James looked at the body.
It lay on its side on the flagstones with the wound above the hip still open and the bare stripe still across the ribs, and it was a body, and it was going to stay a body.
Then he looked four feet to the left, at the patch of stone where the red had gathered itself up and thinned out of existence, and there was nothing there at all. No crack. No seam. No dull glow underneath. Just flagstone, in a courtyard full of people who had been dead ten thousand years.
He looked back at the corpse.
Then at the empty stone.
The man was here. The power was not. That was the only thing in the last four minutes he could actually prove, and he turned it over twice and could not get anything else out of it.
Alice had not moved either. Her wings hung open and almost completely still behind her, and she was watching the same patch of floor, and she had been watching it since before he asked her the question.
He did not ask her anything else.
