“Well, shit,” I muttered. “So much for questioning them. What should we do with the bodies? Think we can get them out of the way before Marisol’s done talking?”
I turned to find my father looking down the hallway, his head tilted. “There were more,” he said.
“More what?” I walked over to stand next to him. My gaze followed his, searching for what had caught his attention.
“There were more of them.” Oliver took a step forward, peering at the still figures scattered like dolls down the hallway. “I killed eight. Now there are only seven.”
One of the bodies shimmered, as if we were looking at it through the heat waves rising from hot asphalt. And then the body disappeared.
I squinted, not quite believing my eyes. “What the—”
Two more ninjas winked out—there and then not. The knives on the floor began to disappear, too. Within the next ten seconds, the rest of the bodies were gone.
Oliver turned to me, his mouth agape. I’d never seen him look so openly baffled.
I shook my head in confusion. The violet flames around Mort sputtered and then extinguished as I let go of my magic. “What in the name of Oberon just happened?”
Chapter 5
MY FATHER AND I were still staring at each other in shock when people began pouring out of the auditorium. I took one last look at the floor, which wasn’t even marred with a drop of ninja blood as evidence of the battle that had just occurred, before my view of the hallway was obscured by the entire population of New Gargoyles.
Well, not quite the entire population. As Marisol had said, a handful of New Gargoyles had sworn fealty to the Spriggan king, and as subjects of Sebastian, they were no longer members of the Stone Order.
Oliver’s face shifted from confused to grim. He flipped his fingers at me, beckoning me to follow him back into the auditorium. I quickly sheathed Mort before the press of people made it too dangerous to be waving a sword around. My father went ahead of me, and I caught a glimpse of his expression before he turned away. I wasn’t surprised that the crowd parted to allow him to move upstream with me in his wake.
As we made our way toward the dais where Marisol stood with Maxen and two of her advisors, I tried to reason out who had sent the ineffectual assassins. The attacks were odd for so many reasons.
Oliver went up to Marisol and spoke in her ear. Her blue sapphire eyes widened and her mouth flattened into a tight line. When Maxen spotted me waiting just off the dais, he lifted his chin in acknowledgement, stepped off the platform, and strode over.
“We meet again,” he said, with the tiniest arch of one brow and a slow grin.
Ignoring the slightly sultry look in his eyes, which were the exact blue of his mother’s, I leaned in and spoke in a low voice, my words rapid. “Remember those ninja guys at Druid Circle? Oliver and I just killed a dozen of them out in the hallway. Then their bodies disappeared. Poof, there one second and gone the next.”
Maxen opened his mouth but didn’t have a chance to reply.
“Petra. Maxen.” Marisol called to us as if we were still seven years old, errant children giggling in the corner. “I need more details about both incidents with the shrouded attackers. But not until we can speak in private.”
She turned to Raleigh, the head of the Stone Order’s security and the only New Gargoyle larger than my father, and spoke a few words to him. He hurried off, as fast as a man of that size can hurry. Then she curled her hand at me, Oliver, and Maxen, indicating we should follow her.
We left the auditorium through the back with her personal bodyguard, a stocky expert swordsman named Jaquard, in the lead. I’d trained with him for a few years when I was a teenager. My father brought up the rear of our little procession.
We moved quickly through the hallways of the fortress until we reached Marisol’s circular office, a sort of Stone Order equivalent of the Oval Office of the United States president. The floors were inlaid with lines of opal that cut concentric circle designs through the square marble tiles. Linen curtains and wall hangings softened the stucco walls.
Jaquard closed both interior office doors and went to the door that led to a private courtyard to peer outside. Satisfied, he turned to Marisol and gave her a slight nod.
With urgency straining her face, Marisol faced us.
“Did the assassins’ corpses disappear after the attack in Spriggan territory?” she asked Maxen.
He nodded and slid a quick glance at me. “It was after Petra left, and I didn’t get a chance to tell her what happened.”
She turned her intense blue gaze on me. “And you think they were part banshee and part dwarf?”
“Lack of pigment in the skin like banshees, and narrow ears with peaked cartilage like dwarves,” I confirmed. I held my hand out flat about four feet above the floor. “Diminutive size, about this tall.”
I was substantially shorter than the average New Gargoyle, as that Elf bouncer at Druid Circle had so helpfully pointed out, and the shortest person in the room by a solid half foot. I was used to it, though, as I’d grown up around full-blooded New Gargoyles. Once I began training as a fighter when I was a child, I discovered I was ten times stealthier and quicker than any full-blood New Garg could ever dream of. Once I developed strength, too, I was almost unbeatable by my peers. That took care of any self-consciousness I might have had about my height.
Oliver shifted. “Petra’s right. I would have guessed the same. I assume we can rule out King Sebastian?”
Marisol nodded, but frowned at the same time. “It appears so. By Maxen’s account, the assassins were genuinely trying to kill Sebastian.”
It had certainly seemed so. The knife that had stuck in the shoulder of Sebastian’s guard had started sizzling and smoking, killing him almost instantly. And that blade had definitely been intended for the king.
“Then who?” Oliver asked.
“Someone with the power to create and command a large number of servitors,” Marisol said.
I stared at her. Servitors were made of very complicated illusion magic, but I’d always thought they were more like apparitions. Not solid-bodied figures who wielded knives that could kill. “You mean those ninjas weren’t real?”
“They were real, just not quite in the same sense as you and me,” she said. “They were created to serve a single purpose and then disappear. This is where the oddity comes in. In both attacks, no one of great importance was killed, yet the servitors dissolved.”
I wasn’t so sure the dead guards would agree with her assessment, but I tried to focus on the salient point.
“If that’s true, in the attack at Druid Circle their main purpose wasn’t to kill King Sebastian,” Maxen said. “And in the attack here, again they weren’t sent to kill a ruler.”