Grave Ransom Read online

  Remy stopped sliding off the gurney and sighed, his shoulders dropping with the movement. Then he twisted, pulling his legs up, and lay down.

  Tamara snorted under her breath. “I wish all corpses were so agreeable.”

  I shot her a look that was part amusement but mostly asked her to stop mumbling jokes loud enough for Remy to hear. I knew it was her way of dealing with a situation that made her uncomfortable—after all, most corpses didn’t walk in and pick out their own gurney—but she wasn’t helping. She gave me a shrug, the movement jerky with nerves.

  “I’m ready,” Remy said, and closed his eyes, looking for all the world like any other inanimate corpse.

  I nodded to Tamara, who stepped closer to the gurney.

  “Before Alex begins, I’m going to do a very quick sweep for spells, okay?” Tamara asked as she lifted her hands, palms flat, several inches above Remy’s still form.

  He didn’t open his eyes as he nodded his consent.

  She moved her hands slowly through the air over his body, working from head to feet. Once she reached the bottom of the gurney, she shook her head, biting her plump bottom lip as she looked up at me. “I almost sense something. Like there is a spell I can’t quite wrap my senses around, but nothing blatant. Nothing that screams magic.”

  Which was what I’d suspected because that was all I could pick up as well, at least with my shields closed, but while I might have been a skilled sensitive, Tamara was quite possibly the strongest in Nekros. There had been a chance she would have sensed something I couldn’t. She stepped back, and I took her place by the edge of the gurney.

  I opened my shields, reaching for my grave magic. It took a moment to gather enough to be usable—I’d really been burning through it quick the last few days. I reached out with the magic, slipping it into the corpse on the gurney. The magic easily crept through the dead skin and sank deep, trying to fill all the space. I kept the trickle slow, trying not to oust Remy’s soul before I could feel around a bit. His soul was so loosely connected to the body, I almost ejected it by accident before I managed to stop the slow dribble of power.

  I opened my eyes, my magic whipping around me. The body Remy was wearing hadn’t been dead long, maybe ten hours at most, so the decay I could see in my gravesight wasn’t as horrible as it could have been. Beneath the rotting flesh, Remy’s soul glowed a brilliant yellow, almost vibrating as it tried to cringe away from where my magic filled the body around it. Death had told me the spell was on the souls. I searched for it, and even gazing across several planes of existence, I nearly missed the seven small clumps of magic sewn into the soul at Remy’s chakra points. They loosely secured the soul to the shell. I mentally reached for the magical suture in the center of Remy’s forehead. The spell was the tightly constructed magic I’d come to expect in this case, and while I could feel the familiar signature of power, untangling how the spell worked was beyond me.

  On the gurney, Remy’s features had formed into a sharp grimace, and his soul writhed, jerking against the spell I was examining as my focus brought my own grave-chilled magic closer. I pushed with my magic, giving his soul the smallest shove. The magic binding him to the body snapped and his soul popped free of the dead body it had been trapped inside.

  Remy shimmered for a moment, and then he solidified, the ghost looking exactly like Taylor’s picture of him.

  “Whoa,” he said, running his hand over the football jersey he wore. “That was different . . .” He looked down at the body he’d vacated and his mouth twisted into a frown as he stared at the now-truly-lifeless body. “So that’s her? Man, why didn’t you tell me what a mess I’d made of her hair? I bet she would have been upset to know her body was walking around looking such a mess. I should have taken more care.” He glanced at me. “When you find out who she was, you’ll let me know, right? It seems wrong to not even know her name.”

  I nodded and then motioned that the morgue attendant could cover the corpse. The inevitable rapid decay was not evident yet, but I guessed it would be soon.

  “Is it done?” Briar asked, pushing off the wall.

  Remy walked toward her. “What, you can’t tell?”

  She never glanced his way.

  I nodded to Briar, and John ran a hand down his mustache.

  “The paperwork on this is going to be a nightmare,” he said, turning to leave.

  “Tell me about it,” Tamara groused as she followed the gurney into the cold room.

  Remy gaped between the two retreating figures. He had his back to Briar and didn’t notice her walking until her shoulder passed through him. He screamed, staring at the spot where, for a brief moment, they’d occupied the same space on different planes. I had it on good authority that it didn’t actually hurt ghosts when people walked through them, but it did feel odd.

  “They can’t see you, Remy,” I said.

  He whirled around. “Why can’t they see me?”

  “Like I said earlier, you can’t interact with the mortal world the same way without a body. Did you ever see a ghost when you were alive? Most people can’t.”

  His mouth fell open, as if he was going to say something, but no words came out. He looked around and seemed to see his surroundings for the first time. I’d closed my shields already, but I could guess what he saw—a wasted and rotted version of the mortal world.

  “This sucks,” he finally said. “Put me back.”

  I shook my head, the movement small, sympathetic. “I can’t.”

  “I take it Remy’s ghost stuck around,” Briar said, and I nodded to her.

  “As long as he avoids collectors, he can remain in the land of the dead as long as his energy lasts. Now that he’s not burning it fueling a dead body, that could be a very long time.” I said it more for his benefit than hers.

  He stared at me, his expression torn between incredulous and angry. “You took me out and can’t put me back? This sucks. What good is being stuck in purgatory forever if Taylor can’t even hear me?”

  “I told you that I would help you talk to her.”

  Briar, who could only hear my half of the conversation, glanced at her watch. “Can you wrap this up, Craft? I’d like to go question our guest and see if we can’t get a line on Gauhter.”

  “Yes,” Remy said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Let’s go find Gauhter. He at least can put me back in a body.”

  I didn’t think that was likely to happen, but I didn’t argue with the ghost. I let Briar lead the way back out of the morgue as we went to deal with yet another dead body.

  • • •

  I once again sat in an uncomfortable chair in one of Central Precinct’s interrogation rooms. At least this time I sat on the interviewer side, not the interviewee. An empty chair sat to my right, waiting for Briar once she doused the theoretically sleeping dead guy with an antidote for the potion her foam dart had showered him with earlier. Remy was in the observation room, sulking. John and Jenson were also in the observation room, despite this being their case. I wasn’t sure exactly how they’d lost out to Falin, but the fae stood at my back, looking intimidating.

  He’d spent the time I’d been in the morgue on the phone with one of his agents who’d been running down license plates. Most of the plates in the lot hadn’t matched the make and model car they were registered to, but it at least gave us a starting point and a partial list of names. Two of those names we recognized: Annabelle McNabb and Rodger Bartlett. We weren’t sure yet if we had plates that matched the body Remy had temporarily resided in, or the sleeping corpse in front of me, but Falin’s agent was working on pulling driver’s license photos that corresponded to registrations. She’d send us a file with them to review soon. Until then, the best way to find out more information was to question the corpse in front of me.

  As I sat in the chair, I let my senses stretch to the corpse across the table. It was coated in a th
in sheen of magic that was easily recognizable as the cocktail Briar had used to knock him out. Under that, I could sense a preservation spell, the kind you’d put on food to keep it from rotting. That was interesting. I hadn’t sensed such a spell on any of the other walking corpses. Of course, by the feel of him, this corpse was older than any of the humans I’d encountered while they’d still been inhabited by souls. Not quite as long dead as the two victims from the car wreck, but older than Rodger, the corpse I’d been able to feel on the street. Rodger hadn’t had a preservation spell on him. I wasn’t sure about the two girls, as they’d been collected before we found their bodies, but this fit with the evolution we’d seen in the necromancer’s magic. I definitely would have felt this corpse from a distance, while the newer victims, like Remy, had been caught at the moment of death, keeping the grave essence rising from them to a minimum.

  Briar dripped two drops of the liquid from a small bottle on the corpse’s forehead. Then she capped the bottle and retreated back around to our side of the table, sliding smoothly into her chair.

  “How long before we know if it works?” Falin asked.

  “If it works on the walking dead? It shouldn’t take—”

  Her last word cut off as the corpse’s eyes flew open and he tried to jump to his feet. His hands were handcuffed behind the chair with a chain leading to a loop bolted into the ground, so that didn’t go so well for him. He got his feet under him, but his top half didn’t follow and he crashed back into the chair. As the chair was also bolted to the ground, it didn’t budge. If he’d needed to breathe, he would have been sputtering, but as he didn’t, he just looked stunned. His gaze finally landed on us on the other side of the table, and his eyes narrowed.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “We were actually going to ask you the same question,” Briar said, leaning back in her chair with a casualness she couldn’t possibly feel.

  The guy looked around the room, assessing. Then his gaze returned to us, studying first Briar in her biker leathers, me with my grave-wind-tossed hair and my coat on despite being indoors, and then finally his gaze moved to Falin in khakis, his jacket off so his shoulder holster stood out in stark contrast to his white oxford shirt. Falin at least looked like a detective type.

  “What is this? Where am I?” the corpse asked Falin. Apparently Briar and I had been dismissed. One glance at Briar made me think this guy would probably regret that action.

  “You’re in an interrogation room at Central Precinct,” she said.

  The top of his lip curled into a sneer. “You can’t keep me here. I’ve done nothing illegal. Am I under arrest? I haven’t been read my rights.”

  Briar gave a bark of a laugh, the sound loud and abrupt enough to make the guy actually look at her. She leaned forward, making herself impossible to ignore.

  “You,” she said, moving into his personal space, “don’t have any rights. You are a corpse.”

  The guy looked like he was trying to swallow something that wouldn’t go down. Then he pursed his lips and lifted his chin in a stubborn tilt as he met Briar’s gaze. “You’re trying to scare me, but it won’t work. I’m a pre-law major. There is no precedent for stripping me of my rights just because I’m . . . uh, ‘mortally challenged.’ That’s discrimination. Either charge me with something or let me go.”

  The revelation about him being a pre-law major surprised me. Of course, maybe I was judging him too much by the corpse he was wearing. He was a big guy, easily six seven and wide with muscle. He had a skull tattooed on the top of his shaved head, and more tattoos peeking out of the collar and sleeves of his shirt. When Briar had been handcuffing him, I’d noticed he even had words on his knuckles, though I hadn’t been able to tell what they spelled. He was a tough guy with a big voice who filled a lot of space . . . but that was just the shell. We had no idea who the soul inside was.

  Briar cocked an eyebrow. “Actually, my directive as an MCIB investigator includes terminating any zombie, ghoul, or shambling dead monster I encounter, as well as determining the potential threat of any animated inanimate creation or magical constructs that could pose a threat to the human or witch populace. I’m pretty sure it would be within my legal scope to forgo this interview and make sure you are true dead and no threat, but as you are capable of speaking, I thought I’d give you a chance to do so.” The smile that spread over her face as she spoke was wolfish, showing too many teeth. It knocked the cocky defiance right off the corpse’s broad face. She pressed her advantage. “And if you really want criminal charges, how about we charge you with possession of stolen property—which would be that body you’re wearing. Or would what you’ve done be more like kidnapping and murder?”

  The man’s eyes widened, the whites showing all the way around his dark irises. “I’m the victim here.”

  “Really? You’re not acting like a victim. In fact, when we found you, you were in the process of coercing a murder victim to perform crimes for you.” She was stretching it a bit, but by the way the man’s frantic eyes scanned the room as if he’d magically find some way to escape, she was making an impact.

  The man looked to me and then glanced at Falin, the expression on his broad face a clear plea for help. We both remained silent, offering him no assistance. The corpse turned back to Briar.

  “I’m the victim here,” he repeated.

  Briar leaned forward. “Then you should be happy we liberated you from Gauhter and be anxious to tell us everything you know about him and his operation.”

  The man stared at her for a long moment, not saying anything, his mouth a thin line as he considered her. Finally he said, “Of course. What do you want to know?”

  I fought the urge to turn and look at Falin’s expression, to see if he felt that the corpse’s quick flip toward helpfulness was too abrupt and insincere. Personally, I wasn’t buying it, but I schooled my features blank and continued silently studying the corpse.

  “What’s your name?” Briar asked, picking up her pen and pulling her pad of paper closer.

  “Bruiser.”

  I managed to swallow my laugh but couldn’t hold back my disbelieving, “Really?”

  That earned me the smallest twitch of a frown from Briar and a glare from the corpse. I’d already started interrupting, I might as well continue.

  “Your mama looked at you after birth and thought, this adorable newborn looks like a Bruiser?” I asked.

  The corpse cringed, looking away from me.

  “Your real name,” Briar said.

  His answer was mumbled too quiet to hear the first time. It took some prompting to get him to speak up, but he finally sighed and cleared his throat.

  “Tiffany. Tiffany Bates.”

  Or, I guess, her throat. I blinked, readjusting pronouns in my head, and evaluating differently why she randomly kept staring at Falin.

  “Just so there is no misunderstanding, with a name like Tiffany, you mean that your real body was female before your soul got shoved into that one?” Briar asked.

  Tiffany nodded, the movement sharp, like it was almost a cringe.

  “Gauhter really likes throwing souls into opposite-gendered bodies, doesn’t he?” Briar muttered as she jotted Tiffany’s name on her notepad. It was more an observation than a directed question. Despite that, Tiffany shrugged, lifting her huge shoulders as much as she could with her hands cuffed behind her.

  “It motivates people. You put an old guy in a young man’s body and he might decide he hit the fountain of youth. But you start screwing with people’s basic identity, like whether they are male or female, and they get desperate to get back in their own bodies. Gauhter could guarantee good behavior by ransoming a person’s own body.”

  We’d technically already gathered some of that from Remy, but the fact Gauhter intentionally made the souls he stole more uncomfortable than he had to fanned a new flame of anger in me.
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br />   “So that’s why you were working for him? Because he’s holding your body ransom?” Briar asked.

  “Yeah,” Tiffany said, but her gaze hit the table.

  Briar glanced at something in her palm. She placed the small disc she’d been cupping onto the table. It was glowing an angry red.

  “Do you know what this is?” Briar asked, and when Tiffany shook her head, Briar continued, “It’s a lie detector charm. Guess what color it turns when you lie to me? If you’re thinking red, you’d be right. So you’re not working for Gauhter because he’s holding your body ransom. Want to try that again?”

  Tiffany glared at the little charm. It was green again, now that Briar had been the last one to speak.

  “I,” Tiffany started, and then cut off, frowning. It took her a moment to speak again, and when she did, her voice was barely a whisper, as if she couldn’t admit what she was saying too loud. “I like this body. I don’t really want my old one back.”

  “So then why work for Gauhter?” Briar asked. “Why not run away and live out your life as Bruiser?”

  “Because I want to keep this body, and sometimes it needs a little . . . tweaking.”

  I stared at her. “But it’s not your body. Don’t you think the person it belonged to would rather you weren’t walking around in it?”

  Tiffany’s frown deepened, but she didn’t turn toward me. Instead she kept her gaze locked on the table as she shrugged, the movement stunted. “Gauhter never actually returned any of the bodies. I was just making the best out of a bad situation. People respect me in this body. No one whistles when I walk by, or tries to grab my ass. Instead they duck their heads and get out of my way.”

  “They fear you,” I said.

  She shrugged again. “But I feel safe in this skin. I can intimidate whoever I need. I can walk down the sidewalk without worrying about who else is on the street. I can—”

  “Pee standing up?” Briar offered.

  “Probably not,” I said. “That body is dead, I doubt she pees.”