Grave Ransom Read online

  “Why, because I stole some old book? It hasn’t even left the library yet, so not stolen. You’ve got nothing on me.”

  “That’s not it. The body you’re in right now. It’s already dead.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said, staring at me. He looked to Falin and Briar, waiting for them to refute my statement. Briar gave him what I supposed was meant to be a sympathetic look but mostly just made her look constipated. Falin offered him a solemn nod. Remy shook his head violently. “You’re all absolutely crazy.”

  How were you supposed to convince someone they were dead? I’d had to clue in the occasional ghost, but the whole not-having-a-body-anymore thing helped. Remy was up walking and talking, even if he wasn’t in his own body.

  “You’re dealing with a very stressful time right now. How fast is your pulse racing?” I asked him.

  “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” He stood as he yelled the question, his hands balled in fists at his sides.

  “Just check, okay?”

  He gave me a disgusted look. Then, determined to prove his living status, he lifted two fingers to his throat and pressed them where his pulse point should be. He waited, concern etching around his eyes. He moved his fingers over just slightly. Then again, and again. He lifted his wrist, searching there. Then he shoved a hand down his shirt, pressing it against where his heart should have been pounding. If he were alive.

  The horror in his face was absolute. Frantic eyes begging me that it couldn’t be true. But I couldn’t take it back, couldn’t rescind the information now that he’d acknowledged it. So I had to continue.

  “You probably didn’t notice, but you aren’t breathing either.”

  “That’s not true. I have to breathe to talk,” he said, drawing an intentionally large breath.

  “True. So don’t say anything, just hold your breath until you get the urge to breathe.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and did a little twist with his shoulders, marking the seconds with his body movements. After nearly a minute the smug movements began to slow down. Another minute, and he sank back into his chair, looking freshly stunned.

  “You don’t blink either,” Briar added. “It’s freaky.”

  I shot her a glance over where Remy had just buried his head under his arms on the table. He was breathing now, fast and jagged, like he was close to a panic attack. I doubted he could actually have a panic attack without a beating heart, but his mind was still reeling, so I gave him a minute. Eventually he sat up. He wiped at his eyes, but they were dry. Apparently he couldn’t cry either, not even for his own death.

  “So, what does that mean for me? Is this body going to rot around me?”

  “Not initially,” I said, and here was where I could get into some trouble with the collectors, but he deserved to know. “Your soul is what is powering that body. The longer you are in it, the weaker you will get, until the you that is looking out through those borrowed eyes, that remembers you are Remy, will cease to exist.” Or at least, that was what I’d gathered from my conversation with Death.

  “Oh, great.” He laughed, the sound harsh, verging on despair. “So what are my options here? I’m dead so I can’t die again, but what am I if I don’t have this body?”

  “A ghost, if you stay. Or you let one of the soul collectors send you on.”

  “Send me where?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but to answer your options question, you have the option to stay as you are, existing in this half-life for a few days, maybe weeks, or you can avoid destroying your soul by not draining away your energy to fuel a dead body.”

  “Those options are crap.”

  I couldn’t disagree with that.

  “Before Craft goes and talks you out of your body,” Briar said, leaning forward, “we still need to catch the necromancer who did this. Our best bet is catching him when you give him the book.”

  “Well, it sounds like I’ve got nothing to lose,” he said, his shoulders slumping, as if he could sag into himself. He sighed, taking a deep breath, and looked up at me. “We better hurry, I’m supposed to meet him in fifteen minutes.”

  • • •

  We were considerably farther than fifteen minutes from where Remy was supposed to drop off the stolen book. He’d driven to the library in a car that had belonged to the girl whose body he wore, so Briar went with Remy while Falin and I followed. It was a considerably better seating arrangement than the drive to the library.

  Against my better judgment, we’d gone through with stealing the irreplaceable rare book Remy had been sent to take. Briar said that she’d take responsibility for us borrowing the book and would see it returned. There were probably official channels she should have gone through, but those would have taken time, and Remy was on a strict deadline he was already running late for.

  I’d been sure the alarms would go off as we walked out of the library, or we’d get caught in a security ward, but between the fact that the backpack Remy had been given had some hard-core wards built into it and contained several other charms to facilitate this theft, which was how Remy got the book off the shelf in the first place, and the fact that Briar carried it out the same way she’d walked in, no one had blinked as we walked out of the library. Judging by the amount of magic embedded in the bag, Gauhter was not playing around or sparing any expense. Which meant this book had to be important.

  But why?

  I’d held on to the bag and book during the drive to try to figure that out. The book Gauhter had Remy steal was the journal of an alchemist who’d died hundreds of years before the Magical Awakening. There had been a lot of magic in the world before science and technology first began crowding it out, but magic had long been in heavy decline by the author’s lifetime. During his time, there had been a lot of incorrect assumptions about how the world worked and superstitions that weren’t magic at all. Alchemy was a gray area of history. It was considered a magical science, but whether any of it actually worked was a highly debated topic. Many scholars had studied the old texts and illuminations since the Magical Awakening, and some of the things alchemists strove to achieve could be done with magic these days, but the processes and recipes that had survived seemed rather ludicrous. As Falin drove, I flipped through the journal’s pages, occasionally stopping to scan a hand-scrawled block of text or carefully drawn image.

  “You should be wearing gloves and using tools. That book is probably four hundred years old,” Falin said, glancing at where I was poring over the pages.

  “Remy had it shoved in a backpack,” I said as I flipped another page. “It’s seen worse.”

  Falin didn’t argue, but his lips compressed into a thin line of disapproval. I consented to digging out my gloves. I had them on me anyway, though they made turning the pages significantly more difficult.

  From what I could gather from my quick skimming, the book was a journal chronicling the alchemist’s experiments. His main areas of alchemical interests were the creation of an immortality elixir and engineering homunculi. Neither were unusual alchemical goals for his time, but there was no proof any alchemist had ever succeeded with either goal.

  During the author’s lifetime, magic would have been thin. If this alchemist had been studying ancient texts, what had worked in ancient times wouldn’t have created any results for him. Alchemists of his era ended up using a very strange pseudochemistry approach to magic, which was evident in how he logged his experiments. I turned the page to discover a carefully illustrated account of one homunculus attempt that involved slowly heating a chicken egg in a mix of urine, semen, and silver nitrate at a precise temperature for two weeks. Case in point.

  So what did Gauhter expect to find?

  I flipped to the end of the book, but the last third seemed to be blank. Either the writer had given up before he ran out of paper, or he’d succeeded and stopped havin
g to track his experiments. I thumbed back, looking for the last journaled page. When I finally found it, the page didn’t contain any words but was a line drawing of a woman heavy with child standing on a moon with stars in her hands. While it may have been some sort of alchemical imagery—my limited knowledge of alchemy came from history class back in school and a recent brush with a fae alchemist distilling glamour—but the image seemed very out of place in the book. I laid two gloved fingers on the page and let my ability to sense magic stretch.

  It took a moment. The spell on the page was so old and so unlike any kind of magic I’d ever felt before that I almost missed it, but it was there. I couldn’t have proven the alchemist was the one who placed the spell on the page, but the magic was definitely old. A whole lot older than seventy years, so someone put it on the page before the Magical Awakening. I tried to untangle the traces of information I could feel buzzing through the page, but the magic was too foreign to gather a hint of what it might do.

  I flipped back a few more pages and found more enchanted illustrations. When I finally found more text, it was clear several pages had been torn from the book between the last journal entry and the first full-page illustration. I glanced over that last entry. It was more of the same as the first part of the journal except that this one ended midsentence before the formula was listed. So had the alchemist torn out the pages to hide his results, or had someone else? And were the odd illustrations clues to his final experiment, meaningless ways to help mask whatever the spells on the page hid, or part of the spells themselves? I glanced over the handful of illustrations, but they were bizarre: men in beakers, the sun and moon in each other’s landscape, and so forth. They looked vaguely alchemical, so they might have had deeper meaning. Or they might have been nonsense.

  I closed the cracking cover and called Briar. When she answered I said, “I don’t think we can risk handing over this book.”

  “We’re not going to let the necromancer keep it,” Briar said, as if nothing could possibly go wrong. Taking the chance of allowing Gauhter to slip away with whatever information he was searching for between the covers of the book sounded like a really bad idea to me.

  “I’m not sure if he’s after eternal life or the ability to create a homunculus, but there is something hidden behind really old magic in this book. If he knows how to activate the spells, he could very well get whatever it is he’s after.” I explained what I’d found in the book. I couldn’t show her the images, as she was in the car ahead of me, but I told her about the spells and gave her a brief summary of what the images depicted.

  I didn’t realize that she had me on speakerphone until Remy said, “Wanting eternal life I get, but what is a ‘homunculus’?”

  “It means ‘little man,’” Briar said, and since she had me on speaker, I put her on speaker as well so that Falin could hear more than my side of the conversation. Briar went on, “It was said to have been a perfect copy of the alchemist who created it, except small.”

  “So a magical clone?” Remy asked.

  Briar made a sound that made me think it had accompanied a shrug. “Sort of. But it lacked a soul because it was never technically born. Or that’s what is theorized. There’s little to no evidence that anyone was ever successful in creating one. Craft, I want to see those images before we turn this book over.”

  “I’m still against turning the book over.” I looked at Falin. “If we had another book to use as a base, do you think you could glamour it to look similar to this one?”

  Falin glanced away from the road for barely a moment, evaluating. “It would depend on how deep an inspection you wanted it to pass. Just the cover? Sure. Believable contents? No. Not unless I had several hours to work on it, and then it would still revert to normal at sunset.”

  We didn’t have a few hours. I directed my next question at my phone again.

  “Remy. The place you’re supposed to deliver the book, have you been there before? What did you see before you were in this body? You said the necromancer’s friend called him Gauhter; what did this friend look like? Who else did you see there?”

  “Man, I just finished answering similar questions from her,” he said, and he could only mean Briar. There were more reasons why she’d wanted to be the one to ride with Remy than escaping Falin’s cramped backseat. He let out a long sigh, which had to be intentional considering what we’d recently discussed about his breathing needs. “The other guy I saw was maybe a little younger than Gauhter, I don’t know.”

  Right, Mister Observant, I forgot.

  “I think I . . . died”—he paused, struggling over the word “died” before continuing—“somewhere else. He kept me in a bottle before putting me in this body, and the bottle was in a bag most of the time. When it wasn’t, it was still hard to see. The bottle had this weird, gold lacelike thing covering most of it.”

  I went cold, not even daring to breathe. “You mean like a gold filigree?”

  “He’s shrugging with a dumb look on his face,” Briar said, and I heard Remy make some sort of exclamation of dismay in the background.

  “Were there gems inlaid in the glass? Sapphires? Rubies? Emeralds?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I think my bottle had some stone. Blue maybe?”

  “Alex, why does it sound like you’ve heard of these bottles before?” Falin asked, his grip tight on the steering wheel.

  “Because I have,” I said. “I’ll call you back in a minute.”

  I disconnected before Briar could reply and hit the speed dial for Rianna. It went to voice mail.

  I started to leave a quick message for her to call me back, but then I hesitated. This was too important to put off or risk me missing her call when she returned mine.

  “Stop working your case on the missing artifact,” I said, unsure how much I should leave on a recording. “I think the necromancer I’m chasing probably has it. Gather all your notes on the case and the original contract and e-mail them to me when you can, okay? Just whatever you do, don’t track the bottle.” I sagged in my seat. “Geez. I don’t think your client gave you enough information. That bottle? I think it’s been being used to store souls.”

  Chapter 23

  As soon as I disconnected, I tried Rianna’s number a second time, just in case. It went to voice mail again. If she was in the middle of a ritual, she wouldn’t have taken her phone in the circle with her. I just hoped she’d listen to her voice mail before she went chasing any leads.

  Falin was staring at me as best he could out of the corner of his eye, not fully taking his attention from the road. I sighed and filled him in on the case Rianna had been working.

  “And she was sure he was fae?” he asked when I finished.

  I shrugged. “Desmond thought so.”

  Falin pulled his phone from his pocket one-handed and dialed one of the numbers on his favorites list without ever slowing the car—he couldn’t have. Briar was the one driving Remy’s car, and we’d have lost them if Falin so much as blinked too long. The woman liked her gas pedal.

  “I need you to see if we were brought a case about a missing artifact a few weeks ago. The item was a bottle.” He described the bottle to someone I could only guess was one of his FIB agents on the other side of the line and then paused a moment before saying, “Call me back as soon as you know.” Then he hung up.

  I was about to dial Briar back when she turned off into the rest stop just outside town. Falin followed, pulling in beside her to park. We were a few miles outside the northeastern part of the city, only a dozen or so miles from where Briar and I had discovered the dead creatures. It wasn’t a particularly grand rest stop. It was perfunctory at best. There were a couple of covered picnic tables, a small building with bathrooms, and some vending machines. I think the city planners added it just because the last stop on the interstate had been a while, and when the city was still new, it made Nekros seem more offi
cial, but it was rarely used. It was faster to go around the folded space containing Nekros than to go through it, so anyone using this highway had somewhere they were headed in the city and could probably wait for a bathroom.

  “We’ll have to walk from here,” Remy said, shouting to us from over the top of his car.

  I climbed out of the car. It wasn’t like I’d expected Gauhter to have his circle drawn in the middle of the men’s bathroom, but aside from the rest stop and the wilds, there was theoretically nothing out here. I glanced around. There were a surprising number of cars parked in this lot, but no other people.

  “Do you think all of these cars belong to Gauhter’s victims?” I asked, counting cars. There were nearly half a dozen besides ours.

  Falin frowned. “Surely not all of them.” But he took his phone out of his pocket and began photographing license plates. “I’ll have an agent run these through the system.”

  We followed Remy past the building and picnic shelters, into the woods behind the rest stop. He stopped just past the tree line and dug a small disc out of his coat pocket. It appeared to be just a clear glass disc until he set it in his palm. A small red arrow appeared in the disk, pointing deeper into the woods.

  “This way,” he said, leading us in the direction the arrow pointed.

  He had to consult the charmed disc several times as we navigated through the woods, making sure we continued on the right path. At times I was sure it was the arrow that turned, not us or the terrain, but a guidance charm that led the user on an indirect path so they’d have a hard time finding their way would be quite the spell. I itched to get a better look at it, but I was pulling up the rear of the group, far from where Remy led the way. Navigating through the woods under a thick canopy that cast the ground in gray shadows would have been a challenge for me on a good day. Today was not a good day. I kept tripping over roots I couldn’t differentiate from the rest of the forest floor and getting tangled in vines that snagged my boots.