Chapter 11

Nina Kingly was waiting for me when I arrived at Tongues for the Dead the next morning. Clearly she’d missed the part of my message about making an appointment. In fact, there was only one portion of my message she appeared to have heard.

“What do you mean they have pictures of James alone on the roof? I want to see them,” she said before I could so much as insert my key in the lock.

I waited until I’d unlocked the place and turned on the lights before answering. “I don’t have the photos. They are part of the official police file.”

She stared at me with too much of the whites of her eyes showing. “I need to sit down,” she said, her voice wispy, breathless.

Crap, I was about to have a pregnant woman hyperventilate in my office.

Grabbing her by the elbow, I guided her to the secondhand love seat in the lobby. She collapsed onto it.

“It’s true. It’s all true,” she said between gasps, her arms wrapped under the bulge of her stomach. “He left us.”

Her husband’s ghost knelt at her side. “I didn’t, sweetie. I didn’t. Calm down. Please calm down.”

But she wasn’t calming. Her breaths were fast, shallow.

The ghost twisted around, looking right at me. “Do something.”

Like what?

I knelt beside him. “Mrs. Kingly?”

She didn’t even look at me.

“Nina, you’ve got to calm down,” I said, touching her arm.

No reaction. What will happen to the baby if she passes out? I was guessing nothing good. I had to get her calm.

Except she didn’t know me. Wasn’t responding to a thing I said. I briefly considered manifesting her husband, but seeing the ghost might shove her over the edge. That left me with one other option. One I wasn’t sure would work but was positive she’d despise.

She can bitch at me after she’s calm.

I unhooked my charm bracelet and pulled on her arm so I could clasp it around her wrist. She didn’t fight me, which was probably a bad sign.

“What are you doing? Help her,” the ghost yelled.

“I am.”

My bracelet contained mostly shields, but I had a couple of other charms I kept on reserve. One of which was a spell I used when I couldn’t calm myself enough to center and project my psyche into the Aetheric. It was like a double dose of Xanax and an hour’s worth of meditation all rolled into a couple of seconds. Clamping my hand around her wrist so that I pressed the charm against her skin, I channeled a trickle of magic from my ring, activating the charm.

Nina Kingly stilled. She leaned back against the love seat, her body going limp, boneless as she took a long, slow breath. Her head rolled to the side, and she looked at me, making a sound that may have been a moan or a really elongated “Oh.”

“That’s nice,” she said, smiling and sinking farther into the love seat—which I wouldn’t have said was possible until she did it. “Did you know your eyes glow?”

She didn’t sound the least bit disturbed by that fact.

“What did you do?” James asked, his hands clenched at his sides as he looked from me to his now placid and listless wife.

“I calmed her,” I said, reclaiming my charm bracelet.

As soon as the clasp closed around my wrist, Mrs. Kingly’s brow scrunched together, but she didn’t lift her head from where it lolled against the back of the couch.

“The lights went out,” she mumbled, staring at me.

Okay. Clearly too much happy charm for her.

“Mrs. Kingly, do you remember what we were talking about earlier?” I asked, standing across from her.

She nodded, the movement so exaggerated it would have been comical if it hadn’t accompanied her saying, “James killed himself.”

“That’s what the police believe,” I said, “but there are a lot of pieces that don’t add up.”

“You mentioned that on the phone” she said, her words slurred.

Right. She was out of it. I wanted her to consider what I’d found and hire me to continue investigating, and right this moment she probably would have. But it would be an agreement under magical influence, which was not only unethical. It was illegal.

Which meant any business talk was going to have to wait.

“Well, when you’re feeling up to it, if you would like to talk about what I found, I’m going to be in my office,” I said, and when she only smiled, added, “It’s right through that door.” I pointed, but her expression didn’t change.

Okay then.

I turned toward the ghost. “May I speak with you privately?”

James looked from his wife to me and back. For a moment I thought he’d refuse, and I’d have understood, Nina was in a rather…odd state of mind. But no matter how out of it she appeared, I didn’t think she would miss me questioning what to her would appear as thin air. I’d already said more to the ghost in front of her than I should have, but I hoped she wouldn’t remember.

After another moment of hesitation, the ghost nodded and followed me to my office. I shut the door behind us so that my voice wouldn’t carry to the woman in my lobby. When she came to, I didn’t want her to hear me and think I was talking to myself. Coming off as crazy isn’t a good way to impress clients.

“You can have a seat,” I told him as I stepped around my desk. “If the chair is there for you, that is.”

The ghost looked at the two chairs. “I don’t think they’d hold.”

I only shrugged. Roy could sit in them, but he was pretty juiced up on my energy half the time. This ghost, on the other hand, appeared less substantial than he had the day before. I remembered what Roy had said about the ghost looking like something had sucked part of Kingly out from the inside. I didn’t spot it at first, but then I saw the softball-sized area that was slightly less substantial than the rest of him.

“Your shade confirmed your story,” I told him, not surprised when he gave me a dull look in return. While I might have doubted him, he’d known he wasn’t lying. “The fact that your memory goes from the bar to being dead with three days missing in between makes me think you didn’t kill yourself, regardless of all the evidence to the contrary. The problem is, no magic I know of could force you to throw yourself off a building. Can you think of anything, anything at all, that could have happened at the bar or directly after you left that you’d be so ashamed of that you’d be forced to erase your own memory and jump off a building?”

“Of course not! I’ve never been suicidal in my life.”

“So you don’t have any deep dark secrets that could have threatened to come to light? Gambling debts? Drug use? Mistresses? Love child?”

“No. I’m devoted to my wife and if you brought me in here just to slander my character, I’m leaving.”

“Calm down, Mr. Kingly. I’m just trying to eliminate possibilities,” I said, opening a new document in my computer labeled JAMES KINGLY. After adding a line about his claim to sainted behavior, I looked up again and said, “How was work? Was there any tension in the office?”

“There’s tension in every office, but nothing unusual. I got along with most of my coworkers and tolerated the rest.”

I added “No work problems” to the file. And I knew from previous conversations with Mrs. Kingly that money wasn’t an issue. I frowned.

“What about your disease. Where you having trouble managing it? Or maybe you couldn’t face the idea of having passed it to the baby?”

“What are you talking about? I was as healthy as an ox. I hadn’t been sick since—” The chime on the door sounded and the ghost whirled around, ready to charge back into the lobby.

“It’s my partner,” I said, recognizing Rianna’s magic. I added “denies being sick” to James’s file.

A light tap sounded on my door, which opened a moment later, allowing Rianna to poke her head into my office. “Did you know there’s a drunk pregnant lady in our lobby?”

“She’s not drunk. She’s…” I hesitated. “Calm.”

Rianna lifted both eyebrows, giving me an incredulous look. “She’s more than calm. What happened?”

“She was hyperventilating so I used my meditation charm on her. It seems something went a little awry.”

“A little?” She shook her head. “You want me to look her over, see if I can help?”

I didn’t have time to consider her offer before James raised a fist, shaking it at both of us. “No more magic.” If ghosts had color, I think he’d have turned red. “Hasn’t it done enough harm? This is why it should be more closely regulated and witches—”

I stopped listening to his Humans First diatribe; I’d heard it all before. To Rianna I said, “The effects can’t last much longer, so just let it wear off naturally.”

With a shrug that screamed “If you say so” Rianna ducked back out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

Once she was gone, I turned back to James Kingly. “What made you decide you needed a drink on your way home from work? Was that habit? Something someone who knew your schedule would expect?”

The ghost shook his head, but he didn’t elaborate.

“Well, if you have no problems at work and no problems at home, why did you lie to your wife and go out for a drink?”

I could have sworn the pale, shimmery face drained of what little color the ghost had. “I…saw something.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing hard. “I just needed to get it out of my head.”

The ghost’s penchant for vagueness was becoming irritating.

“What did you see?”

“It was…” He shook his head and collapsed into one of the chairs. Or at least, he tried to. He’d been right about it not holding him and he slid straight through to the ground.

I stepped around my desk and helped the shaken ghost to his feet. He held on to my hand longer than what would be considered polite, long enough that I wanted to tug free, but I knew exactly why he did it and that he wasn’t trying to be rude or sexual. He was just trying to understand.

“Why is it I can touch you but no one else? I mean, no one. I keep trying. No one but you even sees me,” he said, his voice full of wonder laced with sorrow.

“That’s a long story.” One we didn’t have time for because his wife would surely come around soon. I returned to my chair on the other side of the desk. “Now, what is it you saw?”

The ghost stepped backward, his face scrunching and his lips disappearing as he chewed at them.

“I need to know, Mr. Kingly. If you stumbled into a dark magic ritual or—”

“No, nothing like that. It was just a horrible, horrible tragedy.” He glanced down at the chair again, as if he wished he could sit, but he didn’t try again. “I was at the gas station, filling up my car, when a man carrying an empty plastic milk carton walked up to me. He asked if I could fill it for him. Gas is so expensive right now, but this guy, he was in bad shape. All skin and bones. And the clothes he wore? They couldn’t have been his. It looked like what he really needed was a hot meal, not gas, but I filled the jug for him. I even offered him a little money, and I never do that. He refused the money and thanked me for the gas. He was so polite.” James paused, his eyes distant with memory.

“Then what?” I asked, because if a homeless person’s appearance prompted him to drink, he was a hell of a lot less stable than he liked to let on.

“He…he took his jug of gas and walked out into the middle of the street. Then he dumped the entire gallon over his head, letting it run down him, soaking his clothes. He pulled a cigarette out of his coat pocket. Then a lighter.” The ghost’s Adam’s apple quivered. “The flames moved so fast. One moment he was dripping in the middle of the street, the next he was covered in flames.” He paused again, chewing at his lip. “I thought it was a prank at first. I think we all did. Because he stood there, not making a sound. I assumed it had to be magic. Maybe some sort of charm that prevented fire from burning flesh, they have those, right?”

I didn’t interrupt him to tell him that no charm, no matter how powerful, would allow someone not to be burned by that sort of proximity to fire.

“People were pouring out of nearby stores and businesses to see this man standing perfectly still while covered in flames. He must have been burning for a full minute, and we were all watching him, when all of a sudden, he started screaming and running around, flailing his arms. No one knew what to do. We ran from the gas station because if the fire got near those pumps…” He shivered. “But he never made it that far. His screams stopped almost as suddenly as they started, and he collapsed. This flaming heap that smelled of burnt hair and charred flesh. It was…I needed that drink.”

“How long before that second drink and your last memory did this incident occur?”

“Incident? It was a fucking nightmare. It was terrible. The man was so nice. So polite. I had no idea he’d use the gas I gave him to kill himself. What was he thinking? Why would anyone want to go out that way?”

I didn’t have answers for any of those questions, but it was certainly interesting that my suicide victim had witnessed a suicide.

He’d talked to the man directly before the stranger had flambéed himself. Kingly obviously felt sympathetic toward him, and guilty he’d given him the gas. Could Kingly have been suffering from some sort of shock? Sort of a posttraumatic stress that left him wandering without any memory. Maybe he did kill himself?

Though shouldn’t the shade have some sort of memory of that time? Even if it were jumbled? Besides, would someone in a state of shock go out for a meal including veal and a hundred dollar bottle of wine? That didn’t fit.

I tapped a pen against the desk, beating out an uneven rhythm as I thought.

I had two very public suicides. It was strange, though the real question was did the first suicide act as a catalyst for the second? Was it James’s tipping point? A coincidence?

Or was it a pattern?