Chapter 5

By the time Mrs. Kingly emerged from the bathroom, her makeup was once again perfect—as was the cold chip on her shoulder. Aside from the fact he’d lied to his widow during their last conversation, I hadn’t learned anything useful from James, and of course, I went back to ignoring him as soon as the door opened and Mrs. Kingly reappeared. James didn’t want to talk about whatever had happened during those unaccounted for days. I’d have to wait until I questioned the shade to get any real answers.

“You can do the ritual tonight, right?” Mrs. Kingly asked, and I hesitated, my hand halfway across the desk with the blank contract for hire that Rianna and I had drawn up as well as several OMIH regulated forms.

Tonight? “I don’t do nighttime rituals.”

“You don’t need darkness and moonlight and all that?”

I didn’t groan at the stereotypical—and completely incorrect—assumption but my “no” was perhaps overly terse. I ended up blind enough in broad daylight, doing rituals at night would be downright stupid.

“But you can do it today? His body will be picked up tomorrow and you need to prove it was murder before he leaves the morgue.”

Her insistence was on the side of frantic and I had the feeling that she was one breath away from either yelling or a repeat of the earlier waterworks. Neither appealed to me, so I aimed for a placating smile and tried to keep my voice calm as I said, “I can raise the shade this afternoon, but I can’t give you any guarantees that his death will be decreed a murder. It all depends on what the shade says.”

“It’s murder.” The words were matter of fact without any room for question as she signed and dated a consent form to grant me access to her husband’s body while in the morgue.

I wished I could be half as sure.

“And find out where he was those three days he was missing. I’m assuming kidnapped by whomever killed him, but I need to know.” The smallest tinge of doubt crawled into her voice with the last, as if some small part of her believed what everyone kept telling her—that her husband’s death was a suicide.

Well, I’ll know soon enough.

I went over the contract with her but she stopped me when I reached the portion about paying a retainer fee upfront.

“How will I know you’ve really performed the ritual? What if something goes wrong? Am I just out that money?”

“You’re more than welcome to accompany me,” I said and the color drained from her face.

“You could maybe, record it? In audio I mean. I don’t want to see…”

I nodded, not making her finish the sentence. Since I’d be performing the ritual at the morgue, making a recording wouldn’t be an issue. Hell, when I consulted for the police, the ritual was always recorded. The fact that all the equipment needed was already set up for autopsies helped. I’d just record the ritual and then detach the audio file for Mrs. Kingly.

We were finishing the last of the paperwork when the chime on the door sounded. This time I did recognize the tingle of magic—Rianna. She popped into my office, Desmond at her side, but backed out again when she saw the client at my desk. She smiled, but curiosity peeked through her expression. I wasn’t surprised when her eyes flashed with an inner light as she opened her shields. Her gaze landed on the ghost of James Kingly and that smile widened as her eyebrows raised in an expression I recognized well from our academy days. I could almost hear the unsaid “I told you so.” I wanted to roll my eyes—just like I would have when we were younger, but I didn’t think Mrs. Kingly would find that half as amusing as Rianna. I waved my hand, the movement more shooing motion than greeting.

Once Mrs. Kingly left, I grabbed my purse and headed across the lobby. “I’m off to the morgue.”

Rianna looked up from a paperback—a mystery novel, no doubt. “You’ll be back in time for dinner?”

She needed to be inside Faerie during sunset and sunrise as those were the times between, when day and night changed and Faerie’s magic was at its weakest. If she strayed in the mortal realm without Faerie’s magic supporting her, all her years would catch up with her. I’d seen it happen to another changeling and it wasn’t a pretty way to die.

“If it looks like I’m running late, go on without me. Holly and I can meet you there.” After all, Rianna didn’t need me to get into Faerie, and with signs of fall all around, the sunset was earlier each evening. Holly, on the other hand, needed an escort who was on the VIP list.

Rianna nodded, but her expression dropped slightly before her eyes returned to her book. I waved at Desmond as I passed him. The barghest ignored me, which was pretty typical.

I’d just reached the front door when I paused.

“Oh yeah, by the way,” I said, my hand hovering over the door handle. “I forgot to tell you. Roy moved into the broom closet.” And with that, I left.

“She’s roped you into this wild-goose chase too, huh?” Tamara, the lead medical examiner and one of my best friends, said as she wheeled a sheet-covered gurney out of the morgue’s cold room. “I mean, it’s a terrible, tragic thing, and I pity her having to deal with it in her condition, but she needs to come to terms with the fact her husband jumped.”

“So you don’t think there’s a chance this is anything other than suicide?” I asked, but I was only half paying attention. Grave essence was wafting out of the now shut door of the cold room, and despite the fact I once again had my shields locked as tightly as I could possibly maintain, I could feel its cold but seductive touch. I could also feel the fact she had nine bodies in the room, and the gender and approximate age of each—way too much was getting through my shields.

Tamara didn’t notice my distraction, that or she was accustomed to me acting a little odd in the morgue. “Not a chance. This guy didn’t just jump, he dove off that building, and judging by the injures I found—and almost as important, those I didn’t find—he didn’t attempt to brace himself or break the fall.”

Then why is the ghost so insistent? I glanced at the gurney. The lumpy form the sheet covered was too flat, the outline wrong for an adult man’s body. But it was a body, and from my interaction with his ghost, I could tell without a doubt it was Kingly’s body. I was glad that sheet wouldn’t have to be removed, but I wasn’t looking forward to seeing the condition of his shade.

“You staying for this or are you going to send in one of your interns?” Because chain of evidence demanded someone official stay with the body while I performed my ritual, but I knew Tamara had just acquired a couple of new interns and she enjoyed breaking them in by letting me freak them out.

“Oh, I’m staying,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “After everything that woman put my office through, I want to hear this selfish prick admit he jumped. Besides, I’ve barely seen you in a month. Holly is suddenly too busy to go to lunch, ever. And you’ve stood me up for dinner twice. I’m seriously having a case of third wheel syndrome here. Too old to hang, maybe?”

She made it sound like a joke, but I could hear something else, something hurt, in her voice. I cringed and tried to hide the reaction by focusing on digging through my purse.

I found the tube of waxy chalk I used for drawing circles for indoor rituals and started working my way around the gurney.

“You know that’s not it. The timing just hasn’t worked. Besides, you’re not that old.”

Tamara huffed. “I’m a bride in my late thirties trying to plan a wedding without the help of my two closest friends.”

I nearly dropped the chalk. “You and Ethan finally set a date?” She’d been wearing a huge diamond for at least four months now, but while Ethan had proposed, he wouldn’t commit to a date.

“Yeah.” A dreamy smile spread across Tamara’s face, her eyes going distant and a slightly dopey expression claiming her face. Then her gaze snapped back to me and the softness faded. “And you’d know that, and that I want you and Holly to be my bridesmaids, if you weren’t avoiding me.”

“I’m not avoiding you.” And it wasn’t a lie, or I wouldn’t have been able to say it—I was too fae to lie. And that was part of the problem. Holly and I were both dealing with issues tied in with Faerie, and well, we hadn’t told Tamara any of it. The less she knew, the safer she was. Even though the fae had come out of the mushroom ring seventy years ago, they were still a secretive bunch. But I was feeling guilty enough that if she pressed me, I might just spill more than I should. How had I missed that they’d finally set a date?

I rushed the last quarter of my circle—which in my haste was more oblong than circular, but it would work—and flicked on the camera.

“I’m going to start the ritual now,” I said, knowing that I was only stalling the conversation, not stopping it.

The look Tamara gave me confirmed that fact, and I closed my eyes so she couldn’t see the guilt there. Not much I could do about that right now.

Concentrating, I focused on clearing my mind and centering myself—not an easy task with Tamara’s news rambling around my brain on top of the grave magic fighting to break out of my shields while grave essence struggled to force its way in. I took a long breath. Let it out. I couldn’t cast a circle with grave magic, and I wasn’t working without one, especially when my magic was behaving erratically. I breathed in again, focusing on my lungs, my body, as I struggled for some semblance of calmness.

It took me longer than I liked to block out the distractions enough to concentrate on the obsidian ring on my finger. The ring carried raw energy drawn down from the Aetheric plane, and unlike my grave magic, which was a wyrd ability and had only one true purpose, this raw Aetheric energy was limited only by the caster welding it. I channeled a thin stream of the stored magic into the circle I’d drawn and a shimmering blue barrier sprang up around me.

The assault of grave essence immediately lessened. It didn’t vanish—after all, I had James’s corpse in the circle with me, which emanated the power of the grave. But the circle did block out the other corpses in the morgue, making the grave essence clawing at me in an attempt to crawl under my skin manageable, if not exactly comfortable.

Of course, letting it in was exactly what I had to do.

I removed the silver charm bracelet that carried my extra shields, and as soon as I unlatched the clasp, my pent-up magic roared to the surface, testing the now weakened resistance between it and the grave essence that raked across my mind. I still had my personal shields, but my psyche had already crossed the chasm separating the living and the dead enough for a howling wind to swirl around my circle, blowing curls in my face. If I’d opened my eyes, I knew I’d see the room in the ruined devastation that existed on the closest layers of the land of the dead. But I wasn’t ready to open my eyes yet.

I still had the most important part of the ritual to complete.

I cracked my mental shields slowly, trying to control the outpour of magic. It almost worked. My magic latched on to the corpse as grave essence flooded my body, filling my blood, my very bones, with the chill of the grave. The invasion hurt. I was alive. The essence looking for a home in my body wasn’t. I might have been cold to the touch for most people, but I still had my own living heat, and it warred with the chill of the grave.

So I released that heat, giving away a part of myself and sending it into the corpse already filled with my power.

Then I opened my eyes. The room had decayed around me, at least in appearance. Though if I wasn’t careful, the seemingly threadbare sheet covering a gurney so rusted a bump might turn it into a mound of red rust could blend with mortal reality, becoming the true state of the objects. That was what it meant to be a planeweaver. I could tie different planes of existence together. And the land of the dead wasn’t the only reality now filling my vision. The Aetheric, the plane of magic, was also visible as it filled the room with swirls of colorful raw energy. If I wanted, I could have reached out and drawn on that magic. A dangerous temptation, very dangerous, as witches were meant to touch the Aetheric only with their projected psyche. Beyond those planes were others, but I tried not to focus on them because I had very little control over my planeweaving ability, and no one to teach me.

Instead I focused on the body under the rotted sheet. With so much of my magic filling the corpse, it took only a twitch of my will to form the man’s memories into a shade. It sat up through the sheet, seemingly unaware of its crushed and misshapen head and broken body. I averted my eyes from the mangled mess. Unlike ghosts, which tended to look like how the person had perceived themselves during life, shades always appeared as the body existed the moment before the soul was collected.

With the shade raised, I focused on a new mental shield I’d spent the last month constructing. It sprang up in my mind’s eye like an opaque bubble around my psyche. Immediately the layers of different realities dimmed. They didn’t disappear, and the shield didn’t stop the grave essence, but in theory it helped prevent my powers from reaching across those planes of reality. Also, from previous rituals, I’d noticed that my eyesight took considerably less damage when my psyche only looked across the planes through the shield, as opposed to having an open channel.

Shield in place, I turned back to the shade I’d raised, though I couldn’t bring myself to look directly at its misshapen form.

“What is your name?” I asked. I knew his name, of course, but usually when I raised a shade in the morgue, it was for an official police case, and the shade had to identify itself for the record. It had become habit.

“James Kingly.”

“James, do you remember how you died?”

The shade sat perfectly still, not answering. Shades always answered immediately, unless the question was outside the scope of what the body remembered. His death shouldn’t have been hard to recall.

A bubble of panic built in my chest, pressing against my lungs so it was hard to breathe. Shades were nothing more than memories held together by grave magic and the witch’s will, but my magic had become erratic recently and I’d filled the corpse with a hell of a lot of it.

Then the shade spoke, the delay, which had felt like forever, only a few seconds. “There was blood and pain. Things were broken. I was on my back and then…” He trailed off, which meant that was the moment a collector had freed his soul and the RECORD button on his life had stopped.

Okay, so he’d described the moment of his death. I’d asked that same question to hundreds of shades and most described the events leading up to their deaths, not just the last moment. Did my grave magic go wrong? It was the one magic I’d always been able to rely on behaving. My spellcasting sucked, and the whole planeweaving thing was new and a mess, but I’d always been able to raise shades, and I was damn good at it. So what the hell was going on?

“Before the blood and pain, what were you doing?”

No hesitation this time. “Sitting in Delaney’s draining my second beer.”

I stared at the shade, speechless. That isn’t possible.

From outside my circle Tamara said, “How can he not remember jumping? His blood alcohol level wasn’t near high enough for him to have stumbled over the edge of that building in a drunken stupor. And where the heck is Delaney’s—I’ve never heard of it. I thought shades couldn’t lie.”

“They can’t.” Or at least they weren’t supposed to be able to. They were just memories. All will, ego, and emotion had left with the soul when it was ripped from the body.

“Rest now,” I told the shade, pushing it back into the body. I drew part of my magic out of the corpse, and then called the shade again. It returned, slightly more translucent than before. I asked the shade the same question, and got the exact same answer.

“That’s not possible,” I said, seriously wishing I had a chair inside the circle because collapsing into a seat sounded like a plan. But that wasn’t an option. “James, do you remember being on the roof of Motel Styx?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been to Motel Styx?”

“No.” No hesitation. No emotion. It was the type of response I expected. Except it wasn’t true. I knew, without a doubt, that he’d been at that building.

What the hell?

“I think the OMIH might have to reevaluate the honesty of shades,” Tamara said, pacing the edge of my circle.

Maybe, but…“James, did you jump off the roof of Motel Styx?”

“No.”

“Have you had suicidal thoughts in the last six months?”

“No.”

“Did you lie to your wife about meeting clients and instead go to an Irish pub?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” I hadn’t had a chance to ask James’s ghost that question before his wife returned, but then he’d been dodgy about admitting he’d been at the pub for any reason other than what he’d told his wife. I much preferred the shade’s direct, unemotional answers.

“When Nina got pregnant, we both agreed that since she couldn’t drink, I wouldn’t either. But I needed a beer.”

Or two, apparently. “What time did you leave the pub?”

The shade didn’t answer.

Tamara stopped pacing and frowned at the shade through the blue haze of my circle. “What is wrong with him, Alex? Doesn’t he have to answer you?”

He did. Unless he doesn’t know the answer. I no longer feared my magic had gone awry. Everything the shade said confirmed what the ghost had told me in my office. But that meant that James Kingly had lost three days of his life, including the moment he’d decided to die.