“What?” a voice grumbles.
“Let me up,” I say. “I’ve got the stuff.”
“About time.” There’s a buzz and a click, and the door opens.
“What stuff?” Artemis asks.
“I don’t know. It looks like the type of place where a lot of people are waiting for stuff. Worked, didn’t it?”
She walks past me without responding. Leo nods in approval, but his nervousness has only increased. It radiates off him with the same level of intensity as Artemis’s derision.
I follow them up four flights of stairs, half the lights broken and my shoes sticking on substances best left unseen. The building is even colder than it is outside. I shrink into Artemis’s leather jacket, wishing I had worn another layer. When we get to the door, I knock. No one answers.
“It’s dark,” Leo says. “She’s probably already out patrolling.”
“We can leave a note.” Artemis searches her weapons bag.
Leo leans against the wall, settling in. “I want to talk to her in person. Make sure
she’s okay.”
We can’t afford to hang around all night. The Doug problem is still waiting for me back at the castle, as well as the mystery of Bradford’s death. I want to press my mother for some actual answers. I bet Eve will back me up. Hell, Wanda Wyndam-Pryce will too, if only to catch my mom in wrongdoing again. I don’t want to believe it was my mom who’s been contacting demons and bringing them to the very castle she spent all this time keeping secret, but it seems more and more likely. That, or it really was Bradford, and he’s dead because of it.
Cosmina can’t take up too much of our time. She’s pretty low priority, all things considered. I knock harder, and the door swings open. It hasn’t been latched all the way. Dread pooling deep in my stomach, I force myself to step into the apartment.
Cosmina’s home after all.
Sort of.
23
I’M FIXATED ON THE YELLOW ducks. No girl wearing pajamas with yellow ducks on them should be lying dead on the floor.
“Bed’s cold,” Artemis says. “But it looks like she was in it before this happened. Check the body for marks.”
Leo’s frozen at my side. We came to help her. We were too late. I was too late. My dreams gave her to me, and I failed her. My father died to save a Slayer. I wouldn’t even risk losing my spot in the castle for her sake.
“Window’s secure, and we’re four stories up. They probably got in through the door. Check the body!” Artemis snaps her fingers impatiently.
She’s not my Watcher. But she is the only one of us who seems capable of coherent thought. I half expect her to tell me to leave the room, to shield me from this, but she’s done doing that, apparently. I kneel next to Cosmina’s body. She’s lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. According to movies I should close her eyelids, but it feels disrespectful. She met death open-eyed and fighting. Who am I to pretend she’s at peace?
“No marks.” I check her neck and exposed skin. “Her knuckles look raw, but that might have been from before.” She’s stiff, too. I haven’t studied dead bodies as much as living ones, but I suspect she’s been dead for more than a few hours. Possibly a full day.
“Was it your demon?” Artemis asks.
“First of all, he’s not my demon,” I snap. “If anything, he was Honora’s. And second of all, Cosmina’s been dead awhile, probably since before Doug got free. Maybe it was the fighting pit people.” Cosmina knew they were dangerous. They’d already proven as much. Why didn’t we force her to come with us then? Protect her?
It would have been against her will, though. I don’t know that we could have. She’d been a Slayer a lot longer than me.
And now she’s dead.
Artemis steps around a fallen lamp, her boots crunching brightly in the glass. “You don’t know Doug’s not a killer. And there was definitely a struggle.”
“This wasn’t Doug,” I repeat, but I’m distracted.
Cosmina was probably asleep when she was attacked. And there are no marks on her. It’s too much like Bradford Smythe. I want Eve’s other theory to be true—the one where I dreamed Bradford’s death because my super Slayer senses clued me in that he was sick—but the similarities are too much to discount. Which makes two dead bodies. But what do Bradford and Cosmina have in common? Or rather, what did they?
“Why do you think Mom decided we needed to help Cosmina right now? And only wanted to send Leo?” I ask. “Doesn’t it seem suspicious that Mom wanted to track down Cosmina specifically? The one Slayer we secretly already knew?”