Grave Ransom Read online

  Praise for the Alex Craft Novels

  Grave Visions

  “Grave Visions has been a long-waited-for read and it certainly delivers.”

  —A Great Read

  “If you love urban fantasy, DO NOT miss out on this series.”

  —Kings River Life Magazine

  Grave Memory

  “I hope there will be many more books to follow.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “A truly original and compelling urban fantasy series.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “An incredible urban fantasy . . . This is a series I love.”

  —Nocturne Romance Reads

  “An action-packed roller-coaster ride . . . An absolute must-read!”

  —A Book Obsession

  Grave Dance

  “A dense and vibrant tour de force.”

  —All Things Urban Fantasy

  “An enticing mix of humor and paranormal thrills.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  Grave Witch

  “Fascinating magic, a delicious heartthrob, and a fresh, inventive world.”

  —Chloe Neill, New York Times bestselling author

  “A rare treat, intriguing and original. Don’t miss this one.”

  —Patricia Briggs, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “Edgy, intense . . . a promising kickoff to a series with potential.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “This series is more addictive than chocolate.”

  —Huntress Book Reviews

  The Alex Craft Novels

  Grave Witch

  Grave Dance

  Grave Memory

  Grave Visions

  ACE

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Kalayna Smithwick

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE is a registered trademark and the A colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781101595091

  First Edition: July 2017

  Cover art by Aleta Rafton

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To Dad,

  who sparked my love of fantasy fiction

  at a young age and who read all my books.

  I miss you.

  Contents

  Praise for the Alex Craft Novels

  The Alex Craft Novels

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  The first time I realized I could feel corpses, I had nightmares for a week. I was a child at the time, so that was understandable. These days I was accustomed to the clammy reach of the grave that lifted from dead bodies. To the eerie feeling of my own innate magic responding and filling me with the unrequested knowledge of how recently the person died, their gender, and the approximate age they were at death. When I anticipated encountering a corpse, I tightened my mental shields and worked at keeping my magic at bay. Usually that was only necessary at places like graveyards, the morgue, and funeral homes—places one might expect to find a body.

  I never expected to feel a corpse walking across the street in the middle of the Magic Quarter.

  “Alex? I’ve lost you, haven’t I?” Tamara, one of my best friends and my current lunchmate, asked. She sighed, twisting in her seat to scan the sidewalk beyond the small outdoor sitting area of the café where we were eating. “Huh. Which one is he? I may be married and knocked up, but I know a good-looking man when I see one, and, girl, I don’t see one. Who are you staring at?”

  “That guy,” I said, nodding my head at a man in a brown suit crossing the street.

  Tamara glanced at the squat, middle-aged man who was more than a little soft in the middle and then cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’ve seen what you have at home, so I take it this is business. Did you bring one of your cases to our lunch?”

  I ignored the “at home” comment, as that situation was more than a little complicated, and shook my head. “My case docket is clear,” I said absently, and let my senses stretch. When I concentrated, I could feel grave essence reaching from corpses in my vicinity. All corpses. There were decades of dead and decaying rats in the sewer below the streets, and smaller creatures like insects that barely made a blip on my radar, but like called to like, and my magic zeroed in on the man.

  “He’s dead,” I said, and even to me my voice sounded unsure.

  Tamara blinked at me, likely waiting for me to reveal the joke. Instead I pushed out of my seat as the man turned up the street. Tamara grabbed my arm.

  “I’m the lead medical examiner for Nekros City, and I can tell you with ninety-nine point nine percent certainty that the man walking down the street is very much alive.” She put extra emphasis on the word “walking,” and on any other day, I would have agreed with her.

  My own eyes agreed with her. But my magic, the part of me that touched the grave, that could piece together shades from the memories left in every cell of a body, disagreed. That man, walking or not, was a corpse. Granted, he was a fresh one—the way he felt to my magic told me he couldn’t have been dead more than an hour. But he was dead.

  So how the hell had he just walked into the Museum of Magic and the Arcane?

  I dropped enough crumpled dollars on the table to cover my portion of the bill and tip before weaving around tables and out of the café seating. Behind me, Tamara grumbled under her breath, but after a moment I heard her chair slide back as she pushed away from the table. I didn’t wait for her to follow me out as I all but sprinted across the street to catch up with the walking corpse.

  The museum’s wards tingled along my skin as I stepped through the threshold. I’d been inside the museum a few times, and the collection of rare and unusual artifacts from both pre- and post-awakening was impressive, but I was a sensitive, capable of sensing magic, and between all the security wards and the artifacts themselves, the museum tended to be overwhelming. Definitely migraine-inducing in large doses. I noted that the
magic in the air was particularly biting today, like one of the security wards had recently been triggered. I sucked in an almost pained breath, trying to adjust to the sudden crush of magic all around me. The extra sting of the deployed ward didn’t help.

  I should have walked the extra few steps to clear the entrance wards.

  I’d entered only minutes behind the man, but he almost barreled into me as the door swung closed behind me. His shoulder brushed me at the same moment he hit the antitheft wards, and several things happened at once. The wards snapped to life, blaring a warning to the museum staff to let them know something was being stolen. Simultaneously, a theft-deterring paralytic spell sparked across the would-be thief, locking his body—and the artifact—in place.

  Unfortunately, while the wards were powerful, they weren’t terribly specific. Where his shoulder touched mine, the spell jumped from him to me, immobilizing me as well. Under normal circumstances, that would majorly suck. Under these circumstances? It was so much worse.

  My magic still identified him as a corpse. I could feel the grave essence lifting off him, clawing at me. My mental shields, while strong, were already overwhelmed, and my magic liked dead things. A lot. I hadn’t raised a shade in nearly a week, so the magic was looking for release. Typically I made a point not to touch the dead. Now I couldn’t get away.

  My magic battered against the inside of my shields, looking for chinks in my mental walls that it could jump through. Fighting the spell holding me was a waste of energy—I was well and truly caught—so I focused all of my attention on holding back my own magic. But I could feel the chilled fingers of the grave sliding under my skin, worming their way into me and making paths for my magic to leach into the animated corpse frozen against me.

  I wanted to open my shields and See what the thing in front of me was truly made of. But if I cracked my shields to gaze across the planes of reality and get a good look at the body, more of my magic would escape. And too much was already whispering through my shields, making fissures where more could follow. Sweat broke out on my paralyzed brow as I poured my focus into holding my magic at bay.

  But I was touching a corpse.

  The grave essence leaking from the body clawed at the fissures my magic was chewing through my shields, and it was too much. If I could have stepped back . . . But I couldn’t.

  All at once a chunk of my mental wall caved, and the magic rushed out of me. Color washed over the world as the Aetheric plane snapped into focus around me. A wind lifted from the land of the dead, stirring my curls and chilling my clammy skin. I could now see the network of magic holding me in place, as well as the knot of magic in the sprung ward, but more importantly, I could see the corpse in front of me. And it was a corpse, no doubt about it, the dead skin sagging, bloating.

  But under the dead flesh, a yellow glimmer of a soul glowed.

  Which meant the body was both dead and alive. Considering it was up and walking around, it was a heck of a lot more alive than a dead body should have been.

  The soul inside was the color I associated with humans, so this wasn’t a corpse being worn and walked around by something from Faerie or one of the other planes. I still couldn’t see spellwork shimmering across the dead flesh, but it had to be there, binding the soul inside the corpse. But whatever kind of half-life the man existed in wasn’t going to last much longer if I couldn’t get hold of my magic.

  The hole in my shields wasn’t huge, but I could feel my magic filling the body. And the grave and souls didn’t get along. I couldn’t stop the hemorrhage of magic, but I managed to slow it to a trickle.

  I’d barely noticed the crowd gathering around us until one of the museum guards began releasing the spell holding us. If the antitheft paralyzing spell was dropped, I’d be able to get my distance from the corpse.

  But either he wasn’t a very good witch, or he was stalling—likely to wait for the cops—because he was taking his sweet time as more and more of my magic flowed out.

  I’d ejected souls from dead bodies before. While souls didn’t like the touch of the grave, they tended to cling to their flesh pretty hard and it took directed magic to pry them free. I was actively fighting expelling the soul, and only a small portion of my magic had filled the corpse, but the soul’s connection to the body felt weak, tentative.

  I couldn’t shift my gaze to the museum worker, but I could see him out of the corner of my eye. Oh please, release the damn immobility spell.

  Too late.

  In a burst of light, the soul popped free of the corpse.

  Nothing about the body changed. It had already been dead and it was still held immobile by the spell, but the soul stood free. For a long moment it was almost too bright to look at, a shimmering, crystalline yellow. But souls can’t exist without a body, and in a heartbeat the glow dimmed, the form solidifying as the soul transitioned to the purgatory landscape of the land of the dead.

  If I could have stumbled back in shock, I would have, but I couldn’t even blink in surprise. Not because the soul transitioned—that I expected—but because the ghost now standing in front of me was that of a young woman.

  My focus shifted from the balding, middle-aged man to the woman who might not have been old enough to drink. Ghosts weren’t like shades. While shades were always an exact representation of the person at the moment of death, ghosts tended to reflect how a person perceived himself. Appearing a little younger or more attractive was common. I supposed it was even possible that if someone identified across gender lines, their ghost might reflect that discrepancy. But this ghost was a drastically different age as well as being a different gender and ethnicity. And that was unheard of.

  The ghost-girl looked around, no longer inhibited by the spell holding the body she’d been inside. Her dark eyes rounded as her eyebrows flew upward and her motions took on the frantic quickness of panic.

  A panic that didn’t last long as a figure appeared beside her. He was dressed from head to toe in gray and carrying a silver skull-topped cane. The Gray Man. A soul collector.

  I wanted to scream No. To run between him and the girl who clearly hadn’t belonged in the dead body. Things didn’t add up here, and I wanted to talk to the ghost.

  But I still couldn’t move.

  I stood silently frozen in place as the Gray Man reached out, grabbed the soul, and sent her on to wherever souls went next. Then he turned and looked at the body she’d vacated. His expression gave away nothing as his gaze moved on to me. He gave me one stern shake of his head, which could have meant he didn’t know what was going on or that he knew but it wasn’t any business of mine.

  Then he vanished.

  Of course, that was the moment the guard released the spell. I stumbled back as the now truly dead body collapsed.

  I barely registered the gasps and screams. I only half noted the gun that clattered across the marble as the lifeless body hit the floor. I was far too busy staring at the spot where the Gray Man and the ghost had been. She hadn’t belonged in the wrongly animated body. So how the hell had she gotten into someone else’s body? And why?

  Chapter 2

  “You’re saying the man was dead before he ran into the security system?” The cop interviewing me looked up from his notepad, one skeptical eyebrow raised. “And what makes you think that?”

  “I’m a grave witch. I sensed him when he walked by on the street,” I said, not paying as much attention to the questions as I probably should have been. Most of my attention was focused on the body that someone had draped a black tablecloth over just a few yards away, still where it had collapsed near the door. When I’d first sensed the body—when it was still up and walking around—it had felt like the very recently dead. Now my magic told me it was older, days, maybe even a week, deceased.

  I squinted, as if the action could reveal more about the body. It didn’t, of course. I could have reached out with my ability to sense
the dead, thinned my shields so I gazed across the planes and spanned the chasm between the living and dead, but there was a lot of magic—both latent and active—in the museum, and my shields were already rather worse for the wear after getting caught in the antitheft spell with the corpse.

  The cop’s eyes narrowed. “So you’re saying you noticed the deceased before he entered, and you followed him in?”

  “I, uh . . .” Crap. Yeah, I definitely should have been paying more attention to the questions at hand. One look at the cop’s expression told me that I’d just gone from “unlucky witness” to “potential suspect.”

  The door to the museum swung open and my gaze flicked over the cop’s head. Tamara stepped inside. She held out her laminated medical examiner ID as she assessed the scene, clearly trying to identify who was in charge.

  “That was fast,” the other officer—the one interviewing the museum curator—said with a look of relief on his face. He wasn’t a homicide detective and he’d responded to a robbery call only to discover a dead body. He likely wanted to hand over his notes and be done with this mess.

  Tamara shook her head. “I was across the street. At lunch.” The last words held the barest edge, no doubt aimed at me. “I let my office know I was at the scene. The rest of my team should be here soon.” She made her way toward the prone figure. Her baby bump was just barely showing, but her gait had changed slightly. Nothing major, but I’d known her long enough to notice. “Did anyone try to resuscitate the victim?”

  The cop who’d been questioning me held up one hand, two fingers raised, clearly indicating I shouldn’t go anywhere. He half turned toward Tamara, never letting me out of his sight. Yup, I was officially in his suspect category, and I hadn’t even told him I’d been responsible for driving out the soul who’d hitched a ride in the man’s body.

  “He was clearly dead when we arrived, ma’am. I checked for vitals, but he was gone.”

  Tamara nodded absently and reached down to pull the makeshift shroud from the corpse. “What the—?” She jumped backward, dropping the cloth. “Get a magical hazmat team here now. This body needs to be sealed and contained behind a circle. Now.”