Chapter 3

It took us the better part of a week to get the new Tongues for the Dead offices something akin to presentable and ready to open, but it took me only three days to discover the major flaw in having an office: someone had to be present during posted business hours. Since Rianna was at a gravesite, right now that someone was me.

Not that any clients had visited the office yet. At least, not any new clients. A woman who’d contacted me before we opened had, under protest, stopped by to sign paperwork and drop off a retainer fee, grumbling about the drive the entire time she was here. The office? Yeah, not so much a success thus far.

I sighed and tapped the touch pad on my laptop to wake the screen.

“You look bored.”

I jolted at the unexpected voice and my thrift-store chair screeched in protest as my heart jumped to my throat. Not that I didn’t recognize the voice, or the approaching shimmery form dressed in baggy jeans, loose T-shirt, and open flannel shirt so threadbare it would have been nearly transparent even if it hadn’t been worn by a ghost.

“Hey, a little jumpy there, Alex?” Roy, my self-appointed ghostly sidekick asked, shoving his hands in his pockets. Then he squinted, staring a little too hard. “Your magic is overflowing again, isn’t it?”

I gave an inward cringe. It had been almost a week since I raised a shade, and my magic was battering my mental shields in an attempt to escape. “That obvious?”

Roy shrugged. “You’re sort of…flickering.”

That wasn’t good. Roy, being a ghost, existed in the land of the dead, which was separated from the reality and the living by a chasm. All grave witches could bridge that chasm—that was how we raised shades—but as a planeweaver, part of my psyche always touched the land of the dead. Despite that, Roy had once told me that I was usually as shadowy and uninteresting looking as any of the living, at least, until I actively drew in grave essence. Then I apparently lit up like a roman candle. If I was flickering, my power was clearly slipping.

I should have taken the ritual in the cemetery today—I’d just wanted to give my eyes as much time as possible to recover.

“So whatcha working on? Do we have a case yet?” Roy asked, leaning forward to stare at my screen. He made a face. “Apparently not.”

I blushed and closed the laptop, hiding the two windows I’d had open. One of which was the Dead Club Forums, which was the unofficial digital gathering place for the small population of the world’s grave witches. The other window was the reason for my embarrassment. It held a game that’s sole premise involved slingshotting birds at strangely colored pigs. I wasn’t sure how the creators had done it, but I’d swear they worked a spell into the code. That was the only way to explain why the game was so unnaturally addictive.

“What do you need, Roy?” The question came out snippier than I meant—the pressure of holding my shields was wearing on my nerves—and the ghost jerked back. He took a step to the side and hunched his shoulders, all but broadcasting his hurt feelings.

Well, crap. I squeezed my eyes shut and buried my face in my hands. I really had to loose my magic soon. If I didn’t use it, my shields would crumple with my will. Considering those shields were the only things keeping the different planes of reality from trying to converge through me, I needed to make sure I—and not my magic—was in control when I lowered them.

I was too fae to apologize, so instead I said, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“I know.” But his tone carried a sulking note.

I dropped my hands from my face and glanced back at him. As soon as my eyes fell on the ghost, the barrage of magic attacking my shields found a crack. I mentally grabbed at the slipping power, trying to draw it back.

Too late.

That part of me with an affinity for the dead, that power that let me reach across the chasm, spiraled out of me. What it wanted was grave essence, which every corpse contained, but the office was warded, and no grave essence could make it through. So it reached for the next best thing—a ghost.

Roy straightened with a jolt as my power hit him, his eyes flying wide. Then color bled into his clothes and hair as my magic pulled him closer to the land of the living.

I clamped down on the power, tightening my shields. I imagined the living vines that kept the dead out—and my magic in—slithering closed. A cold sweat dripped down my neck, but I stopped hemorrhaging magic.

Roy gasped—typically an unnecessary action for a ghost—and then doubled forward. “Geez, Alex, warn me next time,” he said between ragged breaths. “I mean, you know I’m more than willing to let you siphon however much power into me that you want, but what the hell was that?”

“An accident.” I frowned at him. With my shields this locked down, I should have been as disconnected from the other planes as possible. Instead my peripheral was filled with the chaotic mix of several planes. And Roy, well, I wasn’t sure if enough power had spilled out of me to make him manifest in reality, but his color was wrong, and in more than him being too vivid for a ghost. Or maybe it wasn’t his color. Maybe it was the way my psyche perceived him. Something was definitely off. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just…” He straightened and rolled his shoulders. “It’s never hurt before.”

He winced, and my frown deepened. Ghosts are dead. As such, they can’t be killed. They can fade out of existence, but they can’t die, and before this moment, I’d have sworn nothing could hurt Roy. Or at least, nothing had before, even when I’d siphoned enough power into him that he fully manifested in reality.

Roy looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time, and maybe he was. The land of the dead overlaid the living world perfectly, except that everything on the other side of the chasm was ruined and decayed. The farther from the chasm the ghost went, the worse the destruction. Even with my planeweaving and grave magic, I’d seen only the first couple of layers, but Roy had told me that in the heart of it there was nothing but dust and wasteland. Depending on how far into reality my magic had pulled Roy, he might be seeing the room almost as intact as it truly existed.

“So am I here?” he asked, curiosity peeking through the wince claiming his features.

“Not sure. Why don’t you try walking through that wall.” Now I was the one with labored breathing. I couldn’t keep my shields locked this tight much longer.

The ghost frowned at me. “You know I can’t walk through walls. Not unless they aren’t there in my plane.”

“I know.” Pain built behind my eyes, between my ears, and clawed down my spine. “Roy, I have to loosen my shields. If you don’t want a repeat performance from a minute ago, you might want to get out of here.”

His gaze moved toward the door, but he shoved his hands in his pockets and didn’t move. “I’m ready this time.”

I almost made him leave anyway. After all, he’d been a factor in the magic overwhelming me. But if a ghost in the room set me off, how the hell was I going to step foot beyond the wards? As soon as the first tendril of grave essence reached for me, my magic would pummel through my shields. My grave magic preferred humans, but if I lost control, it would settle for any mammal or avian corpse in the vicinity. Wouldn’t that be something to loose in the Quarter? It would definitely get Tongues for the Dead noticed, but not in a good way. I shouldn’t have waited so long between rituals. Case or no case, as soon as Rianna returned, I needed to head to the nearest cemetery.

But first I had to see if my magic would flare out of control again if I let my shields return to a maintainable level.

“Okay, fair warning,” I told Roy. Then I loosened my mental hold, letting the vines in my mind relax—not open, they still maintained a solid wall, but no longer in a vicelike knot. The pain in my head lessened as I stopped working so hard, and I waited for the assault from my own magic.

It didn’t come. The magic didn’t even rise to test the weakened shields. I blinked in surprise. I could still feel it inside me, like I was a cup filled to the brim and close to boiling over, but for now the magic wasn’t overflowing. I let out a sigh, relaxing back into my chair.

“So it’s done?” Roy asked, his expression torn between disappointment and relief. At my nod, his shoulders rolled forward a bit and he said, “Oh, okay.”

He looked around my sparsely decorated office and then reached for one of the only things on my desk besides my laptop—a framed photo of my dog. I leapt from my chair and grabbed it before he could.

“Hands off,” I warned.

“Ah, come on, Alex, I just want to see what that little jolt did,” he said, shoving his thick-rimmed glasses farther up his nose.

The first time I’d pumped magic into Roy, he’d gone from an average haunt not able to interact with reality at all, to a passable poltergeist capable of moving small objects when he concentrated. I’d siphoned power into him a few times since then, but it had always been small, controlled amounts. Even with that, he was getting better at picking up, and sometimes throwing, real objects—and I had the broken dishes to prove it. Of course, if he was fully manifested currently, he’d be able to interact with anything he wanted until the energy dissipated.

“Go play with that chair,” I said, nodding at one of the two client chairs at the other side of my desk—not that any clients had actually sat in them yet.

Roy glanced at the chairs and his shoulders sank as if he were deflating into himself. “You know, I’ve been thinking…” he said.

Uh-oh. Did I even want to know?

Not that I had a choice. After shuffling his feet for a moment, Roy looked up, but his gaze was somewhere over my shoulder as he spoke. “I was…Well, since I’m here all the time anyway…I just thought…” He trailed off again and I was beginning to think he’d never get around to whatever he wanted to say when his gaze snapped to meet mine, he straightened, and said, “I think I should have my own office.”

“You’re a ghost.”

“Yeah, but you’re not using the room next door.”

“Roy, that’s a broom closet.”

The ghost frowned at me, but he didn’t back down. “You don’t have a broom.”

True. But we’d eventually have to get a vacuum cleaner as the office was carpeted. I almost said as much, but Roy was still standing up straight, watching my expression, and I knew that he must have been building up to asking me about an office for days.

“Why would you want an office that exists in the living world? I mean really, what’s the point?”

“Because it would be mine,” he said, his gaze going distant for a moment. Then his eyes snapped to me again and he clearly didn’t like what he saw in my expression. “Oh come on, Alex. It’s not like I haven’t been helpful before. Remember when I helped you sneak into the State House? Or when I trailed those Spells for the Rest of Us guys? I can help on your cases. I just want my own office.”

The last was more whine than statement, and his bottom lip protruded slightly as he shoved his balled fists into his pockets. Geez, I hated when he pouted.

“Okay, fine. The broom closet is all yours,” I said, and Roy immediately perked up, a smile breaking across his face. “But you’ll have to share it with a vacuum when we finally get one. And you have to get along with Rianna.”

That smile darkened and fell as quickly as it had appeared. I couldn’t exactly fault the response, after all, Rianna had played a major role in his death. Not an easy thing to forgive and forget, even if she had been under someone else’s control at the time.

“Just stay out of each other’s way,” I said as the ghost slouched into a sulk. Avoiding each other shouldn’t be hard, she couldn’t see him unless she tapped the grave, so as long as he ignored her, everything should be fine. A small smile crept along the edge of Roy’s mouth and I added, “And no hurling objects at her.”

The smile slipped and he gave me a “Who me?” look, which I didn’t buy in the least.

“If I hear about her getting assaulted by office supplies, you lose all rights to the office,” I warned and his shoulders curled farther forward as he huffed out a breath.

“Fine. Can you bring my blocks to my office?”

I nodded. I’d bought him the blocks to save what was left of my dishware.

“And the Scrabble game?”

Again I nodded.

“And can I have my name added to the door?”

“Don’t push it.”

“Ah, but—” Whatever argument he might have concocted to try to convince me that putting a dead norm’s name on the sign was a brilliant plan stopped abruptly as the chime on the door rang through the front room.

I expected to feel the familiar tingle of Rianna’s magic, but I could sense only the smallest bit of magic, and it wasn’t familiar.

I jumped to my feet. A client? Finally. I rushed around my desk, but Roy stepped into my path, his eyes wide behind his thick-framed glasses.

“Am I…?” The whispered question trailed off as Roy gave an exaggerated wave of his hand and I knew he was asking if he would be visible to whomever had entered.

I honestly had no idea. The ghost looked pretty solid to me, but he always did so I wasn’t a great judge. Then there was the fact I still had other planes filling my peripheral vision, giving me glimpses of the world decayed, of colorful wisps of magic, of the emotional shadow of those who’d passed through the room before, and occasionally flashes of planes I couldn’t identify. Recently, determining if what I saw was what everyone else in the world saw was a lot more complicated than it should have been.

“Just go with it,” I whispered back. “If the client sees you, we’ll deal with it.”

Then I stepped around him and rushed into the lobby to greet what I hoped was our first walk-in client.