Chapter 11

I woke the next morning to the sound of my phone blaring R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” which wasn’t what I’d left my ringtone set as. Roy. I needed to have a serious talk with that ghost. Neither he nor Icelynne had been in my apartment when I’d gotten home, but clearly he’d visited during the night. And his outlook on my current situation leaves something to be desired. Or maybe it was on his own situation. I didn’t have time to puzzle over the meaning of the ringtone. Fumbling for my purse, I dug out the phone and stared with blurry eyes at the display. The number didn’t look familiar.

“Hello,” I mumbled, trying, and failing, to keep the sleep from my voice.

“Craft, Jenson here. We’ve got another one.”

I blinked at the daylight playing over my ceiling. Another one? “A murder?”

“Yeah. Another locked room mystery—literally. And a jurisdictional nightmare. Your boyfriend’s already down here.”

“Uh . . .” I frowned. I was barely following this conversation. Maybe it was the groggy haze of being half asleep. No way could Jenson see Death, though as Jenson was a homicide detective, a collector’s presence at a crime scene wouldn’t be completely unheard-of. Still, that couldn’t be what he meant.

I glanced to where Falin had been sleeping last night. The bedding was neatly folded in a pile. I looked around. The apartment was empty, the bathroom door open, and the room beyond dark. I must have been sleeping hard. But Jenson had to mean Falin was there. He certainly wasn’t here.

“The FIB is on the scene?” I asked, feeling a little slow on the uptake. I shook my head to clear it and sat up. The move made me dizzy and I had to pause a moment before asking, “Did you want me to meet you at the morgue when they release the body?”

“Bodies, plural. And no. I’ll give you the address. We need you to get down here pronto.”

“Here as in the crime scene?” I never went to active crime scenes. Well, maybe “never” was an exaggeration, but usually I didn’t get invited officially.

“Yes, the crime scene. My boss and your boyfriend already—”

“Falin isn’t my boyfriend.”

Jenson paused, when he spoke again, I could hear the familiar sneer in his voice. “Fine. My boss and the FIB agent in charge already cleared you doing the ritual on-site. The coroner will clear the bodies in a minute so get your ass down here. Do you have something to write with?”

I scrambled for a pen and grabbed a piece of junk mail off the counter. Jenson gave me the address and I wrapped up the call. Then I stared at the address. I didn’t get called to crime scenes. I just didn’t. But I didn’t have time to wonder about it. I needed to get dressed and on the road.

•   •   •

The address Jenson had given me was a high-end hotel in one of the ritzy areas of town. Roy and Icelynne had walked through—literally—my front door right before I’d left, so they’d decided to accompany me to the scene. Roy because he fancied himself a PI and Icelynne, well, I think she just didn’t know what else to do with herself. At least she wasn’t crying today. Of course, with her recent trauma, taking her to a crime scene probably wasn’t the best thing, but she was an adult and it wasn’t as if I could stop her. So, the two ghosts sat in the backseat of my car, making me feel like a chauffeur to the dead.

It took me exactly forty-two minutes from the time I disconnected with Jenson to reach the hotel. I anticipated a chaotic scene; after all, Jenson had said more than one division of law enforcement was on the scene and that never led to happy times. What I didn’t expect was for both agencies to be milling about the parking lot. The officers in their blue uniforms were easy to identify, but even the plainclothes detectives were easy to distinguish from the FIB agents—most of the agents looked a little too pressed and polished. Likely because little things like weather and environment didn’t affect their perfect glamour while the wind heralding an oncoming storm whipped at the detectives’ hair and clothing.

The two groups didn’t mingle.

Parking the car in the back of the lot, I walked toward the gathered detectives. Three men broke off from the others. The wind-bedraggled shapes of John and Jenson headed over from among the sea of officer blue and Falin walked toward me from the FIB side. We met just beyond the farthest cop car.

“Hiya,” I said, because I didn’t know the protocol. I assumed since Jenson had mentioned the coroner was ready to release the body that they would roll the gurneys out to the parking lot. It was a little public for my comfort, but that wouldn’t affect my ability to perform the ritual. If an ambulance had been on scene that would have been preferable than out in the open, but I didn’t spot one.

“Alex.” John nodded in greeting. It was far from cold, but considering he’d been a father figure for most of my adult life, the recent distance between us stung. I nodded back, trying not to frown. If John was on the scene, why had Jenson called me. Because John didn’t approve of hiring me?

It was a real possibility. Someone higher up than John must have ordered me to be brought in, and he didn’t look happy about it. Or maybe the scene had been that bad. Whichever the case, his mustache was pulled down hard in a frown.

“You ready to go up?” he asked, nodding to the hotel.

I blinked. “You mean, to the murder scene? You’re not bringing the bodies down here?”

“What’s wrong, Craft? Can’t handle getting your hands dirty?” Jenson’s voice was all sneer, ugly and mean. I frowned at him. His eyes were pinched tight and there was a little something at the corner of his mouth. Jenson didn’t handle crime scenes well, and I was guessing he’d puked, which explained why he was being extra nasty today. He got like that sometimes. It also meant this was going to be bad, very bad.

“So what’s the story?” I asked as John led us toward the building. Falin fell in at my side, but Jenson trailed behind. I guessed he didn’t want to go back to the scene. Roy and Icelynne brought up the rear, mostly because the ghost-fae dragged behind. Otherwise, Roy likely would have been the first in the building.

“It’s a proper mystery. Two local high school students checked in after a fall dance,” John said, and then paused as I signed in with the officer maintaining the perimeter. Once the officer had recorded my name and verified my ID, John continued. “The doors are operated with a swipe card, so we have a record of every time the door opened. The kids swiped in at eleven twenty-three last night. Door wasn’t opened again until housekeeping came by at nine seventeen this morning. What she found . . . Well, you’ll see. The important thing is that she saw no one else in the room when she walked in. Video of the hall confirms that no one entered or exited the room between the kids entering and the maid’s arrival.” He stopped in front of a door and pulled out a swipe key. “I should warn you—it’s bad.”

I nodded but put up a hand before John could use the key card on the door. “Who exactly is hiring me here?” I asked, looking from first John and then to Falin.

The two men looked at each other. Falin cocked an eyebrow, it was a jaunty expression, and more than a little challenging. John scowled.

“Currently, NCPD is picking up the tab.” He pulled a folded stack of papers from his jacket pocket and passed them to me. Then his gaze cut to Falin again, his next words directed at him instead of me. “We will, of course, bill half of the ritual to the FIB if we hand over the case.”

Falin shrugged. A slightly pink tinge crept over John’s expanding bald spot, and he turned back to the door. He shoved the key card into the lock a little too hard, jerking it back fast. The light flashed red. It didn’t unlock. He cursed under his breath and tried twice more before the door beeped, flashed green, and unlocked.

As he fought with the lock, I gave the paperwork a cursory scan. I’d been on retainer for the police for years, so most of the paperwork was the boilerplate form we’d established when we’d initially worked out the terms of my retainership. The finer details had been hastily added with a ballpoint pen, but considering the circumstance, that didn’t surprise me. Everything looked to be in order, so I signed both copies and handed one back to John.

He took it without comment, waiting in the open doorway.

Falin leaned down, his words a whisper meant only for me. “You up for this?”

I wasn’t sure if he meant the scene or if I was strong enough for the ritual. Maybe both. I nodded again and hoped I was right.

I started forward but John held up a hand before digging out gloves and covers for my boots. I accepted them and pulled them on, the three men doing the same. Yeah, this was going to be a bad.

“You know I’m going to have to disturb the scene to draw a circle, right?”

“It’s already been photographed,” Falin said, sliding on a bootie over his dress shoes. “That doesn’t mean we should track in unnecessary trace.”

Okay, he had a point.

“So why aren’t we doing this back at the morgue?”

“Because we’re in a disagreement over who has jurisdiction and it was agreed you would be the fastest way to settle it. Besides, in all likelihood you’d end up on the case anyway. This expedites things.” John didn’t sound happy about it. Nice to be wanted. But I guess I couldn’t really blame him. The FIB and NCPD didn’t have a great track record of working well together.

Roy and Icelynne floated ahead of us into the room. I still couldn’t see what was beyond the door, but Icelynne made a sound somewhere between a scream and a gasp. I couldn’t quite make out what Roy said in response, but the rhythmic sound of his murmuring made me think he was comforting her. Apparently they’d become fast friends.

John motioned me forward, but I hesitated, thinking about what he’d said about the scene being up for debate on who had jurisdiction. If the victims were fae, it would be clear-cut, so it must have been the killer the police were uncertain about. Okay, maybe I was stalling stepping into the room, but from what I already knew by Jenson describing the scene as a locked room mystery and John’s explanation, it appeared we had a murder with no apparent means of unmonitored egress. Unless, of course, the killer slipped out when the maid entered or while the police were there.

“You think it’s possible the killer was using an invisibility charm?” I asked.

John nodded. “We scanned the room once we arrived, but personal charms don’t leave a trace once the witch has left the premises.”

The other option was glamour. That didn’t even need to be said. So it would come down to what the kids’ shades said to determine if the FIB or NCPD would be taking lead here.

“Ready?” Falin asked, his hand moving to the small of my back. The touch surprised me. I tried to believe it was just a friendly urge to get this over with, but the heat that lifted in my cheeks betrayed me. I hurried forward, almost stepping on John’s heels as I followed him into the room.

The curtain covering the wall-length window in the far corner of the room had been drawn aside, letting in the late-morning light. All the lamps were on and a few extra work lights had been brought to the scene, but despite the fact there was adequate light in the room, my eyes refused to make sense of what I was seeing. At least when trying to take in the room as a whole. I frowned, trying to focus on one piece of the room at a time.

There, closest to the door, was an armchair toppled over, stuffing exploding from it in long vertical slits. Beyond that was a desk, the wood scarred by a gash that nearly bisected it. My eyes moved farther over the wall, where it looked like someone had pressed their hands in red paint before running them over the otherwise neutral wallpaper. I knew it wasn’t actually paint, but I didn’t stop to dwell on it, instead letting my gaze move on to the bed, only slightly disheveled and still covered with a teal comforter. A figure knelt at the end of the bed, leaning against it heavily. It was a male, as soon as I saw him my grave magic told me that much. Young, maybe eighteen. Blood had dried in a dark stain where it soaked the carpet around his legs, almost blending in with his black tuxedo slacks. At first I couldn’t tell if he still wore a shirt or not, there was too much blood, but I decided he didn’t and the flayed material hanging from his back was flesh.

I tore my gaze away, forcing myself to keep inspecting the room when what I really wanted to do was squeeze my eyes shut and back into the hallway. But I had to look. I could already feel the second body, the grave essence pulling at me.

The girl was a few feet from the boy, between the baseboard of the bed and the large-screen television. She wore only a slip that must have been tan or white when she put it on the night before. It was a dark brownish-red now. Lacerations covered her arms, her torso, even her face. Congealed blood matted her blond hair and had dried in flaking rivulets on her arms and bare legs.

I moved on. The way the girl had been facing, I couldn’t tell if she’d been running toward the door or the bathroom when she’d been . . . stabbed? That made the most sense, but I’d know for sure soon. Sprays of blood trailed across the TV screen, the walls, even the ceiling sported blood. The bathroom door hung open, but I couldn’t reach it without stepping over the couple. Whatever evidence might or might not be in that room wasn’t my concern—I was here only to raise the shades—so I didn’t bother trying to navigate to the bathroom. The carnage ended before it reached the back of the room anyway. From my vantage point just inside the main door, I could see an emerald green dress hanging in the open closet. She must have undressed before whatever happened began. I didn’t know anything about the girl, not yet at least, but I was guessing she and her boyfriend hadn’t been receiving visitors while she was wearing only a slip.

After taking in as much of the room as I could stomach, I averted my eyes. I’d missed details—I knew that—but I’d seen enough, more than I wanted, and for what they needed, only the bodies were important. Unfortunately, I’d have to move the couple to draw my circle. With their positions and relation to the furniture, there was no other way.

Unless I work without a circle.

Just the idea made my skin crawl. It was dangerous, but we were actually fairly far away from any cemeteries and the only two bodies I felt in the immediate area were the couple. Of course, I’d light up like a beacon as soon as I straddled the chasm between the living and the dead. And nasty things lived in that wasteland. I really didn’t want to encounter one of them.

“We’re going to have to move them,” I said, nodding at the couple while keeping my eyes averted.

“Is it possible to perform the ritual without disturbing them?” Falin asked.

“I can’t draw my circle. The bed is in the way.”

The three men conferred quietly. I meant to listen, but the two ghosts poking around the scene distracted me. Roy kept kneeling and pointing at this or that while Icelynne followed him, her dark eyes a little too wide. I couldn’t catch everything he said, but I clearly made out the words “arterial spray” and “signs of struggle.” Roy had been a computer programmer in life, and Tongues for the Dead didn’t typically work active scenes, so he had to be guessing, most likely based on crime shows, but Icelynne hung on every word he said, clearly impressed with his prowess as an investigator. I left them to it.

While I’d watched the ghosts, Jenson must have left the room, because he walked back into the door as I turned, two morgue techs behind him.

“Where do you need the bodies moved?” a young tech with a flush of pimples on his cheek asked.

I glanced around the room. I wanted to disturb the scene as little as possible, which meant I didn’t want to walk—or draw my circle through—any of the blood. I probably shouldn’t move the furniture either if I could help it. It was going to have to be a very small circle. Fine by me, but I still needed enough clear space to do it. It was a nice hotel, but the room was far from large.

I pointed to the largest clear spot in the room. One of the techs spread a drop cloth—which I hadn’t even considered before—and then the techs moved first the boy and then the girl side by side on the cloth. They were both in full rigor mortis, so while the techs tried to lay the boy on his side, the position was unnatural, his knees bent and arms and head curled forward like the overanimated pose of someone pretending to be scary for the benefit of a child. The girl was just as stiff, her legs twisted at awkward angles and one arm up as if she’d been shielding her face, but at least she lay flat.

Once the bodies were moved, I pulled out my wax chalk and drew my circle tight around the couple, being sure to keep to the drop cloth. I actually stood on the outside to draw it, because inside the circle the open spaces were too narrow and awkward for me to squat while ensuring I didn’t accidentally brush against the bodies.

With my circle drawn, I glanced at Falin, John, and Jenson. “Ready?”

John nodded and pulled out a camera that I guessed shot still and video based on the small red light that began blinking when he hit a silver button on top. I doubted the video would be as good as what was shot at the morgue, but it would do to document the ritual.

Falin glanced at the camera. “You know I’ll have to confiscate that if this officially becomes a FIB case.”

“Yeah, you can file for it with the main office. Alex, go on.”

I didn’t wait to see if the argument would continue, but activated my circle, dropped my shields, and embraced the grave. The chill rushed into me, the unearthly wind tossing my curls around my face. The boy was closest to me, so I reached for him with my magic, my power sliding into the corpse.

The shade I found was weak. Not impossible to raise, and not as weak as the male victim Jenson had me raise days before had been, but noticeably weaker than a fresh body should have been. I paused. Raising a weak shade would take a lot more energy than raising a normal one. And I didn’t have a lot of energy to spare. Time to check the girl. Hopefully, she could give us all the information we needed and I wouldn’t have to expend energy into the weak shade.

I drew my magic back from the boy and reached out to the girl. Sometimes, when I hadn’t performed a ritual in a while, my power all but hemorrhaged out of me, rushing toward any corpse in my vicinity. But I’d used my grave magic a lot recently, and I wasn’t at my strongest, so it reacted placidly as I guided it into the girl.

I frowned. Her shade was even weaker than the boy’s.

“Something has damaged them,” I said, opening my eyes to look at the men in the room with me.

Jenson huffed out a breath between his lips. “Well, I’d say that is stating the obvious.”

I turned a glare toward him. “No, I mean their shades. What was done to their bodies shouldn’t have weakened their shades. But . . . something did.”

“You can’t tell what?” Falin asked.

I shook my head. I’d felt shades that had been shredded by a soul-eating spell before—this wasn’t like that. It was more as if they’d burned out, like a candle that had run out of wick. “Something used them up. Wore them out.”

“What can do that?” John asked, stepping to the very edge of my circle. I tensed—John was a null with absolutely no magical sensitivity. He had a bad habit of walking through my circles.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Some sort of massive energy drain before death?” I’d read a study once that explained how a death due to magical depletion damaged a body down to its DNA. Maybe it could damage the shade as well. It was so rare, I doubted it had ever been studied. “Do we know if either of these victims was a witch?”

John pressed his lips together and then shrugged. “They attended public high school, but that’s not always a good indicator. As high school students, of course, neither had achieved any OMIH certifications, so they aren’t card carriers. Without questioning them or their friends and family, or running a Relative Magic Compatibility test, it’s hard to say. What are you thinking?”

What was I thinking? Magic couldn’t cause knife wounds. Sure, there were offensive spells that could rend flesh, but I doubted that was what we were dealing with in this situation. For one thing, that would still require an outside caster to have delivered fatal blows to both kids, which meant they hadn’t been the ones performing a ritual that had gone out of control and drained their life essence. And if the wounds were magical backlash, they should have been inflicted from the inside out, and while I was no medical examiner, even I could tell the wounds started at the flesh and not vice versa.

I turned back toward the bodies. “I’m going to raise the boy now.”

No one said anything as I pushed my magic into the boy’s body again. It took a lot of magic, and I felt the strain before my heat even rushed out of me, but the shade sat up, solidifying. While the corpse was a mess of lacerations, the killing blow must have come pretty quickly because the shade looked fairly normal, at least from the front. I could have walked around and seen how much damage he’d taken premortem, but I wasn’t that curious.

“What is your name?”

The shade turned his head toward me, his eyes dull, unfocused. Not surprising. “Bruce Martain.”

I nodded in acknowledgment—not that the shade noticed, but even if they weren’t sentient, they looked like people and I tried to be polite. Then I turned toward John. I could have questioned Bruce without guidance—I’d done this dance before—but he’d hired me, so I’d take his lead. Besides, he was recording this. It was better if the cop directed the questions.

“How did you die?” John asked, and I repeated the question for the shade.

“The clown crawled out of the TV. It had a knife.”

The room went utterly silent, as if everyone present had drawn in a breath and then held it. Even Roy’s constant whispered prattling paused. All eyes stared at the placid shade.

If I’d been asked to make a list of the top one hundred possible explanations for what happened to these kids, going from most to least likely scenarios, “a clown crawled out of the TV” wouldn’t have made said list. I blinked at the shade. It couldn’t lie. I knew that. It could only repeat what he had seen or thought while alive.

“A clown?” I asked, hearing the uncertainty in my own voice. “Bruce, did you take any drugs recently?”

Okay, I should have waited for John to ask that, but it was too obvious a question to not follow up “a clown crawled out of the TV” with drugs.

“Yes, and not a clown. The clown,” Bruce clarified, as if that actually helped. “We were watching a movie. I picked a scary one because when Shannon is scared she all but climbs in my lap, and I’d already talked her into her slip so she didn’t wrinkle her dress.” The shade said all this with no shame, and I groaned under my breath for all teenagers everywhere. “We’d just watched the scene where the killer dressed up as a clown at a frat party and started hunting down co-eds. Then he turned and called us out by name. He said he was coming after us next. And he did. He crawled right out of the TV. I thought it was the drugs taking effect at first, until Shannon started screaming and I realized she was seeing the same thing.”

“What drugs did you take?” I already had an idea. I wanted to be wrong but . . .

“A guy was giving out samples in the parking lot outside the dance. He said it was like a magical hit of ecstasy. Everything would feel more intense for a few hours, and he suggested it would really get Shannon in the mood. He called it Glitter.”

Shit. I turned to Jenson, my eyes wide. The detective looked away from me. Actually, from everyone. Had he told anyone about the shades I’d raised for him? I’d thought that was why the FIB was here now, but maybe not. Actually, by his response, I was sure not. Damn. That would make things more difficult.

John opened his little flip notebook, trying to write notes while simultaneously holding the camera steady on the shade. It wasn’t working out well for him, but with him distracted by the task, I couldn’t read from his expression if he was familiar with the drug or not. I looked at Falin.

“Have you heard of Glitter before? Did you guys find any drug paraphernalia?” I knew they hadn’t at Jeremy and Emma’s crime scene, but then, they hadn’t been looking. Whatever Glitter was, it didn’t pop on a drug screen. Not the normal ones the ME usually ran, at least.

Falin’s face gave away nothing. “Some personal items were bagged in the bathroom, but no syringes, pipes, or pills.”

I’ll take that as a no.

“Ask how the drug was ingested,” John said. He’d pressed the notepad against the back of the camera and was writing at a vertical angle. Every move of his pen caused the camera to bob, and I hoped whoever reviewed the footage wasn’t prone to motion sickness.

I repeated his question to the shade.

“We drank it. The drug came in little glass vials. The kind cologne samples sometimes come in.”

I glanced at Falin, who nodded to indicate something that met that description had been bagged as evidence. From the corner of my eye, I saw the two ghosts float toward the bathroom. Roy clearly wasn’t done playing detective for Icelynne yet.

“We need to establish a timeline,” John said, looking up from his notebook.

I nodded and turned to ask the shade to recount the order of events, but froze when Roy burst back out of the bathroom.

“Alex,” he yelled. “Alex, we need you.”

I make it a rule not to talk to people no one else in the room can see. It was easier before my planeweaving went into full gear and I heard ghosts only when I tried. These days I actually had to work at ignoring ghosts. But the pitch to Roy’s voice was equal parts excitement and concern, not the type of thing I should ignore. He’d found something. Or at least he thought he had.

But I couldn’t just stop questioning a shade midritual and mosey to the bathroom. I turned toward him, hoping my expression was enough of a question for him to tell me what he’d found.

“The vials? The ones the shade said the drug was in?” he said, and I nodded for him to continue. “Icelynne recognizes them. She said they are what the alchemist used to store the glamour he stole.”