Page 24 of A Dark and Drowning Tide

“Except that day,” she said sharply, clearly flustered. “At any rate! Wilhelm made us all promise that when we were in power, we would never allow the kind of violence we grew up with. We would never turn on each other or let each other suffer.”

It was such a romantic, whimsical notion: exactly the sort of thing only Wilhelm would propose and only children could believe. And yet, none of them mocked her. None of them, she realized, wanted the others to know they’d strayed in their loyalty to him.

Curious. So they genuinely liked him.

“Then I expect you to hold to it,” she said briskly. “In the meantime, shall we discuss the matter at hand?”

“The official cause of death is fluid in the lungs: death by asphyxiation,” Johann said, clearly eager to move past sentimental reflections of their shared childhood.

“No botanical poisons that I could detect,” Ludwig added. “But there were trace amounts of chloral hydrate in her system.”

Heike yawned. “Meaning?”

“She was drugged before she was murdered.” The corners of Johann’s mouth twitched in a smile, full of malice. It set Lorelei’s blood to ice. He did not need to speak for her to catch his meaning:the sedative you use to sleep.

The onehecompounded for her.

“Whoever killed her is an adept magic user,” he continued. “It is theoretically possible one of the staff could have solved thelock—”

“Highly unlikely,” said Adelheid with a grimace. “It’s too complicated.”

Ludwig frowned. “Someone could have left the door open?”

“Of course,” Lorelei snapped. “And they just so happened to be passing by and took that very convenient opportunity to drug and murder her.”

Ludwig winced. “Right. Point taken.”

“Your sarcasm is not appreciated.” Sylvia shot her a look of pure reproach. “At any rate, if we are all agreed on the matter of the cause of death, that means that it could not have been Lorelei.”

“She could be a witch.” Johann clasped the silver fang resting against his collarbone. “Yevani can come to possess magic by unnatural means. Consorting with demons, consuming enough Brunnisch blood to absorb itspower—”

“Shut up, Johann,” Heike and Sylvia snapped at once.

They exchanged a startled look, as if shocked they agreed on something. Heike turned sharply away and said, “No one wants to hear it.”

Johann fell silent, but he glowered at Lorelei. Nothing he said surprised her, but bracing for the blow had never once stopped it from hurting.

“It can’t be me or Lud, either,” Heike added. “Neither of us are as skilled with magic as any of you.”

“It doesn’t take finesse to drown someone,” Johann said coolly.

Lorelei watched with some fascination as Heike blinked up at him with a calculated innocence. “Well, then. I’m certainly no genius like the rest of you, but if you’d just think a little, I’m sure the answer of who did it would become abundantly clear. Right, Sylvie?”

“Me?” Sylvia spluttered.

Heike’s smile turned venomous. “I bet it stung to have your position taken away. Besides, your mother has been waiting for an opportunity like this for a long time, hasn’t she?”

“All right, all right,” Ludwig cut in. “It’s true it could have been Sylvia. But consider this: it could have been me.”

Adelheid let out a long-suffering sigh.

“That’s just the thing, right? If the murder took place at two in the morning, none of us really has an alibi.” He surveyed each of them andwith offhanded lightness added, “That is, of course, assuming Johann is telling the truth about the time of death.”

“Why would I lie about that?”

“You wouldn’t,” Ludwig said placatingly. “But if you missed one detail . . .”

Suspicion simmered in the air, coalescing into a solid thing.