Grave Ransom Read online

  I glanced at Falin when she finished speaking. This was very different from the other shades we’d spoken to. There was a kidnapping instead of a ruse to make the victim come willingly. And he’d stabbed her. He hadn’t physically harmed the others. Their autopsies had proven that fact.

  “What day did this occur, Angela?” I asked.

  “November ninth.”

  Ten days before Remy had died and Angela’s ghost had wound up wearing his body. What had she said when she’d been trying to pull Remy’s body back on after I’d forced her out? “He said if I did this, he’d put me back.” Had the necromancer promised her that he would return her own body if she robbed the bank?

  Briar and John asked the shade several more questions, but she couldn’t offer much information. She’d never seen her abductor, and it had been dark and she hadn’t been paying much attention to the car when it passed, so all she could recall was that the headlights were very bright, like halogen bulbs.

  When everyone ran out of questions, I released her, drawing my heat back. After the last few days, the magic in me that usually existed in a barely contained threat of overfilling was starting to run low. It was both impressive and terrifying. I reactivated my external shields, pushing magic back into the charms containing them until they buzzed around my psyche once more. With my external shields up, I closed the last slivers of my mental shields and darkness blanketed the world. The blindness was absolute, but this ritual had lasted a very short time despite there being two shades, so I hoped my vision would return quickly.

  With my shields up, all that was left was to drop my circle. My hands were trembling, so I didn’t lift one as I spindled the energy back out of the circle. As soon as the circle dropped, the warmth of another body crowded into my space. I backpedaled without thinking and bumped the gurney behind me. Only strong hands closing on my arms, steadying me, kept me from falling back against the body bag.

  I recognized the touch immediately—Falin. It wasn’t that his hands were that familiar, but he was the only person in the room whose body temperature was similar enough to my own that his touch wasn’t physically painful.

  “Steady,” he said, his voice equal parts concern and amusement. “Should you sit down?”

  I nodded. “Tamara’s office.” I lifted my hand to point in the general direction where I thought the door was located.

  Falin put a hand at the base of my back and guided me toward the office. Once inside, he deposited me in a chair. It was all feeling very déjà vu.

  “You’re freezing,” he said, and something fell around my shoulders.

  His suit jacket. It wouldn’t help much—the cold was coming from inside me, not outside—but it was still a sweet gesture.

  “I was worse when I was here last,” I said with a shrug, but I pulled the jacket tighter around me, huddling in the silk lining. While it might not offer much warmth, it did offer some comfort. “I can feel you hovering. I’m fine.”

  I was blind. And cold. But it was true that I was better off than I’d been the last time I sat in Tamara’s office.

  “What can I do to help?”

  He knew my go-to answer: whiskey and a warm body against mine doing some squishy, sweaty activities. But that last part was out. And the former wasn’t likely in Tamara’s office. I shook my head. Only time was going to help.

  “Coffee again?” a female voice asked from the darkness several yards to my right. Tamara must have entered during one of my particularly racking shivers because I sure hadn’t heard her and she didn’t exactly move stealthily these days. “This’ll be the second time this week. I’m going to have to start charging you.”

  “I thought you said it was good the beans weren’t going stale.”

  She made some noncommittal sounds as she went about fixing the coffee.

  “Tamara, if you’re going to be in here awhile, I need to make a few calls,” Falin said. Tamara must have waved him off because his voice grew farther away as he said, “I’ll be back in a few, Alex.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter,” I muttered, but I heard the door shutting before I even finished.

  “I can’t say I get the relationship between you two,” Tamara said, after the last echo of the door shutting faded away.

  “What relationship? We’re just friends.”

  Tamara made an uh-huh sound, and I frowned in the general direction her voice was coming from.

  “I think that glare hit my file cabinet.”

  “I wasn’t glaring.”

  “You so were. Oh look, you’re doing it again.”

  “Ha ha,” I said, but made an effort to relax the muscles in my face, forcing them to be more neutral.

  I’d been hoping I’d at least be able to start making out shadows among the darkness at this point, but the blackness filling my eyes hadn’t abated one bit. So, I sat in silence and listened to the sound of the coffee being made.

  Tamara brought over a mug and handed it to me. I accepted it, lifting it to inhale deeply, but not a single scent of coffee ticked my nose. The charm. Damn, not being able to smell anything would likely ruin the delicious dark roast coffee, but considering I was still in the morgue, there was no way I was deactivating the charm.

  The door swooshed open behind me.

  “How are the eyes today, Craft?” Briar asked as she entered the room.

  I shrugged. “Not great. I’m probably out for an hour or two. Not that we have any new leads unless you heard something back there that I didn’t.”

  “You’re not allowed to be out this time, Craft. For one thing, you’re my bait and, like you said, we don’t have any other leads. Bait is no good without the trap close by.”

  And of course, she was the trap.

  “What do you mean, ‘bait’?” Tamara asked, and she was getting that growly protective voice again.

  I sighed. “I guess you haven’t seen the news, huh?”

  Her answer was drowned out by my phone singing. I dug it out of my purse, mostly to avoid having to rehash the news report Briar had engineered.

  “Why, Alex Craft, I didn’t expect you to answer,” Lusa Duncan said from the other end of the phone, and I groaned, already regretting answering.

  “I’m a little busy right now,” I told her, the operative word that made the sentence not a lie being little.

  “I’m sure you are. Rumor has it you were just spotted heading into Central Precinct. Have you turned yourself over to the police?”

  “Would I be answering the phone if I was in police custody?”

  “A valid point.” But she sounded skeptical.

  I started to tell her I had to go when a thought occurred to me. “Lusa, you didn’t report that I was in Central Precinct, did you?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny that you might have a sound bite airing in a few moments.”

  “Do not broadcast that,” I said, hearing the smallest note of desperation in my voice and hating it.

  “If you give me an exclusive I might be able to delay—”

  I hung up on her.

  “We have to go,” I said, standing with my still half-full mug of coffee in one hand and my phone in the other. Which meant no hands on the purse that had been in my lap.

  It fell to my feet, the contents making clinks and clunks as they spilled onto the floor. I swore, kneeling down, but without being able to see, my knee landed on my wallet and I had to straighten again. I couldn’t see, my stuff was everywhere, and I couldn’t even figure out where to put the cup of coffee I couldn’t taste to enjoy.

  I heard Tamara lower herself to the floor with a long exhale of breath, and I knelt again, not landing on anything, but still unsure what the hell to do with the items already in my hands.

  I must have looked as frantic as I felt because Briar said, “Craft, calm down. What’s going on?”

&n
bsp; “Lusa is about to announce on the news that I’m here. That means the crazy necromancer you put on my scent, the one who already laid a killing trap for me, will know where I am. So I think it’s time to leave.”

  “And go where, Craft? Sit behind your broken door and hope the nasty necromancer doesn’t show up before you can see again? The wards on this building are better than at your house, plus, you know, the whole police force being here. Oh, and let’s not discount that you’re better off under my protection. Besides, you’re the bait, remember? We want him to come after you.”

  I clenched my teeth, biting back the urge to tell her exactly where she could shove her protection, but she wasn’t completely wrong. Granted, I was planning to go back to the castle, not the house, and with any luck, there was enough of Faerie at the castle that I’d get at least partial vision back immediately. Still, the wards had been breached once, and my front door was held together with duct tape. There wasn’t a whole lot stopping someone from searching the house again, and maybe finding the door to the folded space this time.

  “Al, why is your door broken? And what’s this about a killing trap?” Tamara asked, concern lacing her voice.

  Right. There was no avoiding the subject again.

  “Briar decided to use me as bait to get the necromancer out in the open. He or some of his walking corpses broke into my house and my office.” I left out the bit that personal items that could be used as a focus had been stolen.

  From where she still knelt beside me, picking up the scattered items I couldn’t see, Tamara reached over, her hands gripping my shoulders. “Are you okay? Of course you’re okay, you’re here. But you know what I mean. Geez, you’re cold.”

  “Warmer than I was earlier,” I said, lifting the mug to drain the last of the contents so I could put it down without spilling it.

  She dropped her hands from my shoulders to take the mug, which was a relief. Tamara was one of my best friends, but I wasn’t what people would call a hugger, especially when I was blind and feeling vulnerable.

  I felt around for my purse and shoved my phone inside it. Then I tried to take a tactile inventory of the contents. As I felt around, I concluded that Tamara must have gathered nearly everything already. The wallet that was somewhere near my knee was missing, but I felt almost everything else. As I started to pull my hand free, my fingers brushed against something I couldn’t identify. I tried to keep my purse fairly organized. With blindness as an occupational hazard that was bound to happen a few times a month, it was good to be able to grab exactly what I needed and know what anything was in an instant. This, though, was definitely not something I typically carried.

  I pulled it free, letting my fingers feel what was obviously some type of microsuede fabric around Rianna’s magical signature. The tracking charm. Holding it on my palm, I could feel the strong pull toward Remy’s body a room away, but there was a second, faint tug leading off in another direction.

  I was so surprised I almost dropped the charm.

  “Uh, change of plans.”

  “Now what?” The annoyance in Briar’s voice made me glad I couldn’t see her expression.

  As answer, I held out the small bag containing the tracking charm. She lifted it from my fingers, but she didn’t speak immediately. Her boots were almost completely silent, only a soft shush of sound letting me know she was moving. The door opened, and I frowned.

  “Did she just leave?”

  “Yeah,” Tamara said, but Briar was back a moment later.

  “Okay, I give up. I followed it to Remy’s body. There is no other trail.”

  “Are you sure? There was a second trail just two moments ago.” I held out my hand for the charm. As soon as she plunked it onto my palm, the magic in the charm attuned to me and I felt the strong tug toward Remy’s body and a faint one leading somewhere else. “It’s there, faint but there.”

  The charm vanished from my hand so quickly that Briar must have snatched it.

  “No. No, it’s not. Do you feel a trail?”

  “I—” I started, but Tamara touched my arm.

  “She was talking to me.” Her voice was soft, not reprimanding, just clueing me in to what must have been expressed through body language that I couldn’t see. Louder, Tamara said, “I feel a well-constructed spell but only one trail.”

  I opened my mouth. Closed it.

  “What about you?” Briar said.

  Who? I could guess she didn’t mean me, but I hadn’t heard anyone else enter.

  “One trail,” Falin said, and I could almost hear the apology in his voice. He must have followed Briar back in after she’d followed the dominant trail to Remy’s body, but that didn’t explain why no one else could feel the second trail.

  Falin placed the charm in my hand again. I still felt two trails. I didn’t waste any more breath trying to convince anyone I could feel the second trail. Everyone in this room knew I was fae and couldn’t lie; either they believed me or they didn’t.

  “Maybe I can feel the second trail because the charm was made by a grave witch and I am also a grave witch.” Or maybe it was because I was a planeweaver, and even fully shielded, I was still a convergence point for realities. I would have loved to see if Rianna felt the trail when in touch with the land of the dead, but the trail had disappeared before, and there was no time to waste in tracking it.

  “Get me to a vehicle, and I can tell you which way the charm is pulling.”

  Easy, right?

  Chapter 21

  It was not easy. It started difficult and steadily climbed toward nearly impossible. It had been hard enough following the charm when I’d been the driver and trying to look ahead for which roads would head in the direction the charm pulled. Now I had no idea where we were or what surrounded us; all I could say were less than helpful things like “We need to go more to my right. No, we turned too much. A little more in that direction” and point.

  Falin, who was driving, was extremely patient with me, at least as far as I could hear. I couldn’t see his expression or body language. By contrast, Briar, who was scrunched into the almost nonexistent back of Falin’s sporty convertible, had a lot to say on everything from my less-than-precise directions and Falin’s attempts to follow them to the seating arrangement. None of it was flattering and most of it involved profanity.

  “We’re close,” I said after we’d been driving a little over half an hour. “Where are we?”

  “University district,” Falin said as he slowed the car.

  That had not been what I was expecting. The trail we’d been following had been growing distinctly stronger for a while now. We were getting very close. I’d assumed we’d be headed to the wilds again, but the university district wasn’t that far from downtown Nekros.

  We drove a few more minutes. Navigating was even harder here than it had been in other areas of the city. There were just too many large green spaces or buildings connected by courtyards where vehicles couldn’t travel.

  “We should park and go on foot. We’re close.”

  “How close?” Briar asked, still sounding petulant after being relegated to the backseat.

  I tried to figure out any specifics from what I could feel in the pull of the charm, but “close” was about as accurate as I could get. “Walking distance,” I said with a shrug.

  “Are you going to be able to navigate on foot?” Falin asked as he pulled into a faculty and staff parking lot.

  I shrugged again. My vision had finally started returning during the drive, but it left a lot to be desired. I had no peripheral vision and limited distance. I wasn’t going to walk into a brick wall, but I might trip over a curb because I couldn’t see the subtle hints of an elevation change. I also couldn’t see color yet, so the world was all very flat gray tones.

  I tied the nylon cord attached to the charm around my wrist and climbed out of the car. The lot
Falin had parked in stood in the shadow of buildings in every direction. Some were dorms, others clearly contained classrooms or administrative buildings, but all were part of the university. Small brick-paved paths cut around the buildings, and we followed one of these to a green space separating even more buildings. I held my arm in front of me, following the steady tug of the tracking spell.

  “Can we pick up the pace a little?” Briar griped as we walked down into a small tunnel that passed under the road.

  “As I’m the only one who can feel the trail and I can only kinda see . . . No. No, we can’t,” I hissed between my teeth so that the group of college-aged girls walking the opposite direction in the short tunnel wouldn’t hear.

  We passed several more buildings and then had to navigate around a reflecting pool that seemed like it was as long as a football field before I finally hesitated in front of a building that had at least fifty steps to reach the front entrance. I cast a dubious glance at the stairs. From previous times I’d functioned at minimal sight, I knew that steps were funny things. Climbing them was part muscle memory and part depth perception. As I had about zero of the latter currently, climbing several flights of stairs was definitely less than an appealing prospect.

  “What’s the holdup, Craft?” Briar asked.

  “I’m just trying to decide if he’s inside the building or beyond it.” But the frantic tugging of the charm suggested he was close. If he wasn’t inside it, he had to be in the green space just behind it. That seemed less likely than finding him inside, so I took a cautious step toward the stairs. There were handrails, at least.

  Falin’s arm slid around my waist. I opened my mouth to protest, but at the same moment I misjudged the rise of the steps and nearly stumbled. So I took the help for what it was and slowly but carefully climbed the stairs. When we finally reached the top, I was out of breath and had probably scuffed my boots something fierce, but the tug from the charm was so intense, Remy had to be just ahead of us.