“You see, Sir Allard…” Lyili motioned to Mel, the lizard tail girl. “While you were wasting your time during the break, I was making some very important calls.”

I hadn’t been wasting my time. Well… now that I thought about it, a chunk of the recess was filled with Violetta’s useless story about Volk hitting his foot on the inside of his desk. Yeah, okay, but it was more like some of my time had been wasted.

“Important calls?” I asked.

“That’s right,” Lyili said. “And with the information I obtained through these calls, your argument against Madam Rayne will fall apart.”

“Oh no…” Yaika gasped. A long silence descended on the room. “Oh. Did I interrupt something? Sorry.”

“N-Not at all, sweetie!” The king scrambled to reassure her. “That was a very helpful reaction. Now we can… really feel the tension in here!”

Yaika gasped again. “The tension!”

“Let us start with your claim that Madam Rayne lit Sir Volk’s papers on fire,” Lyili continued on like nothing had happened. “You claimed that after she left the room, the smoke from this paper caused the fire sprinkler to go off, and the alarm to sound in the building.”

“…Yeah?”

“Well I regret to inform you that you claim is impossible.” She ‘regretted to inform me’? Ugh, her smug levels were off the charts.

“And… why’s that exactly?” I asked.

“Miss Lyili, I can explain it to Mistaw Wyley if you’d like,” the only one with the voice of a 5-year-old in the room said.

“By all means.” Lyili tapped her open palm on the table. “That would be wonderful.”

Fucking repair shark.

The shark walked up a few feet from Rayne and turned to me with his empty doll eyes.

I sighed. “You’ve got to be kidding me…”

“A lot of people think fiaw spwinklews awe set off by smoke, but that’s not twue,” the shark said. “They’we actually set off by heat. Tempewatuwes of awound 155 to 165 degwees, to be exact.”

Okay… Apparently, ‘fiaw spwinklews’ mean ‘fire sprinklers’. I think I understood what he was saying, and if I was right, then part of my argument really had been crushed. Why did the movies always make it seem like it was the smoke?

Next thing they’d be telling me you couldn’t shoot a car’s gas tank to make it explode.

“Very good,” Lyili said. “You may be seated.”

“Good luck, Mistaw Wyley,” the shark said, heading back into the crowd. Yeah. Thanks.

“Couldn’t… she have just held a lighter up to the detector?” I asked.

“If that had been the case, then she would have been soaked by the sprinklers herself,” Lyili said. “Let’s ask Madam Violetta what she saw…”

“Alright, I get it.” I cut her off. I didn’t need someone that was on my side making things even worse. “So what caused the sprinklers to go off, huh?”

“It’s as Madam Rayne said, there must have been some kind of malfunction.”

Fuck that. That was way too convenient to be just a malfunction. Of course, I didn’t have any alternative theory. Not anymore.

“I see that Sir Allard has nothing to say for himself.” Lyili sighed. “Next, the claim that the fang marks are fake, and that the real murder weapon was the knife you discovered.”

Uh-oh. That claim… was pretty much my most important one.

“As you might imagine, the execution squad works very close with the body disposal squad,” Lyili said. “I made a call down to the demon in charge and had a very nice talk with him.”

I didn’t like where this was going.

The king spoke up in my place. “What did you ask him?”

“You see, the head of the disposal squad is a very perceptive man, unlike our Sir Allard. He did indeed examine Sir Volk’s body before it was sent to the fire pits.”

It was stupid to even ask, but I did anyway. “I don’t suppose… there were any cuts or stab wounds, were there?”

Lyili slowly shook her head, her long black hair flowing around the curves of her body. “None.”

Fuck. I could feel myself breaking out in a cold sweat. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “If there weren’t any wounds on him, then what the hell was a bloody knife doing in that office?”

Suddenly, Rayne stood up in the audience. “If I can say something, your majesty.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” the king stammered. “Is something wrong, Ms. Rayne?”

“It’s about that knife,” Rayne said, brushing her bangs off of her blue cheek. “It belongs to Mr. Volk.”

I looked down at the knife in the plastic bag. “This belonged to Volk? Y-You’re sure of that?”

“Without a doubt.” Rayne nodded. “It’s something very important to him. He always kept it on his desk in a case.”

The case on his desk. I thought it was for a fancy pen or something, but it was for this knife? “What was his own knife doing behind that bookshelf?” I asked.

Lyili shrugged her porcelain shoulders. “The knife you found could have very well been something Volk had hid himself prior to his murder. Or perhaps… something that Madam Violetta planted there to throw us off her trail.”

I looked over at Violetta’s oblivious face. Something she planted? Yeah. Good one. There had to be a reason for it, but I didn’t have the time to think. I needed to change the momentum of this and I needed to do it fast.

“You can’t deny that Rayne could have left her desk at some point,” I said. “We only have Cyana’s claim that she was there at 6:45. She could have been anywhere after that!”

“Ah, very interesting of your to bring that up,” Lyili said. “Mel, come on out.”

A squeaking sound filled the throne room and Mel emerged from one of the side doors. She was pushing a television on a cart. The kind of cart you used to see in schools before teachers started using computers.

Speaking of which, it seemed like this girl’s job was pretty much just pushing things. Why couldn’t I have pretended to be an expert of that instead?

“My last call was to the demon that performs maintenance at the Succy Talent Agency,” Lyili said. “His office was very close, so I had him bring us a tape. A tape that contains footage that will prove that Madam Rayne couldn’t have committed the murder.”

Really? How much had this woman accomplished in that single recess? Also, a tape? No demon DVDs?

Mel pushed a button on the VCR and an image appeared on the screen. It was black and white, but it was easy to see that it was from the camera in front of the elevator. But this wasn’t the camera from the first floor. This was from the camera on the third, and although she wasn’t completely in the frame, it showed Rayne sitting at her desk.

I was definitely not okay with this.

“Objection!” I yelled. “Why are we only getting this tape now?”

“I’m sure you could have easily obtained it earlier if you had simply asked.”

I sent a glare over in Brad’s direction. He didn’t seem to notice, but I hoped at least one of his eyes could see how angry I was right now.

“This is very important evidence,” the king’s voice boomed. “This was taken during the time of the murder?”

“That is right, your majesty.” Lyili pointed over at the TV. “In the corner of the screen, you can see the time the footage was taken.”

6:55. It was just five minutes before the alarms went off.

“Rayne,” I didn’t take my eyes off the footage. “It looks like you wave and then talk to someone in this part of the video. Who was it?”

“Violetta had just finished her meeting,” Rayne replied. “She said hello. I simply replied to her.”

I waited in anticipation as the clock in the corner of the video ticked up to 7:00. Finally, Rayne’s shoulders jolted in her seat. She looked around frantically, even scanning the ceiling. A moment later, Cyana appeared on the camera. Then Violetta, and finally Goldie.

Then Mel shut off the screen.

“There,” Lyili said. “Just as I’ve promised, I have crushed every one of Sir Allard’s assertions.”

The king nodded. “It appears that you have.”

The crowd exploded louder than ever. There were so many voices, I couldn’t even tell if they were angry or excited.

My mind was blank. What the hell was I supposed to do now? If Cyana or Goldie had done it, I didn’t know how I was supposed to prove that.

“This trial has gone on long enough, your majesty,” Lyili yelled. “I call for the execution to proceed!”

The king made a motion with his hand. “I suppose… there’s no other choice.”

Before I could say another word, I was hit with the familiar sensation of a tentacle wrapping itself around my waist.

My career in fake law sure didn’t last very long.