Grave Visions Read online

  While I’d watched the ghosts, Jenson must have left the room, because he walked back into the door as I turned, two morgue techs behind him.

  “Where do you need the bodies moved?” a young tech with a flush of pimples on his cheek asked.

  I glanced around the room. I wanted to disturb the scene as little as possible, which meant I didn’t want to walk—or draw my circle through—any of the blood. I probably shouldn’t move the furniture either if I could help it. It was going to have to be a very small circle. Fine by me, but I still needed enough clear space to do it. It was a nice hotel, but the room was far from large.

  I pointed to the largest clear spot in the room. One of the techs spread a drop cloth—which I hadn’t even considered before—and then the techs moved first the boy and then the girl side by side on the cloth. They were both in full rigor mortis, so while the techs tried to lay the boy on his side, the position was unnatural, his knees bent and arms and head curled forward like the overanimated pose of someone pretending to be scary for the benefit of a child. The girl was just as stiff, her legs twisted at awkward angles and one arm up as if she’d been shielding her face, but at least she lay flat.

  Once the bodies were moved, I pulled out my wax chalk and drew my circle tight around the couple, being sure to keep to the drop cloth. I actually stood on the outside to draw it, because inside the circle the open spaces were too narrow and awkward for me to squat while ensuring I didn’t accidentally brush against the bodies.

  With my circle drawn, I glanced at Falin, John, and Jenson. “Ready?”

  John nodded and pulled out a camera that I guessed shot still and video based on the small red light that began blinking when he hit a silver button on top. I doubted the video would be as good as what was shot at the morgue, but it would do to document the ritual.

  Falin glanced at the camera. “You know I’ll have to confiscate that if this officially becomes a FIB case.”

  “Yeah, you can file for it with the main office. Alex, go on.”

  I didn’t wait to see if the argument would continue, but activated my circle, dropped my shields, and embraced the grave. The chill rushed into me, the unearthly wind tossing my curls around my face. The boy was closest to me, so I reached for him with my magic, my power sliding into the corpse.

  The shade I found was weak. Not impossible to raise, and not as weak as the male victim Jenson had me raise days before had been, but noticeably weaker than a fresh body should have been. I paused. Raising a weak shade would take a lot more energy than raising a normal one. And I didn’t have a lot of energy to spare. Time to check the girl. Hopefully, she could give us all the information we needed and I wouldn’t have to expend energy into the weak shade.

  I drew my magic back from the boy and reached out to the girl. Sometimes, when I hadn’t performed a ritual in a while, my power all but hemorrhaged out of me, rushing toward any corpse in my vicinity. But I’d used my grave magic a lot recently, and I wasn’t at my strongest, so it reacted placidly as I guided it into the girl.

  I frowned. Her shade was even weaker than the boy’s.

  “Something has damaged them,” I said, opening my eyes to look at the men in the room with me.

  Jenson huffed out a breath between his lips. “Well, I’d say that is stating the obvious.”

  I turned a glare toward him. “No, I mean their shades. What was done to their bodies shouldn’t have weakened their shades. But . . . something did.”

  “You can’t tell what?” Falin asked.

  I shook my head. I’d felt shades that had been shredded by a soul-eating spell before—this wasn’t like that. It was more as if they’d burned out, like a candle that had run out of wick. “Something used them up. Wore them out.”

  “What can do that?” John asked, stepping to the very edge of my circle. I tensed—John was a null with absolutely no magical sensitivity. He had a bad habit of walking through my circles.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Some sort of massive energy drain before death?” I’d read a study once that explained how a death due to magical depletion damaged a body down to its DNA. Maybe it could damage the shade as well. It was so rare, I doubted it had ever been studied. “Do we know if either of these victims was a witch?”

  John pressed his lips together and then shrugged. “They attended public high school, but that’s not always a good indicator. As high school students, of course, neither had achieved any OMIH certifications, so they aren’t card carriers. Without questioning them or their friends and family, or running a Relative Magic Compatibility test, it’s hard to say. What are you thinking?”

  What was I thinking? Magic couldn’t cause knife wounds. Sure, there were offensive spells that could rend flesh, but I doubted that was what we were dealing with in this situation. For one thing, that would still require an outside caster to have delivered fatal blows to both kids, which meant they hadn’t been the ones performing a ritual that had gone out of control and drained their life essence. And if the wounds were magical backlash, they should have been inflicted from the inside out, and while I was no medical examiner, even I could tell the wounds started at the flesh and not vice versa.

  I turned back toward the bodies. “I’m going to raise the boy now.”

  No one said anything as I pushed my magic into the boy’s body again. It took a lot of magic, and I felt the strain before my heat even rushed out of me, but the shade sat up, solidifying. While the corpse was a mess of lacerations, the killing blow must have come pretty quickly because the shade looked fairly normal, at least from the front. I could have walked around and seen how much damage he’d taken premortem, but I wasn’t that curious.

  “What is your name?”

  The shade turned his head toward me, his eyes dull, unfocused. Not surprising. “Bruce Martain.”

  I nodded in acknowledgment—not that the shade noticed, but even if they weren’t sentient, they looked like people and I tried to be polite. Then I turned toward John. I could have questioned Bruce without guidance—I’d done this dance before—but he’d hired me, so I’d take his lead. Besides, he was recording this. It was better if the cop directed the questions.

  “How did you die?” John asked, and I repeated the question for the shade.

  “The clown crawled out of the TV. It had a knife.”

  The room went utterly silent, as if everyone present had drawn in a breath and then held it. Even Roy’s constant whispered prattling paused. All eyes stared at the placid shade.

  If I’d been asked to make a list of the top one hundred possible explanations for what happened to these kids, going from most to least likely scenarios, “a clown crawled out of the TV” wouldn’t have made said list. I blinked at the shade. It couldn’t lie. I knew that. It could only repeat what he had seen or thought while alive.

  “A clown?” I asked, hearing the uncertainty in my own voice. “Bruce, did you take any drugs recently?”

  Okay, I should have waited for John to ask that, but it was too obvious a question to not follow up “a clown crawled out of the TV” with drugs.

  “Yes, and not a clown. The clown,” Bruce clarified, as if that actually helped. “We were watching a movie. I picked a scary one because when Shannon is scared she all but climbs in my lap, and I’d already talked her into her slip so she didn’t wrinkle her dress.” The shade said all this with no shame, and I groaned under my breath for all teenagers everywhere. “We’d just watched the scene where the killer dressed up as a clown at a frat party and started hunting down co-eds. Then he turned and called us out by name. He said he was coming after us next. And he did. He crawled right out of the TV. I thought it was the drugs taking effect at first, until Shannon started screaming and I realized she was seeing the same thing.”

  “What drugs did you take?” I already had an idea. I wanted to be wrong but . . .

  “A guy was
giving out samples in the parking lot outside the dance. He said it was like a magical hit of ecstasy. Everything would feel more intense for a few hours, and he suggested it would really get Shannon in the mood. He called it Glitter.”

  Shit. I turned to Jenson, my eyes wide. The detective looked away from me. Actually, from everyone. Had he told anyone about the shades I’d raised for him? I’d thought that was why the FIB was here now, but maybe not. Actually, by his response, I was sure not. Damn. That would make things more difficult.

  John opened his little flip notebook, trying to write notes while simultaneously holding the camera steady on the shade. It wasn’t working out well for him, but with him distracted by the task, I couldn’t read from his expression if he was familiar with the drug or not. I looked at Falin.

  “Have you heard of Glitter before? Did you guys find any drug paraphernalia?” I knew they hadn’t at Jeremy and Emma’s crime scene, but then, they hadn’t been looking. Whatever Glitter was, it didn’t pop on a drug screen. Not the normal ones the ME usually ran, at least.

  Falin’s face gave away nothing. “Some personal items were bagged in the bathroom, but no syringes, pipes, or pills.”

  I’ll take that as a no.

  “Ask how the drug was ingested,” John said. He’d pressed the notepad against the back of the camera and was writing at a vertical angle. Every move of his pen caused the camera to bob, and I hoped whoever reviewed the footage wasn’t prone to motion sickness.

  I repeated his question to the shade.

  “We drank it. The drug came in little glass vials. The kind cologne samples sometimes come in.”

  I glanced at Falin, who nodded to indicate something that met that description had been bagged as evidence. From the corner of my eye, I saw the two ghosts float toward the bathroom. Roy clearly wasn’t done playing detective for Icelynne yet.

  “We need to establish a timeline,” John said, looking up from his notebook.

  I nodded and turned to ask the shade to recount the order of events, but froze when Roy burst back out of the bathroom.

  “Alex,” he yelled. “Alex, we need you.”

  I make it a rule not to talk to people no one else in the room can see. It was easier before my planeweaving went into full gear and I heard ghosts only when I tried. These days I actually had to work at ignoring ghosts. But the pitch to Roy’s voice was equal parts excitement and concern, not the type of thing I should ignore. He’d found something. Or at least he thought he had.

  But I couldn’t just stop questioning a shade midritual and mosey to the bathroom. I turned toward him, hoping my expression was enough of a question for him to tell me what he’d found.

  “The vials? The ones the shade said the drug was in?” he said, and I nodded for him to continue. “Icelynne recognizes them. She said they are what the alchemist used to store the glamour he stole.”

  Chapter 12

  I stared at Roy. The killer in Faerie kidnapping fae and draining their blood to distill their glamour was then creating a drug with it that was somehow making it to mortal hands? Why?

  I glanced at the bodies at my feet. Both teens had imbibed Glitter and now their shades were weak, exhausted. The first victim we knew of, Jeremy, had also taken the drug and had a weak shade. There had to be a connection. The drug somehow burned them out to their core. And it had something to do with pure glamour. And snakes, which Jeremy was terrified of, and a clown from a horror movie. But again, why?

  How did murder of kidnapped fae and seemingly randomly chosen mortals relate? What could a fae gain out of the deaths? Fae who lived in Faerie rarely cared about mortal currency, and besides, with both cases involving Glitter, the shades claimed the drug had been given to them, not sold. So what did the alchemist want? And how can we find and stop him? I did not want to see any more horrific scenes like this or like the grotesque display of Icelynne’s body.

  I turned to Falin. I guess I expected him to be thinking the same thing, but all that was written across his face was cautious concern. John was similar. Jenson just looked impatient. Of course, they couldn’t hear Roy. As far as they knew, John had asked me to question the shade. I’d turned, and then stared off into space.

  I opened my mouth to tell them what I’d learned and then stopped. It was fae business. Falin needed to know, obviously. Jenson was debatable. He was feykin, and a cop, but he was independent. Once the FIB knew the connection, he’d likely be off the case. John was plain vanilla human. The queen might be annoyed if I told a mortal cop someone in Faerie was releasing a drug made from glamour to humans. Still, he was a friend, and a cop on this case. Didn’t he deserve to know?

  “The drug is from Faerie,” I said, and the expressions around me went from concern, to confusion, and then the two faes’ features turned toward dismayed anger. I decided it was best not to add any specifics.

  Falin’s features returned to neutral annoyance in the blink of an eye, and he turned toward John. “This is now officially an FIB matter. Clear out your men.”

  John huffed and stood straighter. John was by no means a small man. In fact, I’ve used the phrase “grizzly bear” to describe him before. But Falin was the freaking assassin and knight of the winter court. Even if John didn’t know those particular facts, Falin had a badass aura to him. When you met his gaze, something inside you knew that he wasn’t someone you wanted to meet in a dark alley. It didn’t hurt that he was taller as well so he literally stared down at John, making the detective look up at him.

  “Unless Alex has some proof for that statement, I intend to finish the interview with this shade,” John said, and then looked at me.

  I looked to Falin. He scowled. The queen would be royally pissed if I discussed Icelynne and what was happening inside the winter court—she’d been trying pretty hard to conceal it. Continuing the interview seemed the better plan. When Falin didn’t stop me from turning to the waiting shade, I assumed he agreed.

  I asked the shade John’s timeline question, and he laid out the events of his evening. Most of the events we already knew or guessed, but confirmation was always good. The couple had arrived at the hotel and checked in just after eleven. Bruce had shared the Glitter with Shannon soon after they arrived. They’d gotten comfortable—aka clothes had been removed—and then Bruce had cued up the horror movie. The movie was less than halfway through when the clown had climbed out of the screen.

  His description of the nightmare clown chasing them around the room was delivered clinically, the shade detached from the story, even as he described the first stab to his back. How he’d stumbled into the bed. I shivered and wondered why no one had called the police, or at least the front desk. Surely the teenagers were screaming? The story wrapped up soon after that, Bruce’s death not far behind the stab to his back. Shannon was still alive in his last memory, but she clearly hadn’t been for much longer.

  John then sent for a sketch artist to question the shade on the appearance of the man who’d given him the drug. The artist took notes without starting his sketch. He’d worked with me before, and he knew that as the shade couldn’t provide feedback about the drawing, his time was better spent asking detailed questions about the dealer’s physical description. I knew he’d review the audio back at the station where he would put pencil to paper.

  Finally, the sketch artist nodded, his questions finished. I sighed in relief, a sigh that came out jagged as I trembled. I looked around, asking with my expression if anyone had other questions. Exhaustion clutched at me and the icy chill of the grave sliced at my skin. Being so cold while still in touch with the grave was a bad sign. No one ventured another question, and I sighed with relief.

  “Rest now,” I told the shade, releasing Bruce back into his body. Some of my life-affirming heat followed the well-worn path through my psyche back into my body, but it did little to warm me.

  “Did you need to question Shannon as well?”
I asked, trying to keep my teeth from chattering.

  John glanced at his notebook, then at the bodies in my circle, and then finally at me. For one excruciating second I thought he’d say yes, but finally he shook his head. Thank goodness. As tired as I felt, I wasn’t sure I had the energy to put the eroded shade back together. It couldn’t have been much after noon, but I was ready for bed, or at least a long nap. Yeah, that sounded divine.

  Wrapping up my ritual, I released my hold on the grave, not the least bit surprised when unbroken darkness covered my eyes. I’d used a lot of magic. I’d be blind for a while. I broke the circle, but then just stood there. Not being able to see while standing in the middle of a crime scene beside a pair of murder victims was not a good thing. With my luck, I’d end up tripping and sprawled on top of the bodies.

  I had a moment of indecision as I debated opening my shields so I could at least navigate out of the hotel. Then a hand cupped my elbow.

  “Let’s get you out of here,” Falin said, his hand on my arm guiding me gently.

  I let him. The AC of the hotel gave way to the midday heat, the sun only slightly warm against my chilled skin.

  “Do you need a ride?” he asked, and I heard the unmistakable sound of a car door opening. As I was pretty sure I’d locked my car and he hadn’t pickpocketed the keys, I assumed it was his car.

  “Yeah, otherwise I have to hang around here for a while.”

  “Unavoidable either way, I’m afraid. That is, unless you want me to arrange for someone else to drive you home.”

  Not really. A yawn caught me by surprise and my jaw cracked with the movement. I covered it the best I could with the back of my hand before shrugging to Falin.

  “If you don’t mind me catching a nap in the passenger seat, I’ll be fine here for a while.”