The Shadow Queen

and took a quick shower before getting dressed.
    The sun—that lazy bastard—was just beginning to think about dawdling its way to the eastern horizon when he tucked the lightly sedated Warlord into the back of the Coach with Holt and took a seat in the driver’s compartment.
    Jaenelle hovered in the doorway between the two compartments, frowning at the large urn of coffee Beale had put in the Coach, along with a variety of foods to provide them with a cold but substantial breakfast.
    Daemon lifted the Coach off the landing web, then caught the Black Wind and headed for the house of the aristo Warlord and his wife.
    “An urn of coffee?” Jaenelle said. “Riding on the Black, it won’t take that long to reach Rhea’s Province and that Warlord’s house. Why would Beale give us that much coffee?”
    He knew better. He really did. But he tucked his tongue firmly in one cheek and said as casually as possible, “I guess he wanted to make sure I would get a cup with my breakfast.”
    He felt her sapphire eyes fix on a spot between his shoulder blades, and he really wanted to twitch.
    Finally she growled, “Drive the damn Coach.”
    He waited until he was sure she was occupied with fixing a plate of food before he allowed himself to grin.
    And he did, eventually, get a cup of coffee with his breakfast.
    Standing in the hallway beside Jaenelle, Daemon looked at the bedroom and the body—and swallowed hard.
    It wasn’t the blood. There had been times when he had drowned rooms in blood, so the sight of a sodden carpet and smears on the walls and furniture didn’t bother him.
    And it wasn’t the body, which, from the shoulders down, looked relaxed, as if she’d fallen asleep on the floor.
    It was the rage—the cold, dark, glittering rage—that made him shiver. It filled the room and yet felt elusive, wispy. As if it could be brushed aside. And there was something more in that rage, some quality to it that he knew he should recognize.
    “Mother Night,” Jaenelle said softly.
    “And may the Darkness be merciful,” Daemon added.
    “She came upstairs early, said she was tired,” Lord Collyn, the aristo who owned the house, said. There was a bitterness in his voice, in his eyes. “She often got tired at house parties and went to bed earlier than the other guests.”
    “This wasn’t her room?” Jaenelle asked.
    “No,” Collyn replied. “My wife and I were the last to retire, and when we were about to go upstairs, our butler mentioned that one of our guests left in a hurry and was very upset. Having heard about what had happened at Lady Rhea’s country house”—he shot a nervous look at Daemon—“my wife went up to confirm that my ‘friend’ was in the guest room that had been assigned to her. She wasn’t, of course, so my wife came to this room . . . and found her. I don’t know what she could have been thinking. It was clear Vulchera was dead, but Rosalene touched the body. That’s how she hurt her hands.”
    “What’s wrong with her hands?” Daemon asked.
    “The Healer isn’t sure.” Another nervous glance at Daemon.
    “Or doesn’t want to say. But she’s tried everything and hasn’t been able to heal the wounds.”
    “I’ll look at them in a few minutes,” Jaenelle said. “Examining the body won’t take long.”
    *How do you know that?* Daemon asked on a private psychic thread.
    She didn’t answer him. Instead, she removed her flowing, calf-length black jacket and vanished it. “You’ll want to air walk when you’re in this room.”
    “I’ve walked on blood-soaked ground before.”
    “That may be, Prince, but you don’t want the scent of blood on you. Not this blood.”
    He watched her walk into the room, standing on air a finger’s length above the floor. He made sure he was standing the same distance above the floor before he walked into the room.
    Jaenelle circled the body slowly. Once. Twice. Thrice.
    He circled the body too, and was almost certain they weren’t picking up the same information. At least, not all the same information.
    If he’d come across a body like this when he’d lived in Terreille, he would have recognized there was nothing gentle about this death, despite there being no sense of violence in the room. That would have made him sufficiently wary to back away. Because it took more than control and power to do what had been done in this room.
    Jaenelle crouched on one side of the body and stared at it. He crouched on the other side, trying to make sense of the pieces of information he could glean.
    He put a Black shield