Affairs of the Dead

by A. J. Locke

  I felt like my blood was running cold.

  “Selene, this could pose a very serious problem for you. You’re already inclined to have an unstable temperament”—oh how well she knew me—“and it will definitely affect Ethan. It could cause him to act on certain feelings if they reach him.”

  “Well, I don’t think we have anything to worry about right n—” I cut myself off when I thought about the rage I had felt toward Andrew the last time I’d seen him.

  My power had responded to that rage, which was unusual, and I had threatened to kill him. I shot to my feet, gripping the edge of Ilyse’s desk and fixing my stare on her.

  “Are you absolutely sure about this, Ilyse?”

  Her eyes widened at my reaction, but she nodded and pushed the book toward me. “You can read it for yourself,” she said. “Personal weapon was the main use of bound ghosts, and if their acts were fueled by emotions from their reanimators, they were that much more effective.”

  “Then I have to go,” I said, turning around and running out of Ilyse’s office.

  “Selene, wait! There’s more I have to tell you, and I wanted to scan you. You can’t give the Rot reason to take hold more!”

  I didn’t want the Rot to spread, but that wasn’t my priority right this moment. If what Ilyse had just said was true, then I was more afraid than I could say that my rage at Andrew could have reached Ethan and caused him to seek Andrew out.

  “Selene!” Micah caught up to me by the elevator banks, grabbed my arm, and spun me around. “What the hell is going on? Where are you going?”

  “Andrew might be in danger,” I said, chest heaving under the pressure of this sudden realization. “What Ilyse just said…what I felt toward Andrew the other night…what I said to him…Micah, I’m afraid that Ethan…”

  “Shit,” Micah said. He got it. “We have to find Andrew.”

  The elevator door opened and I slammed my fist into the button for the first floor as though that would make the elevator move faster. My body felt weak, but I had to keep it together.

  When we got to the first floor, we ran out of the building to Micah’s car, and he drove off.

  “His home. We check his home first, right?” Micah asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. I felt like a meteor was about to smash into my head. If Ethan killed Andrew, Cecelia would lose her husband; AOD would lose its boss; and, despite the fact that I now found him lecherous, I didn’t actually want him dead.

  While Micah flirted with breaking the speed limit, I called Andrew. First his business phone, then his personal phone, but both rang out before going to voicemail. Andrew always answered his phone. Even if he was in the shower. I’d had many a business call with him where he’d felt free to mention that he was exfoliating. Now he wasn’t answering either of his phones. Being the mistress, I didn’t have his house number. That sick feeling in my stomach intensified.

  After a drive that seemed too long, Micah double-parked in front of Andrew’s condo, and we rushed through the door, stopping only long enough to notice that the guard and concierge were lying on the ground, dead. Shit. We ran to the elevator and up to Andrew’s floor. My heart felt like it had crawled up my throat, and I prayed that we would find Andrew alive.

  Micah and I broke into a run toward Andrew’s front door once we got off the elevator, but we paused when the thumps, crashes, and grunts we heard could only mean that a fight was going on. I felt both good and bad about that, because even though my fears that Ethan had tracked down Andrew would be confirmed, if the fight was still going on, then it meant Andrew was still alive.

  Andrew’s door had been broken down, so Micah and I ran into his sprawling living room…and stopped short at the scene that met our eyes. There was a fight going on, yes, but Andrew wasn’t a part of it. Ghost Ethan was fighting his body-jacker.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Ethan!” Obviously, I was screaming for ghost Ethan, but they both stopped their grappling and looked up sharply.

  One of them looked relieved, and the other looked even more menacing. The relieved Ethan was the one getting his ass handed to him. Ghost Ethan used the moment of distraction to wrench himself away from his body-jacker, and he tried to crawl across the floor to us, but he was so badly beaten that he sagged to the ground instead.

  The other Ethan straightened up and whipped his head around. I followed his gaze to where a gun lay several feet away. He lunged for it, but Micah shot the gun farther away, and I shot at him, making him veer course to avoid it. I couldn’t have expected to be confronted with this scene, but I was still worried about Andrew. A quick look around his ransacked living room told me that he wasn’t here.

  “The cavalry’s arrived,” the body-jacker sneered, and now that I had concluded that it was Larry in there, the smile reminded me of Larry’s own facial expressions. Micah and I continued to fire, but he jumped up into the air and did a similar kick off the wall that he did with me in the alley and landed behind us.

  Micah and I had to abruptly stop and turn to face him, and in the time it took us to turn, he ran at us and knocked us down. We didn’t just fall; we flew back and hit the ground, hard. I don’t know about Micah, but the wind was completely knocked out of me.

  “Too bad I got beat to the hit,” body-jacker said as I struggled to my feet. “But I will have that ghost.”

  By the time Micah and I were on our feet again, he was almost out of the apartment. I ran forward, but Micah grabbed my arm and held me back.

  “Let him go. I don’t think we’ll be able to stop him by ourselves, especially since we can’t kill his body.”

  I knew he was right, but I didn’t like it.

  “Larry!” I called. He stumbled for a split second, then started running again. That was all the confirmation I needed. It was Larry’s ghost occupying Ethan’s body. Momentarily pushing past my frustration that I had come face-to-face with him again only to lose him, I ran over to ghost Ethan. Micah was already bent over him.

  “As a ghost, I shouldn’t be able to have my ass kicked, should I?” Ethan croaked. One of his eyes was swollen, and he had bruises everywhere, but what really caught my eye was that he was covered in blood. He might be tangible enough to swell and bruise, but he was still a ghost, and I didn’t think he could bleed. So that meant the blood wasn’t his.

  Micah helped him sit up, but I sat back away from him. We could discuss later why he was tangible enough to get a beating.

  “Ethan, why are you here?” I asked.

  He looked at me and blinked a few times, then looked around as though he was seeing where he was for the first time. Then his confused gaze landed on me again.

  “I…I don’t know what happened,” he said, frowning. “I’d been hiding out at my house the past few days, but I was on my way back to your place when suddenly a surge of…of emotion filled me up. Anger, it was a lot of anger, very strong. It scared the shit out of me. Then I started hearing words in my head. It sounded like your voice, but I couldn’t really make out what was being said. I saw things too—a man’s face, a neighborhood…a building, and I was compelled to find it. It’s like I was possessed, Selene.” He was trembling now and sounded unsure and afraid. “It’s like my body knew where to go, so I ended up here and…”

  He looked at his blood-splattered body, and his eyes widened as he sucked in a sharp breath. I scrambled to my feet and ran out of the room, looking everywhere, and finally stopping and letting out a scream when I walked into Andrew’s massive bathroom, which was accessed from his bedroom. The pristine white floors, the clear walls of the shower stall, the porcelain sink and toilet…they all were splattered with blood, and in the middle of the floor, Andrew lay sprawled, wearing a robe that had once been white. His body was covered in garish wounds, and there was a blood-covered meat cleaver lying nearby.

  I dropped to my knees and started dry heaving. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. Things that had once been inside Andrew’s body now spilled out, and the stench
of death that filled the bathroom made bile rise in my throat. I started sobbing. I couldn’t believe I was staring at Andrew’s massacred body, and I especially couldn’t believe that I had caused this.

  It didn’t matter that I hadn’t meant to do it; I had caused this.

  “Fuck.”

  I whipped my head up to see Micah standing there, looking pale and spooked. He looked at me, then at Andrew’s body again, and turned away, running his hands through his hair and pacing in small circles behind me. I felt like my bones had dissolved into water. I had to be dreaming. Everything that had happened in the last week, starting with my meeting Ethan and culminating with Andrew’s horrific death, had to be a dream.

  “Selene?” The timid, uncertain voice that spoke behind me belonged to Ethan, but I didn’t know what I could say to him right now. He had acted as my unwilling weapon and carried out an act I had never intended. I couldn’t blame Ethan for this, but he was splattered with Andrew’s blood, and the body on the floor would never get up again. I felt cold, sick, and weak.

  “Selene, I called the office for backup,” Micah said, kneeling next to me. He still looked shaken, and I could see his struggle to keep it together. “They’re going to come for his body, but I suggest you not be here when they get here. You and him.” He indicated Ethan. “They’ll want to capture Ethan and do a necromancer circle, and there are numerous reasons why that can’t happen.”

  He helped me stand and started walking me away from Andrew’s body. Ethan stood uncertainly a few feet away. His eyes were too wide, and his body shook.

  “I did it,” he whispered. “I did it. Selene…”

  Micah let me go for a moment, and I immediately fell to the floor again. Micah then took Ethan by the shoulder and left the room with him. I sat there dazed until Micah came back and got me, and when I saw Ethan out in the living room, he had been cleaned of all the blood, and Micah had made him put on one of Andrew’s shirts. He was sitting on the sofa arm, hunched in on himself, and he flinched when Micah laid his hand on his shoulder again.

  “Come on,” he said.

  I hardly knew what was going on. I just let Micah lead me wherever he wanted, and before I knew it, Ethan and I were sitting in the backseat of a cab and Micah was leaning in the open door. He cupped my cheek and made me focus on him.

  “The cab will take you home,” he said gently. When he brushed his thumb across my cheek, I realized I was crying. “Selene…I…”

  He sighed and searched my eyes for a moment. What could he say? Just a few hours ago, he’d been giving me the freeze out because of my affair with Andrew. Now, we both had to deal with the fact that the ghost I was bound to had killed him. We were in the grayest possible area you could imagine. Finally, Micah leaned forward and kissed my forehead.

  “I’ll take care of everything here,” he said. “Then I’ll come by.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but he just squeezed my hand, closed the door, and walked back toward Andrew’s building.

  I slumped back against the seat and stared listlessly out the window as the car drove off. I should have stayed to help Micah. I knew seeing Andrew dead was a huge shock to him too, but the overload I’d been shouldering lately had exploded, and I had become completely undone. All I could see was the red explosion in Andrew’s bathroom and the ruin his body had become. There was such an influx of emotions going through me that I ended up feeling nothing at all.

  When Ethan shifted, I remembered he was in the cab with me. I slowly rolled my head to look at him. He hadn’t lost his wide-eyed, trembling look, and he sat with his shoulders hunched and his arms dangling between his legs as though he wanted to get his limbs as far away from him as possible. He didn’t turn to me, and as we sat there together, I was aware of the connection between us for the first time.

  It was something I could literally feel, like an invisible rope that ran from my body into his. It was that connection that fed him my energy and made him tangible and me stronger, but it had also turned him into an unwilling murderer. How was I going to begin to handle this?

  Ethan didn’t say a word the entire drive home, and neither did I. I couldn’t come up with anything to say. I couldn’t take his hand and tell him it would be all right, because it was clear everything was not going to be okay. Not when Larry was walking around in his body, killing people who had wronged him or his brother, and I had only the barest knowledge about what it meant that Ethan and I were bound.

  When we got to my house and headed inside, Luna immediately pranced over to me, but I could only manage to give her food and water and open the back door for her so she could do her business in my small yard. I only did that on my laziest of days, and days like today, when I had just come from seeing the dead body of a man I had been sleeping with. When I came back into the living room, Ethan was slumped on the couch. I regarded him for a moment, then headed to the bathroom and got my first-aid kit. When I knelt down in front of him, he shrank away from me a little, but he didn’t protest when I started tending to his bruises.

  “Selene, what’s happening?” He finally spoke when I was almost done with bandaging his head. I paused for a second before finishing up, then repacked the first-aid kit and sat back on my heels in front of him. “How can I get hurt? Why did I kill that man? I don’t even know him. Who was he?”

  I wanted to crawl into bed, cover myself from head to foot and not come out until all of this went away, but I couldn’t leave Ethan like this. He deserved to know everything we were dealing with, or at least as much as I knew. I inhaled a deep breath and blew it out slowly, then I explained everything about the bond between us and how it had happened, as well as what it meant. If Ethan looked shaken before, he was practically vibrating by the time I finished, and he looked infinitely more afraid.

  “You killed Andrew because of me,” I said. “He was acting possessive and tried to force himself on me, and I fought him off.” I also told Ethan that I’d been sleeping with Andrew. “I was so mad, so enraged at the way he treated me.” Now I was trembling a little. “My rage at Andrew got channeled to you.”

  It was hard to meet his gaze, but I forced myself to. We were in this together, and I couldn’t demonize him because he had been the one to carry out the murder.

  “I…I can’t believe this,” Ethan said, shaking his head. “I’m supposed to be going to my summer classes in a few weeks. I have a family reunion next month in Florida. I had a date last Saturday that I clearly missed. I’m not supposed to be…be this…”

  He bowed his head and started sobbing, and when I saw tears fall, I realized being able to produce tears must be an effect of his bond to me. I felt beyond terrible. I was carrying not only my pain but Ethan’s, and since I wasn’t used to feeling this invested in someone else’s pain, I didn’t know what to do.

  “Ethan, we’ll figure this out. I promise,” I said. “I’m working with a dead witch who’s looking into this whole bond thing. If there’s a way to undo it, we will.”

  “Then I’ll just be a ghost again!” Ethan wailed. “I still won’t have my body back. You don’t know how to help me with that, just admit it!”

  I opened my mouth then closed it. He was right. I was no more knowledgeable about how to get him back into his body now than I was when this whole mess started.

  “He wanted to take me,” Ethan said. “Whoever’s in my body, he showed up after I had already…already done that horrible thing, and he tried to grab me, tried to take me with him, and when I fought back, he beat me.”

  I frowned. “Larry wanted to take you?”

  “Who’s Larry?” he said between shuddering breaths.

  “Larry is the name of the ghost inside your body,” I said. “I figured out that much. The woman he murdered was his ex-wife, who cheated on him when he was still alive, and the dead witch he killed was the one who discovered his brother was a reanimator. He also shot and killed three dead witches and two guards at the office, as well as at Andrew’s building, and it’s possibl
e he’s killed more. His brother is the one who orchestrated this whole body snatching. My guess is he was coming after Andrew because his brother thinks Andrew did nothing to help him once he was discovered to carry reanimation power.”

  Ethan nodded, his face looking even puffier from crying. I got him some tissues.

  “Did Larry say why he wanted to take you?” I asked.

  “He kept saying I had to be destroyed,” Ethan said. “That he was taking me to be taken care of.”

  I was frowning deeper now. “I wonder why he would want that, especially since he already has your body.”

  “I don’t know,” Ethan said, sniffling into his tissues. “I feel so sick, Selene, so tired, so drained. I just want all of this to end…”

  “Me too,” I said. But that was all I could say. What guarantees could I offer him? What guarantees could I offer myself?

  Just then, I tuned in to the fact that Luna was barking, and I remembered she was still outside. She was too small to climb the steps to get back into the house, so I went to get her, but when I walked outside, I did a double take, because Luna wasn’t the only dog I saw.

  Prancing around with her was another Yorkie, but where the hell had it come from? My yard was surrounded by a high fence and I’d had it recently redone, so I knew there were no holes or cracks for another dog to slip through. When I looked at the dogs again, I paused, because my necromancer magic flared. Actually, it was my reanimation magic I was feeling.

  The dogs saw me and barreled toward me. Luna did that running leap she did when she wanted me to catch her, which I did, and the other dog stood at my feet, barking up at me. Except it wasn’t a flesh-and-bone dog, it was a ghost dog, and it was Luna’s ghost.

  I was shocked. In my arms, Luna squirmed around happily, looking for my fingers to attack, and at my feet, ghost Luna looked like she wanted some attention too. I didn’t know what to make of this. Luna’s ghost had manifested? Was that a good thing? I shook my head, trying to clear it so I could think straight, and bent down so I could touch the ghost dog. My hand went through her at first. I channeled a little energy into her so she was more solid and carried both dogs inside.