Very sharp teeth. Isyllt knew what such bites felt like.
“Do you think this had anything to do with her death?” She kept looking, but found no fresh wounds.
“Maybe.” Khelséa reached into an inside pocket of her coat and pulled out a folded piece of silk. “But this is why I called you.”
Isyllt stretched across the dead woman and took the cloth; something small and hard was hidden in its folds. She recognized the shape of a ring before she finished unwrapping it.
A heavy band of gold, skillfully wrought, set with a sapphire the size of a woman’s thumbnail. A rampant griffin etched the stone, tiny but detailed. A master’s work. A royal work.
“Where was this?” A knot colder than the room drew tight in her stomach.
“Sewn inside her camisole, clumsy new stitches. Her purse was missing.”
A royal signet in a dead whore’s clothes. Isyllt blew a sharp breath through her nose. “How many know?”
“Only me and my autopsist.” Khelséa snorted. “You think I’d wave something like this in front of the constables?”
Isyllt stared at the ring. A woman’s ring, but no woman alive had the right to wear it. She looked down at the body. A sliver of blue iris showed beneath half-closed lids, already milky. “What was her name?”
“Forsythia.”
Not a real name-at least she hoped it wasn’t. Not many mothers branded their daughters with a prostitute’s name at birth.
Isyllt dipped a finger into the gaping wound, licked off coagulated blood and fluids. Khelséa grimaced theatrically, but the inspector’s nerves and stomach were hard to upset.
Cold jellied blood, bittersweet and thin with rainwater. No trace of illness or taint, nothing deadly save for the quantity spilled. The taste coated Isyllt’s tongue.
“Forsythia. Are you there?”
No answer, not even a shiver. Her power could raise the corpse off its cold table and dance it around the room, but no ghost lingered to answer her questions. She sighed. “They never stay when you need them to. She might be wherever she was killed, though.” She nibbled the last speck of blood from under her fingernail.