Grave Ransom Read online

  “Are Alex and Falin with you?” Derrick asked from the other side of the phone.

  I stepped closer so I could hear better, and Falin said, “We’re here.”

  “Good,” Derrick said, and I heard relief in his voice. “Whatever you do, the three of you do not split up, okay?”

  I glanced at my companions. Don’t split up. Well, it wasn’t like I was planning to wander off on my own in the growing dark.

  “Got it,” Briar said. “Anything on that phone number?”

  There was a pause, like he’d been about to say something else and her question had derailed him. “It was a prepaid line, untraceable. It’s off at the moment. Nothing useful.”

  “Well, that sucks,” I muttered.

  “Alex.” Derrick took a breath. Even through the phone it sounded heavy and strained, either like he was about to say something he wasn’t sure he wanted to, or like whatever had happened before he made the call had frightened him. Either possibility was scary considering he’d clearly called because he’d just had a premonition. “Alex, you must hurry. Do not let sunset beat you.”

  The phone clicked as he disconnected before I could ask any questions. Briar tucked the phone back into her pocket, but I was still frowning at the spot where the phone had been.

  “What happens at sunset?” I asked.

  Briar shrugged. “You know as much as I do, Craft.”

  “I think I hate your partner. Why can’t he give us more guidance than that?”

  She gave me an annoyed look, and I got the feeling the subject of her partner was off-limits. “He does what he can. We stick together and we finish this before sunset. Now come on, we are burning what passes for daylight.”

  She was right; if we had to find the necromancer and his cronies before sunset, we didn’t have much time left. The gloom made it feel later, but we had about forty-five minutes before the true moment of sunset.

  We finished our search of the graveyard within fifteen minutes. We hadn’t found any magic, and more alarming in my opinion, we hadn’t found any ghosts. We had found dozens of disturbed graves, including little Katie’s. I’d let my senses stretch. Each disturbed grave we found had been empty, no trace of the body that should have been inside. Our necromancer had been here, surely, but where was he now?

  “It would have been helpful if Derrick had told us if we were at least looking in the right place,” I grumbled as we walked back toward the entrance.

  I was more than a little concerned about what would happen at sunset. Would that be when Gauhter would attack me with the next spell? As a fae, I’d be at my weakest at sunset, and the charm Derrick had given me had been exhausted by Gauhter’s spell, so it would offer no more protection.

  “Is that a light?” Falin asked, pointing somewhere in the back of the cemetery.

  I turned, trying to pick out anything in the growing darkness, but I couldn’t see a light. Briar on the other hand, spotted it.

  “Let’s check it out,” she said, leading us in that direction.

  There was a small growth of trees beyond the final gravestones and statues, and we walked through them, emerging on the other side to find a simple but old house. As Falin had said, there were lights shining through the windows.

  “I think it must be the caretaker’s home,” Briar said as we approached the side of the house.

  I shivered. “We’re still inside the cemetery grounds.” I lived with ghosts, but I wouldn’t want to live locked inside cemetery gates with ghosts who couldn’t leave and often weren’t terribly happy about that fact.

  Not that I’d seen a single ghost since we arrived.

  It was likely that the occupant of the small house was the graveyard caretaker, but then, why hadn’t he or she reported the disturbed graves? We were looking for a necromancer; a report like that would have been flagged. Just in case, we kept to the shadows as we scoped out the building.

  There was a covered carport in the back of the property, about fifty yards from the house, and we ducked into it. Four cars were inside, two covered with tarps. The closest to us looked vaguely familiar. Falin pulled out his phone, scrolling through the pictures he’d taken at the rest stop earlier today. Sure enough, this car was one from that lot. The one that had been missing by the time the crime scene techs arrived.

  “So Rachael is here.” Equal parts excitement and terror pounded through me, making my heartbeat loud in my ears. We were close now. But that also meant they were close.

  “Can you sense anything?” Briar asked me.

  I let my senses stretch. We were too far from the house to get specifics, but in the distance I could feel the slightest tingle of familiar magic.

  “Definitely the necromancer’s magic. We should call the police.”

  Briar put in the call, giving a brief summary of our location and what we suspected we’d found. When she disconnected she glanced at her watch. “Twenty-five minutes until sunset.”

  Crap. The cops would never make it in time. Derrick had said we needed this finished before sunset.

  Briar pulled her crossbow from whatever magic space she stored it in on her back. “We’re going in.”

  Falin crossed his arms over his chest. “Alex is injured and a noncombatant.”

  “We can’t split up,” Briar said.

  “And we can’t wait,” I finished for her, because those were the warnings from Derrick. I didn’t know what would happen if we ignored his warnings, but I was guessing it was worse than what would happen if we took his advice. Of course, everyone dying and the bad guys getting away was a worse scenario than only two out of three of us dying while stopping the necromancer, so there were degrees of better scenarios and sometimes they still sucked.

  Before anyone had time to say more, the back door of the house opened, spilling light onto the lawn. A small figure, a child by the shape of her, stood silhouetted in the doorframe, peering out into the growing darkness.

  We ducked into the cover of the carport as she hopped down the steps. The girl was barefoot and wore only a simple frilled dress despite the cold. Briar lifted her crossbow. Falin grabbed the shaft in one hand, forcing it to point to the ground.

  “It’s a child,” he hissed.

  “That’s no child,” I whispered. She was still at least forty yards away, but my skin felt like it wanted to crawl away rather than stay anywhere near the wrongness oozing off her.

  She was a corpse, but it was more than that. The grave essence lifting from her was darker, almost sticky as it brushed my mind. She was something so much worse than any of the walking corpses we’d encountered.

  I opened my shields a crack, hating how the inky darkness tried to slide in through the holes. It was too thick, my cracks too narrow and carefully made to let it in, but that didn’t stop it from trying. I wanted to get a look at the small corpse skipping across the lawn.

  “Cut the light show, Craft.”

  “In a moment.” I focused on the girl. In my gravesight, she was rotted and bloated, the curls that looked perfectly arranged in the mortal realm instead stringy, clumps missing from her exposed scalp. But that wasn’t surprising. It was what was under her rotted body that shocked me.

  Or really what wasn’t under the decaying flesh. There was no soul. There was just a darkness that whispered of long-dead things and the wastes of the land of the dead. Whatever was inside that child, it had never been a person. Like the creature Briar and I had fought in the clearing, she was filled with something that didn’t belong in the mortal realm.

  “Katie, come back inside,” Rachael yelled, appearing in the doorway her dead daughter had recently passed through.

  The little girl stopped and turned, looking back at her mother. “But I’m hungry, Mama.”

  “You’ve had enough for today. Come back inside.”

  Katie didn’t listen. She turned back towa
rd the patch of woods that separated the house from the graveyard proper, resuming her skipping progress.

  Rachael rushed out of the house. “Kathryn Lane Saunders, get back in the house this minute.”

  “But, Mama . . . I’m soooo hungry,” the little girl said without stopping.

  Her mother hurried across the lawn after her. “I’ll see if Mr. Gauhter will give you one of his bottled ones. Just come back in the house.”

  A jolt of revulsion clawed my guts. One of Gauhter’s bottled ones? We knew what Gauhter kept in bottles. Souls. I suddenly realized why there had been no ghosts in the graveyard.

  Whatever was inside that little girl had eaten them.

  “I guess they found their daughter,” Briar said softly.

  I shook my head. “She may call Rachael Mama, but there is no little girl under that skin.”

  Rachael had reached the middle of the yard now, but the little girl was already disappearing into the trees. Briar lifted her crossbow. Falin didn’t try to stop her this time. There was a soft ping of the cord releasing, and then Rachael collapsed, doused in Briar’s signature combination of an immobilizer, a sleeping spell, and a draught that could temporarily block a witch’s ability to channel Aetheric energy. Rachael wouldn’t be going anywhere or doing any magic for at least twelve hours without Briar’s counterspell potion.

  Briar swung her crossbow toward the woods, but the little girl had already disappeared. I could see the need to track the soul-eating corpse in Briar’s eyes as she peered at the trees. I thought for sure the child would realize her mother was no longer following her and run back, raising the alarm when she saw her in a crumpled heap in the middle of lawn, but Katie didn’t return. She was off to hunt ghosts. I hoped if any were left that they were hiding well.

  “She can’t leave the cemetery,” I whispered. “The gates keep everything dead inside. We should focus on finding Gauhter.”

  Briar nodded, lowering her crossbow, and glanced at where Rachael was sprawled in the middle of the lawn. “One down, two to go.” She moved to the front of the carport and nodded to the house across the lawn. “What spells are on the home?”

  I shook my head. “It’s too far. I can’t tell anything specific from here.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to get closer. Come on.”

  We crept across the lawn, passing only a few feet from Rachael’s unconscious form. The door to the house was open, light spilling into the yard, but I couldn’t see anything beyond it. I could feel the wards on the house, though. I could have stopped there and told Briar what she wanted to know about the house, but there was no cover in the center of the yard. We couldn’t tarry. Rachael’s soul-eating daughter could return at any moment, or one of the men might wonder why Rachael hadn’t returned yet. And, of course, sunset crept closer by the second. We had to hurry.

  When we reached the house, Briar tucked herself into a shadow and all but disappeared. Falin also seemed to fade into the darkness, which had to be a glamour because unlike Briar with her dark clothing and hair, Falin had shocking platinum-blond hair that should have glowed in the dark. Instead he blended with the shadows clutching the house like he wasn’t even there. I wished I could have done the same, but the best I could do was follow them as deep into the shadows as I could and squat with my back to the house, hiding behind the porch, and hope not to be spotted.

  “The wards are both alarm and barrier,” I said as I let my senses trace the magic I could feel pooling in the doorway. There was something sharp to it, potentially dangerous. “They might also be booby-trapped against intruders.”

  Briar cursed. “Well then, we can’t sneak in, or just bust through them. We will have to disable them.” She began pulling pouches from her pockets and then stopped, turning to me. “Craft, the other day you said you cut a door into a ward. Did it work?”

  I didn’t like where this was going, but I nodded. She gave me an evaluating look. “Think you could cut through this one?”

  “Without triggering it?” I trailed my senses across the ward again. While strong, it was thin, no more than an inch thick. The fae dagger probably wouldn’t trigger the ward; it was almost undetectable to witch magic. I moved to retrieve the dagger but then hesitated. My hands were still bound in gauze. This is going to suck. I held out my hands to Falin. “Unwrap me.”

  He didn’t look pleased about the plan, but he didn’t argue. When he finished, I studied my unbound hands, flexing my fingers. It hurt, but not as bad as I expected. The healing spells in the gauze had done a good job, and the blisters were already flat, the fluid gone. Not bad. I took the gauze from Falin and shoved it in my pocket—it was covered in my DNA and no way was I leaving it lying around when there was a necromancer sending killing spells after me. Then I knelt and pulled the dagger from my boot.

  The hilt bit into the healing flesh on my fingers and palm, but I forced my hand to grip it and hold firm. I crept up the steps, stopping just outside the threshold of the open door. The ward buzzed along my skin. This was going to hurt so bad if I was wrong. Here goes nothing.

  I plunged the dagger into the ward and waited. Nothing happened. No spells reached out to engulf me, no alarms sounded, and no necromancers rushed out of the house at me. So far, so good. I dragged the blade down the doorframe, mere centimeters from the wood. I followed the full outline of the doorway and floor, until the ward, no longer attached to anything, dissolved in the door opening. The threshold was bared.

  I crouched by the edge of the porch. I couldn’t see anything in the shadows, but I knew Briar and Falin were there. “Done.”

  A moment later, both joined me on the porch.

  I stepped aside so Briar could take the lead. I thought Falin would go next, but he fell in behind me, covering my back. He had his gun drawn, pointed toward the ground, while Briar had her crossbow loaded with more of her nonlethal, triple-threat darts. I gripped my dagger, barely feeling the pain through the adrenaline pumping through my veins.

  “Okay,” Briar said, lifting the crossbow. “Seventeen minutes until sunset. Let’s do this.”

  Chapter 27

  The first room we entered was a small living room. Toys were scattered across the floor, most mangled beyond recognition. A child-sized plate of food sat untouched on the coffee table beside a cup filled with juice, also untouched. The living room opened to a small kitchen, the open floor plan making it easy to see that both rooms were empty. Briar pushed open a door to reveal a small bathroom, also empty. There was only one other door besides what had to be the front door. Briar pulled it open, sweeping her crossbow in both directions, but there were only stairs, no people.

  The small house was a split-level, with stairs going both up and down. Briar glanced at me, a question in her cocked eyebrow. I let my senses stretch.

  “There is magic in both directions. But there are dead things below us. A lot of dead things. Maybe buried in the basement. Maybe walking. I can’t tell.”

  Briar nodded, and then she lifted a hand to indicate we’d search the upstairs first. Her steps were soundless as she walked up the steps, as were Falin’s behind me. I felt loud by contrast, every scuff of my boots seeming to echo in the narrow stairwell. When we reached the floor above, we found a small hallway with three doors.

  The first door revealed a room with two beds, one larger and unmade, the other smaller and covered with a pink ruffled comforter and a filmy pink canopy. The Saunderses’ room, but wherever Rue Saunders was, he wasn’t here. The next door revealed another bathroom. I grabbed Briar’s arm before she could open the third door.

  Ward, I mouthed silently. Then I frowned, because the ward wasn’t an alarm or a booby trap, but that strange configuration I’d felt in the clearing. The one that kept soul collectors out. Which was overkill, as we were inside a cemetery anyway, and soul collectors couldn’t enter. I nodded, motioning that it was okay to cross the ward, and Briar pushed
the door open softly, her crossbow at the ready.

  This room wasn’t empty, but its occupant also wasn’t a threat, and Briar lowered her weapon a hair. At first I thought the woman in the bed was old, but as I looked at her, I realized she was probably only in her forties, illness having aged her. Magic surrounded the bed in heavy layers, tied through both artifacts and medical machines. The tablet that had been stolen from the museum hung above her head, heavy lines of magic connecting it to her. A basin of dark liquid saturated in magic had tubes trailing from it, leading to one of the bags connected to her IV pole. Runes were scrawled on the floor around the bed, as well as other arcane languages I couldn’t recognize but could feel the power lifting from.

  The woman was alive, but she shouldn’t have been. The mix-match of machines and magic connected to her were keeping her heart beating, her lungs breathing, but the soul inside her was dim, tired. A chair sat beside her bed, close enough that a person sitting in it could talk to her, hold her hand. A pillow and blanket sat crumpled on the chair, as if whoever used it regularly slept in it, keeping vigil. A single silver-framed photo sat on the arm of the chair, showing the woman as she must have looked when she was healthier, wearing a wedding dress and smiling as she stood arm in arm with a man I guessed was a young Gauhter. We backed out of the room soundlessly, though she was beyond disturbing.

  Once the door closed, we looked at each other.

  “Well,” Falin whispered as we crept down the stairs. “You surmised that the Saunderses are part of this because they wanted their daughter back. I think we just found Gauhter’s motivation.” He nodded back toward the dying woman’s room.

  I thought about the items Gauhter had stolen, the evolution of his ritual, of the fact that the earlier bodies felt very dead but the new ones had gotten increasingly better preserved—at least while a soul was still inside them. He’d been creating better and better vessels for the souls, probably in preparation of moving her to a new body once he perfected his ritual. He was trying to save his wife.