Chapter 30

My father dropped me off at the Tongues for the Dead office. The drive was tense, for me at least. He’d refused to answer any more questions. In fact, all he’d said during the drive was that I should call him later in the week to schedule another lesson. As much as I needed to learn glamour, I doubted I’d take him up on the offer. Caleb could help me from this point out. I’d lose the opportunity to work in a private pocket of Faerie, but I hated feeling like a pawn and the more I talked with my father, the scarier his living chessboard became.

After he drove away, I gave a weary glance at my office. It was Saturday, and we weren’t open, but I needed to update my clients and I wasn’t up for long phone calls and extended explanations. E-mail sounded a lot easier, but both Nina Kingly and Kelly Kirkwood’s contact information was at the office. So, first stop office, and then I was going home, burying my head under my pillow, and starting the day over. Or was it that I had to start yesterday over? I’d lost most of the night, so my internal clock was off, but the last few hours would have exhausted me even if I’d had a good night’s sleep.

I dug out my keys but before I could lift them, the lock clicked open. I froze. Who…?

Roy’s head popped through the closed door. “About time you got here. Where the hell have you been? We have a client.”

I blinked at him. A client? Maybe I’d fallen asleep and this was a dream because ghosts didn’t bring in clients.

“Hurry up, Alex,” Roy said, stepping farther through the door. “He’s been waiting for hours now and he’s jumpy.”

Could this day get any weirder? Roy had already unlocked the door for me, so I pushed it open and stepped into the sunlit room beyond. Roy had the client waiting in the dark? And how would a customer get in—the door had been locked. Of course, Roy had proven he was more than capable of overcoming that particular hurdle.

I turned on the lights and headed for my office—which I could already tell was also dark. Where…?

“My office,” Roy said, striding toward his door.

“You put a client in the broom closet?”

That earned a frown from the ghost, but he ignored me as he floated through his “office” door. I, on the other hand, had to actually open the door.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but a ghost huddling in the back corner of the closet wasn’t on the list. The ghost, who was faded to the point that even in my eyes all his color had washed away, cringed as he caught sight of Roy. He backed farther into the corner until his shoulders passed into the unpainted sheetrock of the walls.

“It’s okay,” Roy said, but he kept his distance. I don’t know if it was because he was trying to put the other ghost at ease or because he didn’t want to take the chance of getting too close. Once he’d crossed the threshold, he’d moved no farther into the small room. “This is Alex, the friend I told you about.”

“But she’s alive.” The ghost’s voice was like a whisper carried on the wind. I was surprised he’d managed to cling to his identity. Most ghosts as far gone as him were merely haunts.

“Yes, I’m alive,” I said, and turned to Roy. “I thought you said ghosts didn’t do the social thing? What’s going on?”

Roy shrugged. “Special circumstance. I found him trying to coax his body out of a graveyard.”

Why was it the more he explained the more lost I became? “I think you better start at the beginning.”

Roy looked over at the other ghost. “Steven?”

“My body, it’s stuck in Sleepy Knoll Cemetery—not that it’s listening to me anyway.” The ghost wasn’t whispering, but he might as well have been. It was hard to listen to.

“Give me your hand,” I told the ghost.

Steven backed farther into the wall. “Why?”

“So your voice doesn’t sound like wind rustling through dry reeds,” I said, taking a step forward and lifting my palm toward him.

The ghost stared at my outstretched hand. “But, you’re alive.”

“Yeah, we covered that part already. Trust me, okay?”

Steven reached out a tentative hand so transparent that for a moment, I was afraid he was so far gone we may not be solid to each other. But as his trembling fingers touched the tips of mine, I could feel the resistance, the weight, of the other being.

His nearly clear eyes flew wide, staring at where the tips of our fingers touched. I stepped forward and wrapped my hand around his. Those eyes, wide with both fear and amazement, stared and I felt him preparing to jerk his hand away, but after the initial flicker of panic that made his entire body jolt, he went still.

Opening my shields a crack, I channeled the slightest bit of power through my body and into the ghost. Chill bumps lifted on my skin, the lightest breeze crossing over from the land of the dead. The ghost’s shape filled in, becoming more solid. I’d raised a lot of shades over the last few days, plus the crash course in glamour, so I didn’t give him much energy, not even enough to bring about more than a hint of color, but the trickle I channeled into him carried him closer to the land of the living.

“Wow,” he whispered, his voice stronger, clearer. Which was what I wanted. I closed my shields and dropped his hand.

“I think I’m jealous.” Roy made the comment light, like a joke, but he shoved his hands into his pockets with more force than normal and his shoulder slouched so far forward that he looked like he had a humped back.

Nothing sexual existed between Roy and me, which meant if he was jealous it was all about power. “You start treating me like a food source and I’m cutting you off,” I warned him and the ghost gave me a big-eyed “who me?” look before shoving his glasses farther up his nose and looking away. I shook my head with a sigh—sometimes I really didn’t know about that ghost.

I turned back to Steven.

“You said something about your body being stuck in a cemetery—that’s where your body is supposed to be. You’re lucky you were smart enough not to follow it or you’d be stuck there too.”

“No, you don’t get it, my body, it’s walking around the cemetery. Well, really, more like scuttling. And what it’s doing…” He shuddered. “It ate a woman. I mean, she was already dead, but my body ate her.”

I went still, my pulse crashing in my ears. “Your body is a ghoul? When were you attacked and where?”

The ghost frowned, and Roy stepped closer, elbowing me lightly. “This is the really good part. Tell her, Steven.”

“I, I don’t remember being attacked. I remember fixing myself a bowl of bran cereal—my wife has been on a real health kick lately—and the next thing I knew it was night and I was squished under a park bench and something dark and frightening was sliding into my body, pushing me out.”

That doesn’t sound like a collector.

“Then this guy showed up and told me it was time to go, but my body was all wrong and it was shambling away. So I fought with the guy, because I couldn’t just let my body walk away like that. And the man let me go, telling me he’d be there when I was ready.”

Now that sounded like a collector. In fact, it sounded like Death—he’d told me the exact same thing once, only it hadn’t been my soul in question. Choice. It was the hardest damn lesson I ever learned, and I was only five.

Steven continued his story without notice of my momentary distraction. “I followed my body, trying to figure out how to make it stop. I mean, if I was dead, I should be properly dead, right? It headed straight for the closest cemetery, and I almost followed it inside, but the gate felt wrong, so I waited. That’s when I noticed the moon. I’m a bit of a star freak, and I’d been using my telescope the night before—only it wasn’t the night before. Somehow between breakfast and waking up under the park bench, I lost three whole days.”

Oh crap. That sounded awfully familiar. The rider’s victims always lost three days, at least before he killed them. But they weren’t ghouls—they were just corpses.

“Steven, I need you to think hard. When you were following your body, did it look hurt? I mean, claw marks, or signs that you might have killed yourself and not remember?”

The ghost shook his head. “No. I mean, I didn’t look like myself. I was thin, my skin drawn back tight, and I had scary-ass teeth and talons, but I didn’t look hurt.”

The blood drained from my face and a shiver shook me. I’d never seen a ghoul, never thought about what they looked like. Briar had mentioned something about a transition, but I hadn’t considered the physical changes. Like the sharp teeth that allowed them to rip through flesh—teeth like I’d seen in Kirkwood’s burnt body. And then there was the rapid burning of all fat and desiccation of the body, which every one of the rider’s victims displayed to some extent or another.

The rider wasn’t committing suicide just to jump to a new host—he was killing his host before his presence turned the body into a ghoul.