Grave Ransom Read online

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Death said, kneeling down beside her. “It’s time to go.” He held out his hand.

  She reeled back. “No. No. He said if I did this, he’d put me back.”

  “Who did?” I asked her, and shot a pleading gaze at Death. I needed to talk to this ghost.

  He only shook his head. “It’s time to go,” he said again, and reached out, catching her arm. Her form shimmered, losing its distinctness and becoming brighter, clearer as she transitioned from the land of the dead to the realm of souls again.

  “No!” the girl and I shouted at the same time.

  Death flicked his wrist and she was gone. The look he gave me was apologetic, but he didn’t apologize—he knew what I was. Without a word, he vanished as well, and I was left in the sea of chaos that was the bank.

  • • •

  Two hours later, I was back in the closetlike waiting room in Central Precinct. I again wasn’t under arrest, but I had the sinking suspicion I couldn’t walk out as easily as I had the day before.

  Remy’s body was also in the building—presumably in the morgue in the basement. I knew because the charm was once again alerting me that its target was close. At the same time, it had a thin, distant pull to another location, no doubt toward the wilds where I’d first felt the schism.

  I considered that as I sat there in an uncomfortable folding chair. I’d assumed the issue was contamination of the focus because a person can’t be in two places at once, but what if it wasn’t? Remy’s body had been at that bank, but his soul hadn’t been. Maybe his soul was somewhere in the wilds? I’d never heard of anyone tracking a soul specifically, but typically there wasn’t much of a point. Either it was in the same place as the body, or the person was dead, and almost all souls crossed over immediately.

  The door opened, revealing a young officer who looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t name. “Ms. Craft, if you’ll come this way,” he said, gesturing.

  I followed obediently. Any hope I had for a friendly sharing of information evaporated when he turned the opposite direction from the detectives’ offices and led me instead into an interrogation room.

  “Have a seat,” he said, pointing to a sturdier but even more uncomfortable-looking chair.

  For a moment I thought he was going to be the one leading the interview, but then, without waiting for me to comply, he turned and walked out of the room, the door shutting behind him.

  I considered trying the knob, but I was fairly certain it would be locked, and there was a good chance someone was watching from behind the two-way mirror, so I refrained. Walking up to the chair, I sat with as much dignity as I could scrounge up and attempted to not slouch as I waited.

  And waited.

  • • •

  I’d succumbed to boredom and was playing a game on my phone when the door finally opened. John, my once-favorite homicide detective, was the first into the room. He carried a small laptop that looked even smaller against his bearlike bulk. His partner, Jenson, followed him. As the door crept closed, I felt more than saw a third figure enter.

  Briar.

  She was working hard at not being seen, and the spell that masked her magic was once again in place, but while it felt innocuous unless I explored deeper, it was still a spell, and in a group this small, it highlighted her location. I made a point of not looking at her, focusing on the two detectives instead. I knew she was there, but she didn’t have to know I knew.

  John sat in the chair across from me and set the computer on the table, closed. Another chair waited for Jenson, but he only leaned against the table, arms crossed over his chest. Briar hovered near the far wall, hidden from sight behind her veil of spells. I looked at John. They all looked at me.

  No one spoke.

  I waited. If I’d learned anything from the summers I’d spent in my father’s house, it was how to keep silent. It was never a good idea to offer explanations to questions that hadn’t been asked just because a silence stretched too long.

  “So why were you at the bank today?” John finally asked.

  “Missing-person case.”

  John and Jenson exchanged a look I couldn’t decipher.

  “Did you find the person?” Jenson asked.

  “He’s in your morgue.”

  Jenson grunted, and there was silence a moment before John said, “Tell us what you witnessed in the bank.”

  And that was the tricky question. I took a deep breath, but I didn’t hesitate. “I walked into a robbery in progress. I believe Remy Hollens was about to lock the door when I walked inside. He held a gun to me and had me click the lock before getting to my knees. He then turned his attention to the bank guard. There was a woman with a shotgun at the teller’s desk. She had the man behind the counter fill a duffel bag. There was also an older woman with an assault rifle robbing the hostages.”

  John nodded, motioning me to continue. This was the hard part. I was fae, so I couldn’t lie, but I also couldn’t reveal everything I’d seen. I was still unsure I should reveal exactly what I’d done either. All three robbers had been dead already. The collectors would have ripped the ghosts out of the bodies if I hadn’t—I was sure that was what Death had been telling me—but they’d looked alive. It might be a tricky distinction for someone who hadn’t felt the grave rolling off the bodies.

  “Someone caught the older woman’s attention and she started yelling. That drew the other two robbers’ attention. While they were distracted, the security guard drew his own gun. He fired and all three robbers collapsed, dead. Or maybe they collapsed as he fired. It happened really fast.” And I’d been otherwise distracted, so I wasn’t sure on that detail, but I was guessing none of the bank witnesses could have given any account other than what I just had.

  John and Jenson exchanged a look again, and then John opened the laptop. He pulled up a video file and hit play without saying a word.

  The screen filled with a quad screen of crisp black-and-white videos. There was no audio file, but I didn’t need one—I’d been in the room where it had been recorded. It was security footage from the bank. In shades of gray I watched myself enter the bank. A chill crawled down my spine as I saw Remy shove his gun in my face while I blinked dumbly.

  The events unfolded on the small screens exactly how I remembered.

  John hit the pause button, freezing the video version of me yelling a silent but clear no, and reaching a hand forward, toward empty space deeper inside the bank. Which was extra odd, as all the other patrons were running out the door.

  “Care to revise your statement?” John asked, looking from the series of frozen images and then back up at me.

  “I wanted to question the ghost that popped out of Remy’s body, but she moved on before I could.”

  “She?”

  I nodded. “Like the museum thief yesterday, today’s souls didn’t match the already-dead bodies they were wearing.”

  Briar stalked toward the table, dropping her invisibility spell as she moved. It probably would have been damn impressive and shocking if I hadn’t known she was there, but I’d been expecting her to jump in at any moment, so I simply turned, focusing on her for the first time.

  “Here’s the thing, Craft,” she said, sliding the laptop away from John. “That wasn’t the only weird moment.”

  She used the trackpad to back up the video. John’s lips compressed, and Jenson scowled, but neither interrupted her. When it came to magical crimes, she outranked them.

  “Here, you jump for no reason, and then nod,” she said, hitting play. She couldn’t see Roy in the video, but the clip was the moment he’d let me know he’d unlocked the door. “And here, before ‘someone caught the older woman’s attention’ as you put it, you focus right on the spot that is about to be the center of the robbers’ attention. And again, you nod.” She enlarged one panel on the screen, playing a clo
seup of me when the collectors first appeared. “And then, of course, there is this, right before everyone drops dead.” She cued up one more selection, and no big surprise, it was the moment I’d thrown open my shields.

  I grimaced. In the black-and-white images, you couldn’t see that my eyes were glowing eerie green, but the change in light spilling onto my cheeks and the way my hair lifted in a sudden violent wind were dead giveaways to anyone who’d ever seen me raise a shade that I’d been using my magic. On the screen, it happened so fast. The guard lifted his gun, the maelstrom started around me, and then all three robbers fell, simultaneously. At least I finally knew that the guard shot after they were already falling, though he couldn’t have realized it at the time.

  I looked back up at Briar. She hadn’t asked a question. Yet. I redirected before she could.

  “What did the ME determine was the time of death?”

  She frowned. “The field determination was inconclusive.”

  “Because two of the bodies were already in full rigor mortis when the medical examiner arrived, and the other appeared to be coming out of it,” John said. Then he sighed and rubbed one large hand over his expanding bald spot. “Alex, help us out here—help yourself out—we have four bodies downstairs who were walking and talking before they met you. The footage from the museum yesterday is horrible quality, but the bank clearly shows you using your magic when three people suddenly drop dead.”

  “Technically, they were already dead,” I said, which earned me a scowl from all three. “Remy Hollens’s girlfriend exchanged several text messages with him at five o’clock yesterday, but we don’t know at what point he actually went missing between five and eleven that night, when he missed picking her up from work. That’s a window of fourteen to twenty hours between his abduction and the robbery. Rigor releases what? Twenty-four to eighty-four hours after death? I’m guessing Remy must have been one of the bodies in full rigor. Have you identified the other two—”

  John slammed his palms down flat on the metal table, and I flinched.

  “I know you can accelerate decay,” he said, so softly that I doubted Jenson, only a few feet away from John, could hear him. “I’ve been on crime scenes where you have done it.”

  I opened my mouth. Closed it. I didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t wrong. It was the root of the issues that had come between us. Until earlier this year, John and I had been good friends. He’d been the one who’d hooked me up with my retainer job with the police years ago, I used to have dinner at his house with him, his wife, and several other cops from the station nearly every Tuesday, and I’d considered him a father figure. We’d drifted apart in recent months. There were just too many things I hadn’t told him about my changing magic, my newfound heritage, and my tenuous relationship with the Faerie courts. The fact that a combination of those things had landed me in the middle of some very weird crime scenes, most of which wound up classified above his pay grade, had chipped away at the trust and friendship until a giant gulf had opened between us. I had no idea how to span it, and it looked like I was about to tumble down into it and probably get buried in a landslide.

  “I . . .” I started, but then floundered. I was fae, so I couldn’t lie. I couldn’t claim that my magic had no part in the bodies aging, because my magic had forced the souls out, and from what I could guess from the little I’d seen of these walking corpses, the souls were what prevented the bodies from decaying. Once the souls were out, it all caught up to them. So, in an indirect way, my magic had done this, but not the way he meant.

  “Back up the video,” I said, and nodded at the laptop.

  Briar dragged the bar back to the exact moment I appeared to startle on the screen.

  “That was when the ghost who haunts my business informed me he’d unlocked the door. You’ll notice later in the video that the first person who rushes by me doesn’t stop, just pushes the door open.” I nodded for Briar to forward it to the next questionable spot. “Our friendly neighborhood grim reapers appeared here. Most people can’t see them, but the robbers were already dead, so apparently they could.”

  John frowned, and Jenson raised a skeptical eyebrow, but Briar nodded. Almost nothing was known about soul collectors, and many didn’t believe they existed. On forums frequented by grave witches, there were threads reporting sightings occasionally, and there were often entire chat rooms devoted to speculation about collectors, but as far as I was aware, I knew more than any other living person. I was also bound with oaths of secrecy about much of it. Briar did know a little, though, as the case we’d met during had resulted in her meeting Death before a creature from the land of the dead had temporarily taken over his body.

  “And here?” she asked, forwarding it to the moment before the three robbers collapsed.

  “These bodies were better . . . preserved . . . than the thief at the museum. With the museum thief, I felt the grave essence rolling off him from the sidewalk. These three I didn’t realize were dead until after the collectors showed up. Here I’ve opened my shields so I could see into the land of the dead and get an idea of what we were dealing with.” Which was true, just not the whole truth. “They were piloted by ghosts. Once the souls were out of the bodies, they stopped mimicking life and collapsed. But all of these people were murdered before they ever walked into that bank.”

  Briar glanced from me to something in her palm. She scowled at it. Then she set a small glass charm on the table. A lie-detecting charm. It glowed a cheery green, indicating it hadn’t caught any lies being spoken.

  With a sigh, Briar stepped around John and sank down into the empty chair beside him. Maybe Jenson had left it open for her the whole time. Nah. Jenson wasn’t that polite. Or maybe it was just me he didn’t like.

  “Initial reports indicate no active spells on any of the bodies,” Briar said. “How were these corpses, as you call them, walking around?”

  And wasn’t that the question of the hour. I’d been asking myself that since yesterday. I still didn’t know.

  “I didn’t sense any spells before they stopped moving either, though I admittedly wasn’t looking. I am technically still on retainer for the NCPD. The shades might—”

  “You’re still a suspect,” Jenson said, his eyes widening as if he couldn’t believe I’d had the audacity to mention the shades. “You’re not going anywhere near those bodies.”

  John frowned, the motion dragging down his gray and red mustache. “Unfortunately, he’s right. And that’s coming from the top, Alex.”

  “So now what?” I asked.

  Jenson just scowled at me, but John looked to Briar, who shrugged.

  “You remain a person of interest in this case,” Briar said, then held up her hand to stop my protest when my mouth opened. “But there are enough questionable circumstances that you are not currently under arrest. Geez, Craft, I leave you alone for a few hours and you take a case that should have concluded with a bad breakup and end up with three bodies at your feet.” She shook her head, whether in amazement or disgust wasn’t clear. “Go home. And, of course, don’t leave town.”

  Chapter 7

  I wasn’t going home. Not immediately, at least.

  It probably would have been smart to head straight home as, by the time I walked out of Central Precinct, dusk was only an hour or so away and I wouldn’t be able to drive much longer—legally or in actuality. Years of magic had destroyed my night vision. But there were too many questions boiling in the back of my mind. I needed to talk to Death. He’d snatched that ghost right out from under me. If he’d given me five minutes, maybe I’d have more answers now—something to tell my client at the very least. Hopefully he’d have some idea what was going on, if I could get him to answer. Besides, it had been too long since he’d visited. I didn’t like feeling like my boyfriend was avoiding me.

  The problem was, as always, how to contact him. He hadn’t visited me in over a week,
and I had the feeling that after today’s brief disagreement about the ghost, he wasn’t going to drop in tonight. Which meant I needed to get a message to him. And I knew only one way to do that. I had to pay a visit to the Raver, the only collector whose haunt I knew.

  The temperatures were quickly dropping with the drooping sun, and I set a brisk pace for my car, turning the heat up to high as soon as I cranked the engine. A charm worked into the air system and seats made the heat kick in and warm to a nice toasty temperature quickly, and I held my hands in front of the vent, letting the warmth flow over them. This car soaked up a sizable chunk of my income, but times like this made it totally worth it. That, and the fact it was fae-engineered without a trace of iron so it didn’t make me sick to sit inside it, of course. Always a plus to not be on the verge of passing out every time you crawl behind the wheel.

  On the drive, I made the call I really didn’t want to make, but it was better if my client heard it from me than from the news. Telling someone her boyfriend was dead was news you should deliver in person, but there was only so much time before sunset and I couldn’t drive after dark. So it was the phone, or risk her hearing about it some other way, which would be even worse.

  “Hi, Taylor. This is Alex Cra—”

  “Did you find him?”

  “I did, but, Taylor, it’s not good news.” I paused, unsure how to continue.

  “What do you mean? He wasn’t with another girl. I know he wasn’t. Is he okay?”

  “No,” I said, and then blew out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “No, he’s not okay. You’re probably going to hear a lot of confusing stories about . . . about how Remy died. But, Taylor, I don’t want you to jump to any conclusions. No matter what you hear, remember that you knew who he really was.”

  A jagged sob cut through the line, and I heard a loud clattering crash as she dropped the phone. I didn’t think she’d fainted because I could hear her crying on the other side, long, loud cries of pain ripping from her heart to her throat and out. I waited, keeping the line open but staying silent.