Grave Ransom Read online

  Tiffany looked up long enough to shoot us both a glare.

  “Hmmm. True,” Briar said, as if she hadn’t noticed the change in our interviewee. “But we are getting off topic. Do you know the name of the person whose corpse you’re wearing?”

  Tiffany shook her head, but she didn’t look concerned about not knowing the name of the man whose body she wore. From what she’d said, I could guess she’d been a victim long before Gauhter found her, but her admission that she’d been willing to work with Gauhter in order to keep a murdered body made me feel far less sympathetic toward her than I normally would have. Hopefully we’d be able to identify the body by other means, like fingerprints or a missing-person file.

  “Did you know many of the other people who had their bodies switched?” Briar asked.

  “Yeah, most.”

  “Two girls, their bodies at least, with Gauhter’s history no telling who was inside. They were found in and around a car belonging to a boy named Remy.” Briar described what the two girls from this morning’s wreck had looked like before their swapped souls had been collected. “Did you know them?”

  Tiffany nodded. “Only by first names. James and Becky. They’re dead?”

  They’d been dead before the car crash, but now they weren’t walking around anymore. At Briar’s nod, Tiffany sagged. She might have been working with Gauhter, but she was clearly sad to hear about the passing of her companions.

  “I knew it was bad news when they didn’t check in. The newer bodies don’t seem to have an issue, but the older ones, our reflexes aren’t always right. Driving a car is . . . hard.” She stared at the table, falling into a long silence.

  “Tell us about Gauhter,” Briar prompted.

  Tiffany grimaced. “That’s a really broad question.”

  “Okay, tell us where to find him,” Briar said, impatience making her voice sharp.

  Tiffany shrugged again.

  I could practically hear Briar’s teeth grinding. “You were picking up a book for Gauhter when we found you. Where were you supposed to take it?”

  Another shrug, but there was a hint of the cockiness that had been present when the interview first started. She was playing us.

  I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

  “Okay, this is getting us nowhere.” Briar turned to face me. “Craft, remove Tiffany from that body.”

  I blinked at her, too stunned to reply.

  “You can’t do that,” Tiffany sputtered, trying again to stand, to fight her cuffs.

  “I can’t. She can.” Briar nodded at me.

  Tiffany scanned my face again, and her jaw fell open. True fear showed in her eyes. “You’re the lady on the news.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll be a lot more cooperative outside that body,” Briar said, invading Tiffany’s personal space again. “So unless you want to lose that tank of a corpse you’re wearing, I suggest you pony up some real answers.”

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” Tiffany said, her tone a panicked whine, which sounded odd in the deep male tones.

  “Then you better give us something useful,” Briar said, tapping her fingers on the tabletop, the staccato beat impossibly loud as Tiffany looked between the two of us.

  I was fairly certain Briar was using me as an idle threat, but I wasn’t sure what she’d do if Tiffany called her bluff. While Tiffany’s body was dead, and it was true that I’d pulled ghosts out in self-defense and by accident in previous encounters, I wasn’t comfortable ejecting Tiffany from her body just because she wasn’t cooperating. That definitely felt like a moral gray area.

  Tiffany looked from Briar to me. She didn’t bother looking to Falin. He’d been a silent shadow behind me, making it clear he wasn’t going to help her. An incredulous look passed over her features and she glanced down at the lie detector charm still sitting on the table. It hadn’t changed colors when she’d spoken last, which was apparently a good reason to repeat herself.

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” Tiffany gave what might have been intended as an apologetic smile. It came off smug. She was going to call Briar’s bluff.

  This was going to suck.

  Briar turned to me again. “Alex?”

  Crap.

  “Can I speak with you a moment?” I asked Briar, which made her scowl at me.

  “Just a moment,” she told Tiffany, and then she stood, motioning Falin and me to the corner of the room. As she turned, she snatched the lie detector from the table.

  As soon as all three of us had reached the corner, Briar activated a privacy bubble. “What’s the problem, Craft?”

  “For starters, we never discussed me popping her out of that body, and for another, I think it’s a terrible idea.”

  “I’m with Alex on this,” Falin said, nodding. “This interview will be much more difficult if most of us can’t see or hear the person we are interrogating.”

  “Well, obviously we wouldn’t want Tiffany out of the body permanently. We just need to scare her into cooperating.”

  I frowned at her. “Briar, I can’t put her back. If I were to eject her—and that’s a big if because with her being neither a threat nor willing, that feels a lot like, well, I guess it can’t be murder as she’s already dead, but assault at the very least—so if I were to eject her, she’s out for good.”

  “Okay, okay. Keep her inside her stolen body, which, by the way, makes ejecting her a way of reclaiming stolen property. Maybe even recovery of a kidnapped person.”

  “Definitely a gray area,” Falin said, and I nodded.

  “How good an actress are you, Craft? Because I’m about to look very stern and I need to you to walk out of this corner looking resigned to get her out of that body.”

  “But we just said—” I started.

  Briar cut me off. “I said acting, Craft. It’s a bluff, but it has to be a good one, so do the creepy wind-from-nowhere and possessed-glowing-eye thing.”

  So push the bluff to the furthest possible point. I glanced at Falin.

  “What do you think?”

  He didn’t speak as he considered it. After a moment he said, “This interview turned to threats quick, and she already called your bluff once. If she does it again, you’re out of cards.”

  “But you’ve been hanging back,” Briar said, a small smile spreading over her face. “Are you waiting to play good cop?”

  He answered with a small twitch of his eyebrow. Briar turned back to me.

  “Time to look duly cowed, Craft. Let’s do this.”

  She dropped the privacy bubble and we headed back to the table. It wasn’t hard to look like I was about to do something I didn’t want to do.

  “Last chance,” Briar said as she slipped back into her chair.

  Tiffany looked from Briar to me. Her eyes were wide, the whites shiny in the bright lighting of the interrogation room, but she remained silent.

  “Okay, do it, Craft.”

  I opened my shields, letting my psyche straddle the chasm between the living and the dead. A frigid wind ripped through the room, tossing my curls and catching the notepad Briar still had sitting on the table, making the pages flip noisily. Tiffany stared at me, the horror written in her open mouth, bunched brow, and staring eyes. She looked away, as if not looking into my glowing gaze could stop my power. It couldn’t, but as this was meant to be a bluff, looking away could lessen the intimidation.

  I reached out and placed two fingers in the center of her forehead. It wasn’t necessary, and if I hadn’t spent the last few days exhausting my grave magic, it would have put me in danger of losing control, but the magic in me was sated so it behaved nicely. I let the smallest touch of the grave curl out from my fingers, spreading the chill of the dead over the broad forehead my skin touched. Not much; I knew from the previous walking corpses I’d encountered
that the soul was not firmly attached to the body the way it would be in its own.

  As I let the magic unravel, I searched for the spell binding Tiffany to her shell. It was easier to find than the one on Remy had been. The magical sutures were larger, sloppier, and in different spots. The spell tied her to the body at the head, heart, hands, and feet, and it looked like the spell had been reinforced in several places at least once. Tiffany had said she’d needed Gauhter for magical tweaking. More evidence that his ritual was evolving—but what was his end goal? A seamless soul swap? Why?

  As the chill of my magic settled through her, her soul recoiled and Tiffany jerked, trying to get away from my touch. She bucked in the seat, ripping at where the cuffs bound her.

  “I’ll talk, I’ll talk. What do you want to know? Please stop. Please.”

  I started to pull back, but Briar slammed her palm down on the table, the sound booming through the small room. “You had your chance. Now we’ll question your ghost when you can’t lie or avoid our questions. Craft, keep going.”

  That wasn’t the least bit true, and Briar knew it. Which was probably why she’d hidden the lie-detecting charm.

  “Let her go. She said she’d talk,” Falin said, from behind me. Good cop coming into play.

  I didn’t hesitate or wait for Briar to push, but sat back, closing my shields. The wind immediately stopped, and Tiffany sagged in her chair.

  “Thank you,” she said, gazing at Falin like he was her savior.

  “You’re welcome. I expect you to answer the investigator’s questions honestly and in full for my intervention.” As soon as the words left his mouth, I could all but feel the electric charge in the air as the price he’d set for her debt wrapped around her.

  Clever fae.

  Tiffany nodded enthusiastically, likely not even realizing the binding her own words of gratitude had tied around her. It had been well played. Very well played.

  A wolfish smile spread across Briar’s face as the realization of what Falin had just pulled occurred to her. She gave him a quick nod of approval, and then she straightened the notepad that had gotten tossed about in the grave wind and looked at Tiffany. “Let’s try this again, shall we? Where were you supposed to take the book?”

  “I’m not sure. Honest! Rachael had those details.”

  “Rachael?” Briar asked, but I gasped. She turned to look at me, a dark eyebrow lifting.

  “Rachael Saunders,” I said, the name jarring a memory of where I’d seen the face before. She’d looked different in my office than when I’d seen her outlined in a brilliant coating of magic in the woods, but now that I’d put it together, I could have kicked myself for not recognizing her earlier.

  Tiffany frowned at me. “I only know her as Rachael. They don’t trust us. Not even me despite the fact that I agreed to help in exchange for keeping this body.”

  Briar glanced at the charm concealed in her palm. It glowed a cheery green. Tiffany was telling the truth.

  “Do you have any idea where Rachael might have planned to meet Gauhter?”

  Tiffany shrugged.

  Briar frowned at her. “Use your words.”

  “Gauhter has a lot of different places he uses,” Tiffany said, and then looked surprised that she’d spoken.

  Welcome to the binding compulsion of repaying a debt to the fae. I almost felt sorry for her. Except that she seemed content to work with a bad guy and hide his secrets.

  “Where are these places?” Briar asked.

  Tiffany started to shrug, but then her mouth opened as if she couldn’t keep the words back. “Some I think he rents. Some he just squats in for a few days at a time. He doesn’t seem to stay in the same place for long. Though I heard them mention ‘the cemetery’ several times over the last week or so. Rachael mentioned it earlier today, so maybe that’s where we were supposed to take the book, but they’ve never taken me to a cemetery before.” The confusion on her face knotted to anger as she spoke, but she couldn’t stop herself from answering Briar’s questions.

  It didn’t surprise me that Gauhter had never taken her to the cemetery before. She was still a corpse. She would get stuck if she ever passed the gates.

  “Which cemetery?” Briar asked.

  If Tiffany answered, I didn’t hear her. A tingling feeling crawled over my flesh, like a spider creeping up my arm, except the feeling was everywhere. Then it intensified, no longer a tingling, but a burn, like I’d spontaneously caught fire.

  I pushed away from the table, trying to stand, but tripped backward over my chair. I landed on my ass, all the air rushing out. Lack of air was the only reason I didn’t scream. I was on fire. I was burning.

  Except there were no flames.

  There was smoke. Though it wasn’t coming from stinging flesh but from my charm bracelet. The charm Derrick gave me.

  This was the spell he’d given it to me to protect against. Gauhter had finally used my personal items as a focus to send his attack.

  “What the hell, Craft?” Briar said, staring down at where I was trying to get my legs under me.

  “Spell. Fire,” I managed to get out.

  Falin knelt beside me. He grabbed my shoulders, and I felt cold pour down his hands, into my skin. It wasn’t the chill of the grave, but the cold of snow, of winter.

  It didn’t help. The fire kept trying to burn through the protection charm. Any second now it would make it, and I’d burn from the inside out.

  I opened my shields. It was foolish, it gave the spell another way inside, but I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to see what was attacking me.

  Aetheric energy washed over the world. The spell attacking me consisted of a tight network of red and orange magic spun into an angry net draped over me. Derrick’s charm was a thin coating of green energy holding the aggressive spell at bay, but I could see that green light dimming, growing weaker.

  I could barely breathe. The air seemed superheated as I tried to draw it into my lungs around the spell. I was going to ignite. Die.

  I dropped the bubble that kept me from touching other planes. Raking my hand over my arm, I sank my fingers into the red and orange energy and tugged. A handful of malicious magic pulled free. I flung it away from me. It hit the tiled floor and sizzled, bursting into a small flame that immediately burned itself out in a puff of black smoke.

  I grabbed at where the burning spell was trying to smother me and pulled off another handful. Then another. My fingers felt like they were blistering. Small smudges of ash circled me. But my face was clear, no longer burning. And my arms. My chest.

  At some point I realized it wasn’t just my hands pulling the spell free. Death knelt beside me, pulling the spell apart with his fingers. I must have been in true danger because the spell Death had tied to my life force only called him when I was in mortal peril.

  My hands were burning, the skin angry, red. My fingernails were blackened at the tips. But we’d pulled apart enough of the spell that the rest dissolved, unable to sustain itself. As the burning along my body dissipated, I collapsed forward onto my hands and knees. I lowered my head to the cool tile floor, sucking down air that was no longer threatening to boil my lungs.

  I realized it was snowing. Falin had conjured or glamoured snow in the interrogation room. I wasn’t sure which. It probably hadn’t helped, but it had been a nice effort and the cool flakes felt good as they touched the bare skin of my face.

  Death ran a hand through my hair, murmuring soothing words in a language I didn’t know. He placed a cool hand on the back of my neck. It felt good against my still-too-hot flesh.

  Death. Death was here. In the room with a walking corpse. As if my thoughts had drawn attention to her, I felt Death’s hand still. His gaze locked on Tiffany, his hazel eyes narrowing.

  “Leave her. We’re still questioning her,” I whispered, the words almost lost against the tile
where my cheek still rested.

  Death heard me anyway. He glanced down at me, regret in his eyes, but shook his head. “I can’t.”

  My head shot up. “Circle Tiffany.”

  The words came out hoarse. Falin and Briar only looked at me.

  “Get Tiffany in a circle,” I said, looking directly at Briar. “Now.”

  She didn’t question me but vaulted over the interrogation table to land beside the massive body that held the ghost we didn’t want collected. She placed her hand to the ground by Tiffany’s feet, and magic snapped through the air. She hadn’t drawn a circle, but one crackled into place around her and Tiffany. It was impressive. I couldn’t have done it.

  Death scowled, the look one of the most serious I’d ever seen on his face. “Alex, what have you done?”

  “Protected my lead,” I said around shaky breaths.

  “That’s a dead body. That soul can’t stay in there.” He rose to his feet effortlessly, taking a step forward.

  “You’re right. But we need more time. The guy who just sent a killing spell after me? She’s our best bet for finding him. Please, we just need more time.”

  Death looked away from me. “You’ll find another lead.”

  “That’s the second spell he’s sent for me today. I don’t think I’ll survive a third.” The naked plea in my voice was clear even to my own ears, and I imagined I was a sad sight, slightly singed and still on my knees surrounded by melting snow and charred tiles. I didn’t care. I needed him to understand why this was so important. This wasn’t just me asking as his girlfriend for him to bend the rules and reveal secrets like his name because the secrets hurt. There were lives at stake. More than just mine.

  Death hesitated. Then he squeezed his eyes shut. My chest constricted as I realized he wasn’t going to give us time to question Tiffany. He was bound by rules and duties, and even if he’d just disregarded both by helping me destroy a killing spell, he still had to follow most of those rules.

  To hell with that. He chose to break the rules all the time. Our entire relationship was against the rules. I wasn’t asking him to forget about Tiffany’s soul forever. I needed an hour. And he wouldn’t give me that. Gauhter’s spell had failed, and once the necromancer realized I’d survived, he was likely to send another wave. Next time it could kill me. And I likely wouldn’t be the only victim if we didn’t find him today. Gauhter’s experimentation was accelerating. How many more would die if we didn’t locate him soon? But Death wouldn’t even delay an hour on a soul that had been walking around in a dead body for more than a week already. That stung.