Chapter 6
“Back up. What do you mean, it’s your body?” Even as I asked, possibilities were running through my head.
“Just what I said.” The ghost shoved his fists in his pockets. “I’m the one who is dead on that damn slab.”
I frowned. I’d had nothing but questions since I’d seen the spell on Coleman’s body—not that I’d had much time to think about it. But my stock theory made the most sense, both because of the way my grave magic failed to latch on to the body and because of the basis of stock in folklore. Of course, most folklore was nonsense, but there were grains of truth in it. Even now, seventy years after the Magical Awakening and the fae coming out of the mushroom ring, stock had never been proven or disproven to exist. You can bet that every case of SIDS was carefully examined.
Though the stock theory did give me something to report to Casey to justify my fee.
But the problem with the theory kept circling back to the same question. If the fae were responsible for the assassination of the governor, why would they keep his body two weeks and then plant a fake? It didn’t make sense. Of course, Roy wasn’t disputing the fact the body was stock—or, at least, not disputing that it was something spelled to look like something else. He was saying it really was a body. Just not Coleman’s body. Which still didn’t explain why it didn’t register as dead.
I chewed at my lip and looked up at Roy. He was watching me, as if waiting for my thoughts to settle before he said any more.
Whatever he saw in my face seemed to reassure him, because he let out a breath. “You believe me. Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to tell someone?”
“I’m guessing about two weeks?” That was when the surveillance camera caught the shooting. Now that I really examined Roy, he did look as though he could have been Coleman’s unkempt younger cousin. His frame was right, and his hair, if cut, would have been identical. His eyes, too. It made sense that you’d find a body that already looked similar to the person you were making a stock of. Poor guy, murdered because of a vague resemblance.
Roy shook his head. “Two weeks? Try twelve years.”
“Wait. What?”
“Twelve years that bastard has been walking around wearing my stolen body. Then he goes and gets it shot and just abandons it. But will anyone ever know what happened to me? No. They’ll bury me under his fucking memorial, and my family, my girlfriend, will always be left guessing.”
My head reeled, and I backed up. My thighs bumped into my bed, and I sank onto the mattress. Twelve years?
That would be about the time Coleman showed up on the Nekros City political scene. If what Roy said was true, everything Coleman claimed to be, everything he claimed to believe in, was a lie. That is, if I believe the ghost.
“Prove it.” My voice was low, contained, and I was proud it didn’t waver with the uncertainty in my head.
Roy glared at me. “How the hell do I prove something like that?”
That was a good question. “How was it done?”
“I don’t know. I’m—I was—human. Coleman—he went by Aaron then—put me in a circle and ripped a hole in reality. This ghastly specter of a girl walked through, and between the two of them, they cast the ritual. I don’t remember all of it, just the shattering, tearing sensation as I was jerked from my body. Then Aaron collapsed, and my body stood up, walking around without me in it. Bastard is a body thief.” Roy paced as he spoke, and in my grave-sight I could see the air around him contracting and sparking. I was glad I’d circled him. He was one strong ghost.
My brain felt as though it was one step behind in this conversation. Every question Roy answered created a half dozen more. Who was Coleman? Scratch that—more important, what was Coleman? And what kind of spell could possibly rip one soul out of a body and let another one in?
I took a deep breath, trying to realign my thoughts.
Everything Roy had said was impossible, or at least highly improbable. And before the Magical Awakening, science and logic were the only truths. Even children didn’t believe in magic. I let out my breath.
“Okay, say I believe you. Does that mean Coleman is really dead or that he switched bodies?”
Roy looked at his feet. “He conned another sucker out of a body.”
“Who?”
He shrugged.
“Well, what did he look like?”
Roy’s face scrunched up as if the effort of remembering was hard on him. Then he shrugged again. “Middleaged guy. Brown hair.”
Great. That described half the men in the city. I glanced away, and my gaze dragged over my television.
It was hard to see the screen with my grave-sight insisting it was shattered, but I was still enough in the land of the living to make out the distorted image of my father, Lieutenant Governor Caine. Actually, Governor Caine, now that Coleman’s dead. I’d muted the TV hours ago, but now I walked over and turned up the volume. I can’t wait to find out what Daddy Dearest has to say about my film debut.
I didn’t get a chance to hear. By the time I got the volume up, Caine had stopped speaking and the anchor reappeared, a photo of my father superimposed in the background.
The anchor smiled so hard at the camera, his lips barely moved as he spoke. “It sounds like Governor Caine is picking up right where the late Governor Coleman left off.”
My mouth went dry as grave dust. My father was a middle-aged man. With brown hair. I whirled around, my eyes locking on Roy as I pointed at the screen.“Was it him? Was it Governor Caine’s body?”
The ghost squinted at the screen. He shook his head, and the world righted itself. I hadn’t even realized how worried I was until the weight lifted off my shoulders.
My father and I had our differences, and we might not have been speaking currently, and well, we’d pretty much disowned each other, but that didn’t mean I wanted his soul ripped out of his body and left to wander.
Roy finished his headshake with a shrug. “I don’t know. It could have been.”
The tension wrapped around me once again. “How can you not know?”
“I’ve been dead twelve years. After a while, the living I don’t know all start looking the same.” His bottom lip puckered out.
Perfect. A pouting ghost. Just what I need. The TV anchor had moved on to a new story, and I hit the mute button again. Then I walked to the bed and sat down.
The mindless movement gave me a moment to collect my thoughts.
“Okay, so it boils down to this,” I said, pulling my legs onto the bed and sitting cross-legged. “You have been following me because you want me to let people know your body was stolen. You say Coleman stole a new body before discarding yours, but you can’t tell me more than a vague description of the new victim. I miss anything?”
Roy smiled. “I might not know anything about the victim, but I know where the recent switch occurred. I can show you.”
———
I wrote down the address Roy gave me. I was vaguely familiar with the area, but when I cranked up my car, I didn’t head straight for the building. After all, if Roy was to be believed, I was about to break into the scene of a crime. I needed to make sure the press didn’t track me straight to it.
So I cruised downtown a while, constantly glancing in the rearview mirror to watch which vehicles were following me. Then I hit the interstate headed east toward Georgia. After about ten miles, I flipped around, passing Nekros to head toward the Alabama border. Once I was twenty miles away from the city proper, I made a quick exit and jumped on an old country road. There was no way anyone could follow me on the narrow unpopulated dirt road without my noticing.
They say that before the Magical Awakening, technology had made the world a smaller place. I think the saying had something to do with communication, and wasn’t meant to be literal, but one thing was certain: the resurgence of magic made the world bigger. The fae called the new areas that appeared “folded spaces” and claimed the land had always been there—mortals simply hadn’t perceived it before. Nekros City was built in the very center of such a space.
Inside the city and the surrounding suburbs, Nekros wasn’t unlike any other city in America, but in the country, things were different. Wilder legends haunted the forests, and creatures of old were rumored to live in the floodplains below the city. The very air seemed untamed, as if it resented the growing human influence.
I kept my doors locked as my car kicked up dust on the dirt roads. After I crossed the Sionan River on an old stone bridge rumored to predate the Magical Awakening, I angled north, reentering the city. Then I took back roads into the warehouse district in the south of the city.
By the time I reached the address Roy had given me, almost two hours had passed, but at least I knew no one had followed me. I glanced at my phone as I climbed out of the car. I wished I could call John and run everything by him. But I can’t, and even if he were out of the hospital, he wouldn’t know what to make of Roy’s story.
I certainly didn’t.
Looking up at the sprawling warehouse in front of me, I crossed the gravel pit I’d parked in. I kept telling people I was a PI, not just a magic eye, so it was time to start investigating.
Roy had told me that the loading docks were covered with aluminum siding, and that one of the sheets of aluminum in the center dock was loose, providing easy entrance to the bay where the ritual had been performed.
Finding the dock wasn’t a problem, but moving the panel with one hand in a brace wasn’t the easiest thing I’d ever done.
The panel screeched as I dragged it across the cement dock bed, but I couldn’t budge it more than a foot. Well, here goes. I shimmied through the hole I’d opened and was consumed by the gloom encasing the old warehouse.
I blinked, trying to give my eyes time to adjust. Slowly, mounds of dilapidated and forgotten crates came into focus. I made my way around the closest. There must be five years of dust on this thing. Could anyone have been here recently?
I knelt, peering down at the dust around my feet.
There were definitely more shoe prints than just mine in the room. Could belong to vagrants escaping the elements.
Or, Roy could be telling the truth.
I crept around several more crates. Nothing moved in the gloom. No sound but my own clunky boots on the cement floor. I stepped over a rotted piece of plywood.
Shadows clung everywhere, but the place looked undisturbed.
A chill crossed my neck, and I jumped. Whirling around, I found myself face to face with Roy.
“I was wondering if you’d join me,” I said.
He smiled and said something I couldn’t hear. It looked a lot like “This way,” and considering he stepped around me and headed for the door set in the inner wall, I assumed that was it.
“Okay, you lead,” I said, falling in step behind him.
I don’t know what I expected to find in the next room.
A body, maybe. Though I guess that didn’t make sense, as Coleman/Roy’s body had already turned up, and the other body was off walking around. What I didn’t expect was to find nothing.
Literally nothing.
The room had no boxes. No scattered wood beams. No broken crates. There wasn’t even dust on the floor. The massive room was just a large empty cavern lit by a couple of skylights in the roof.
Roy walked to the center of the room and gestured to the floor as if to say “here.” I frowned at him. This wasn’t useful. This wasn’t … anything. It was just a big empty room.
I stepped farther inside, and a tingle of magic brushed my bare arms. My breath caught in my throat. The touch of magic was oily, sinister, but it wasn’t active. Whatever I was feeling was a residual taint left by a ritual. The magic brushed against me again, as if tasting me, and the scratch wounds on my shoulder ached. Oh, I don’t like the feeling of this. Which, of course, meant I had to dig deeper.
I was a natural sensitive, nowhere near Tamara’s level, but I had a knack for locating and deducing the purpose of spells. If only I could cast half of what I sensed.
This spell, though, whatever had happened here, my mind tried to shy away from. Maybe my subconscious is smarter than me. I took several more steps into the room. The residual magic wrapped around me. It felt slimy, like being tangled in seaweed.
I crinkled my nose and closed my eyes, focusing on the spent magic that had been absorbed by the floor, the walls. The taint of magic swirled around me. More than one spell, one ritual, had to have been cast here. The chaotic jumble of magic battered my shields, each touch leaving behind a film of darkness. The spark of the inactive circle was directly in front of me, and I stepped across it.
I shouldn’t have.
The magic, which had only tainted the air before, roared like a tempest inside the circle. Still inactive. Still spent. But it crashed over me. Terror tore at me. Not my terror, not yet, but something outside trying to get in.
Echoes of screams roared in my ears, and the scratch on my shoulder turned cold, like a dagger of ice ripping into my flesh, hitting my soul.
The taste of bile filled my mouth, and my eyes flew open. I was still in the empty room. Nothing was here.
Nothing but the memory of a spell that was trying to rip me apart. And it’s not even active.
I backed up all the way out the door, out of the reach of the magic. My breathing was ragged, and I forced myself to draw in a lungful of air. Hold it until the count of three. Let it out. I repeated the exercise three times before I felt confident I could speak. “I’ve seen enough.”
Roy frowned at me, and whatever he said was clearly a protest to my leaving.
I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling chilled despite the heat wave. “I believe you, okay? It’s time to go.” Because I wasn’t going back in that room. Whatever magic had been worked in there had been big. Big and dark, and quite definitely evil.
———
PC met me at the door, his plumed tail wagging. I dropped my purse on the counter and scooped him up. He needed a bath; oil coated his gray skin, and the white crest on his head hung in limp clumps. I put bathing him on my list of things to do after I talked to Casey, saw John, and researched Roy’s story. Oh, and tried to figure out what kind of spell would allow someone to steal bodies. Not necessarily in that order.
PC wriggled in my arms. I plopped him down, and he ran to his bowl, staring at the emptiness inside. He wasn’t a fan of his recent switch from free feeding to rationed kibble.
“Yeah, I’m hungry too,” I told him. It was early for dinner, but breakfast hadn’t happened for me, and lunch had been chips. I grabbed the bag of far-too-quicklydiminishing dog food and measured out half a scoop for PC. Then I pulled open the fridge. I had an empty carton of cream, a pickle, and a single hot dog.
I grabbed the hot dog PC had already finished his kibble, so I ripped off the top third of the hot dog and tossed it to him before taking a large bite of the remainder. Mmmm, reprocessed and unidentifiable meat product. I bit off another mouthful.
At my feet, PC whined, yipping again.
“I outweigh you, mutt.”
He lifted his front paws, crossing them in the air. One paw hung funny where it emerged from the bright blue cast.
“Fine.” I tossed him another piece of the hot dog.
Stuffing the last bite in my mouth, I opened my laptop and typed “Roy Pearson” into the search box. I ran a records check, searching for speeding tickets, marriage applications, land purchases—anything that would have been uploaded to the net as public record. As I sifted through the mostly erroneous results, I couldn’t help thinking that Rianna, my roommate and best friend from the best years I’d spent at academy, would have been thrilled by this case. We were both grave witches and had decided to open a PI business after we both graduated, but she’d been the one gung-ho about becoming some sort of super sleuth. I’d been the one who went along with the idea mostly because I couldn’t not raise shades, so I figured I might as well get paid for doing it. But by the time I’d graduated from college, Rianna had disappeared. Searching for her had put everything I’d learned about being a private investigator to the test, but I’d never found a trace of her. Sometimes people just vanished—which usually meant they were dead. Like Roy. The only legitimate hit in my search for the ghost was a missing persons report. Filed twelve years ago. Damn. Everything Roy said could be true.
Three loud bangs on my door jerked my attention away from the computer screen. If that’s a reporter …
PC growled, charging the closed door and barking—not that anyone would be afraid of a seven-pound hairless dog with a pretty white crest on his head and cute white puffs on his feet. PC didn’t know that, though. I peeked around the curtain in the door and groaned.
Pasting on a smile, I jerked it open.
“Can I help you, Detective?”
Falin stepped around me, shoving his way into my little loft. His eyes scanned the room.
“Hey, I didn’t invite you in.”
He grunted and walked a circuit around the room.
His gaze traveled over the clothes piled in front of my dresser, my unmade bed, and the dishes in my sink, and finally stopped on my laptop. He stepped forward, tilting the screen back so the angle was better for a standing person.
“Hey!” I slammed the lid shut.“Was there something you wanted?”
I’d talked to Holly, and we were pretty sure I couldn’t be arrested for attempting to raise Coleman’s shade. Oh, the executives of his estate could sue me, though what would they take? My broken TV? But I didn’t think Falin was here to arrest me. At least, I hoped not.
His jaw clenched, making his lips purse, and he looked around again. This was starting to feel a lot like an illegal search and seizure. PC sniffed Falin’s leg, looked up at the tall man, sniffed again, and then apparently decided Falin was no threat and launched himself onto the bed.
He curled up in the center of a pillow and closed his eyes.
Well, good to know my faithful companion isn’t worried.
“Detective Andrews, what do you want?”
He finally turned and looked at me. “Stay out of the Coleman case.”
“Okay.” I’d learned about as much as I wanted about the body in the morgue. I definitely wanted nothing to do with the spell I’d felt. As soon as I confirmed that my father hadn’t been the most recent victim, I was turning everything I’d learned over to cops in the Black Magic Unit, or maybe to the FIB, the Fae Investigation Bureau.
My phone buzzed, and I fumbled for the button to send it to voice mail without glancing at the display.
Falin scanned my face as if he was searching for a lie, but apparently I passed the test. “Are you going to tell me your client, or wait for the press to dig him up for me?”
“Why are you so convinced my client had anything to do with the”—Oh crap—“shooting?” If Coleman had stolen my father’s body, and then Casey told him she’d hired me to look at the discarded body, he might have been afraid of what I’d find. Falin might have been right in disagreeing with everyone else in the police force about the shooter’s motive. The shooting may have had absolutely nothing to do with the Holliday trial and everything to do with Coleman.
I tried not to let my thoughts show on my face. I was good at obstinate, and I pasted stubborn refusal all over my expression.
Falin frowned at me, but with a nod, he headed toward the door. He stopped before reaching it and turned back. “Keep your head down. You’ve attracted a lot of attention.”
“Right.” Like the mass of reporters circling my house hadn’t alerted me to that fact.
The phone buzzed again. Persistent much? I glanced at the display, and my hot dog decided to disagree with my stomach. CASEY flashed in bold on the phone’s screen. Damn. I had no idea what I was going to tell her.
Falin hadn’t failed to notice the change in my face, and he looked a little too interested. I flashed a smile at him.
“Personal call, Detective. If you please.” I gestured to the door.
His jaw clenched again, but he saw himself out. I locked the door behind him before flipping open my phone.
“Casey,” I said in greeting, holding the phone slightly away from my head and fully expecting an earful.
She didn’t disappoint me. “Alexis, what is the meaning of this? I haven’t heard from you, but I saw the video on the news, and—”
I cut her off. “I think maybe this is something we should discuss in person.”