Grave Ransom Read online

  “You’re a ghost. You can’t eat.”

  “No, but I can watch you and remember.”

  I cut my gaze across at him. “And that’s almost as creepy and weird as the scattered-body theory. But I agree about tracking the one in the city. It’s closer. Let’s just hope it’s Remy.”

  • • •

  We followed the pull of the charm back through the outskirts and the suburbs, until, when the businesses began outnumbering the houses, the tracking spell began all but jumping on my wrist, we were so close. We weren’t in the city proper yet; the skyscrapers and municipal buildings of Nekros were still a distance off. This was more sprawl that had grown around the city since it was founded fifty-odd years ago. Most of the buildings in this area were retail establishments or restaurants, but as if anticipating joining the city, or maybe just to increase foot traffic to the local businesses, all the roads had sidewalks.

  I pulled into the lot of an outdoor mall—it was far too gentrified to be called a strip mall—and parked. The charm was dancing on my wrist now. If I kept searching by car, I’d likely pass Remy and have to double back. It was smarter to go on foot and pay attention to the changes in the charm.

  Roy followed as I set a brisk pace up the sidewalk. It was early afternoon on a Saturday and the sidewalks weren’t exactly packed, but they boasted clumpy crowds of shoppers scattered sporadically between shops. Several young people were gathered in a green space between a bookstore and a coffee shop, and I scanned the faces eagerly, but none belonged to Remy.

  The charm at my wrist was no longer pulling—except for the light tug back toward the wilds—but was more like silently buzzing, alerting me its target was here, close. But where?

  I pulled up the photo Taylor had sent me of Remy and held it up for Roy. The ghost wasn’t the best at identifying the living—being dead it wasn’t something most ghosts paid attention to particularly because the chasm between the living and the land of the dead tended to distort things, but he’d been honing the skill since deciding he wanted to be a detective.

  “This is who we’re looking for,” I said, earning me a questioning glance from an elderly couple sitting on a bench not far away. Puzzled looks from bystanders happened sometimes when talking to someone no one else could see. But I didn’t have time to worry about people thinking I was crazy. Remy was around here somewhere. Or, at least I hoped that was who the spell had tracked here.

  Roy studied the screen, tilting his head this way and that as he tried to see the image through what likely appeared to be a broken phone on the other side of the chasm. After a moment, Roy nodded and dashed into the nearest store to check the patrons. I continued up the sidewalk, searching, the charm vibrating on my wrist.

  As I passed a branch of the First Bank of Nekros, the charm at my wrist gave a lurch. Yes. I jerked open a door that proclaimed the bank’s new extended weekend hours and rushed inside. The bank had soft lighting, and the sudden change from the bright outside sunlight left me blind.

  “Lock the door,” a deep male voice instructed.

  I blinked, willing my magic-damaged eyes to adjust quicker. Shadows resolved around me, slowly bleeding into color. A dark-haired man in a football jersey stood in front of me, still not quite in focus, but with the charm vibrating its excitement at my wrist, I took a guess.

  “Remy?”

  The man lifted something dark right in front of my face. I squinted. Then I yelped as the hazy shadow revealed itself to be a matte-black gun.

  “I said, lock the door,” he said, and from farther inside the bank, I heard the distinct sound of a gun cocking.

  Behind him were two more figures, both carrying even bigger guns. Patrons were on the ground, their hands behind their heads. I turned and twisted the lock on the door, as instructed.

  “Now, on the ground,” Remy said, and I did as told, sinking to my knees.

  Well, I’d solved my first missing-person case. Yay? Taylor would be relieved to know Remy was alive and well. Now I just had to hope I stayed that way too.

  Chapter 5

  “Cash in the bag,” yelled a woman in her midthirties, throwing a dark duffel at the teller’s counter. She wore a button-up sweater with pearls, white jeans, and sandals—not at all what I would expect from a bank robber. She held her shotgun clumsily, pointed at the teller, but braced low, near her hip. I didn’t know a lot about guns, but I was guessing the lady knew even less because even I knew that if she actually shot from that position, she would end up doubled over in pain from the recoil.

  Remy still stood in front of me, but his gun was now pointed at the security guard several yards to my left. The guard was on his stomach, hands tucked behind his head, but Remy hadn’t given me any more instruction since he’d told me to get down, and he hadn’t instructed me to get down on my belly, so I still knelt, looking around. My eyes were finally clear and able to make out finer details again. Like the fact that while Remy held his Glock with much more confidence than the lady with the shotgun, his grip was all wrong, and if he pulled the trigger, the gun’s slide would break his thumb.

  The third person in the group was considerably older than the other two. If I had to guess, I’d place her somewhere in her sixties, but life had ridden her hard, so I couldn’t be sure. Her skin was dark with accumulated grime, her stringy gray hair greasy and matted, and her layered clothing threadbare. She limped as she walked, but she carried the sleek, deadly-looking assault rifle in her hands with an expertise her companions lacked. She moved among the patrons, forcing them to place wallets, jewelry, charms, and anything of value into another dark duffel bag.

  “Taylor is worried about you,” I whispered to Remy.

  “Stay quiet,” he snapped without looking at me.

  “When you didn’t pick her up last night, she went to the police to file a missing-person report.”

  Now he looked at me.

  “I said shut up,” he said, swinging the gun to point at me again.

  My teeth snapped together and I shut up. Remy stared at me, his mouth a tight line, but when it was clear I was done speaking, his gun swiveled back to the security guard.

  A small clicking sounded behind me, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if a hand hadn’t landed on my shoulder a moment later. I jumped but managed to muffle any sound I might have made when a familiar voice whispered, “I unlocked the door.”

  Roy. Bless that ghost. Not that I could currently use the door to my advantage, but at least I had an escape route at my back. Of course, that wouldn’t help any of the other bank patrons being held hostage.

  I gave the briefest nod of thanks, and the ghost stepped to the side, surveying the room.

  “Isn’t that our missing person? Well, this case took an unexpected turn.”

  Tell me about it. But I didn’t say anything. Instead, my gaze moved between the unlikely trio of bank robbers. A homeless woman, a college student, and a lady who looked like she belonged in a country club—how had they come together to rob a bank? And not one of them wore a mask or gloves. According to any cop show or novel I’d ever seen, that was a really bad sign for those of us who were witnesses.

  As if summoned by that thought, three new people appeared in the center of the room. Well, not strictly people, as they were soul collectors, grim reapers, angels of death, or whatever people chose to call those beings whose job description involved ferrying souls from the mortal realm to wherever they went next. Soul collectors only appeared when the likelihood of death was probable—it wasn’t always guaranteed, as mortals had free will, and insignificant-seeming choices sometimes had cascading effects that could literally be the difference between life and death. But when collectors appeared, someone dying was highly likely. Which was definitely a bad sign for an unknown number of people in this bank.

  I recognized all three collectors. Anyone who expected skeletons in black robes carrying scy
thes to reap the dead would be sorely disappointed. The dark-skinned woman was a blinding display of neon colors, from her bright orange dreadlocks down to her go-go boots. I’d nicknamed her the Raver, and she was a stark contrast to the man beside her, whom I’d nicknamed the Gray Man because of his monocolored gray suit and gray cane topped with a small silver skull. The third man I just called Death. I’d known him my whole life, and recently, rather intimately. As in intimately enough to know what it felt like to fall asleep with my fingers tangled in his chin-length hair. But I didn’t know his name.

  Roy gave a curse at their sudden appearance and vanished, withdrawing deeper into the land of the dead. Soul collectors collected souls, and ghosts were just wandering souls, fair game to collect anytime they were caught.

  The Raver’s eyes landed on me and she shook her head, making her long dreads dance over her shoulders. “Damn, girl, you have a knack for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, don’t you?”

  I gave her a thin smile and made the smallest waving motion with a single finger to Death.

  “What the hell?” the homeless woman yelled, spinning to level her gun at the small band of collectors. “Where the hell did you come from? Get on the ground.”

  The collectors frowned at the woman in unison, surprise evident on each of their faces. Remy and the shotgun lady also spun, their guns moving to the collectors.

  “Well, that was unexpected,” the Gray Man said, lifting his cane to push his gray fedora back on his head.

  “On the ground,” Remy yelled at the same time Country Club said, “On your knees!”

  The mortals already on the ground looked around the room, faces showing fear, puzzlement, and panic. They couldn’t see the collectors. Only grave witches could see collectors, and only when spanning the chasm between the living and the dead. And planeweavers like me, of course, but to my knowledge, I was the only one of those in this realm. Maybe some other rarely encountered magic users could see collectors, but Remy was theoretically human. The other two? I wasn’t sure, but I was guessing human. The only time mortals saw collectors was in the moment before their death, and at that point, the collector typically had their hand wrapped around a soul already.

  So what was going on?

  A woman pulled her legs to her chest and sobbed into her knees. A man began muttering. A prayer? A spell? To my left, the security guard’s hands were slowly dropping, moving toward the gun at his belt. This situation was about to escalate quickly.

  I met Death’s eyes. I wasn’t close enough to see if the colors in his irises were spinning, if all the possible scenarios of different potential futures were playing out before him, but I could guess they were. Soul collectors were forbidden from getting involved, from leading mortals toward one possibility over another, but their sudden appearance had thrown them into the thick of this mess. The question was, who were they here to collect?

  Death slowly lifted his hands and nodded to his companions. “It’s okay. See, we are getting down.”

  He knelt as he spoke, and the Gray Man followed his lead. The Raver shook her head again.

  “This just isn’t right,” she muttered, but she knelt as well, lifting hands with neon-colored nails.

  “See,” Death said again, putting emphasis on the word. He wasn’t looking at the robbers now. He was focused on me. When he’d told me to See in the past, he always meant he wanted me to gaze through realities.

  I cracked my shields, letting the wall I mentally pictured as a hedge of vines peel apart so that I could gaze across the planes. A cold wind cut across my skin, the world around me changing as different planes of existence overlaid reality. I was only seeing across the planes, not weaving them together, so I saw without actually touching the swirls of raw magic waiting to be gathered and directed. The putrid colors of fear soaked into the floor around the cowering bank patrons. The polished marble of the floor looked dull and cracked. The wood of the teller’s booth rotted, becoming pitted, half of it crumbling. All around me, purses and clothing, paper and briefcases weathered, becoming thin and full of holes. But the patrons on the floor remained the same, their life force separating them from the decaying touch of the land of the dead, their souls twinkling bright, merry yellow from beneath healthy flesh.

  The three robbers were a different story.

  With my shields up, I hadn’t caught a hint of death or decay from them, but now that my shields were cracked, my magic reached for them like it would any other corpse. But they weren’t like any corpse I’d ever encountered. The last walking corpse I’d seen had felt dead, even if he hadn’t looked it until after the soul inside him—not his soul—vacated his body. These bodies were dead, my magic was sure of it, but it was like the moment of death had been paused, drawn out to keep going endlessly. They walked, they talked, but I realized the only time I’d seen any draw a breath was directly before they spoke. Robbing a bank was a tense, adrenaline-pumping kind of activity. At least one should have been sweating with nerves, breathing a little too fast. But no. When they stood still, they were eerily still . . . they were dead.

  Remy, my client’s boyfriend, the person I was supposed to find, was dead.

  His soul was wrong as well. All three robbers’ souls were wrong. Souls didn’t overlay a person with a duplicate image. They weren’t clear and defined the way Roy’s ghost appearance was, though he was, in fact, a soul. That level of definition didn’t occur until after the soul separated from the body. Inside a body, souls were more like an internal glow that radiated outward, surrounding the person in a warm, auralike glow. All three robbers glowed the faint yellow I associated with a human soul, but the glow didn’t encompass their bodies right, like the soul inside didn’t quite fit.

  Country Club had turned back to the teller, urging him to fill the bag with cash faster. The homeless woman kept her assault rifle trained on the three collectors. To my left, the security guard had his weapon in hand and was pushing off the ground. Remy was just starting to turn. He hadn’t seen the guard yet, but when he did . . . Regardless of who shot first, if anyone started shooting, the other two robbers would as well. And people would get hurt. Die.

  I could see the possibilities on Death’s face as he stared at me. He mouthed my name, inclining his head as if giving me permission, or urging me onward. Because I could stop it.

  Remy finished his turn. Saw the guard. His gun lifted, aiming, his mouth opened to yell something. I didn’t have time to think, to weigh my options. I let my mental shield fall, let the icy touch of the grave rip through me as I let my own magic stab outward and coil around the robbers. Their dead flesh offered no resistance, letting my magic slide right through to the warm, glowing souls beneath.

  The souls tried to recoil from the icy touch of my magic, but they were weak, diminished from being trapped inside dead flesh, and the smallest tug of my magic pulled them free.

  Three bodies hit the floor simultaneously. Inanimate. Truly dead.

  Three souls stood beside them, looking confused, scared. Not one soul matched a body on the ground.

  Chapter 6

  My ears were ringing, and it took me a moment to realize the security guard had fired a shot before the robbers’ bodies hit the ground. People were screaming, crying. I tried to look around, but I hadn’t had time to use any finesse when opening my shields, I’d just thrown them wide, and the cacophony of information barraging my senses was overwhelming. I squeezed my eyes closed, but it barely helped. I managed to keep my new secondary shield in place, though, the one that kept my psyche from reaching out and merging planes until everything I saw became part of mortal reality. So, while the racking wind from the land of the dead was whipping my hair around and had caught a stack of deposit envelopes, at least the building wasn’t in danger of decaying around me.

  Someone brushed by me on their dash to the door. The heat of the brief contact felt scalding even through the light jac
ket I wore. I needed to get my shields under control. Taking a deep breath, I drew my magic back and then focused on closing the walls I kept around my psyche. Slowly, piece by piece, the living vines I visualized forming my mental shields slid into place. The wind around me died down, but the chill that had snuggled under my flesh remained.

  I shivered, opening my eyes.

  The room was dimmer now, my magic having burned out some of my vision, at least temporarily. The collectors were clear, though—it was more than my eyes that I saw them with. The Gray Man had already collected the soul that had been inside the homeless woman. I hadn’t even had a chance to look at it. The Raver was approaching the soul standing beside the fallen country club lady, though the soul was that of a man. Death was en route for the soul that had popped free from Remy’s body.

  I held up a hand. “Wait.”

  Death didn’t meet my eyes now, and I pushed off the ground. I was trembling, both from the cold that had ripped through me and from the adrenaline of the last several minutes. I wobbled as I got my feet under me, but my legs held, and I focused on the soul.

  She was female. I couldn’t tell her age, but I was guessing not much older than Remy. Ghosts often took a moment to realize they’d lost their bodies, and I’d pulled her all the way across into the purgatory of the land of the dead, which was probably an even bigger adjustment. She stared down at Remy’s body, shaking her head.

  “Hello,” I said, trying to get her attention. Death had almost reached us. “What’s your name?”

  She looked up, and I was close enough to the land of the dead to see that she’d had big brown eyes in life. They were brimming with insubstantial tears.

  “Put me back,” she said, kneeling down over Remy’s body and plunging her arms into his chest as if trying to pull him back on like a coat. “Put me back right now.”