Thorn Queen (Dark Swan, #2)(50)

"Who is it? I told you I didn't want to see anyone...."

"It's all right, Moria," said her mother. "This is the queen. She's come to talk to you. She's not going to hurt you."

The girl wilted even more, blond hair covering half of her face. "No, no...She's come with the others, come with her human blood to bind us and kill us and-"

"Moria," I said gently, holding my hands out as one would under a white flag. "She's right. I'm not going to hurt you. I just want to talk to you. It won't take long."

"They all say that," Moria said, eyes wide with tears. "They all say they won't hurt you...all the humans...you're no different...they all say they aren't...." She lapsed into muttering too low for me to hear, her hands clinging to the covers.

"I think," Dorian murmured to me, "that her experience has left her...ah, a little touched. I doubt you'll get anything useful from her. There's a healer at Maiwenn's court who's particularly good with sickness of the mind. You should send for her."

I had a feeling he was right but had to make one more attempt. "I just want to know where you've been. Who took you. I want to make sure it doesn't happen again. Tell me who it is, and I'll stop them."

"No," she breathed. "You're the same...the same as him...the Red Snake Man."

"Red Snake..." I still had demons on the brain, and an image of their red and black mottled skin came to mind. Were they snake-like? "Moria, were you taken by demons? Or some kind of..." Hell, in the Otherworld, any monster you could imagine pretty much existed, as Smokey had shown us. "...um, snake monster?"

She shook her head frantically. "Our own kind don't hurt us. It's only yours...you're all the same...the human blood...all marked the same...." Her eyes left my face and lowered. For a disorienting moment, I thought she was staring at my chest until I realized her gaze was on my arm. I absentmindedly touched the spot. It was where my snake tattoo coiled around my arm. Moria squeezed her eyes shut. "All the same..."

I stiffened. "Did he...are you saying the person who took you had a tattoo like this on his arm?"

"The Red Snake Man," she whispered, still refusing to open her eyes.

"Did he banish you? Did he force you to this world? Or did you come back on your own?"

"Iron...iron everywhere..."

I stared off at nothing for several seconds. "I'm done," I said, turning to her parents. "She can rest now."

I left the house as swiftly as I'd come in, Dorian matching my pace. "What's going on? That meant something to you."

I nodded, heading toward where Rurik stood with our horses. "I think I know who took her-and maybe the others. Not bandits or a monster. It was a human."

"How do you know that?"

"Because of the tattoo." The Red Snake Man. I'd seen a red snake tattoo just the other day-on Art. He'd had that on one arm and a raven on the other. "It's another shaman, one who lives very close to where the crossroads around here opens up in my world." He was also the shaman who had told me to my face he knew nothing about gentry girls. I came to a halt by the horses and absentmindedly stroked the side of mine. She looked back and sniffed me. "But why? Why would he take a gentry girl? Or more than one? His job is to get them out of our world. I could see him banishing them out of the human world....That might traumatize her, but that doesn't sound like what happened. She disappeared from this world. She made it sound like she didn't want to be in the human world."

Dorian snorted. "Eugenie, where in your jaded existence did you pick up this naïvete? If a human took one of our girls, it'd be for the same reason we'd take one of theirs. For the same reason any man would abduct a girl."

I blanched at his implications. "But more than one?"

"He wouldn't be the first man to prefer-ah, how shall we say it? Variety."

I couldn't see it of Art, not the Art who happily tended his garden and offered us beer and pop. He'd known Roland for years. They'd worked together. Was Art truly a kidnapper and rapist? Or was the girl just traumatized from being banished? It could be a pretty horrific experience.

I grimaced, feeling a sharp twisting in my stomach. I'd come too close to rape already in my life to treat even a hypothetical situation lightly. Was Moria a victim? Were there others like her out there? Maybe it wasn't truly Art...and yet, her words had dark implications. The human blood. A mark like mine. The Red Snake Man. The crossroads to Yellow River. He had to be involved; I just didn't know how.

I gave the horse one last pat and then mounted. "I have to get home," I said, turning back to Dorian and Rurik. There was some mistake here, some mix-up. Art wasn't involved in this. He couldn't be, at least not in the way Dorian had suggested. "I have to talk to someone. Immediately."

I waited for the requisite Dorian joke, but none came as he mounted his own horse. "Then we go different ways. Be careful, Eugenie." For some reason, frankness and concern from Dorian was more disconcerting than his usual banter.

"If I'm right about this, then it's a human matter. Should be a cakewalk compared to what I deal with around here."

Dorian shook his head. "I'd have to disagree. Give me demons and restless spirits any day over human deceit. But if you need help, I'm here. Just ask."