Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page A

nodded to Lee and Gelert as they paused by the tarp. ‘The samples have gone down to Parker?” Lee said.
    “Yeah. You want me to move people back?” Blessington said.
    Gelert gave him a very straight-faced look. “What are we, a kindergarten class? We can tell your people from the perps just fine. Maybe they want to get back in the shade, though. No reason for them to boil their brains.”
    “Huh,” said Blessington, one of the seemingly null noises he made that Lee had learned to translate as approval. He waved a hand casually at them and headed back to the palm trees.
    Lee stood there over the tarp for a moment, Gelert beside her, and closed her eyes.  Madam, we’re on   Your business now , she thought, as she executed the series of tiny jaw-clenches and neck movements that brought her implant online and started it recording.  Be in what we see, for the innocent’s sake…
    She waited a few seconds for the “aura” that came with the onset of judicial sight: a blurring around the edges, not quite a rainbowing as of visible light but a sense of multiple possibilities. Lee leaned over and pulled the tarp away.
    The bloodstain had sunk deep into the cracked white cement of the sidewalk, running down the cracks and the joins between the slabs. Lee blinked, her eyes watering at the strength of the impression of what had happened here, still so recent. The body lay there already, drowning out everything else.  No , she thought.  Earlier.
    The vision resisted her, lying there with limbs splayed, its chest shot away, seeping. Death in any given spot always impressed itself powerfully on the matter there, making it hard to perceive any life sharing the same spot in time and space: and it was life that Lee needed to see now. She did not turn her eyes away from the body, but held her gaze steady, waiting for the shift. Slowly it came, but not before she’d had to spend a good long while looking at the chiseled, classic beauty of Omren dil’Sorden’s face. It had been much easier, last night, seeing it in just a glimpse, on the news, before she knew his name.
    Lee held her pity in check, waited. It was not pity she needed now, but paraperception, and slowly it came. The body was no longer lying in front of her, but falling to the ground past her left shoulder.
    Through the silvery mist of uncertainties implied by the movement of the air molecules between her and the murdered man, Lee felt the wind and concussion of the second shotgun blast as it hit dil’Sorden. A second, faded perception overlaid her first: the last tattering impressions leaking from dil’Sorden’s sensorium as he fell. Lee took note of the perception, but didn’t expect much from it. Hydrostatic shock, nerve damage and blood loss, let alone the overriding disbelief and horror at what was happening, had left dil’Sorden’s own view of his last moments nothing much more than a terrible dark blur, with a long wet jagged bloom of brightness laid across it at the very end, the remnant of a last glimpse of the nearby streetlight as he went down.
    Slowly, because the moment resisted quick movement and was likely to be denatured by it, Lee turned a little, looked over her shoulder. The fall was in process again, from a slightly earlier point in time. There were only so many of these reversals she could induce without draining that “site” or point of view dry: she had to see as much as possible in each of them. Here was the first shotgun blast, from a little farther down the sidewalk. Lee looked at the shape holding the gun, but from this “angle” could only see clearly what dil’Sorden had seen clearly; and that was little. Eyes, then the barrel of the gun. The shape itself was far more uncertain, a dark blur. Still, not a tall man: he barely came up to dil’Sorden’s shoulder. Stocky, perhaps a hundred kilograms, a head that looked almost rectangular.  Turn a little , she willed him, but from this angle there was no profile, or not enough,