by Karen Chance
I reluctantly followed Pritkin through the wrecked living room while Nick stayed behind to check things out. We moved gingerly down a hallway, trying to dodge the worst of the blood. It wasn’t easy. By the time I managed it, I’d decided that the victim must have taken at least a few of his attackers with him. No single body could have possibly bled that much.
Sure enough, the door at the end of the hall was ajar due to the corpse lying half out of it. Or, to be more precise, part of a corpse. The top half was several feet away from the remainder, and I didn’t see a right arm at all. Of course, I wasn’t looking too hard.
I carefully stepped over what was left of the body and immediately spotted the missing arm. It was affixed to the wall inside the door, courtesy of a large axe that had severed it at the shoulder. The arm hung by the remains of a sleeve that may once have been blue but was now a stiff purple mess.
Swallowing hard, I stared around, sweat already forming on my upper lip. The air-conditioning wasn’t on, and despite an occasional breeze through a shattered window, it had to be ninety degrees in the apartment. But that wasn’t the reason I was perspiring.
The rays of midafternoon sunlight seemed thicker than usual, clouded with dust and what I realized after a moment were a couple hundred flies. They were hovering over what at first appeared to be a random mass of body parts atop a king-sized bed, but which I finally identified as the corpse of a man. To put it nicely, it wasn’t fresh. I’m no expert, but I seriously doubted that the newly dead would look like a fleshy balloon about to erupt with fetid gases and decay. The sight was gruesome enough that it took me a minute to notice that he had skin the color of an after-dinner mint, a chalky blue green.
“Djinn,” Pritkin said curtly, before I could ask. “Do you see him?”
I looked at him incredulously. “He’s a little hard to miss.”
“The spirit!”
I shook my head. If there was a ghost on the premises, he was keeping real quiet. Or maybe he’d passed out from the stink of whatever was seeping out of a gash in the djinn’s side. At least the flies seemed to like it; about a hundred had congregated there in a working black mound. I gagged hoarsely and tried to breathe through my mouth. It didn’t help.
“Careful, Cass—you look about as green as he does,” Billy commented. “Tell the mage that the only ghost around here is me, and let’s get outta here. This place is giving me the creeps.”
I swallowed hard. “Do you sense anything?” If anybody could round up a freaked-out ghost, it was Billy.
“No, but I’ll check around, just to be sure. Sometimes the new ones hide.” He doesn’t get generous very often, so I must have really looked bad.
“Thanks.” I started edging toward the door, intending to catch a breath of comparatively sweet-smelling smog, assuming I could get a living room window open. But Nick was in the way.
I hadn’t seen him come in, and he startled me. I gave a yelp and pulled back so hard that I would have fallen if Pritkin hadn’t caught me. “I doubt he’s here,” he said curtly, setting me back on my feet, “even if part of him survived. He’d be after the murderer.”
“What could a ghost do to anyone?” Nick scoffed.
Pritkin and I exchanged a glance. He’d seen firsthand the damage a couple of pissed-off ghosts could do. But he didn’t mention it. “I’m going to check the rest of the apartment,” he said instead, and left.
“He may be the Corps’ best demon hunter,” Nick said, scowling after his friend, “but I’ll bet you know more about ghosts. Saleh could have left one, right?” He looked from me to the body, but it didn’t answer. That wasn’t too surprising, as it no longer had a head.
“I don’t know.” I’d never met a djinn before, but I assumed that the same laws governed them as ruled other non-human magical creatures, none of whom left ghosts. Of course, neither do most people. It’s actually a pretty rare condition all the way around, so whatever information this one had carried into the great beyond was likely to stay there. But I didn’t feel up to giving a long explanation at the moment. “Billy’s gone to take a look around. If there’s anything left of him, he’ll find it.”
“Anything left? He’s either a ghost or he isn’t!” Nick seemed a little stressed, with a vein throbbing insistently beside his right eye. He looked like the office type to me; maybe fieldwork didn’t agree with him, either.
“It’s not that simple,” I explained. “Not all ghosts are permanent. Some spirits linger around their bodies for a while before accepting things and moving on.”
“How long?”
“A few hours, maybe a few days. No more than a week, unless they’re planning to stick around for the long haul.”
“Based on the condition of the body, he couldn’t have died more than four days ago. By your calculations, his spirit could still be here.”
“Maybe. But I don’t sense anything.”
“Try harder,” Nick urged. “He’s no longer in a position to make demands. If you can contact him, he may be willing to tell us something.”
“If he’s here, Billy will find him. If he isn’t—” I shrugged. “I don’t do anything to attract ghosts, so I can’t ‘try harder.’ They just tend to show up when I’m around.”
“We can’t afford to stay much longer.” Nick spoke quietly, but there was a warning note in his voice that I didn’t like. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder why the place wasn’t overrun with war mages. It was their job to investigate murders in the supernatural community, and there looked to be enough bodies here to occupy them for a while. I’d just spied a foot—of a much more human golden brown—sticking out from behind the bed. I didn’t look to see if it was still attached to anything.
“How long before anyone else shows up?” I asked uneasily. Pritkin and his fellow mages weren’t exactly on good terms, and I would just as soon miss the reunion.
“There’s no way to know. But Saleh was under interdict by the Council.” Nick saw my expression. “It’s like parole,” he explained. “And when he doesn’t show up for his weekly meeting, someone will be sent to check on him.”
“Crap.” I started for the door, but Nick grabbed me.
“What if you were to touch the corpse itself? Would that make for a stronger connection?”
I stared at him in horror. “I’m not touching that thing!” The very idea made my skin crawl.
“What about something he owned, then?” Before I could stop him, Nick crossed the room to tug at the dead man’s shirt. I think he intended to rip a piece of fabric off for me, but the dead flesh peeled away with the cloth, flaking off the bone like a well-done fish. The shirt gaped open where he’d grasped it, giving me a glimpse of a belly that moved on its own. When I realized I was seeing maggots teeming beneath the skin, I gagged and almost lost it.
“That’s it. I’m done.” I staggered through the door and bumped into Pritkin coming up the hallway. “Is there a bathroom?”
“Two doors down to your left. There’s no one in there.”
For a second, I didn’t know what he meant. There were only three of us along on this crazy errand to interrogate a dead man—unless you counted Billy, and he hadn’t needed to use the facilities in quite a while. Then I realized that he was implying that the bathroom was free of corpses. I got a mental image of the bloated body behind me, choked and fled.
The dress seemed to like the bathroom better than the bedroom-turned-morgue. The mirror reflected back to me a hesitant pale rose, like the sky just before dawn. But although I stood over the sink for a long minute, trying not to heave up lunch, the sun didn’t rise. I didn’t blame it.
I’d just finished washing my face and hands, trying to get what felt like a greasy film off them, when a fine mist floated up from the drain on a cold silver glow. It resolved itself into a face, wavering in front of the mirror like a mirage made out of steam. It was vague and indistinct, not almost solid the way I usually see ghosts. I blinked at it, but it didn’t go away. “Is it safe?”
a tremulous voice demanded.
“Uh,” I said stupidly. There really was no good answer. On a few memorable occasions in the past, I’d encountered spirits who weren’t yet aware that they were dead. And no one ever appreciated being brought up to speed.
The misty eyes started moving around the bathroom. They detached from the rest of the head to float off, poking into things. One slipped under the door, and I winced, only too aware of what was coming. A few seconds later, the mouth opened in shock, but no words came out
“I know it’s bad,” I babbled, “but you’re going to a better place.”
The sightless head turned in my direction. “I’m a demon,” it snarled. “I don’t think so.”
Okay, he had a point. The other eye returned from looking out the window and settled in the middle of his forehead. It gave him a weird Cyclops vibe, but under the circumstances, I didn’t think that worth pointing out. “Who did this?”
“Don’t you know?” I asked, surprised.
“I was asleep!” he said, sounding outraged. “I heard someone break in, got halfway out of bed, and then the lights went out.” Permanently, I thought but didn’t say. The eye focused on my face, really seeing me, for the first time. “And who the hell are you?”
“Just visiting,” I said, edging toward the door.
“Not so fast.” The face reappeared in my path. The wandering eye caught up with the other one and there was some jostling around while they fought each other for forehead space. When they finally settled, he looked at me accusingly. “You can see me!”
“I’m clairvoyant.”
“Good. Then tell me who did this. Someone is gonna pay!”
I had a sudden idea. “Maybe we can work something out,” I offered.
“Whaddya mean?”
“I need to know about the Codex,” I said tenuously.
“Which one?” he demanded, suddenly businesslike.
“There’s more than one?”
“A codex is a compilation of knowledge, babe. Which one are we talking about here?’
I swallowed. “The Codex Merlini. The lost volume.”
His gaze sharpened. “What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t. Do you know anything?”
“Possibly.”
I sighed. “I’m Cassie Palmer,” I admitted, and the ghostly eyes visibly brightened.
“Okay, then.” Saleh’s voice turned brisk. “The Codex was lost centuries ago, but that isn’t the main problem. Even if you find it, you won’t be able to read it.”
“It’s in code?”
“Better. Codes can be deciphered, sooner or later, no matter how good. He was a little more creative than that.”
“He? You mean, there really was a Merlin?”
“No, they called it the Codex Merlini because it was written by a guy named Ralph,” Saleh said impatiently. “You know that old story about Merlin getting younger every year, instead of older?” I nodded. “Well, the storytellers got it mixed up.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that it wasn’t the mage who aged backwards. He spelled the Codex so that, if it ever left his possession, it would start aging in reverse.”
“Why would he do that?”
Saleh gave me a look that said he was starting to suspect that my IQ equaled my bust size. “So it would begin unwriting itself, of course! In our time it’s just a bundle of blank parchment.”
“But if someone was to go into the past…”
Saleh slid me an evil smile. “Then that someone could possibly retrieve it.”
I felt my stomach sink. My new position meant that, among other things, I had the fun job of policing the timeline. But without some of those lessons I was missing, every time I went back, I risked messing up something I wouldn’t know how to fix.
“Where is it?” I asked, knowing I wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Wrong question,” he murmured. “You should be asking where was it. Because you need to go back to a time when the text was still mostly intact, yet after it left Merlin’s hands.”
Someone rapped smartly on the door, and I jumped. “We need to go.” Pritkin’s voice carried clearly through the thin wood.
“Then where was it?” I hissed quietly. The only person who hated my jaunts into the past more than I did was Pritkin. I wanted to make the deal before he interfered and possibly screwed it up.
Billy suddenly zoomed through the wall like a firecracker on speed. “The mage is right, Cass. We gotta get gone. Now.” He pulled up at the sight of the djinn’s spectral face. “Who’s that?”
“Saleh. I found him.”
“Great. So let’s go. There’s a cadre of war mages coming up the elevator.”
“Give me a minute.”
“You don’t have a minute.”
“Billy! I may have found something!”
Pritkin started beating on the door. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” Too late I recalled being told once that his hearing was super sharp.
I looked at Saleh. “What do you want?”
He gave me an eye roll. “What do you think? You’re clairvoyant. I want to know who did this.”
“I don’t control my gift,” I told him desperately, as Pritkin started throwing himself against the bathroom door.
“Then I guess I’ll hang around with you until it decides to manifest,” Saleh said pleasantly.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Billy said, glaring daggers at the djinn.
I stared at Saleh, who gazed peacefully back. I sighed and gave in. “When did you die, exactly?”
“Monday morning, sometime around ten.”
I glanced at Billy. No way was I going back to an apartment full of murderers in a vulnerable human body. “Some help here,” I said urgently.
My body needs a spirit in residence to maintain life, but nobody ever said it had to be mine. I’d been told by someone who ought to know that I didn’t need Billy to babysit my physical self whenever my spirit took a little jaunt. Just shift back to the same time you left, she’d said nonchalantly, as if timing a shift that closely was so damn easy. Needless to say, I preferred my solution.
“I do not believe this,” Billy muttered, as one of the hinges gave way with a crack. I gave him frantic eyes and he said something profane before slipping inside my skin. “Don’t be long. He’ll figure out it’s me when I can’t get us out of here.”
“What’s going on?” Saleh demanded.
“I can’t tell you what you want to know. But I can show you.” I waved my hand through what was left of him and shifted.
The bathroom reformed around us, four days earlier. There was no sound coming from outside the door, so I cautiously stuck my insubstantial head through the wood and looked around. The absence of blood on the walls was enough to tell me that I’d made it ahead of the murderers.
Saleh streamed through the wall, looking determined. I followed, keeping an eye out for anything unusual. Like someone with a really big axe.
Saleh floated through the wall of his bedroom as easily as if he did it every day. On the bed was the sleeping djinn. In life he’d been pretty normal-looking except for the skin color. No turban, gold earrings or Middle Eastern garb in sight. Instead, he had a mop of curly brown hair, a well-trimmed goatee and a Lakers tracksuit. He also had a head.
The alarm clock on the bedside table said 9:34. Saleh and I glanced at each other, then settled down to watch. It didn’t take long.
At 9:52, I heard the sound of running feet and the clash of weapons as, presumably, Saleh’s bodyguards faced off with the assassins. A moment later, one of them stumbled through the door, before a magically levitating axe took off his arm. A sword wielded by human hands bisected him a moment later, while the figure on the bed woke up, blinked his eyes blearily, and started to look around. Before he could focus, the second bodyguard was dead and Saleh’s head was playing basketball with the clothes hamper on the far side of the room.
I barely notice
d the gruesome denouement, because my eyes had fixed with disbelief on the sword-wielding figure standing over the scene. I would have gasped, but my lungs didn’t seem to work, my body suddenly empty of anything resembling air. A sickening disorientation hit me, and for a moment I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Time seemed to stop as I stared in hollow shock at the face, splattered by his victim’s blood.
He looked different, some part of my brain noticed. Instead of a ratty T-shirt and a brown coat that looked like it had been through one too many battles, his lean form was poured into close-fitting black jeans, a matching button-up shirt and a rich black leather jacket. It was his usual look, but upgraded, as if he’d suddenly developed a sense of style. His hair also appeared to have been brushed recently, and the stubble on his cheeks looked more like a fashion statement than someone who had forgotten to shave.
It was his expression that was the most radical alteration, though. I’d seen him angry more times than I could count, but that particular arrangement of features, like a hunting bird about to snap the neck of its prey, was new. I looked into a pair of familiar green eyes in utter denial. All I could think was, No wonder he didn’t want to bring me to see Saleh.
“I don’t believe this!” Saleh complained. “I don’t even know him!” We watched Pritkin wipe the bloody sword on a corner of Saleh’s sheets before sheathing it in a long scabbard slung across his back. He walked out with an easy, unhurried stride, frightening and graceful. He didn’t look back.
“Some guy saunters in here, hacks me to pieces and I don’t even know him?”
“Calm down,” I said, feeling light-headed and faintly ill. “Keep your head.”
“I don’t have a head!” he snapped, and started for the door.
“We had a deal,” I reminded him.
“Your book’s in Paris,” Saleh threw over what would have been his shoulder if he’d still had one. “Try 1793.”
I stared at him. “What?” Damn it—I should have known that wasn’t coincidence.
