by E. A. Copen
The van’s engines roared back to life, and it spun around, tires screeching. Nate slammed his hand on the high beams just as the headlights closed on the first god. A chilling roar like thunder encompassed the unloading area, and god number one bit the dust.
The second had only a moment before the headlights reached him, but a lot can happen in a moment. He looked at me, a triumphant grin projecting into my mind. But he hadn’t gotten what he’d come for, had he?
I jerked my head to one side as the headlights dissolved god number two, searching for where Lexi’s body had fallen. In the dim shadows, I could just barely make out a third shadowy figure and another set of red eyes squatting next to her. Dammit, since when were there three of them?
Nate kept spinning the van until the headlights fell on the third god and it disappeared like dust in a strong wind. But he didn’t stop his panicked doughnut until he’d done a full one-eighty. His skinny form appeared in the rolled down window. “Are they gone?”
When he finally stopped, I ran to Lexi’s body and lifted the sheet.
She was pretty mangled from the wreck. I tried not to tell my eyes to notice the skin peeling away from her face, or the twisted limbs and smashed parts of her body. I didn’t need to see that. What I did need to see was her left side. I pulled up the bloodstained shirt, and sure enough, there was a long slice there, moving from her ribcage all the way down. I was willing to bet once Nate got her on the table—and I was going to insist that he did—he’d find most of her body cavity empty.
For all my effort, I’d failed to protect the body from the organ thieves.
Chapter Eleven
Detectives Knight and Moses arrived at their second crime scene of the night just fifteen minutes later, only this time they were sure it was a murder scene. Four police officers lay dead around the loading dock of the morgue.
I felt the weight of death pressing in on me as I gave my account of what happened to Emma who wrote down an abbreviated—and I hoped heavily edited—version in her little notebook. There was nothing I could’ve done differently to save those lives, and yet I felt guilty over their loss just the same.
I glanced over at Nate, who was still shaking as he gave his statement to Moses. Despite his current condition, I had to hand it to the guy. Not many mundanes would’ve reacted the way he did. He’d saved my bacon with those headlights, and I hadn’t even had a chance to thank him yet.
“So these shadowy… gods. They’re the ones stealing the organs?” Emma repeated for the third time. “How do you know they’re gods again?”
“I told you,” I said, rubbing my head, “by the color of their souls. Emma, do we have to play twenty questions right now? How I know isn’t as important as knowing, is it?”
“I’m going to have to explain this to my superiors somehow.” She lowered her notebook and pen. “My last report was a little empty because of everything I had to leave out on your account, you know. Maybe it’s good enough for you to get the bad guys, but my job is to put them in jail, not in the ground.”
I snorted and shook my head. “Good luck with that. Until you can find a way to cage shadows, you won’t find a cell to keep these guys, whoever they are. At least we know light hurts them.”
I squinted at the floodlights Emma’s team had brought in to cover the scene. They were tiny buzzing suns, bathing the loading area in artificial white light. I didn’t think the gods would be coming back anytime soon; they’d collected what they were after and split. Still, it didn’t hurt to be overly cautious.
“Just stay in well-lit areas,” I instructed. “Carry a flashlight. Sleep with the lights on. Don’t even step into a shadow at midday if you can avoid it, and tell every one of your guys to do the same.”
“That sounds like paranoid crazy talking.”
“Maybe it is. Better to be paranoid and alive than oblivious and dead.” I nodded toward the entry to the morgue. “Now that we know who’s behind the thefts, I think it’s time to check out my other hunch.”
“I thought you said you had to wait for help to see if the other victims were fae?” Emma crossed her arms.
“To see through glamour, yes. But if I can raise a shade? Shades can’t lie. All I have to do is ask the right question, and I’ll have my answer.”
What I didn’t tell Emma was that I’d have to raise more than one shade to establish a true pattern, something I hadn’t done in a while. In theory, I assumed my new Horseman powers would be of use. I seemed to be able to go for longer, tap into a deeper well of magic, since gaining them. Still, I’d need to concentrate, and that meant only one or two people at most could be in the room with me. Last time I’d raised a shade for the police, I’d nearly died when my body temperature dropped rapidly. Now that my temperature was already low, maybe it wouldn’t drop again, or maybe it would. I didn’t know how I’d handle that, or if I would at all.
“You said if you can raise the shade.” Emma’s frown deepened. “Meaning you’re not sure you can do it.”
“It doesn’t always work. And I’ve never tried to raise a fae shade before. I’m not sure how it’ll go, but I do know if we do nothing, someone else is going to die tomorrow at midnight. We have a lot of work to do, and we still don’t even know how these assholes are choosing their victims.”
She tapped her pen on the cover of her notebook in thought.
“Come on, Emma. It costs nothing but time and hurts no one but the bad guys to try. Especially since the bodies I need to look at aren’t part of any murder investigations.” I flashed her my best roguish grin. “I can’t even screw up any crime scenes this time. And if there’s been one death every night for the last seven nights, this is the last day I can question the first victim. There’s a seven day limit on raising most shades before a more serious ritual is required, and we don’t have three days to prepare for it.”
“Okay,” she said at length, nodding once, “But I’m coming in there with you.”
I’d expected her to say that. No point in arguing, since I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. Emma Knight was a fierce lady, and she was already affording me more leeway than she needed to. The way I saw it, she was the one doing me a favor by giving me access.
She put two fingers to her lips and gave a shrill whistle, gesturing the cop talking to Nate and waving. The cop immediately put a hand on Nate’s shoulder, and the guy jumped so hard his glasses nearly flew off his nose. He seemed in a daze as the cop walked him over. Emma and the other officer exchanged nods, and the officer wandered off to process another area of the crime scene.
Nate pushed his glasses up his nose with one finger. “Any news on Officer Meadows?”
Officer Meadows, the fifth escort officer and the only one the gods hadn’t killed at the scene, had barely been clinging to life when the paramedics carted him away. Judging by the large, dark smear on the ground where he’d been laying, Meadows had lost a lot of blood.
Emma shook her head. “Nate, this attack may have been in connection with something going on. Lazarus and I need you to bring some bodies out of cold storage for us.”
“Sure, just need to get the paperwork in order.”
“This isn’t the sort of thing you have paperwork for.” Emma cringed as she said it. It must’ve been painful, resigning herself to doing something off the books. She as the most by-the-book cop I’d ever met.
Nate’s green eyes danced between Emma and me before he pushed his glasses up again, even though they hadn’t fallen. “This is a mutant thing.”
I opened my mouth to try and explain it some other way, but he stopped me.
“I just watched some shadows kill four police officers, and then you smack your staff on the ground, and it splits open like the Red Sea for the Israelites.” He crossed his skinny arms over his chest. “Don’t tell me I didn’t see what I saw. I’ve read enough comic books to know what I’m about. Either you’re some kind of mutant, or that pastrami on rye I had for lunch was way older than my wife said.”
/> I almost let him keep believing I was some sort of mutant. It sounded way cooler than just being a wizard. After all, mutants got to save the world and got their own comic books. I’d be lucky if I avoided being an obituary most days. But if I didn’t correct him early, that’d make what I was about to attempt way more complicated than it had to be.
“Not a mutant,” I said, “a wizard. A necromancer, actually.”
His body went completely still. “Oh.”
“But necromancy isn’t all blood magic and desecration,” I cut in quickly because that’s what most people think of when they hear the word necromancer. Doesn’t help that necromancers are frequently portrayed as villains in the media. “I’m helping the police figure out who and what’s behind this.” I gestured to the crime scene at large.
“So you want to question one of the dead people?” His gaze bounced between Emma and me again.
Emma held up seven fingers. “Seven dead people.”
I frowned at Emma. Seven was a lot. I hadn’t planned on questioning every one of them. If I could just establish that three out of the seven were fae, that should’ve established a pattern, but leave it to Emma to be thorough.
Nate, for his part, wasn’t any more shaken by the prospect of encountering seven shades than he was one. Guess you develop some sort of immunity to being afraid of ghosts when you’re the night shift assistant coroner. He nodded and said, “Come with me,” before turning and marching toward the morgue doors.
Emma and I had to jog to catch up with him. He was already halfway down the sloped corridor when we pushed through the double doors. By the time he reached the service elevator, however, we’d caught him. Nate hit the call button, and the three of us stepped into a spacious elevator once the doors opened. He remained at the front with his arms crossed, staring at the crack between the elevator doors. “Magic, huh?”
“Yep.” I put my hands in my coat pockets because my fingers were twitchy from going without sleep.
“Are there wizard schools, too? I’m going to be disappointed if there’s not at least one.”
I shrugged when he glanced back at me. “I honestly don’t know. Not many necromancers around and most of the rest of the magical community doesn’t want to talk about it. The magic that revolves around dead things freaks proper folk out. Makes one a pariah.”
He grunted and turned around. “Boy, do I understand that.”
I supposed he would in a way. He probably didn’t have many conversations about his job at the dinner table or other social functions.
The elevator doors opened, and Nate led us down the familiar hallway I’d been in that morning. Or, since it was after midnight, I guess it was the morning before. Time gets funny when you’re sleep-deprived. I’d mostly been running on adrenaline, and that was wearing thin. To raise seven shades, I’d need a boost from somewhere, and the nearest cemetery was over two miles away, well beyond my reach.
Nate took us into the same room where I’d looked at Captain Ross earlier and motioned for us to stop. “Which one do you want first?”
I turned to Emma. “The oldest one. It’ll be the most difficult.”
She nodded and turned to Nate. “Leonard Barringer.”
The squirrely assistant coroner disappeared into the cold room and came back a moment later with a body on a gurney. “Don’t quote me on this one since I didn’t do the autopsy, but I think this guy was electrocuted.”
He pulled the sheet from the body’s face. A black band covered the man’s eyes, and uneven lines of black raced over the rest of his visible skin, broken only in places where the first layer of skin had burned completely off. Patches of ash-like white dotted the rest of him. Where his eyes had once been were now just two holes.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “You can leave the sheet on.”
“Oh,” said Nate, a hint of sheepishness in his voice. “Sorry, man. You should’ve said so earlier.”
I waited a minute for him to tuck everything of Leonard back under the sheet and then cracked open a cautious eye. “I need chalk. Couple of candles.”
Nate frowned. “There’s chalk in the supply cabinets, and there might be some emergency flares in one of the storm prep kits, but I really doubt we’ve got old-fashioned candles just lying around.”
The candles weren’t really as important as the meaning attached to them. In this type of magic, the goal was to use actions, words, and objects to create a sort of link between me and the circle I was working in, creating another barrier. Inside a fully powered circle, I could safely let down my guard enough to pour necromantic power into the body and coax out the shade. For that, road flares would work just fine.
After I confirmed that for Nate, he scurried off to the corner of the room and returned with a handful of sorry looking flares and an open pack of white chalk. “I’d really hate to get stranded here if a hurricane made landfall,” he said, handing them over. “But I guess if I did, I’d be happy to have some light.”
I took the chalk from him, slipped off my shoes, and sketched out a mostly circular shape on the floor and some simple lines before closing it with a drop of blood with the help of some sterile medical equipment. Then I took the flares one at a time, lit them and placed them where the candles normally went.
A wall of energy sprang up at the circle’s edge, invisible but humming with power. I stood and faced the body trapped inside the circle with me. “Here goes nothing,” I said and lowered the concrete walls of my mental shields.
Chapter Twelve
Death reached for me from the bodies in the next room. I was so acutely aware of their presence that I could count them. Information flooded my psyche through the thin shields that remained, these made of bone and decaying vines. Nine bodies lay in the next room, all on their backs, facing upward as if they were stacked on shelves. Only seven of them interested me. The essence of death surrounded them like a tangible black. When I called, the essences heeded my command, flowing from the bodies into me. The familiar electric euphoria of cemetery power coalesced in the circle, moving through a different plane, one of non-existence, a place of death, a place I’d always called the After.
The mortal world crumbled away, the stainless-steel rusting, linoleum tile cracking. Window panes sagged. Gray-green rot and the stink of decay coated everything but the body in front of me. Even my clothes faded into decay. I felt them rot on my body, thinning to bare threads.
I blinked and looked around. I’d had glimpses of the After before, but never seen the curtain of it descend on the realm of the living. Had I pulled too much power into the circle? It’d come easily enough. Normally I had to struggle to pull things through the circle, but this time it’d be as easy as tearing open a perforated package.
A side effect of the Pale Horseman mantle? I wondered. But the living weren’t supposed to be in the After. I could feel death clawing at me, weighing me down. I had to finish the ritual and quickly.
“Leonard Barringer,” I commanded the shade, raising my hands. “I summon forth the dead. I command you to commune with me in the realm of the living.”
Shades, unlike ghosts, didn’t have a will of their own, making them much easier entities to raise. Once they were bound to my will through the command, it was impossible for them to disobey. At least, that’s how it had always gone before.
But this shade struggled in my grip.
Surprised, I almost lost my connection before pouring even more magic into the spell and repeating the command. I felt the thread form between my fingers, the one binding Leonard to my will, but it was weak, fragile, as if the shade were too far away to call back.
I laced the thin thread around my fingers several times and gave it a jerk. The shade that popped free of the body was almost completely transparent. Even so, the faint outline shimmered like sunlight on the sea. Faint warmth radiated from the shade, which was a new experience for me. Usually, shades and ghosts were at least as cold as I was, if not more so.
But the shimmery warm
th wasn’t the most surprising thing. The shade I raised from the body looked completely different from the body, and not just because the body was covered in nasty third-degree burns. Leonard’s body had been thin, humanoid. This shade was small and round with big eyes, eyes too big to be human. A button nose accented a slit of a mouth. Long arms that ended in talons hung at the shade’s side.
Shades often appeared as the body had in death, giving them a disturbing and sometimes otherworldly appearance, but I’d never seen one take on a completely different form. Glamour, it had to be.
Emma cursed. “What the hell is that?”
“What’s what?” Nate’s head jerked back and forth, searching.
Emma pointed straight at the shade. “You mean you can’t see that… that thing?”
I cringed and tightened my hold on the shade. I could feel it fading, weakening by the second. “The only reason you can probably see it, Emma, is because of the psychic link. Of course, he can’t see it. Now, can I get on with the questioning before it’s too weak to stay on this plane of existence?”
Emma waved a hand, motioning for me to continue.
I turned all my attention to the shade floating a few inches above the body, unaware of its corporeal shell. “State your name.”
“Leonard Barringer,” said the shade without hesitation.
“How did you die, Leonard?”
“We were remodeling the basement,” Leonard’s shade said without any emotion attached to his words. “Nina asked me to get the water heater hooked back up, so I was working on the fuse box. The screwdriver slipped to the right and then...” He stopped speaking, so I assumed that’s when the deadly jolt of electricity coursed through him.
Now came the tricky part. Shades weren’t supposed to be able to lie since they were basically just recordings the soul left behind. But sometimes, when faced with new information, they faded, unable to process it. This shade was weak already. If I said anything to shock it, I might lose it altogether. As weak as it was, I wouldn’t be pulling it out again, not if I wanted to do this six more times. “Leonard, your shade looks different from your body. Is that because you’re a fae in hiding, using glamour to hide your appearance?”