Page 53 of Gilded Wicked Mirrors
Giselle shook her head as more tears gathered with the first. “I don’t think you should see it.”
Quinn gulped. “I need to see it, Giselle. It will be fine no matter what it is.”
Pushing the book in Quinn’s direction, Giselle looked like the haunted in Soul Mirror Row—devastated and tortured. Turning the book toward her, Quinn peered down at the words. The letters were loopy and hard to read, but eventually, she saw what caused Giselle’s reaction.
The names of the victims included Quinn’s parents.
Seventeen
She stopped reading and tuned into petrified wood, unmoving and unblinking. She stared down as the letters spilled together like pooling blood. She held her breath until her throat burned.
Time dripped and ticked together into a blanket woven of silence and sorrow.
It was unclear how long she sat unmoving and unwilling to process the information she’d just read. Eventually, she slammed the book shut and pounced out of her chair. She ran without knowing where she was going and without caring either. A robed librarian yelled at her, but she didn’t listen. She just needed to run to physically process the pain coursing through her veins.
When she finally stopped running, she clutched at her chest and gulped for air.
Emotions bombarded and attacked like the cavalry in a medieval vampire army. Her hair rose at the base of her neck, and her heart burned with devastation.
It hurt like a thousand splinters cutting her heart. There was a reason Quinn chose to push her memories down into a bottomless dark pit, never to be seen again.
So, Quinn ran. Ran out of the library and to a place she felt athome, her lab. She needed to throw herself into science or dance. But dance reminded her too much of Jane.
When Quinn got lost in her work, she didn’t have to feel. It had worked in the past, and it would now, too. Refusing to cry, Quinn pulled Jane’s body from the preservation cabinet. It had been two days since her death, and unsurprisingly, the newspapers barely ran the story. A couple of lines was all she got. Gang murders happened far too often to be considered news to the city, but Jane deserved to be remembered. She deserved more.
But no, the newspapers were too enthralled with writing about Quinn insulting Emrys, which happened far too often to be news.
Trying to avoid thinking about everything she learned at the Grand Library, she decided to check if she could extract any other fingerprints. Using ink, Quinn painted each of victim’s fingers black before pressing each down onto a piece of paper. Once she finished, Quinn cleaned Jane’s hands and methodically transferred the bloody fingerprint onto paper. With all eleven samples, she compared the prints to see if there was a match. Every person in the world had a unique set of prints on each finger. If the print didn’t match the victim, it most likely matched the killer.
Quinn’s lower back ached as she refused to feel emotion. She had to be impartial and distant.
It was the only way to do this job.
She checked and cross-checked the samples four times until she concluded that the bloody fingerprint was not Jane’s, which meant that Quinn held the best evidence that could identify the murderer.
Unfortunately, she needed samples of their prints to identify them.
Next, she placed the feathers' fragments next to each other and tried to extract fingerprints from them. She managed to pull a print from one of the feathers. Quinn was pretty sure it was the one found on the body. Cross-checking it with the bloody print, Quinn found a match.
The fingerprints matched.
So the purple feather came from the murderer? Maybe.
“Hello, little Ginger,” Emrys glided beside her. “Did you want to talk about it?”
Of course, Emrys would be the person to find her. It was just her luck.
“What?” She swallowed, her throat tight and sore.
“Any of it.” Emrys leaned against a cabinet, and his brown eyes sparked with compassion or pity. Both of which made Quinn cringe.
“No,” she whispered.
As if sensing that she needed a distraction, Emrys said, “So what would you like to talk about? I can talk about anything, but I do prefer talking about myself.”
A soft laugh escaped from her lips. Emrys’s chestnut eyes twinkled like a kitten who discovered a roll of yarn. It was contagiously charming.
“But I gather that you would rather not like to discuss my narcissism today?”
