The sight of Haitao’s broken and bloodied body would haunt Tianyu for the rest of his life. He’d only gone to the harness maker’s house to pay the man off. All he had wanted was silence.
How had all this gone so horribly, horribly wrong?
Forgive me, Shuang! Have mercy on your poor, foolish husband. I was trying to do the right thing.
All I wanted…
It didn’t matter what he had wanted. Part of him wanted to take the Pearl Seal and fling the cursed dragon into the sea. Maybe then no one would ever know of his crimes. Maybe there was a way he could sneak onto the mainland. Surely the papers people spoke of in hushed whispers weren’t that important.
They were only papers after all. How important could papers be?
There had to be those who would hire a skilled carpenter on the mainland, someone who worked well with horses and could fix a wheel before you could finish a cup of tea. Surely he could manage in the outside world.
He had to get off Penglai Island. Maybe if he took a trip out to the outer islands, he could find a boat that would take him and Jiayi to the mainland without the magistrate knowing. Was there a good excuse for Tianyu and his small daughter to visit one of the outer islands? Maybe there was a shrine that had been dear to Shuang, who had been born on Set?
Someone pounded on the front door.
“Tianyu!” A deep voice shouted his name. “Come to the door! Quickly! Something terrible has happened!”
You don’t know. You don’t understand. So many terrible things have happened that I have lost count.
Tianyu wiped the panic sweat from his forehead and tried to compose his face. Then he tore his outer coat off, unbound his hair, and wrapped his housecoat around himself as if he were just rising from bed. He walked to the door and cracked it open.
“What’s wrong?”
Chapter Sixteen
Ben and Tenzin surveyed the scene in silence. Three vampire guards from the palace stood in the narrow street outside, and another was positioned in the alley behind the house.
The small cottage was behind a leather shop where harnesses, aprons, and tools hung in the windows. Inside the attached living area, saddles sat on wooden frames around the room, blocking two of the doors. The windows were wide open, the cold wind whipped through the house, and the smell of woodsmoke permeated the air from a bellowing stove in the corner.
“I can’t smell anything but smoke, ice, and mud,” Tenzin said. “Whoever did this knew vampires would come.”
And they didn’t want to leave a scent behind.
Ben was tempted to close the windows, but he didn’t want to move anything until he’d formed a mental picture of the small wooden house where a lifeless body lay on the floor.
The human was bloody and bruised with numerous cuts on his face and hands. He’d been struck from behind by a long, thin hammer with a narrow square head on one side and a thin, piercing point on the other, which was still embedded in his skull.
Ben crouched down and spoke in a low voice, keeping his words in Spanish to avoid immortal ears outside. “Tiny, this is not our thing.” He looked up. “We find valuables, not murderers.”
Tenzin echoed his quiet voice. “You don’t think this has to do with the Pearl Seal?”
He rose. “We have no idea. We can’t even find the thief because no one seems willing to admit that it was probably an inside job.”
Tenzin pointed at the body. “Perhaps he had something to do with it.”
Ben had doubts that a seemingly crude harness and saddle maker would be behind the theft of a gold-and-jade seal, but there was something tickling the back of his memory, and he couldn’t settle on it. There were too many thoughts flying around his mind, too many senses on alert.
The sickly-sweet scent of the man’s cold blood, the sweat ingrained within his blankets and clothes, the woodsmoke and a hint of stale bread. The smell of sweat and stale bread triggered a memory of his childhood, and he was back in an alley when he was seven years old, staring at the broken body of a man in a red hoodie behind the bakery.
“Ben?”
He blinked and remembered where he was. “We don’t do this, Tenzin. Maybe we should call—”
“We have to do this.” Her voice was barely audible. “If we do not, the town authorities will find someone to blame in order to pacify the elders, execute that person, and move on. They will not care if it’s truly the murderer or not.”
Ben ignored the spike of anger in his blood and nodded. “Fine. You’re right.”
She nodded and continued in a normal voice, conscious of the guards outside. “It looks like he was beaten first. Then the hammer blow came at the end.”
Ben crouched down and looked at the man’s frozen face. “Yeah, he was in bad shape even before he was killed. Could have been a human or a vampire.”
“Vampires don’t kill like this.” Tenzin shook her head.
“They might if they didn’t want anyone to know a vampire did it.” Ben stood and looked around the room. “We all have fists, Tiny.” He nodded at the potbellied stove in the corner. “He lived alone, and the fire was built up. Could he have been expecting company?”
“It’s a cold night,” Tenzin said. “He could have wanted to read a book or do some work by the fire.”
“He lived alone?”
“Neighbors say his parents lived with him until their death, but he never married. He learned the leather trade from his father.”
Ben looked around the room at the low, worn couches, the stacks of bowls and mugs in the small kitchen area, and the closed door that led to a cold bedroom. “It looks like he slept in here in the winter. One room is easier to keep warm.”
“Agreed.” Tenzin reached for the hammer. “Should I?”
Ben nodded. “I guess so. I mean, it’s not like they’re going to call the crime lab, right?”
“There’s never been a murder like this on the island.” Tenzin removed the hammer from the man’s skull and lifted it to her nose to smell the handle. “Leather.”
“In a saddle shop.” Ben huffed out a breath. “Imagine that.”
“Or the killer wore leather gloves.”
“Again, could be either a human or a vampire who wants us to think it was a human. What do you mean ‘a murder like this’?”
“What?” She looked at him with a frown.
“You said there’d never been a murder like this on Penglai.”
“Oh.” Tenzin waved a hand. “Over the centuries there have been drunken idiots who fought and one accidentally killed the other. There have been husbands or wives who killed their spouse in a rage. But nothing like this. Someone plotted to kill this man.”
“Or it could have been a fight gone wrong.”
“The hammer came from the shop in front.” She looked at the side door that led to the harness workshop. “Someone brought it here with the intent to kill this human.”
“I don’t know, Tiny. It looks like he worked in the evenings, so it’s possible the victim might have brought the hammer from the shop and it was just lying around.”
“And the killer grabbed it and killed him with it during an argument?”