To add insult to injury—not to mention my aching head—the cacophony of magic radiating off Darque intensified as my ability to sense magic heightened without the buffer the external shields provided. I winced, she wasn’t carrying so much magic that it would overwhelm me, but the magic grated at my remaining shields, announcing itself and vying for attention. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the worst of it. The real issue, the dangerous one, was the breeze making my loose curls flutter across my face. A breeze that shouldn’t have existed in a building with no open windows.
The land of the dead. I was way too close.
Darque was saying something, but I zoned her out as I took a deep breath and concentrated on centering myself. With my eyes closed, I ran a quick check of my mental shields. My main shield of living vines was solid, but I urged the vines just a little closer, tighter. I couldn’t maintain it that way indefinitely, but it wouldn’t start taking conscious effort to hold it for at least an hour. I did a quick scan of my inner shields, the ones that protected my core. All were intact. I erected my new shield—the opaque bubble that let my psyche look but not touch. Though I’d been working on it the better part of a month, the shield wasn’t ready for extended use because it still took conscious effort to maintain. Once I finished constructing and integrating the shield, it would be tied into the same part of the subconscious that reminded me to blink or to breathe. But I was far from that stage with the new shield. Which meant I wouldn’t be able to maintain it longer than a half hour or so. I hoped like hell that Briar would return my external shields before the barrier failed.
Taking one more deep breath, I released it slowly, mentally running one more check on my shields. Then I let my focus lift back to my body and opened my eyes. The wind from the land of the dead had ceased and the magic surrounding Darque no longer threatened to throw me into sensory overload. Unfortunately, I’d missed everything the woman had said in the interim.
“What?” I asked, looking up at her.
“I said do you have any other magi—Fuck!” Darque stumbled half a step back before catching herself. “Do you want me to shoot you? What the hell are you doing? Your eyes are glowing like lanterns.”
My vision was still adjusting to the overlay of the swirling colors of raw magic from the Aetheric and the patina of rot and decay from the land of the dead superimposed over mortal reality, so I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw her force herself to ease her finger from the trigger of her crossbow.
I lifted my hands in supplication. “The charm bracelet holds my extra shields. Without them the light show is unavoidable.”
Her eyes narrowed and she studied me as if waiting for an indication I was prepping an assault. If I didn’t have a crossbow pointed at my head, the situation might have been funny. After all, while my eyes glowing like night-lights may look unnerving—I’d been told that more than once—I wasn’t remotely close to being a threat. Not even with my planeweaving. Oh, I could drag her weapon into the land of the dead and let it rot, but first I’d have to reach it and she’d plug me before I made it over the desk.
“I have one more bit of magic on me,” I said without lowering my hands. “It’s a dagger. If I pick it up to put it on the desk, are you going to shoot me?”
She looked like she just might, but all she said was, “Move slow.”
I did. Since the dagger was already in my lap, there wasn’t even much moving involved.
“That’s it?” she asked and at my nod, she motioned me to stand.
Without lowering her crossbow, she used a spellchecker to sweep me for spells. As she reached my boots, I remembered that the hilt I carried the dagger in was also enchanted. Crap, this chick might just be unstable enough to shoot me where I stand if she thinks I lied. Who the hell would authorize her to carry, let alone make her an MCIB investigator?
But the spellchecker didn’t change color or make a sound as it passed the fae-enchanted leather. I almost let out a sigh of relief—except then she’d realize she missed something. Once she’d waved the spellchecker over every inch of me, she stepped back.
“Okay, let’s try this again. Tell me about the prime.”
“I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t even realize we had ghouls until you told me.”
Briar watched her wrist as I spoke. Then she let out a string of curses, some of which I’d never heard before. Once she finished, she tucked her crossbow behind her back again. “Get your charm bracelet, your eyes are freaking me out.”
I was more than happy to comply. Grabbing the chain of charms, I clasped it around my wrist and immediately the pressure in my head eased. Unfortunately, while the overlay of other planes thinned, they didn’t vanish, as if my psyche was reluctant to let go. I pushed them away, and the wisps of color and signs of decay retreated to my peripheral once more. The room darkened. Not a full fade to black or even a graying out, but it dimmed as if one of the lightbulbs had gone out. Better than I expected.
I reclaimed my obsidian ring from the desk, but when I reached for my dagger, Briar stopped me.
“Not that,” she said, grabbing the dagger before I could pick it up.
As soon as her fingers closed on the hilt, her face tightened, her eyes widening as her lips thinned. Her hand spasmed open and the dagger clattered back onto the desk.
“Fuck. What the hell was that?” she said, ducking her head as she rubbed small circles in the soft spot just above where her jawbone met her ear.
I stared, dumbfounded. I’d always known the dagger had some form of awareness, and recently it had bonded with me to the point it followed me around in Faerie. Despite that, no one had ever had a problem touching it. Not that I walked around handing the dagger to people, but most of my friends had held it at one point or another. No one had ever had the reaction Briar just did.
Of course, Briar Darque isn’t a friend. And the dagger hadn’t liked her since she walked through the door. Still, what exactly had it done when she touched it? I’d never know if I didn’t ask.
Briar’s glare morphed into an uncertain frown at the question. “What do you mean what did it do? It screamed the most disharmonious wail I’ve ever—” She stopped, her brows creasing. “You couldn’t hear it, could you?”
I shook my head and Briar gave the dagger an appraising look. For a moment I thought she’d try to pick it up again—and I think she considered it—but her hand flexed in the air above it before dropping to a pouch on her belt. She pulled out a bag with an OMIH crest stamped on it. It wasn’t until she broke the seal on the bag that I realized it was a magic-dampening evidence bag.
She wasn’t seriously…? But she was.
“I’ll have to confiscate this,” she said as she flipped the bag inside out and put the inert side over her hand like a glove.
“You can’t just take my dagger.” Actually she probably could. Hell, for all I knew, I was still under arrest despite the fact I’d proven I hadn’t created the prime.
“You’ll get a reimbursement slip for the dagger’s value. But I’ve never seen an alarm spell quite like that. The guys at the lab will want to try to reverse engineer it.”
She’s seriously taking my dagger because she wants the spell? That was ridiculous. No, worse than that, it was government sanctioned theft. Hell, it wasn’t any better than some of the bullshit the FIB pulled. And lucky me, I currently answer to both.
She picked up the hilt through the charmed plastic, and her body went rigid, her shoulders hitching.
“Son of a—” She jerked back, dropping the dagger again. This time it landed pointed side down and the blade sank through the solid wood of my desk.
“Great,” I muttered as Briar continued to curse. But she didn’t stop me as I grabbed the hilt and pulled the blade free. It slid through the wood as easily as if the desk were room temperature butter. Sometimes having a blade that could cut through anything was less than convenient. Its slightly alien presence fluttered at the edge of my mind, urging me to attack Briar while she was
still off balance.
And that was the reason carrying it was always a risk.
Propping one foot on my chair, I shoved the dagger into its enchanted sheath. I could still feel it in the back of my mind, but it was a hell of a lot easier to ignore it sheathed.
“Did you enchant that thing?” Briar asked. She’d recovered from the dagger’s second mental assault and now watched me with a predatory wariness, her weight balanced, ready for a fight.
I put my foot back on the ground and turned to face her, my hands in front of me and my body open and, hopefully, nonthreatening. “It was a gift, and your lab won’t be able to replicate the spell. It’s fae-wrought, the magic imbued in the otherworldly metal.”
She cocked an eyebrow, her expression evaluating as she studied me. Then she shifted her weight back so she didn’t look like she would lunge over the desk at any moment. About time.
“You’re full of surprises, Alex Craft, and definitely not what I was expecting.” She picked up the file she’d dropped on the desk earlier.
“Since you entered my office armed to the teeth, do I want to know what you were expecting?”
Her lips curled in something that passed for a smile only if you considered a tiger baring its teeth a sign of friendship. “Your OMIH files are very interesting, more because of what is missing than what is in them. You have no known next of kin, no birth records, and yet you have all the required paperwork to be a legal citizen. Even your academy records indicate nothing about your past as your fees were paid by an anonymous benefactor.” She looked up, searching my face for a response.
A response I didn’t give. I’d been through this particular line of questions before. When I’d changed my name my father had buried any and all paperwork that could tie me back to him. And when he buried something, he was thorough.
“Fine, we’ll ignore the mysterious past in which there are no records of your existence before you enrolled in academy at eight, and we’ll move on to more recent events.” Briar flipped the page. “Your file reads like a cover-up, full of redactions and missing reports. A notation mentions you being involved in an event at the governor’s house in which his daughter was maimed, and yet, while a record of the police being deployed exists, there’s no official report—or unofficial either. Nor is there any record of your rumored arrest on that night. More peculiar though, is that the first responders have no memory of ever reaching the governor’s house.”
I remained perfectly still, focusing on keeping my face blank. The event she was talking about had occurred three months ago, under the Blood Moon, and was when my life was turned upside down and inside out. And the governor’s daughter? Yeah, that was my younger sister. The blood I sported on my hands when I went to Faerie I’d earned trying to keep her alive.
“Another notation suggests that you might have a connection to a series of holes into the Aetheric. But again, there are no official records that mention your name. A warrant was apparently issued for your arrest by the FIB—which is more than odd as you’re a witch not a fae, but regardless, records of that warrant are also missing. Oh, and you’re rumored to have been involved in both the Coleman case and the Sionan River murders. Both of which are classified as closed despite the fact no one was ever apprehended. At least a record of those cases exist, though both were sealed—”
I didn’t miss the “were” in that.
“—But guess what. Once I got the order to have them unsealed, all details were vague and you weren’t mentioned. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
“That you base your judgment on rumors?”
Her glare could have pinned me to my chair as easily as one of her crossbow bolts.
“No, I’m thinking you have some very powerful connections who are covering your tracks. Something is rotten here, and it surrounds you.”
I couldn’t deny that someone was covering the truth about what had happened—my father most likely, so I sidestepped because I had to admit words like “rumored” and “involved” coupled with missing records did make me look suspicious. “I assure you, any involvement I had in the events mentioned involved working the case, not the crime.”
She glanced at her wrist, checking her lie detector spell. Her jaw clenched as she shook her head. “I don’t suppose you have a suggestion of who might know more about the prime ghoul?” she asked as she gathered the photographs she’d scattered over my desktop.
I didn’t, though there were a number of possibilities. While she was correct that I’d been the only local grave witch for most of the last four years, recently Nekros had been a hot seat for grave witches. Not counting Rianna—because she’d no more create a ghoul than I would—I could think of a half dozen grave witches who’d passed through Nekros in the last three months and not all of them were what I’d consider good guys. There were two in particular who I knew for a fact were bad news. But they were both dead—okay, one had started out dead, but now he wasn’t walking around anymore.
Ashen Hughes’s ghost might still be in Faerie, but even if I knew how to find him, I doubted I’d get any help out of him. The fact that he worked for a slaver who’d tried to soul chain me and sell me to the highest bidder and I’d sort of separated Ashen from his already dead body pretty much put a damper on our relationship. And as for Edana? Well, she’d screwed with reality and to stop her, I’d ripped reality from around her. Not even dust was left of her now.
But even as twisted as those two grave witches had been, I couldn’t think of any reason why they’d create a prime or how ghouls would have benefited either of their plans. A prime could be controlled to a certain extent, until it started killing people to create more ghouls. Then the hive mind mentality of the creatures overwhelmed the witch’s will and you ended up with a nest of corpse-eating walking dead. You’d have to be an idiot to create one.
“I have no idea.”
Briar snorted and turned toward the door, her dark braid whipping behind her. She hesitated at the threshold and glanced back over her shoulder.
“You might not be responsible for the prime ghoul, but there is something weird going on with you, and as soon as I deal with the immediate threat, rest assured that I intend to find out what.” Then she stalked out of my office.
Chapter 17
It was hard to concentrate on searching obituary columns after Briar left. It may have been the fact my pulse was still irregular from having a crossbow thrust in my face not once, but twice, getting accused of murder, learning that Nekros had ghouls, or the fact I had attracted the attention of an MCIB agent.
I jumped at the sound of my phone, my heart leaping to my throat. Rianna, it’s just Rianna. But despite the fact I knew it was her—she was the only person set to Rob Zombie’s “Living Dead Girl”—I couldn’t stop my hand from trembling as I dug the phone from my purse.
“Hey,” I said, trying to sound natural. I failed. My voice came out raw, hoarse, as if I’d been screaming.
If Rianna noticed, she didn’t mention it. “So get this,” she said over the background sound of a crowd. “The bartender remembers James Kingly. Apparently he’d once been a regular at Delaney’s, but hadn’t been around much of late. The bartender said that two weeks ago, Tuesday night was slow and since Kingly was sitting at the bar, they’d had more than just a passing conversation. Well, about an hour after he arrived, Kingly stopped midsentence and without explanation—or paying—excused himself. The bartender assumed he was headed to the john, until Kingly walked out the front door. The bartender followed, intending to make Kingly pay for the beers. When he got outside, he found Kingly pointing his key fob at each car he passed, as if he had no idea which was his.”
Well, that was certainly odd. “Did the bartender mention how many drinks he’d served Kingly?”
“Yeah, Kingly was in the middle of his second when this happened.”
Which was exactly when his memory loss hit.
“Did the bartender say anything else?”
“Yeah
, he said Kingly called the beer rat piss. He also wanted to know if I was going to pay for the drinks. We don’t have an expense account, do we?”
Right now we barely had next month’s rent, but I couldn’t expect her to pay for case expenses out of her own pocket, and we could always bill Mrs. Kingly—though if she demanded an itemized invoice, a charge for two beers wouldn’t look good.
“He already gave you the information you need, so unless you think he’s holding something back, forget the drinks. If he wants to collect on Kingly’s debt, he can contact Nina,” I said, but the question did bring into focus the fact that building a petty cash reserve was another thing on my list of things to do for the business—it was getting to be a pretty long list.
“Agreed,” Rianna said. “But now I’m not sure where to go from here. If we were super spies we’d just hack the city’s traffic cameras…” Rianna’s grin was all but audible, and I shook my head. Not that the smallest smile didn’t crawl to my own lips.
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s on our résumé,” I said as I woke my computer. What did we know that could help us? What similarities were there between Kingly and Kirkwood? The suicides, of course. And the memory and weight loss. But what else?
It hit me. Their stomach contents. They’d both eaten very expensive cuisine shortly before death.
“Look for fancy restaurants in the area,” I said, and filled her in on my reasoning.
“Not a bad idea,” she said. The background noise dimmed, as if she’d stepped out of the pub. “So how are things going with your searches?”
Grave Memory: An Alex Craft Novel Page 15