15
Have you ever seen a death mage go full monkey shit? Yeah, me neither.
Not until right then, and I had to say, it was the most frightening fucking thing I’d seen since Tabitha’s soul clawed its way out of her body.
I sure was glad we were in a secluded area and the place had been cleared out, because if the humans could see this shit, the arcane cat would be out of the bag.
If I’d thought Bishop was pissed before, I was sorely mistaken. I’d never seen someone lose it while also going fluid before, but there I was. When Bishop finally lost his grip on his anger, he was a sinuous beast of black and purple swirls of magic, his magic wafting from his shirt and hair as it leaked out of his body. I did not want to be Mariana right then—or ever, really—but definitely not when Bishop had snapped.
Even Greyson—who had lost his life just hours before—didn’t want to be anywhere near Bishop now that he’d lost his leash.
“She swore to me that no one would be left behind. She swore,” he growled, a strange golden light illuminating his irises.
“Bishop?”
I couldn’t believe how small my voice was. It wasn’t like I feared him, because I didn’t. I sure as hell worried what consequences he’d suffer if he went off half-cocked.
Bishop whipped his head to me, the golden light in his eyes growing brighter, becoming beacons in the darkness. “She deserves their wrath, Darby. She deserves to be where they are. She deserves—”
“Stop it right now, La Roux,” Sarina barked, startling me since she seemed to have popped out of nowhere.
My relief came quickly at her presence. A crazed ghost I could deal with. A gonzo death mage? Not so much.
“What you’re thinking will only cause more death and destruction. You cannot fix this by stealing a life, and you cannot raise those who have left this world. You got lucky when Darby took your place in prison. She had a bargaining chip. You don’t. Calm down before I make you.”
Bishop’s rage was palpable—I could almost taste it on my tongue. But Sarina’s words rang true. He didn’t have a bargaining chip, and whatever he was planning—as horrific and likely justified as it was—was going to get him killed.
“She earned this,” he growled through clenched teeth. “She deserves to die.”
Sarina huffed out a bitter laugh. “When has anyone ever gotten what they deserved in this world? Do we deserve to work for this agency if they treat their people as disposable? Do I deserve to honor my contract even though they have broken their end? Do you deserve the deal you made for a wrong that was never yours?” She shook her head, her expression pitying. “But those are the deals we made and contracts we signed and the hand we’ve been dealt. A reckoning is coming for Mariana O’Shea. Just you wait.”
I couldn’t say why out of all the horrors Sarina had uttered, the realization that my mother had reclaimed her O’Shea surname hit the hardest. It was small—a tiny betrayal I couldn’t really describe—but it was that last grain of sand on an already-overflowing scale.
Tears pricked at my eyes at the sheer gall, at the fucking audacity of it all. There had never been a time where death did not seem like a large thing. That people’s lives didn’t seem precious. That the lives I was responsible for as a police officer and detective weren’t vitally important to me.
How fucking could she?
And as bad as Mariana was, she still wasn’t the murderer I was looking for. She might have left this man to die in her stead, but she wasn’t the person who killed him. She might have left him as bait, but someone else had taken it.
And it made me so fucking mad that she wasn’t the actual bad guy in this scenario that I wanted to scream. I sincerely hoped there was a special place in hell for people like Mariana.
But I probably wasn’t that lucky.
“Darby?” Bishop called.
Slowly, I managed to look up at him. He was no longer in danger of raging out all over the ravine, his coal-black eyes back to normal, his magic back under wraps. A springtime breeze fluttered through the air, cooling the wetness on my cheeks.
I dashed at the idiotic tears and sniffed. My sorrow was stupid, and it didn’t serve anything except to prove that my mother was dead to me in all the ways she could be. She was not my mother, and I’d never think of her as someone I shared any ties with whatsoever.
I swallowed, cleared my throat, and stomped my emotions back down into the pit of my stomach. They belonged there, anyway. What I did not do was answer him, because what was there to say? She changed her fucking name? How in all the atrocities she’d committed in just the last twelve hours did that even rank?
Instead, I met Scott’s gaze. “I want to inspect your body and the scene for clues. I know you were dumped here, but I would still like to check. Would that be okay?”
Scott blinked at me, seemingly stunned I would ask. Unless the entire scene was cleared, did I ever ask, but if the owner of the body was there and I could, I tried to be respectful.
“Y-yeah, I suppose that would be okay. But… are you okay?”
I couldn’t recall a time when a ghost—especially not a fresh one—asked me that.
“No, I am not, but I can get the man who killed you, and that’ll help.”
Scott’s face was the picture of concern. Bishop and Sarina probably appeared the same, but I didn’t check. No, I pulled the Nitrile gloves from my bag and got to work.
Leave it to Jimmy to get all the photographs while I was in the middle of a drama. J and Jimmy had processed three quarters of the scene by the time I’d hauled myself over the stream to the dump site. Either J or Jimmy had marked off the scene with tape, first an inner square that encompassed thirty feet around the still-untouched body. Then there was an outer square that spanned about sixty feet around.
It was just like riding a bike. All of my processes came back to me like I hadn’t just been in prison for damn near a year. Before I entered the outside square, I donned my booties and lit my flashlight. The brightness of it almost hurt my eyes as I searched the ground for anything amiss.
The damp ground was a map of footprints, and I mentally cursed Sal and whoever else was dumb enough to trod all over a scene like a herd of buffalo. As carefully as I could, I minced around the prints, sticking to the tufts of grass that wouldn’t disturb the silty sand. Three hops later, I was to the inner square, and I had to fight the bile rising in my throat at the sight of Scott’s body.
There was nothing nice about Scott Greyson’s death. Not in the manner in which his body had been dumped, not in the way his life was taken—nothing. Even though I knew he was not killed in this ravine, there were pieces of him scattered about the inner square like scavengers had gotten a piece of him.
Except… the pieces of Scott were whole, displayed with a purpose, and with the stench of enough magic to make any animal within a mile want to run for cover. Each piece was laid out methodically and meticulously, on purpose and with intent. Whoever put him in this ravine not only wanted me to find it, but they also wanted to taunt me.
What was with arcaners and mutilated corpses? One would think they had better things to do with the rest of forever, but alas, it seemed they did not.
Foregoing my usual headphones, I crossed the tape, picking my way through evidence. I swear, if I could have figured out a way to hover over the body, I would have.
There was very little left on the inside of Scott Greyson. His heart, lungs, stomach, and liver had all been removed, placed in an almost halo arching over his head. But it was the damage done to his face that made me want to puke like a rookie. There weren’t words for what was done to him, and trying to think of them made me want to cry.
“Please tell me this was done to you after…” I muttered to myself.
“Yeah,” Scott answered, nearly making me jump a mile. “It was the throat. He cut it.”
I knelt, careful not to put my knees in the sand, and inspected Scott’s neck. Well, what little there was of it. If hi
s throat had been cut, the wound was efficiently masked by well… not being there anymore. I tried to recall what Scott had said about his killer.
“Didn’t you say he had white hair? Do you remember what he looked like? Any other features?”
Because we sure as hell weren’t going to get anything from the knife patterns on his neck, that was for damn sure.
“It was weird,” he replied. “It was almost like he didn’t have a face. When I looked at him, all his features were gone. Like a no-see spell. And it didn’t break when I died, either. All I know is that he had white hair and wore a suit.”
“Skin tone? Tall, short, skinny, fat? Did he walk with a limp or have any visible tattoos?”
Scott’s face screwed up like he was trying to remember but the picture in his mind was illuding him. It didn’t seem like memory magic exactly, more like a glamour powerful enough to go past the grave.
“Pale skin, but not undead pallor. He was tall, maybe six feet or so. No limp or tattoos. Trim build. Definitely male. Other than that, I’m sorry. I know that isn’t much to go on.”
It really wasn’t. But something niggled at me.
“You said they—the un-nesteds—called him ‘X,’ right? So, he’s a white-haired, old-as-shit, Caucasian arcaner with a name likely starting with X. How many of those are walking around Tennessee, right?” And how many had an army of vampires at their disposal?
I was really going to have to talk to Magdalena. Or maybe Ingrid would do. Ingrid would know all the gossip, wouldn’t she?
“Did you say the vamps called him X?” Bishop asked from the edge of the inner square. “You’re sure?”
Looking to Scott, I gauged his expression. Scott seemed to think about it, the agent in him wanting to help as best he could. “Yeah, I’m positive. It stuck out.”
I relayed the message and Bishop’s face turned to stone.
“Fuck,” Bishop muttered before reaching for his phone. “I gotta make a call. Don’t go anywhere, Adler. You hear me?”
His tone did not speak of happy tidings. What else was there to do but agree?
“I’m kinda in the middle of something here. I won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.”
A trill of unease hit me square in the chest, and I thought my unease was at peak levels already. Trying to focus, I studied the wound at Scott’s throat. Knowing vamps were involved, I could see the wound patterns for what they were—a disguise. Everything about this was fake. Scott’s wounds weren’t the ritual of a serial killer or for a spell working.
There weren’t sigils carved in his skin or in the ground. Not unless his organs were covering them, but I doubted it.
It was all fake. A show.
We were back at square one all over again and it was pissing me the fuck off.
I struggled to keep myself on task, trying to catalogue all the visible injuries, the position of the body, the wounds that were more a macabre window dressing than anything else. But my unease grew. Bit by bit, minute by minute, until I could feel the disturbance on the air. Scott and I might have been working together to solve his murder, but I knew the second his attention shifted.
Looking up, I followed his sight line to the edge of the ravine and saw the blonde woman who was standing at the edge of my crime scene like she had any right to be there.
16
I knew it the moment Scott turned. It was that little pop of pressure that told of a poltergeist’s power. Usually, the fresher the dead, the least amount of power a ghost had.
Unless the death had been beyond traumatic.
Unless the body had been desecrated.
Unless the ghost knew about the arcane world.
So even though Scott Greyson was brand spanking new to the flip side of life, even though he should have been no more powerful than a newborn baby, the whole ground moved when he turned. One second he was talking, even chuckling a little, and the next I was knocked off my feet as the change took him.
There was a damn good reason why a Code Boo was a legit thing. Because there was no such thing as a safe poltergeist and trying to banish one was about as easy as riding an angry bull or playing chicken with an ostrich.
I found myself tangled in yellow police tape as Scott launched himself at Mariana, sorely tempted to leave her to her own devices. She was a grave talker. It wasn’t like she was helpless.
And the truth was that she’d earned his wrath. She earned every single bit of his anger, every bit of his punishment.
But the problem with leaving an enraged ghost to their own devices was that it wasn’t just their quarry that they hurt. They hurt any and everyone who was in their way, anyone near enough to them, anyone unlucky enough to even resemble a vague representation of their catalyst. So soon, it wouldn’t just be Mariana who was on the receiving end of Scott’s punishment. It would quickly turn from Mariana to any blonde woman to just any woman. Then it would go to any human, and then…
It wouldn’t stop. Ever.
Somehow, I found my feet, racing after the ghost as fast as my feet would take me. Which wasn’t very far. Almost immediately I realized what I’d missed in the initial burst of adrenaline. There was something wrong with my right arm. Either it wasn’t in the right spot or it was broken. Either way, I was down an arm all while running on rocky terrain after an enraged specter.
Scott’s howls of fury echoed through the canyon, the power in them making rocks float up off the ground, the wind whip, and the stream surge. Trees swayed so hard they nearly broke at the bases, and all the while the land pitched and rocked as if we were at sea. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but it didn’t matter if the words were in my language or not. It didn’t matter if they made sense at all.
Nothing mattered except to contain this spirit before it harmed anyone. I didn’t know if we were held accountable for what we did while we were ghosts, but I didn’t want this man to earn punishment if he didn’t deserve it in life.
“Stop, Scott,” I yelled, but my words were swallowed whole by the howling wind.
Down a useful arm, and without much backup, I raced after him as fast as I could, skidding to a stop in the damn sand when Mariana sailed through the air in my direction. She should have stayed where I put her instead of getting in the middle of this. Was my back porch so terrible? No. It was a damn sight more comfortable than kissing dirt, that was for damn sure. Before she could land on me, I dove out of the way, the impact of my meet with the ground rocketing through me.
And because my luck was just that terrible, when Scott followed his rightful quarry, he found me instead.
The man with the chiseled jaw and impeccable suit was long gone. In his place was a thing of nightmares representing his body in the real world. His chest cavity yawned wide as he raced for me, the wide-open maw of his body, the mutilation of his face, everything making me want to scream my head off and run away.
A regular ghost was bad enough. This was worse. So, so much worse.
Struggling to stand, I felt the icy touch of Scott’s ghostly hands wrapping themselves around my upper arms. He lifted me, his fingers burning me they were so cold, his now-distorted maw in my face as he screeched at me.
And then just like Mariana, I was airborne.
This time, my landing was not a happy one—not that the one prior to it was in any way awesome. No, this time I landed in the stream, the rocks digging in my skin in some places and breaking it in others. And this time, Scott followed me, his mangled ghostly face in mine as he let out an unholy shriek. He shoved at me, dunking my head under the water.
I didn’t want to take Scott—not like this—but my options were all gone.
It wasn’t until I decided to take him did that part of myself seem to unlock. The last time I did this, I had no idea what I was doing. This was no different. I still didn’t know what I was doing, and after almost a year with no practice, I was back where I started.
My lungs burned as Scott’s soul was called to me. The anger in him resisted a l
ittle, but it was no match for the siren song of the beyond. He was in pain here, and the call spoke of peace, of rest. I had no idea what it really was, but I hoped it wasn’t bad. Still—even after so much time—I didn’t know where the souls went or why I could take them.
I just knew I was a portal of some kind. Just like my real father.
But when Scott fell into me, it wasn’t like the others. I couldn’t see from the outside of his life, a casual observer witnessing his pain and anguish.
No, now I was in it.
Kenzari was in my face, grabbing me by the shoulders and guiding me to a portal exit. I couldn’t hear anything over the siren, but that was sort of the idea. If vamps had breached the ABI, then the siren was supposed to disguise our footsteps so we could make it to safety. It was the Protocol C plan in the handbook. Phillips had already masked the servers so no one could gather intel, but it was my job to make sure the paperwork on our desks went into the incinerator.
But Kenzari wasn’t having it.
“Screw protocol, Greyson. Get the fuck out of here before it’s too late,” she ordered, her gaze getting that far-off quality that she always got when she was looking ahead. “I expect you to be right behind me. Do not make me ask twice.”
I liked Kenzari. I liked her a hell of a lot better than our boss. But who really liked the director? No one with a brain in their head.
As far as I was concerned, our boss was the reason I hadn’t seen my bed in a week and likely why we were being breached in the first place. I mean, why else would we be attacked unless it was because of her?
With who her daughter was, who her family was, with what she’d had us doing…
This was just like January. Just like the ghouls. Just like that shifter who was killing randoms. It was connected. I knew it was connected. But I couldn’t prove it. Someone had control, influence, and a boatload of power.
And we’d gotten too close.
“I’m coming. Get to a portal. I’ll be right behind you,” I told her as I dumped an armful of papers in the incinerator. “I have one more desk to do, and then I’m done.”
Dead and Gone (Grave Talker Book 2) Page 10