A Valley of Darkness (A Shade of Vampire #52)(23)

“Come on, Blaze!” she purred. “You’re too good a dancer to be left alone on the sidelines!”

She pulled him back onto the dancefloor, and he gave me an apologetic half-smile, while I was left simmering and wearing my best straight face.

“He wasn’t alone,” I muttered beneath my breath, then gulped down the rest of my drink.

I went over to the bar for a refill, and spent some time there, leaning against a pillar and watching the rest of my team dancing and talking to various Exiled Maras. They were all doing a fine job of keeping the Lords and Ladies busy, and Blaze seemed to be asking Rewa some more serious questions—I could tell from the gentle frown on her face that she wasn’t too pleased with the direction in which that conversation was headed. She seemed to brush some questions off with short bursts of laughter, then rested her head on Blaze’s chest. He seemed a little uncomfortable, and I could say the same for myself.

I focused on the string of disappearances instead, desperately needing a distraction. I turned my back on the dancefloor, and began to mull over all the details we’d gathered so far, replaying the interviews in my head and taking all the unknown variables into account. After five minutes of intense concentration, I began seeing a pattern in the abductions. The timeline began to make sense—as did the order in which the people were being taken.

While the incidents had, at first, occurred in the gorges and on the plains, they had soon stretched over to the base of the mountain and were slowly making their way up.

Though… what about Sienna?

Her case didn’t fit in with the rest, and that bugged me. Her disappearance was an anomaly, given her location, so I decided to consider it an exception and exclude it from the pattern I’d discovered so far.

Once she was out of the equation, the dates and places did make sense, and I was positive that it would look even clearer once we put some pins into a map of Azure Heights and its surrounding areas.

“Hey!” Avril’s voice startled me out of my musings.

Both she and Heron were standing next to me. I hadn’t even seen them coming.

“Hey!” I smiled. “You’re back!”

“Oh, yeah.” She smirked, a tinge of satisfaction in her tone, then pulled me to one of the tables at the edge. We sat down, watching the crowd dance in front of us, with only a couple of Exiled Maras occupying one of the tables on the other side. Nobody wanted to sit down for long. “And we definitely got some useful intel.”

“You found Arrah,” I said, and they both nodded. “What did she say?”

“First of all, mind-bending doesn’t work on her,” Avril replied. “Heron tried a couple of times. Arrah said she’s immune but doesn’t know why. So we could only appeal to her emotional side—we tried to get her to help us.”

“She wasn’t too forthcoming, but still, she helped. A lot,” Heron added.

“Her mom went missing like the others,” Avril explained, “and her brother was imprisoned for, and I quote, ‘conspiring against the city’. There was no clear motive given; she only got a letter. There’s a prison here in the city, but nobody besides the Correction Officers, and probably the Five Lords, knows where it is.”

“Yeah, we read something about that today.” I remembered it from our session in the library archives. “House Kifo business, right?”

“Yup, but here’s the thing,” Avril replied. “Arrah might know more about Sienna’s disappearance, but she’s afraid to come forward because they’re keeping her brother in that prison, and they’re not letting her see him, either. She thinks there’s some form of… I don’t know, Imen’s rights abuse, I guess. I don’t think she’ll talk unless her brother is safe.”

“How is Sienna connected to all this?” I frowned.

“We’re not sure.” Heron shrugged. “She might not be. We can’t be certain of anything until Arrah tells us more. Which she won’t because they’ve imprisoned her brother. Vicious circle… She didn’t know or couldn’t talk about daemons, either. That wasn’t very clear. She didn’t confirm or deny, given the circumstances.”

“How can we help her, then?”

“Not sure at this point,” Heron replied. “We need to run all this by Jax and Hansa—maybe they can suggest and approve the next course of action. But we could definitely dig a little deeper into House Roho. There must be some secrets there, some even tied to Sienna, that Arrah knows and can’t divulge, due to her brother’s situation.”

“According to what I read today,” I mentally flipped through the Roho family registry, “Rowan’s husband, and Vincent and Sienna’s father, Nathaniel Rohan, died about ten years ago. But there was no mention of cause of death. He was reported missing, then declared dead in his absence. We know the daughter disappeared, too, but it may be completely unrelated. And Arrah, a servant in their house, has a brother who was arrested on a vague charge. She also knows more about Sienna and House Roho, in general, right?”

“Exactly.” Avril nodded. “Thing is, she was pretty clear when she said she was afraid to tell us more. She said she feared for her life and her brother’s. Do you think Vincent or Rowan had something to do with it?”

“I think Fiona’s the best person to tell us, at this point.” I sighed. “She’s the one dancing with Vincent tonight. But I wouldn’t exclude House Kifo from the suspect list, either. You’ve seen how anti-GASP Caspian has been since we got here…”