Touch of Shadow (The Shadow Sorceress Book 5)

by Bilinda Sheehan

  Whatever had happened to change it back in Ireland, the demon mark had gone dormant as a result.

  Or had it?

  The thought hit me like ten-ton truck, slamming into me and momentarily splintering all of my thoughts. What if it wasn't that the demon mark had become dormant? What if whatever Fionn had done to me had given the demon mark an even greater hold over my soul?

  I'd seen the black lines that had extended outwards from it during the last case, I'd felt the demon trying to take control of me, and now, suddenly, all that had stopped. It didn't really make sense; the only thing that did make sense was that the demon part was no longer a separate entity to me, that it had become one with me. And that frightened me more than anything else I'd experienced in my life.

  "What is it?" Victoria said, her voice snapping me out of my own reverie.

  "Nothing, I...." I cut off, unsure of how to finish the sentence.

  I met Marcel's knowing gaze. He knew far more than he was willing to say. Whatever he did know, I needed that information, by any means necessary.

  "Marcel, somebody killed that woman, and we're going to find them. Now, my boss brought you in to help out on the case and I'm going to honour that, but you need to work with me and cut the bullshit."

  Marcel's smile faded around the edges and a haunted look passed through his eyes. Whatever he had seen, whatever he had experienced, it had truly been terrible.

  And here I was trying to bully it out of him—not that I would have had to bully it out of him if he had simply shared the information with me. Everything that was going on, he had brought on himself.

  "There are some things that should never be shared," he said, lifting his hands to scrub them across his face.

  "It's our job. We don't get to pick and choose what is shared. Now, I need to know what happened in that house. I need to know what happened to Tess and you're the only one that can tell me," I said, speaking softly as though to a small child.

  Marcel's head jerked up and he glared at me from across the table. "Do not patronise me. If you were any good at your job, you would figure it out yourself," he said angrily.

  "Look, you knew what you were doing when you cleaned that crime scene. You knew I wouldn't be able to walk it and you were counting on that. All of this—" I gestured to Victoria, the bar around us, and the burn mark on his chest "—is your fault. You wanted all of this. You started the pissing match, now I'm going to finish it."

  Marcel flopped back in his chair and closed his eyes as he let his head roll back onto his shoulders. Silence passed between us, broken only by the gentle hubbub of the bar we were sitting in.

  I waited for what felt like an eternity, but when I opened my mouth to call him, he raised his hand as though he knew I was about to speak.

  "If I tell you what I saw, you promise this ain't going to become a witch hunt," he said, a bitter laugh escaping from between his lips. "Excuse the pun."

  "If it was a witch that did this, then I'm going to hunt them down."

  Marcel sat up a little straighter and stared from me to Victoria. "This was no witch; this was Voodoo. Ain't no witch on Earth can do spells like this."

  "What kind of spells are we talking about, Marcel?" I asked, dreading the answer. I already had my suspicions about the scene, and I knew that whatever Marcel was about to tell me would simply be confirmation of them.

  Confirmation of the fact that Tess had been dead much longer than the police and her neighbours suspected. Confirmation that whatever had been passing in and out of Tess's house hadn't been the woman everyone had loved but had instead been the thing wearing her meat suit. She'd been taken out on jobs by whoever it was that controlled her, made to look as though she was still alive and living her life. It was a horrible thought; nobody deserved to be treated like that.

  The fact that I'd seen Tess's ghost gave me hope that whoever was responsible for it all hadn't taken her soul.

  "Most people like to call them zombies," Marcel said, the smirk on his lips suddenly at odds with his words. "But they ain't no zombies. Well, not the same ones from those horror movies you see.”

  "Then what are they?" I asked, leaning across the table.

  "It is easier to show you," he said.

  "Woah, what do you mean ‘show me’?" I asked, scrambling to wrap my head around what he had just suggested.

  "There is a reason I come here," he said, lifting his hand and gesturing to one of the women sitting on a bar stool just a few feet from where we were. She slipped from her seat and moved toward us, a wide smile changing her dour expression, making her look younger than I'd first believed.

  Hopping to my feet, I reached for my gun, my back pressed to the wall behind me. I didn't want to reach out to the woman with my magic but there was definitely something really off about her, and Marcel's words rang in my ears. What had he meant when he'd said it would be easier to show me? What had he meant when he'd said he was most irresistible to the dead ones?

  The woman slid onto his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck and leaning in against his chest. She nuzzled against his neck. It was a surprisingly intimate gesture and heat crept up my neck into my face.

  "Delilah here isn't quite as she seems," he said, the smile lingering on his face—but there was a wistful melancholy that had crept into his eyes and voice. "Many of them aren't what they appear. She used to be a nurse, helping people, bringing them peace, and then one day, she helped the wrong person...." Marcel trailed off as he reached into his pocket and pulled a small blade from inside.

  "What are you doing, Marcel? I won't let you hurt that woman," I said, unclipping my gun from my belt.

  My hand screamed in protest as I closed my fingers around the grip, the blistered skin stretching uncomfortably.

  "She can't be hurt," he said, flipping the blade and bringing it up against the woman's neck. His hand shifted, and I didn't wait to see his reaction.

  I pulled the trigger as Marcel whispered something in the woman's ear and she lunged in front of him. The bullet struck her square in the chest as a fine tremor started in my hands and spread up into my arms.

  The woman blinked up at me from her position in Marcel's lap. The pain and confusion I expected to see in her face wasn't there. She merely continued to stare at me with the same stupid smile curling her lips that she'd worn since she'd come to the table.

  "Oh my God," I said, jamming the gun back down into the holster on my waist as I slipped around the table. "We need to call an ambulance and put pressure on the wound...."

  Marcel shook his head at me. "You're not so naive as this. Look a little closer," he said, tugging on the edge of the woman's green blouse to reveal the clean bullet hole.

  She wasn't bleeding.

  "How?" I asked, but I already knew the answer. Marcel hadn't been kidding when he'd said it would be easier to just show me.

  "She's already dead," he said. "She feels no pain. She feels nothing that she isn't told to feel."

  "Who did this?" I asked.

  Marcel shrugged. "I don't know," he said honestly.

  "Amber, we need to call this in," Victoria said from beside me. She was right. We needed to call it in; if all these people were zombies then they needed to be put to rest and that was something the Elite could do.

  "They cannot be rested," Marcel said, as though he'd read my mind.

  "Of course they can, the Elite have a spell for a situation like this...." I didn't say what type of spell; if I was honest, I didn't know. It had been a long time since the Elite had needed to use something like it.

  "They are different. They do not rot as quickly as the others, but they do rot. I have tried to rest them myself but...." He trailed off.

  "But what, Marcel? What aren't you telling us?"

  "But it cannot be done without first restoring their souls, and doing that … well, the trauma alone would create ghosts. We cannot do it to them...." He didn't need to finish what he was saying.

  He was right. The trau
ma of restoring a human soul to its dead body, a body that had potentially had any number of horrors visited upon it, could potentially create ghosts and restless spirits. It could also create things a hell of a lot worse, too—the kinds of things that did more than just go bump in the night. But there was more to it than that. The simple act of trapping a spirit was beyond heinous. Preventing a spirit from moving on would take someone particularly twisted, their moral compass so utterly broken that I had to wonder if they even had one at all. It would also take some serious mojo to pull it off, and there weren’t many I knew of in King City who could do it.

  "Oh, God," I said, realisation hitting me.

  "What is it?" Victoria asked.

  "Tess Greenville's body was just like these, but...."

  "But?" Victoria prompted.

  "But I've been seeing her ghost.... Someone was restoring her soul to her body, and in doing so, they created a ghost...."

  I'd been wrong about Tess Greenville. Someone had trapped her soul, but if her body was now truly dead, then where the hell was her soul?

  5

  "I need you to walk me through everything that happened at the crime scene," I said, staring Marcel directly in the face.

  "What good do you think it will do?" He asked. "There's not much I can tell you. It wasn't the place where she died and that makes it harder."

  "I know it wasn't the place where she died but it's all we've got right now and you took away any chance I might have had for walking that scene, for getting a glimpse into what exactly it was that killed her."

  Marcel shook his head and smiled, dropping his gaze toward his lap as he closed the knife and replaced it in his pocket once more. "I know what killed her," he said, lifting his gaze to mine.

  "Then tell me what it is. I need to know. I need to know what we're up against," I said.

  It was true—I did need to know what we were up against. I needed to know if it was something we could kill, and if that wasn't an option, I needed to know if it was something we could control.

  If it wasn't, then I wasn't sure what we would do. It had been a long time since anyone had dealt with Voodoo on any great scale. And I wasn't entirely sure we were equipped to deal with it now. From everything I’d read in the history books, it had been a more hands-on approach the last time—one might even call it a culling.

  Not that the history books actually said that, but if you read between the lines, then it was more than obvious. I was pretty certain it was something similar to what had happened to the shadow sorcerers. It had certainly been hands-on then, too.

  However, at least where the shadow sorcerers were concerned, they were honest about what they had done to them. There was no dressing it up and attempting to hide what had truly gone on. They had slaughtered each and every one of them that they could find, and all because of fear. Perhaps they were right to be so fearful. There were times when I was afraid—afraid of my own abilities and power—and I was a shadow sorcerer.

  But I knew it was my own ignorance which made it hard to understand what was truly going on. It wasn't as though there was anybody I could ask or have show me how to control my own power. Everything I did was some variation of blundering around in the dark.

  "Look, we need to know how to contain this, and you're our best shot. Graham says you're an expert and that you’ll be able to help us. I'm inclined to believe him, but I need to be able to trust you, and so far, you're not exactly proving yourself to be particularly trustworthy.

  "In fact, I don't think I could trust you as far as I could throw you, and I don't think I'd throw your very far," I said.

  Marcel laughed and pushed the woman that was still sitting in his lap up into a standing position. Without protesting or even a backward glance, she wandered over toward the bar and sat herself down on a stool once more.

  It was beyond weird to watch her move, the vacant stare in her eyes, as though sitting at the bar until she was summoned was the only thing she knew how to do—and perhaps it was. Someone was pulling her strings, and whoever that was had clearly programmed her to do exactly what she was doing.

  "We have to get the Elite down here. These need to be taken in...." I trailed off and stared around at the people gathered inside. I counted twenty-three in total and my heart sank. How had this even happened? And what would we do with a bunch of zombies in custody? It was beyond me, and I was pretty sure it was above my pay-grade, but it made my chest ache to think of them being out here, doing the bidding of someone else, unable to rest because some psycho had their souls trapped, all the while running the risk of having their souls restored to their bodies once more. Did their families know where they were?

  "If I find out you had anything to do with this…." I said.

  Marcel's dark eyes met mine, the expression in them anything but friendly. "I can assure you, Miss Morgan, this is not my work. I do not believe in torturing anyone who has passed on. I respect the dead, but I cannot say everybody else does."

  "Then why are you even here?" Victoria asked. "You said this was a place you liked to come to?"

  "Because of the power. Just because I wouldn't do it doesn't mean I can't appreciate the power...." He trailed off and knotted his fingers together. "And because I am looking for someone."

  "Who?" I asked.

  "That is not something you need to know the answer to," he said sharply.

  "I'm pretty sure I was clear when I said if we were going to work together then I needed to be able to trust you." I folded my arms across my chest, tucking my injured hand gingerly against my body.

  "There are some things a man should keep to himself," Marcel said.

  His expression was blank once more and I couldn't get a read on his emotions. Why was he so difficult to read? What was it that he was hiding from me? I had a feeling the answers to those questions were vitally important, and that if I could just get him to come clean, it would give me greater insight into his character. He was here for a reason, and the dangerous part was that I had no idea if that reason was to truly help or to hinder.

  "Well, if you're not going to tell us that, the least you can do is give me the answers I want about the scene. Tell me about Tess," I said.

  Marcel shrugged and gave me a lopsided grin, but there was no joy in his expression. "As you wish," he said. "She was attacked by another of her kind. I do not know who, and it is nobody in this bar, but it certainly wasn't human."

  There was something haunted in Marcel's eyes, something that he had seen at the site where Tess's body lay, something he wasn't sharing with me.

  "Was the zombie there alone?" I hated calling them zombies. I gave a surreptitious glance to those in the bar and shivered. They didn't look like zombies, and whoever was keeping them animated was powerful enough to conceal their magical signature.

  It hit me then—the signature. Dark magic left a stain; my own was prone to doing it, but ever since I'd received the demon mark, all of that had stopped. Clearly just another of the nifty little side-effects of having the mark.

  Marcel's head jerked up at my mentioning whether the zombie had been alone, his impenetrable gaze meeting mine. "Very clever of you to ask the question. I can tell this is not your first brush with Voodoo."

  "Stop trying to change the subject, Marcel. Just tell me, was the creature that attacked Tess alone?"

  "No." Such a simple word, and yet it had the power to bring everything grinding to a halt.

  I heard Victoria's sharp intake of breath next to me, and I knew what she was thinking. It hadn’t been just a rogue zombie attack, the creatures growing territorial with one another and turning on each other. No, this had been a cold-blooded, premeditated murder. Part of me felt ridiculous for calling it a murder in the first place, especially when Tess had been dead for over two months.

  "The symbols on the walls, they're the Bokor's signature, right?"

  "How did you know?"

  "All dark magic leaves a mark," I said.

  "But you do not," Ma
rcel said, his sudden insight leaving me cold.

  "This has nothing to do with me. I am not a Bokor," I said.

  He smiled in response, but he had picked up on something from me, enough to know that my power should leave a dark magic stain. That worried me—just how much did he know that he wasn't telling me?

  "You said you have seen a ghost?" Marcel asked, his question catching me off-guard.

  "Yeah, she's kinda been hanging aroun. I'd assumed it was just a ghost that I picked up, but after all of this, knowing now that it's actually Tess...." I didn't know how to finish that sentence. I'd ignored Tess's ghost every time I'd seen it, or at least, I'd tried to ignore it, but she had been pretty insistent.

  Not just that, but she’d tried to help me, tried to save me from Fionn. I could still remember the look of warning in her eyes, the way her hands had reached out to me. It had been futile, but I couldn't ignore the fact that she had tried to help me, and now was my turn to help her.

  "When did you last see her?" Marcel asked, an urgency to his voice.

  “A couple of days ago, why?"

  "Merde," he said, rubbing his hands across his face. He let them drop back to his sides but there was a weariness that hadn't been there before.

  "Look, you're supposed to be the expert in this Voodoo stuff. Either you start sharing or you can get outta here," I said. I was done with his bullshit. If he had secrets to keep, fine, but I had a case to solve and I wouldn't let Tess down a second time.

  "I am sorry, detective, but with the body destroyed, Tess's soul is now lost," he said, and his words shocked me. It was the very last thing I was expecting to hear. How could her soul be lost? It was so unfair. To think of the horrors inflicted upon her by some sick psycho with a god complex; that she had been tortured, murdered, her soul trapped somewhere and then placed back into her body at will. The pain she would have endured, the suffering which had been enough to create a ghost, and now Marcel was telling me my one chance to save her was gone. It just wasn't right.

  "How can you be sure?" I asked, hoping against hope that he was wrong.