Grave Memory: An Alex Craft Novel Page 6

  “You staying for this or are you going to send in one of your interns?” Because chain of evidence demanded someone official stay with the body while I performed my ritual, but I knew Tamara had just acquired a couple of new interns and she enjoyed breaking them in by letting me freak them out.

  “Oh, I’m staying,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “After everything that woman put my office through, I want to hear this selfish prick admit he jumped. Besides, I’ve barely seen you in a month. Holly is suddenly too busy to go to lunch, ever. And you’ve stood me up for dinner twice. I’m seriously having a case of third wheel syndrome here. Too old to hang, maybe?”

  She made it sound like a joke, but I could hear something else, something hurt, in her voice. I cringed and tried to hide the reaction by focusing on digging through my purse.

  I found the tube of waxy chalk I used for drawing circles for indoor rituals and started working my way around the gurney.

  “You know that’s not it. The timing just hasn’t worked. Besides, you’re not that old.”

  Tamara huffed. “I’m a bride in my late thirties trying to plan a wedding without the help of my two closest friends.”

  I nearly dropped the chalk. “You and Ethan finally set a date?” She’d been wearing a huge diamond for at least four months now, but while Ethan had proposed, he wouldn’t commit to a date.

  “Yeah.” A dreamy smile spread across Tamara’s face, her eyes going distant and a slightly dopey expression claiming her face. Then her gaze snapped back to me and the softness faded. “And you’d know that, and that I want you and Holly to be my bridesmaids, if you weren’t avoiding me.”

  “I’m not avoiding you.” And it wasn’t a lie, or I wouldn’t have been able to say it—I was too fae to lie. And that was part of the problem. Holly and I were both dealing with issues tied in with Faerie, and well, we hadn’t told Tamara any of it. The less she knew, the safer she was. Even though the fae had come out of the mushroom ring seventy years ago, they were still a secretive bunch. But I was feeling guilty enough that if she pressed me, I might just spill more than I should. How had I missed that they’d finally set a date?

  I rushed the last quarter of my circle—which in my haste was more oblong than circular, but it would work—and flicked on the camera.

  “I’m going to start the ritual now,” I said, knowing that I was only stalling the conversation, not stopping it.

  The look Tamara gave me confirmed that fact, and I closed my eyes so she couldn’t see the guilt there. Not much I could do about that right now.

  Concentrating, I focused on clearing my mind and centering myself—not an easy task with Tamara’s news rambling around my brain on top of the grave magic fighting to break out of my shields while grave essence struggled to force its way in. I took a long breath. Let it out. I couldn’t cast a circle with grave magic, and I wasn’t working without one, especially when my magic was behaving erratically. I breathed in again, focusing on my lungs, my body, as I struggled for some semblance of calmness.

  It took me longer than I liked to block out the distractions enough to concentrate on the obsidian ring on my finger. The ring carried raw energy drawn down from the Aetheric plane, and unlike my grave magic, which was a wyrd ability and had only one true purpose, this raw Aetheric energy was limited only by the caster welding it. I channeled a thin stream of the stored magic into the circle I’d drawn and a shimmering blue barrier sprang up around me.

  The assault of grave essence immediately lessened. It didn’t vanish—after all, I had James’s corpse in the circle with me, which emanated the power of the grave. But the circle did block out the other corpses in the morgue, making the grave essence clawing at me in an attempt to crawl under my skin manageable, if not exactly comfortable.

  Of course, letting it in was exactly what I had to do.

  I removed the silver charm bracelet that carried my extra shields, and as soon as I unlatched the clasp, my pent-up magic roared to the surface, testing the now weakened resistance between it and the grave essence that raked across my mind. I still had my personal shields, but my psyche had already crossed the chasm separating the living and the dead enough for a howling wind to swirl around my circle, blowing curls in my face. If I’d opened my eyes, I knew I’d see the room in the ruined devastation that existed on the closest layers of the land of the dead. But I wasn’t ready to open my eyes yet.

  I still had the most important part of the ritual to complete.

  I cracked my mental shields slowly, trying to control the outpour of magic. It almost worked. My magic latched on to the corpse as grave essence flooded my body, filling my blood, my very bones, with the chill of the grave. The invasion hurt. I was alive. The essence looking for a home in my body wasn’t. I might have been cold to the touch for most people, but I still had my own living heat, and it warred with the chill of the grave.

  So I released that heat, giving away a part of myself and sending it into the corpse already filled with my power.

  Then I opened my eyes. The room had decayed around me, at least in appearance. Though if I wasn’t careful, the seemingly threadbare sheet covering a gurney so rusted a bump might turn it into a mound of red rust could blend with mortal reality, becoming the true state of the objects. That was what it meant to be a planeweaver. I could tie different planes of existence together. And the land of the dead wasn’t the only reality now filling my vision. The Aetheric, the plane of magic, was also visible as it filled the room with swirls of colorful raw energy. If I wanted, I could have reached out and drawn on that magic. A dangerous temptation, very dangerous, as witches were meant to touch the Aetheric only with their projected psyche. Beyond those planes were others, but I tried not to focus on them because I had very little control over my planeweaving ability, and no one to teach me.

  Instead I focused on the body under the rotted sheet. With so much of my magic filling the corpse, it took only a twitch of my will to form the man’s memories into a shade. It sat up through the sheet, seemingly unaware of its crushed and misshapen head and broken body. I averted my eyes from the mangled mess. Unlike ghosts, which tended to look like how the person had perceived themselves during life, shades always appeared as the body existed the moment before the soul was collected.

  With the shade raised, I focused on a new mental shield I’d spent the last month constructing. It sprang up in my mind’s eye like an opaque bubble around my psyche. Immediately the layers of different realities dimmed. They didn’t disappear, and the shield didn’t stop the grave essence, but in theory it helped prevent my powers from reaching across those planes of reality. Also, from previous rituals, I’d noticed that my eyesight took considerably less damage when my psyche only looked across the planes through the shield, as opposed to having an open channel.

  Shield in place, I turned back to the shade I’d raised, though I couldn’t bring myself to look directly at its misshapen form.

  “What is your name?” I asked. I knew his name, of course, but usually when I raised a shade in the morgue, it was for an official police case, and the shade had to identify itself for the record. It had become habit.

  “James Kingly.”

  “James, do you remember how you died?”

  The shade sat perfectly still, not answering. Shades always answered immediately, unless the question was outside the scope of what the body remembered. His death shouldn’t have been hard to recall.

  A bubble of panic built in my chest, pressing against my lungs so it was hard to breathe. Shades were nothing more than memories held together by grave magic and the witch’s will, but my magic had become erratic recently and I’d filled the corpse with a hell of a lot of it.

  Then the shade spoke, the delay, which had felt like forever, only a few seconds. “There was blood and pain. Things were broken. I was on my back and then…” He trailed off, which meant that was the moment a collector had freed his soul and the RECORD button on his life had stopped.

>   Okay, so he’d described the moment of his death. I’d asked that same question to hundreds of shades and most described the events leading up to their deaths, not just the last moment. Did my grave magic go wrong? It was the one magic I’d always been able to rely on behaving. My spellcasting sucked, and the whole planeweaving thing was new and a mess, but I’d always been able to raise shades, and I was damn good at it. So what the hell was going on?

  “Before the blood and pain, what were you doing?”

  No hesitation this time. “Sitting in Delaney’s draining my second beer.”

  I stared at the shade, speechless. That isn’t possible.

  From outside my circle Tamara said, “How can he not remember jumping? His blood alcohol level wasn’t near high enough for him to have stumbled over the edge of that building in a drunken stupor. And where the heck is Delaney’s—I’ve never heard of it. I thought shades couldn’t lie.”

  “They can’t.” Or at least they weren’t supposed to be able to. They were just memories. All will, ego, and emotion had left with the soul when it was ripped from the body.

  “Rest now,” I told the shade, pushing it back into the body. I drew part of my magic out of the corpse, and then called the shade again. It returned, slightly more translucent than before. I asked the shade the same question, and got the exact same answer.

  “That’s not possible,” I said, seriously wishing I had a chair inside the circle because collapsing into a seat sounded like a plan. But that wasn’t an option. “James, do you remember being on the roof of Motel Styx?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been to Motel Styx?”

  “No.” No hesitation. No emotion. It was the type of response I expected. Except it wasn’t true. I knew, without a doubt, that he’d been at that building.

  What the hell?

  “I think the OMIH might have to reevaluate the honesty of shades,” Tamara said, pacing the edge of my circle.

  Maybe, but…“James, did you jump off the roof of Motel Styx?”

  “No.”

  “Have you had suicidal thoughts in the last six months?”

  “No.”

  “Did you lie to your wife about meeting clients and instead go to an Irish pub?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” I hadn’t had a chance to ask James’s ghost that question before his wife returned, but then he’d been dodgy about admitting he’d been at the pub for any reason other than what he’d told his wife. I much preferred the shade’s direct, unemotional answers.

  “When Nina got pregnant, we both agreed that since she couldn’t drink, I wouldn’t either. But I needed a beer.”

  Or two, apparently. “What time did you leave the pub?”

  The shade didn’t answer.

  Tamara stopped pacing and frowned at the shade through the blue haze of my circle. “What is wrong with him, Alex? Doesn’t he have to answer you?”

  He did. Unless he doesn’t know the answer. I no longer feared my magic had gone awry. Everything the shade said confirmed what the ghost had told me in my office. But that meant that James Kingly had lost three days of his life, including the moment he’d decided to die.

  Chapter 6

  I put the shade back in its body because there was nothing more it could tell me, and then I reclaimed my heat and wrapped up the ritual. Tamara wheeled James Kingly’s body back to the cold room as I stood there blinking at the thick gray film coating my vision.

  “How are the eyes?” Tamara asked, and I turned toward the sound of her voice. As she crossed the room, I could track her movement, but as soon as she stopped, she blended into the bleakness. Either my expression or my silence was answer enough because she said, “That bad, huh?”

  I shrugged, hating the pity in her voice nearly as much as I hated the blindness. Times like this were when it was tempting to open my psyche and see across planes. It could be confusing, seeing multiple layers of reality stacked on top of each other, but at least I could see. Of course, that would only exacerbate the problem when I finally locked my shields again. Currently the shadows were gray, not black, and I could make out the outline of the shelves and tables in the room, so hopefully my vision would soon clear enough that I could safely navigate to the elevator. Until then…

  “You want some coffee?” Tamara asked, as if reading my need for a distraction.

  “That would be great.” And warm. I shivered. I should have brought a jacket. Except I hadn’t planned on raising a shade when I’d left the house, and September in Nekros was not what you’d describe as cold. Sometimes the nights were chilly, but after the blistering heat of July and August, September was downright comfortable. Of course, that meant I sometimes forgot to carry a jacket.

  Reaching a slightly trembling hand toward what looked like the outline of one of the autopsy tables, I started in the direction of Tamara’s office.

  “You need help?” she asked, and if I’d had any heat left, it would have rushed to my cheeks.

  I hated being treated like an invalid, more so because sometimes it truly was necessary. But not right now. “Just lead the way,” I told her, because as long as she was moving, I could see her.

  I followed her gray shadowlike form, managing to graze only one counter…and slam my shoulder against the doorframe of her office. The small “mmph” that escaped me on impact made her stop, but, thankfully, she didn’t mention the misstep. All and all, not my most successful pathfinding.

  If my eyesight continued to degenerate this rapidly, I might need to look into some alternatives. Maybe I could train PC as a Seeing Eye dog. Of course, I couldn’t even get the six pound Chinese crested to walk on a leash without pulling. Who knew where we’d end up if I relied on his guidance.

  I shuffled around Tamara’s office, searching for a place to sit. As I sank gratefully into Tamara’s spare chair, I heard the coffeemaker turn on. Central Precinct was infamous for the burnt sludge most of the cops choked down, but here in the morgue, Tamara kept her own machine and a stash of good dark roasted coffee beans.

  “So did anything strange stand out in Kingly’s autopsy?” I asked as the smell of rich coffee wafted through the small office.

  “Let me glance over my notes,” she said, and I could almost hear the frown on her face, even if I couldn’t see it. I knew her well enough to guess she was kicking herself, sure she’d missed something.

  “He likely jumped, even if he can’t remember,” I said as I heard the sound of her file cabinet opening. “You weren’t wrong about that.”

  Paper crinkled as she riffled through a file. “All the physical evidence pointed that way. But there had to be a spell involved, right?” She paused. “Or could brain damage have caused the memory loss?”

  I considered the idea. Memories were stored in every cell of the body, but they were limited to what the soul experienced and remembered. Dementia, brain damage, brainwashing, or spells affecting memory—if powerful enough—could change what the body recorded and what the shade reported. But I didn’t think brain damage was the issue in this case. “Kingly died too soon after impact for the damage to have changed his memory.”

  “Alex, he died on impact.”

  I didn’t bother arguing if life ceased when the body died or when the soul left the body. Remove the soul, and the body dies. Even if it takes a couple minutes for the person to be considered medically dead, the shade would have no memory of that time. On the other hand, a body could be medically dead but the soul still in it, and the shade would know everything that happened to the body after death until the soul was finally freed. Which equalled true death? It was a topic on which a medical professional and a grave witch were unlikely to ever agree.

  Tamara was silent as I heard her turning pages. My vision was finally recovering, and I could clearly make out the outline of her leaning over the file on her desk. I let her review it in silence. The pot of coffee finished brewing before she finished reading, so I stood and made a fumbling attempt to locate th
e Styrofoam cups that were always on the shelf above the coffeemaker. Except, nothing I touched felt like a cup, and as I was still seeing mostly gray outlines, the one thing that looked like it might be cup shaped turned out to be a container of powdered creamer.

  “You’re out of cups.”

  “Oh, sorry. I meant to tell you. I’m using mugs now,” she said, and slid open her bottom drawer, retrieving two ceramic mugs.

  I’d cringed at her use of the word “sorry” though it had been more expression than true apology so the incursion of possible debt that hung between us was small. If it had a monetary value, it would have been worth no more than a penny or two, but I still hated the feeling of imbalance. Of course, it was an apology, not an expression of appreciation, so at least I had the option of not accepting.

  “Mugs. Really?” Yeah, my sarcasm sounded mean, but it was the only way not to forgive her. I was going to have to tell her I was fae—or, at least, fae enough to count—soon or we’d eventually run into unavoidable and weighty debt. But if I started telling people, it became more real. Not that the fact I spent time in a pocket of Faerie almost every single day didn’t highlight it nice and bright.

  “—and Ethan’s always going on about how bad Styrofoam is for the environment,” Tamara was saying. I’d been so caught up in my own thoughts that I hadn’t been listening, but it sounded like she was still talking about the mugs and I hadn’t missed anything important.

  “So you didn’t tell me the date you two picked,” I said, picking up the steaming coffeepot.

  Tamara took the pot away from me, which was probably a good plan. Color was returning, but the world was still blurry. After she filled both mugs, she handed me one and then added a heaping spoonful of creamer to the other. She didn’t ask if I wanted any, we’d been friends long enough for her to know I took my coffee black.

  I clutched the hot mug and inhaled the heady aroma, but a pang of sorrow washed through me at the scent. Death loved coffee. It was something we shared, literally. Even before I’d realized I was a planeweaver, Death and I discovered if we were in physical contact, he could interact with whatever else I was touching. Both of us holding one mug, while he watched me with those deep hazel eyes over the rim as he took a sip? I swallowed. It wasn’t one memory, it was dozens. Every time I drank coffee—and I drank a lot of coffee—I half expected him to show up, that easy smile on his face. But he didn’t, or at least, he hadn’t in over a month.