The first time I realized I could feel corpses, I had nightmares for a week. I was a child at the time, so that was understandable. These days I was accustomed to the clammy reach of the grave that lifted from dead bodies. To the eerie feeling of my own innate magic, responding and filling me with the unrequested knowledge of how recently a person died, their gender, and the approximate age they’d been at death. When I anticipated encountering a corpse, I tightened my mental shields and worked at keeping my magic at bay, but usually that was only necessary at places like graveyards, the morgue, and funeral homes—places one might expect to find a body.

I never expected to feel a corpse walking across the street in the middle of the Magic Quarter.

“Alex? I’ve lost you, haven’t I?” Tamara, one of my best friends and my current lunch mate, asked. She sighed, twisting in her seat to scan the sidewalk beyond the small café. “Huh. Which one is he? I may be married and knocked up, but I know a good-looking man when I see one, and, girl, I don’t see one. Who are you staring at?”

“That guy,” I said, nodding my head at a man in a brown suit crossing the street.

Tamara glanced at the squat middle-aged man who was more than a little soft in the middle, and then she cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’ve seen what you have at home, so I take it this is business. Did you bring one of your cases to our lunch?”

I ignored the “at home” comment, as that situation was more than a little complicated, and shook my head. “My case docket is clear,” I said absently, and let my senses stretch. When I concentrated, I could feel grave essences reaching from corpses in my vicinity. All corpses. There were decades of dead and decaying rats in the sewer below the streets and smaller creatures like insects that barely even made a blip on my radar, but like called to like, and my magic zeroed in on the man.

“He’s dead,” I said, and even to me my voice sounded unsure.

Tamara blinked at me, likely waiting for me to reveal the joke, but when I pushed out of my seat as the man turned up the street, she grabbed my arm. “I’m the lead medical examiner for Nekros City, and I can tell you with ninety-nine point nine percent certainty that the man walking down the street is very much alive.” She put extra emphasis on the word “walking,” and on any other day, I would have agreed with her.

My own eyes agreed with her. But my magic, that part of me that touched the grave, that could piece together shades from the memories left in every cell of a body, disagreed. That man, walking or not, was a corpse. Granted, he was a fresh one—the way he felt to my magic told me he couldn’t have been dead more than an hour. But he was dead.

So how the hell had he just walked into a shop specializing in high-end magical components?

After dropping enough crumpled dollars on the table to cover my portion of the bill and tip, I sprinted toward the shop across the street. Behind me, Tamara grumbled under her breath, but after a moment I heard her chair slide back as she pushed away from the table. She hadn’t quite caught up as I reached the door to the shop.

The shop’s wards tingled along my skin as I stepped through the threshold. I’d never been in this shop before. The types of magic I could create didn’t require any outside components aside from the occasional storage vessel, like the silver charms dangling from my bracelet—not that I’d created most of those either. I sucked at traditional spell casting. But my ability to sense magic was acute, and the wards on the doors had some hard-core theft deterrents that prickled at the edge of my senses. Of course, most magic that used components required items that were rare or hard to acquire, or were just plain dangerous, so it probably wasn’t surprising that such extensive wards were in place.

Not everyone could feel wards though. Clearly the corpse I’d followed in didn’t comprehend the extent of the shop’s theft-deterrent system.

I’d entered only minutes behind him, but he almost barreled into me as I stepped through the door. His shoulder brushed me at the same moment he hit the antitheft wards, and several things happened at once. The wards snapped to life, blaring a warning to the shopkeeper to let him know something was being stolen. Simultaneously, a theft-deterring paralytic spell sparked across the would-be thief, locking his body—and the merchandise—in place.

Unfortunately, while the wards were powerful, they weren’t terribly specific. Where his shoulder touched mine, the spell jumped from him to me, immobilizing me as well. Under normal circumstances, that would majorly suck. Under these circumstances? It was so much worse.

My magic still identified him as a corpse. I could feel the grave essence lifting off him, clawing at me. My mental shields were strong, but my magic liked dead things. A lot. And I hadn’t raised a shade in nearly a week, so my magic was looking for release. Typically I made a point not to touch the dead. Now I couldn’t get away.

My magic battered against the inside of my shields, looking for chinks in my mental walls that it could jump through. Fighting the spell holding me was a waste of energy—I was well and truly caught—so I focused all of my attention on holding back my own magic. But I could feel the chilled fingers of the grave sliding under my skin, worming its way into me and making paths for my magic to leach into the animated corpse frozen against me.

I wanted to open my shields and See what the thing in front of me was truly made of. But if I cracked my shields to gaze across the planes of reality and get a good look at the body, more of my magic would escape. And too much was already whispering through my shields, making fissures where more could follow. Sweat broke out on my paralyzed brow as I poured my focus into holding my magic at bay.

But I was touching a corpse.

The grave essence leaking from the body clawed at the fractures my magic was chewing through my shields, and it was too much. If I could have stepped back . . . But I couldn’t.

All at once a chunk of my mental wall caved, and the magic rushed out of me. Color washed over the world as the Aetheric plane snapped into focus around me. A wind lifted from the land of the dead, stirring my curls and chilling my clammy skin. I could see the network of magic holding me in place, as well as the knot of magic in the sprung ward, but more important, I could see the magic coating the corpse in front of me. And it was a corpse, no doubt about it, the dead skin sagging, bloating.

But under the dead flesh, a yellow glimmer of a soul glowed.

Which meant the body was both dead and alive. Considering it was up and walking around, it was a heck of a lot more alive than a dead body should have been.

The soul inside was the color I associated with humans, so this wasn’t a corpse being worn and walked around by something from Faerie or one of the other planes. I’d never seen spellwork like what shimmered across the dead flesh, but whatever kind of half-life the man existed in wasn’t going to last much longer if I couldn’t get ahold of my magic.

The hole in my shields wasn’t huge, but I could feel my magic filling the body. And the grave and souls didn’t get along. I couldn’t stop the hemorrhage of magic, but I managed to slow it to a trickle.

I’d barely noticed the crowd gathering around us until one of the shopkeepers began releasing the spell holding us. If the antitheft paralyzing spell was dropped, I’d be able to get my distance from the corpse.

But either he wasn’t a very good witch, or he was stalling—likely to wait for the cops—because he was taking his sweet time, and more and more of my magic was flowing out.

I’d ejected souls from bodies before. While souls didn’t like the touch of the grave, they tended to cling to their flesh pretty hard, and it took directed magic to pry them free. I was actively fighting expelling the soul, and only a small portion of my magic had filled the corpse, but the soul’s connection to the body felt weak, tentative.

I couldn’t shift my gaze to the shopkeeper, but I could see him out of the corner of my eye. Oh please, release the damn immobility spell.

Too late.

In a burst of light, the soul popped free of the corpse.

Nothing about the body changed. It had already been dead and it was still held immobile by the spell, but the soul was free. For a long moment it was almost too bright to look at, a shimmering crystalline yellow. But souls can’t exist without a body, and in a heartbeat the glow dimmed, the form solidifying as the soul transitioned to the purgatory landscape of the land of the dead.

If I could have stumbled back in shock, I would have, but I couldn’t even blink in surprise. Not because the soul transitioned—that I had expected—but because the ghost now standing in front of me was that of a young woman.

I glanced from the balding middle-aged man to the woman who may not have been old enough to drink. Ghosts weren’t like shades. While shades were always an exact representation of the person at the moment of death, ghosts tended to reflect how a person perceived himself. Appearing a little younger or more attractive was common. I supposed it was even possible that if someone identified across gender lines, their ghost might reflect that discrepancy. But this ghost was a drastically different age as well as being a different gender and ethnicity. And that was unheard-of.

The ghost-girl looked around, no longer inhibited by the spell still holding the body she’d been inside. Her dark eyes grew large and round, and her motions took on the frantic quickness of panic.

A panic that didn’t last long, as a figure appeared beside her. He was dressed from head to toe in gray and carried a silver skull-topped cane. The Gray Man. A soul collector.

I wanted to scream No. To run between him and the girl, who clearly hadn’t belonged in the dead body. Things didn’t add up here, and I wanted to talk to the ghost.

But I still couldn’t move.

I stood silently frozen in place as the Gray Man reached out, grabbed the soul, and sent her on to wherever souls went next. Then he turned and looked at the body she’d just vacated. His expression gave away nothing as his gazed moved to me. He gave me one stern shake of his head, which could have meant anything from the fact that he also didn’t know what was going on or that he knew but it wasn’t any business of mine.

Then he vanished.

Of course, that was the moment the shopkeeper released the spell. I stumbled back as the now truly dead body collapsed.

I barely registered the gasps and screams. I was far too busy staring at the spot where the Gray Man and the ghost had been. She hadn’t belonged in the wrongly animated body. So the question was, how the hell had she gotten into someone else’s body? And why?