The word hung in the room like smoke from a pistol shot.
Yes.
Caelan watched it land. Watched it hit Isadora the way silver hit his kind — not all at once, but in stages. First the surface burn. Then the slow, creeping poison beneath. He saw it move across her face in real time — the flinch, the widening of those mist-gray eyes, the tightening of her mouth into a line so thin it could have cut glass, and then the worst part. The worst part was always the worst part with her.
The stillness.
She went still the way she went still when she was deciding whether to scream or to hit something, and five centuries of reading people told him she was choosing the latter.
