by SM Reine
“I don’t like morgues,” I said. “You got my back on this?” I reached out for her, offering a hand. She stared at me for a long time before taking it.
“Sure,” she said, leaning against my side. We fit together pretty well. “I’ve got your back.”
I’d like to say that was just a smooth line to get her inside, but not so much. Never been a fan of morgues. Bodies give me the heebie jeebies.
Suzy held the door until we passed through. Then she closed it, punched a few numbers in the keypad by the handle, reactivated the alarm sensors by pressing a red button.
We were in a sterile hallway. The night crew wasn’t in this part of the building, so only the emergency signs over the doors gave us any light.
Suzy clicked on a penlight and traced it along the wall. “Rob said he’d leave me alone to check the bodies, but I didn’t tell him that I’d have company. Be quiet.”
“What excuse did you give him for wanting a little one-on-one time with cadavers?” I asked in a whisper.
“I didn’t give him an excuse. I gave him money.” Suzy led us down an adjacent hall. Isobel had pulled back from me, hugging her arms around herself, walking slowly. She was shivering in her shorts and tee.
Shucking my jacket, I dropped it over her shoulders. I had long sleeves underneath. It didn’t make a difference to me. But she looked startled and kind of pleased. “Thanks,” she said, pulling the lapels closed over her chest.
“I looked up Peter’s case file,” Suzy said, walking backward so that she could address me directly. She talked like Isobel wasn’t with us. “Our last necrocog.”
“I remember Peter.”
“They scanned his personal notes and put them in the database. Good reading. Did you know the dead can’t lie?”
“Of course they can’t,” Isobel said, picking up her pace to walk alongside me. “Souls move on after the bodies are gone. All that they leave is residue. An imprint. Memories don’t have the motivation to lie. The testimony of the dead is inviolable.”
Suzy nodded. “If the victim’s body is still here, and if Stonecrow can talk to her, you’ll have your answer.” She stopped in front of the door to the refrigerator and gave me a hard look. “You sure you want that? It’s not too late for you to hop a bus to Mexico.”
I answered by pushing the door open.
It was even colder inside. One wall was nothing but silver drawers. There was a steel table in the middle, some jars and cabinets to the wall on the right. Chills rolled down my spine at the sight of them.
Suzy grabbed a clipboard off the wall. “Karwell, Karwell…” she muttered, tracing her flashlight down the page.
While she searched for Erin’s name, Isobel moved to stand in front of the drawers. She’d been reluctant to enter the building, but she didn’t look reluctant now. She looked…drunk. Intoxicated. Her eyes were lidded and she was breathing heavy.
“Isobel?”
She didn’t respond to me. She lifted her hands in front of her like she was trying to push curtains apart.
That glazed look was starting to freak me out. Way creepier than tribal drums and raccoon bones and shit.
Suzy hung the clipboard up on the wall again and faced me. Her features were pinched. Bad sign. “Erin Karwell is here.”
“Where?”
She didn’t move toward the drawers. She went to the cabinets on the opposite wall, grabbed keys hanging from a hook, and unlocked them. There were several white boxes inside, each a bit smaller than a banker’s box. Isobel recoiled at the sight of them.
Suzy grabbed one. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take a few steps back when she carried it over and set it on the steel table.
She lifted the top. There was a bag of gray dust inside.
Cremains.
“Erin Karwell,” she said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I’d flirted with Erin for months, so you’d think that I would know more about her. Or at least be able to put together a memory of her face and hold it clear in my mind, as crisp as the grayscale photograph in my pocket. Like, what color were her eyes? Were her ears pierced? Did she wear jewelry?
I couldn’t remember any of that without checking the picture Domingo had printed up. I couldn’t remember Erin’s smile or laugh or even her black eye all that well. Months of heavy tipping and one trip sneaking into the kitchen to find her name, and I couldn’t even tell you how long her hair had been when she wasn’t wearing a ponytail.
But I remembered what her body looked like in my bathtub. I remembered her cracked fingernail and the hole between her breasts. I remembered the bruised shape of a hand imprinted on her unbreathing throat.
Now even that was gone.
Erin Karwell had been cremated. Body vaporized.
“Shit,” I said. “I’m fucked.” Probably an understatement.
Suzy seemed to deflate. It didn’t look like disappointment, but relief. “Guess that’s it,” she said, moving to put the lid back onto the box.
Isobel stopped her by reaching in to grab the plastic bag. “I can try. I’ve never done ash before, but I’ve worked with some rotted bodies. It can’t be that different.”
“A lot of cremains are just bone and whatever the victim was burned inside,” Suzy said, her voice hard-edged as she tried to pull the box out of Isobel’s reach. “There’s probably barely any of the body left.”
Isobel dragged the bag toward her anyway. “We can at least attempt it.”
They were playing tug of war with the box. I settled it by grabbing Erin’s cremains and placing them in front of Isobel. She pulled the rubber band off, folded down the edges of the bag.
“Cèsar,” Suzy said warningly.
“The worst thing that can happen is nothing,” I said. “Stop worrying so much.”
“It can be so much worse than that,” she whispered. I ignored her.
Isobel had her hands stretched out over the cremains and her eyes had gone blank. She stared at the wall without seeming to see it. “Erin Karwell? Erin…come on…” Her cheeks flushed. The muscles in her hands strained.
I felt her voice all the way down in my stomach.
Erin Karwell…
Magic built around us, pressing tight inside my chest as silvery mist lifted from the cremains. I smothered my nose and mouth with a hand, fighting not to sneeze at the force of magic.
Erin didn’t appear as quickly as the man in the temple had. I glimpsed ghostly legs, but they faded to nothing within moments. Then I glimpsed a sliver of face. Eyes without irises. A bald scalp.
The body formed slowly, painstakingly, blurred around the edges.
There she was. Erin.
Suzy stepped back, reflexively reaching for the pistol she wasn’t carrying again.
Erin looked down at herself, running ghostly hands over her breasts. They looked smaller than I thought I remembered. Maybe she’d had implants and plastic surgery hadn’t translated to her ghost. The hair wasn’t there either, just like it hadn’t been on the man Isobel had raised. She looked bald.
The ghost flickered. Her legs had never fully formed. When I stepped to the left, I could see that she didn’t have a back either, more like a flat picture than an entire body.
Guess cremains were enough to summon her soul, but only barely.
Her mouth moved. Isobel spoke for her.
“What’s going on?” she asked softly.
It was quiet in the morgue. Dead quiet. No pun intended. Isobel was whispering, but I didn’t have to strain my ears to hear her at all.
“Erin?” I said.
Isobel grimaced, pressed a hand to her forehead. The ghost vanished for a full second before reappearing. “Where am I?” Erin asked through Isobel. “What happened?”
“My name is Agent Takeuchi. I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Suzy sounded hoarse, kind of freaked out, but I still almost laughed at her introducing herself as a member of the FBI. Like a dead woman was really going to ruin our cover. “I need to
ask you a few questions. Can you hear me?”
Erin nodded. Her gaze drifted over the room, but just like Isobel, she didn’t seem to see any of it.
“What’s the last thing you remember, Miss Karwell?” Suzy asked.
Isobel spoke. “I went to work. I was running late.” She flinched, mouth twisting and brow furrowing. “I went to work. I was running late. I’ve been running late a lot, so Thandy chewed me out.” She groaned and bent over at the waist as if someone had struck her. At the same time, Erin faded out of view then faded back. “I went to work,” Isobel whimpered. “I was running late.”
Damn. Erin was barely there. I wanted to grab Isobel, shake her free of the connection, but stood frozen at the end of the table. I needed to hear this. I needed to get past Thandy to what happened after that.
The door opened. An out-of-breath morgue tech rushed in, and stopped short at the sight of the ghost. “Praise Allah,” he breathed.
“Rob,” Suzy said, stepping toward him, trying to block his view. It was too late. He’d already seen her. “Get out of here. I told you to leave us alone. I fucking paid you.”
His mouth worked soundlessly. “It’s—the—what is that?”
“Rob. What are you doing here?”
“The cops,” he said. Erin was reflected in his wide eyes. “The cops are here. I know the alarms are disabled, and I didn’t call them, so someone must have…tipped them off…” He tried to move toward Erin’s blurry ghost. “Is that a ghost?”
Suzy swore in a language that wasn’t English. “I’ll take care of this,” she told me, seizing Rob’s arm, dragging him into the hallway. She left the door open. I could watch their shadows slide over the wall as she hauled ass toward the reception desk. Voices I didn’t recognize echoed back toward me.
We were out of time.
“Keep Erin here,” I urged Isobel. “Just a few more seconds.”
The sound of my voice finally drew Erin’s attention to me. Her ghost solidified and brightened. Her blank eyes penetrated me.
“Cèsar?” she asked through Isobel’s mouth.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, baby. It’s me. I’m here. You gotta tell me who killed you. I need to know what happened.”
Her glowing, delicate hands flew to her throat. Erin’s white eyes widened and her mouth opened.
Isobel began to scream.
Shit.
I grabbed her wrists, shoved her away from Erin’s ashes. Didn’t help. Isobel was trapped. All tangled up in Erin’s spirit.
And there was no fucking way that the cops wouldn’t hear it.
Footsteps beat in the hallway. I heard Suzy shout.
I shook Isobel hard. “Let go! We have to run!”
“You killed me!” she shrieked, beating at my chest, trying to wrench free. “You killed me!”
What she was saying sunk in. The room spun around me. Erin’s horrified mirage clutched at her heart where the bullet wound had been, screaming through Isobel’s lips as she stared at me, fraying around the edges. The ghost vanished with terror in her eyes, and Isobel kept screaming.
Terror pounded through me. The cops were still fighting with Suzy in the hall and getting closer. We needed to be gone. Now.
I lifted Isobel off of her feet, slammed her back into the wall.
“Izzy!”
Her scream cut off, mouth still open, eyes blank.
Slowly, she focused on me.
“Nobody calls me Izzy,” she whispered. She reached up to touch my face. Her fingers brushed along my jaw, up my cheekbones, to my brow, like she was identifying my features with her hands. “Oh my God, Cèsar. Oh my God.”
She didn’t have to tell me what she had learned from her connection to Erin. I already knew what she was going to say.
I had killed Erin Karwell.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Somehow, we escaped. Don’t even fucking ask how, because I don’t know.
Everything went from screaming to running in about two seconds flat. There had been gunshots. Suzy had been yelling, flashing her badge. Men had shoved guns in my face and grabbed my sleeves. I had punched someone. Maybe a couple someones.
Then Isobel and I had been running. We’d gotten into her RV. And then we were driving.
After that, all I knew was that we ended up outside Los Angeles. It was night outside the windows. Desert stretched to the hills. We weren’t on a road anymore. We were far from the LAPD, far from the OPA, far from Suzy at the morgue.
But there was no running from what I had learned.
I sat on Isobel’s creaky futon and stared at my hands. They looked bigger than usual. I wondered if the shape of them matched the dark imprints on Erin’s throat before her body had been reduced to nothing but ash. I hadn’t checked. I’d been too busy freaking out. I hadn’t believed it could have been me anyway.
I still couldn’t believe it.
“Erin.” Her name was a prayer on my lips. An apology.
I wasn’t that guy. I wasn’t someone who got drunk enough to black out. I wasn’t capable of getting drunk enough to shoot a woman.
And yet, somehow, I was.
Like Suzy had said, the dead couldn’t lie.
You killed me, she’d said. You killed me. God, those screams. They’d carved my heart right out of my chest and left me hollow on the inside.
Isobel stood a few feet in front of me. Just out of arm’s reach. She was staring at me as if seeing my face for the first time. She wasn’t driving, so that meant that the RV had stopped at some point. I wasn’t sure when.
“Did you lie to me?” she asked.
I didn’t understand the question. “What?”
“You told me that you didn’t kill Erin. Were you lying to me?”
She had heard what Erin had said, hadn’t she? She knew what I had done. I could see it in her face. “I didn’t know,” I said slowly. “I didn’t think that I would have ever done…that. I wasn’t lying to you. I believed that to be true.”
“I don’t think I want you in my RV.”
I couldn’t blame her for that. I stood.
She pushed me back onto the futon.
“I didn’t tell you to leave,” she said. I stared up at her blearily, trying to understand. “We’re miles out of town. There’s nowhere for you to go anyway. So don’t even think about bailing on me.”
That was a lot of sympathy for a murderer.
I leaned back against the wall, stared up at the ceiling. “I should have turned myself in to the OPA.”
She sat next to me. The mattress sagged under our combined weight. She touched my leg and I pulled away.
Erin wasn’t going to smile again, never serve drinks again, and I’d ended that. It was me.
“I should really go,” I said. I could barely hear my own voice over the roar of shock in my ears. High blood pressure, probably. My adrenaline was still insane. I felt cold all over.
“Go where?”
“Just…go.” To the desert. Find that ditch where we’d abandoned Joey and Eduardo. Climb in, pull the dirt over me, never climb out again. It would still be better than I deserved.
Isobel slid her arm around my back. “You’re not going anywhere like this, Cèsar.”
How could she touch me, knowing what we knew now?
“I killed her,” I said.
A shadow flashed through Isobel’s eyes. She brushed the hair off of my forehead. “She didn’t come back right. The cremains were harder to work with than I thought. She didn’t really know what she was saying.” She looked thoughtful. “I really thought that it should have worked with her remnants like that. I’m not sure why it didn’t. If it wasn’t so dangerous to go back to Helltown, I’d ask Ann what she thinks, but…”
But the incubi there were watching for us now.
Maybe I should have let the Silver Needles have me.
“I’m not a real witch,” Isobel said. She was changing the subject to something easier to stomach than murder. Fine.
Dully, I sai
d, “I just watched you raise Erin.”
“Yeah, but that’s all I can do. I told you that I didn’t enchant my RV’s engine—that was something my friend did for me as a favor because I can’t. I’ve never cast a spell in here because I don’t have whatever it takes. I can’t do wards. I can’t even light a candle.”
“The blister powder,” I said.
“Another present from my friend.”
“The cure?”
“Those are just herbs that counter the effects. It’s not magic.” Isobel shrugged. “I am a fraud—just not the way you thought. I have to fake my rituals because I can’t cast spells for anything.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m coming clean with you,” she said gently. “As clean as I get with anyone. I want you to know…I trust you. No matter what happened with Erin, I trust that you’re a good guy.”
“Don’t,” I said.
Isobel touched my wrist. “I’ve met a lot of bad people before, Cèsar. I’ve known career criminals. Not people who hurt by accident, but people who hurt by design, and those who enjoy it. You’re not one of those people.”
But I was. I had killed Erin.
Lord, the fear in her eyes when she looked at me…
“You’re right. You killed Erin Karwell. But that doesn’t make you a bad man,” Isobel said. “I know you’re not with the Needles. And come on, you were more worried about the safety of a teenager hiding out at the Temple of the Hand of Death than you were about being held captive. That’s not something bad men worry about. I’ve seen the goodness in you.”
“That another one of your witch powers?”
She smiled faintly. “I don’t need magic to know goodness when I see it, Cèsar.”
“You shouldn’t even be sitting next to me.”
She rubbed her thumb over my knuckles. “You won’t hurt me.”
I wanted to believe that was true. I wanted it to be true so badly that it hurt deep down on the inside. “I always thought that…” It was too hard to get the words out. It felt like I was choking on Erin’s name, like she had become permanently lodged in my chest. “You know why those incubi wanted me dead?” Dumb question. Of course she didn’t. But she was polite enough to shake her head. “It was because I saved my sister, Ofelia. That’s what made me an OPA agent, too. Saving Ofelia.” Like that could change what I’d done to Erin.