Small places like Sproing had a chance to flourish, if we could just stop people from doing things that ended with them being eaten. But there were sections of the bigger cities in Thaisia that would always be a scar on the landscape—a forever reminder of what the Humans First and Last movement had cost all of us.
I tucked the issues of Urban Life beneath the issues of Nature! and continued with the tidying.
Since my guests were trapped at Lake Silence and sufficiently terrified of being thrown out of their rooms for bad behavior, they were making an effort to be tidy, so there wasn’t a lot for me to do, despite not having any helpers. Which is why I ended up staring at one of the jigsaw puzzles. We had started two at different tables. All the outer pieces had been found and fitted in on both. One group of puzzlers had separated pieces according to color. The other table had grouped pieces according to shape. The thing is, you can have two shapes that fit together but the colors don’t match, don’t make a visually correct part of the picture.
I moved some pieces around on one table, not really thinking about anything anymore. Then I picked up a few pieces from the other puzzle—the ones separated by color, which you would think would make it easier. But each puzzle had a blue sky. Not quite the same color blue, but . . .
Pieces from one puzzle fit with pieces of the other puzzle. Not surprising. I imagine there were only so many shapes that were used for all puzzles. It was the picture that made each puzzle different.
“Victoria?”
Ilya stepped up beside me. I had no idea how long he’d been watching me.
“The pieces don’t fit together. Physically they do, but that’s a deceit.”
“More like a confusion since you took pieces from one puzzle and fit them into another puzzle,” he said. “People will expect one thing only to discover too many pieces in one puzzle and not enough in the other.”
“And eventually they’ll realize that things don’t really fit because they didn’t recognize that they’re working on two puzzles instead of one and they’ve mixed up the pieces.” I shook my head, undid the pieces I’d put together, and returned the bits of blue sky to the other puzzle—and hoped I’d put the correct pieces back. “I’m trying to understand how a simple event like Trickster Night has turned into all of this. I keep moving around everything that happened like each death was a puzzle piece and trying to fit them together in a way that produces that aha moment. It just seems like some of the pieces don’t look like you’d expect them to look—out of context they look too big or the wrong color—but then that one piece slips into place and suddenly things make sense. Which I’m not making.”
Ilya stared at the puzzle. Finally he said, “Unfortunately, Victoria, you are making a great deal of sense.”
CHAPTER 69
Them
Earthday, Novembros 4
He’d wondered if he could influence a human like Edward Janse, and now he knew that he could. Supposedly, Intuits had an extra bit of intuition or sense of their surroundings. Supposedly, they weren’t as susceptible to doing things outside their normal behavior or being provoked into irrational behavior, but Janse’s impulse to help other people was a weakness easily exploited—especially after Janse had ingested a hefty dose of feel-good that had been mixed in a mug of tea.
How else could he have convinced the Intuit that someone needed help that required walking into the woods last night?
He wished he had dared to go out and see the body for himself. Had the terra indigene killed Janse? Or had his rival’s former subjects—her little monstrosities, as she liked to call them—been given extra treats filled with gone over wolf before being aimed toward the cabins, toward him?
He wished he could interview them and find out how they had managed to elude the Others in order to reach the cabins, but all her subjects became unmanageable after a certain age—although a combination of fear and reward seemed to keep them sufficiently subservient to her.
Was this about rivalry? Had Edward Janse been killed by the Others because he’d been at the edge of the woods and was easy prey? Or had he been killed because his rival’s little monstrosities had been pointed toward someone wearing a certain color coat?
Picking up his olive green coat from where he’d dropped it last night, Richard Cardosa hung it in the closet out of sight.
CHAPTER 70
Grimshaw
Earthday, Novembros 4
What made it abundantly clear that this police station was considered an auxiliary station in an insignificant human village was the lack of a private office for the person in charge. That wasn’t a problem for weeks at a time. Grimshaw preferred not having a place where people could have a private chat with him. The possibility of someone walking in and overhearing something intended only for police ears encouraged residents to get to the point faster. Besides, if he needed a private place, he could ask Ilya for the use of the outer room in the Sanguinati’s office upstairs.
But this needed some privacy, which was why he sat in the station’s break room looking over the reports and e-mails that had come in from ITF agents and from various police stations in the Northeast.
Incidents. Deaths, both human and Crowgard. Investigators had noted the removal of the lower legs and feet of the dead Crowgard—and noted that those feet showed up tied to the bodies of some human victims—but they hadn’t known about Crowbones, hadn’t understood the significance of two victims being connected in that way.
Then there were reports of minor conflicts between terra indigene and humans. Usually adolescents of both species, if he was reading between the lines correctly. The police could confirm the ages of the humans but had no measuring stick for the Crows or other small terra indigene who had been caught up in a conflict.
Not all the police stations had answered his query, but based on the ones that had, the boundaries for these conflicts were Hubb NE to the east, the Addirondak Mountains to the north, towns a couple of hours’ drive south from the Finger Lakes—and Lake Silence to the west.
No indication that the city of Lakeside or the other towns around Lake Etu had seen this particular kind of killing. Because this—whatever this was—hadn’t reached them yet or because . . . ?
Grimshaw opened the map of the Northeast Region. All the Crows who lived around Lake Silence were born around here or, at least, in the Northeast. Was Crowbones a regional bit of folklore? Would Crowgard in the Southeast Region have heard of this Hunter? What about in the western regions? Elementals had territories. There wasn’t just one Elemental named Winter or Fire or Earth. Elders also usually kept to a territory. Why not one of these Elders who had a designated role as a Hunter? Maybe this Crowbones wasn’t the only Crowbones in existence. Maybe they all used the same signature pieces—the cape made of feathers, the hollow gourd filled with bones, and tying the lower legs and feet of a crow or Crow to a corpse to indicate who had been innocent and who had done the killing.