“—and then she has the nerve to say she won’t take ’em unless they’re in good shape.” He clucked over his collection, all of whom looked pretty good to me.
For severed heads, that is.
“Yeah, but I still don’t get it,” Ray said fretfully.
“What’s not to get?” Zheng asked. “She wants people who’ll fight for her. What’s the use of Senate members if they won’t do anything?”
“No, I mean I don’t get this,” Ray said, gesturing at their surroundings. “I know how the fey hacked through the shield, okay? But it shouldn’t have mattered. It should have been back up in minutes—”
“And it woulda been, if somebody hadn’t offed Marlowe’s guys. You heard him, all five ended up—”
“Dead, yeah. And that’s my point. Who killed them?”
“Whaddya mean, who killed them? The damned fey killed them. Or their mutants did. Those things were strong—and fast. Did you see—”
“Yes, I saw,” Ray said sharply. “I saw a bunch of…things…come through the portal. But Marlowe spoke to Dory just after that—like less than a minute after—telling her that he’d sent guys to the basement. So he must have sent them practically the second he saw anything come through.”
I nodded. “He told me he had people taking care of it.”
“But they didn’t take care of it. And a couple minutes later, he had Halcyon ask you to check on ’em, because the shield wasn’t back up and they hadn’t reported in.”
“Yeah.” I was starting to see where he was going with this.
“So the mutant things are back in the ballroom and then a few minutes later, they start showing up in the hall. But Marlowe’s boys are dead by then, because you and me, we’re already on the way to check on them. So again, who killed them?”
“It couldn’t have been Jonathan’s experiments,” I said slowly. “Marlowe’s boys should have been ahead of them.”
Ray nodded.
“Unless a portal opened down in the basement,” Zheng pointed out. “We wouldn’t have seen it, so we wouldn’t know.”
“Okay, say it happened that way,” Ray replied. “Say somebody figured Marlowe would be sending a group to fix the shield, and opened a portal down there before we even realized they could do that. That still leaves a bunch of other things unexplained.”
“Like what?”
“Like Slava’s.” He looked at me. “It’s been bugging me since our convo in the car. The bad guys, they got this perfect plan for getting into Central, right? But that requires us arresting a bunch of Slava’s guys and taking them back there. They got in so easy because they were let in, and they were let in because they were expected.”
“You’re wondering how the fey and their allies knew we’d be showing up at Slava’s,” I said, wondering why that hadn’t occurred to me.
Ray nodded. “They couldn’t just wait around, hoping you’d get there sooner or later. It was too elaborate a plan for doing on the fly. And anyway, Slava was known as a pimp, not some big-time conspirator. Why would they think Marlowe would go there at all?”
“He went there because of the yacht,” I said slowly, my headache getting worse. I was too tired for this, too tired to think. But Ray was right; something was…off. “Mircea saw it in my head, and then Marlowe tracked it down from the description he gave. And discovered that it belonged to Slava.”
“Yeah. So if it was in your head, who else could have known?”
“Whoever Marlowe told,” Zheng said.
Ray rolled his eyes. “Yeah, because we all know what a forthcoming guy he is, right?”
“Nobody was in the kitchen when he told me but us and Louis-Cesare’s cook,” I told Ray. “And I somehow can’t see Verrell being involved in the conspiracy.”
“Neither can I, but that still don’t explain how the bad guys knew.”
“You need to let Marlowe know there might still be a problem,” I said. “Some loose end somewhere.”
He nodded. “I’m going to if I can ever find him. He’s probably off interrogating the fey—”
Zheng nodded. “I heard they’re bringing in Jack for that. Should be fun.”