

Joaquim Tavares came into the library, an old leather case in each hand. He stopped to nod to her. “Miss Paredes.”

“Mr. Tavares.” Wearing a suit in a deep mauve shade that accentuated the unusual color of her hair, now neatly tucked up in a bun, she might look human save for the fact that she'd left off the silk mitts he'd always seen her wear before.

He shot a glance in the direction of her bare hands, then looked away. He handed one of the leather cases he held to Duilio. “Father sent this over this morning.”

Duilio laid the case on his desk unopened, making Oriana want to sneak a peek. But he retrieved several sheets of foolscap from the map chest in the corner and carried them over to the table in the center of the library while Mr. Tavares carefully lifted one of the giant clamshells off the table and carried it to the corner of the room. Duilio helped him move the last two, and then wiped off the table
before they began to lay out the paper. Mr. Tavares drew a sheaf of papers out of the second case and then held out a chair. “Miss Paredes?”

Oriana settled into the chair. “Do you mind my being here?”

Inspector Tavares hesitated only an instant. “I suspect you will bring a fresh perspective to the discussion, Miss Paredes.”

“It would be easier then, if you called me Oriana.”

“Then perhaps you might call me Joaquim,” he said, “as we are almost family.”

Family?
She decided not to pursue that last statement.

Duilio had retrieved a pencil, a pen and ink, and a ruler from his desk. He began using the straightedge to draw lines across the page first, and then vertical ones. “We're going to lay out everything we know by date. Hopefully some pattern will start to emerge.”

“For the murders,” she guessed. They'd created a timeline for the murders that Maraval had committed, but she'd only seen it once completed.

“And everything else we think may be pertinent.” Duilio finished making his lines, and began numbering across the top of the page, one number in each column. “So we start on the sixth. What happened then?”

The first number he'd written
was
six, Oriana saw. “Maraval was taken into custody.”

“And you left.” Duilio picked up the pen and ink and began writing in that column. “Let me put some notes in here.”

His notes included his first meetings with her father, the infante, the ambassador, and when he'd brought her back. It seemed odd that he was including so much information about her in his list but when she commented, he said they were merely being thorough.

“The otter girl,” Joaquim said when Duilio stopped writing, “was named Erdeg, and she was taken on Thursday the sixteenth from the brothel where she lived.”

Duilio looked up at him, amazement on his face. “How did you find that out?”

“Some brothels cater to more exotic tastes,” Joaquim said delicately, “so I discreetly asked around if there were any otter girls available for a wealthy patron. One of the brothels confessed theirs was missing.”

Oriana hadn't thought of that possibility—but now that she considered it, there might be one or two sereia girls working in such places as well. Even so, otters stayed in tight-knit family groups, so it surprised her that an otter had agreed to leave her family. Then again, perhaps she hadn't. “I'm surprised they were willing to speak to the police.”

“He's one of the few who will investigate crimes against their workers,” Duilio told her. “It's easier to ignore crimes against women who don't hold influence.”

Joaquim's jaw worked, his head shaking.

“So this girl Erdeg was probably killed the next day,” Duilio said, making a note in the appropriate column.

“And her body dumped in an alley that night,” Joaquim agreed. “She was brought into the morgue the next morning, Saturday the eighteenth.”

“And that is the same day Gita was grabbed from the alleyway behind the . . . ah, Erdano's favored tavern.” Duilio continued to write, his face flushing.

“Which tavern is that?” Oriana asked.

Duilio looked at Joaquim, his mouth open, and then turned back to her. “The Lusty Siren,” he confessed.

Oriana groaned. Her people had a questionable reputation among humans. Some of it came from the fact that most sereia couldn't blush and were therefore perceived as shameless. At the moment, a blush would be useful.

“You asked,” Duilio reminded her.

Well, I did.
“I was going to suggest that we make a map and mark the places where the bodies were found.”

“And where they were last seen,” Joaquim added with a nod. “We'll do that after this. Gita died Monday,” Joaquim said. “Her body was dumped either Monday or Tuesday night, found Wednesday morning.”

“Why do you suppose they waited till Monday?” Duilio asked absently.

“Because they didn't want to kill her on a Sunday?” Oriana suggested.

Duilio appeared to consider that. “A murderer observing the Lord's Day?”

“Wait till we're done,” Joaquim insisted.

“Fine. Here's the strange bit,” Duilio said, looking up from the paper. “Her pelt started to rot,
but not all of it.
”

“Go back,” Joaquim said. “You found her pelt? You never told me that.”

Duilio waved his hand vaguely, dripping ink onto the paper. “She left her pelt on one of the Ramires boats. It was found by the fisherman, but he didn't touch it until it started to smell. He told João, who told me earlier today. A patch the size of his hand wasn't rotting, while the rest was.”

They worked for some time, Duilio writing down details that Oriana saw no reason to include, but she had to bow to their greater experience with this bizarre method of theirs. When they collectively ran out of scraps of information, Duilio sat down next to her and peered at the two sheets of foolscap, now held together by pins to make a continuous sheet. Next to that lay a map of the city Duilio had produced from his map chest, defaced with red spots marking where each girl had been taken and where each body had been left.

“There's not a clear pattern,” Joaquim noted, “other than their bodies being dumped in poorer sections of town.”

“Well, they did take them one at a time,” Duilio said. “Each girl taken after the last body was dumped.”

“If there were only the three of them,” Oriana pointed out. “Could there be more?”

Joaquim shrugged. “We'll never know. There could have been bodies dumped in the river or the sea. We can only consider what we've got.”

“Besides,” Duilio said. “They took one of each of the sea peoples. That's a pattern in itself.”

“Have they taken a human?” she asked.

“None have been found who've been . . . mutilated like them,” Joaquim answered. “I asked Gonzalo to alert me if any showed up.” He was staring at her hand, Oriana realized, spread wide on the edge of the paper so that her webbing showed. His eyes turned away, almost guiltily.

She kept her hand where it was. “So they held the otter girl a day before she was killed, the selkie girl two days, but the sereia girl only hours.”

“Why did the selkie take so much longer than the others?” Oriana asked.

“You may be right,” Duilio said with a nod in her direction. “Perhaps they didn't want to kill her on a Sunday.”

“There were three days between the first two killings,” Oriana noted, “but four between the second and third.”

“No clear pattern,” Joaquim agreed. “We
are
dealing with more than one person, by the way. It would take two to get a struggling girl into a coach and drive it away. And someone who knows where to find nonhumans. Someone had to be watching your boats, Duilio, to have seen the girl come up onto the docks. The same with the doctor. They had to know he works with nonhumans.”

Duilio's lips narrowed. “A Sympathizer?”

“Or not,” Joaquim said. “Someone who hates them.”

“And why are they choosing the trophies they are?” Duilio asked. “That hints they know more than most about nonhumans.”

Trophies?
Oriana cringed at a sudden mental image of jars filled with preserved parts.

Duilio scowled. “Or not. Dr. Esteves wasn't certain an otter's magic is in their tail; it was what he'd heard. Mother agreed a selkie's magic is in their skin, though, or rather in the relationship between the skin and pelt, if that makes sense.”

But a sereia couldn't change form like the selkies or the otter folk. A sereia's only magic was in her voice. Oriana laid a hand over her throat, and then snatched it back into her lap when she realized she'd done so. Neither of the two men said anything.

Cardenas rapped softly on the frame of the library's door. When Duilio looked up, he said, “Captain Pinheiro is here, Mr. Duilio. I told him you're occupied, but . . .”

“No, bring him on through,” Duilio said with a flash of a smile. “Rafael's been working in Lisboa for the last two weeks.”

Pinheiro was a captain in the Special Police, but not a threat in any way to Duilio or her. During their search for Isabel's killer, they'd learned that Pinheiro was Duilio's first cousin, the illegitimate son of Duilio's detestable uncle, Paolo Silva. Oriana found Pinheiro quite likable, despite his questionable father, and from the first he'd seemed unconcerned that she was a sereia.

A moment later, the captain entered the library, stopping to embrace both Duilio and Joaquim. Pinheiro didn't wear his Special Police uniform, making this a social call. “Rafael, you remember Miss Oriana Paredes?”

“Miss Paredes,” he said, pressing her hand between his. “It's good to see you again. I'd been worried about you, but I'm glad to see I was right.”

Although he was shorter and a bit stocky, there was a strong resemblance to Duilio—and Joaquim as well—in Pinheiro's face. It made her like him by default. “Right?”

“That you would come through your trials safely,” he said.

“You knew?” Duilio asked sharply.

Pinheiro laughed shortly. “I have been doing nothing but meditating these last two weeks and trying to control my gift, so yes, I
knew
, after a fashion. Nothing specific.”

Oriana hoped she wasn't the only one confused. “Control your gift?”

Pinheiro sat down at Duilio's gesture, picking a seat across from hers. “Anjos sent me to Lisboa to study with the Jesuits there, trying to pull my abilities as a seer into order.” He shrugged. “I inherited the gift from my father, but I've always ignored it, and therefore have probably missed more opportunities than I should. When I think of all the people who might have been helped had I worked to use my gift instead of brushing it aside, I cringe.”

Duilio shook his head. “You can't fix everything in the world, Rafael.”

Joaquim leaned against a bookshelf near the door, his lips pursed in a pensive manner.

“So you're working for Inspector Anjos now?” Oriana asked.

Pinheiro grinned lopsidedly. “Yes, I'm to be their group's seer, although how successful I'll be remains unclear. The Jesuits can train me, but not increase my natural talent.”

Oriana nodded. That was similar to how a sereia's
call
worked. There had to be natural talent before it could be trained as hers was. “I see.”

“He's actually a much stronger seer than I am,” Duilio told her. “Gaspar says my selkie blood limits my seer's talent somehow.”

Pinheiro rolled his eyes, but then turned his gaze to the papers on the table. “Is this what you're working on? I think this is why I came by.” He glanced over at Joaquim. “Whatever you're working on is related to the case Gaspar is working on. You need to bring him and Anjos in on this one, and combine the two.”

Duilio closed his eyes for a second. Asking himself questions,
Oriana decided. A moment later, he opened his eyes. “Damn. I never thought to ask that.”

Joaquim stepped away from the bookshelf. “There's nothing in common.”

Pinheiro held his hands wide. “Sorry, cousin. I don't know
how
they're related. I spent hours trying to figure that out, but never could chase it down. Perhaps there's someone linking the two cases.”

That sounded similar to how Duilio described his gift as working. He had to know the right questions to ask himself, a harder feat than expected unless one understood the criminal's design.

Pinheiro turned back to Duilio, hazel eyes worried. “This is going to turn into a bloody mess. A deadly one.”

Duilio pinched the bridge of his nose. “It already is, Rafael.”

“No,” Pinheiro said. “It's going to get worse, and you're not going to be able to prevent the deaths.”

“Then what's the point of knowing?” Joaquim asked.

“You'll be there to clean up the mess afterward,” Pinheiro said to him. He swept a hand over the papers on the table. “This is all someone's design. This goes beyond a handful of deaths. The repercussions from whatever they've set in motion, that's what
must
be stopped.”

Joaquim folded his arms across his chest. “Those deaths are not negligible.”

Pinheiro inclined his head in Joaquim's direction. “Sorry, cousin. I didn't mean to say they were. But they're already gone. Don't lose the city trying to save one house from burning.”