Grave Visions

by Kalayna Price

  Chapter 2

  I arrived at Nekros City Central Precinct fifty-five minutes later. Fall had finally realized it was running late and overcompensated with a cold front that knocked the temperature from the mid-eighties to the mid-forties overnight. Half the city seemed to have raided their stash of winter clothing, so for once no one gave me a second look when I pulled a jacket from the passenger side of my car before heading into the building. I might not have been particularly cold now, but once I embraced the grave—assuming that was why I’d been called—I’d have a chill it would take me hours to shake.

  Central Precinct was an austere multipurpose building holding most of the city’s important law enforcement entities, from the crime lab and DA’s offices on the upper floors, to the main police station on the ground floor and the morgue in the basement. I passed through security without issue, which despite the fact I’d done so a hundred times since I first started working on retainer for the police, was a relief. I’d half expected to be stopped in the front lobby. While nothing had officially ended my retainer status with the NCPD, I’d been told in no uncertain terms that my services wouldn’t be requested unless the brass decided it was absolutely necessary. Add to that the fact that John had always been my first contact, and I wasn’t sure what I might be walking into. I just hoped this sudden call from Jenson was the start of something good.

  I took the elevator down to the basement. Fluorescents lit the long hall leading to the morgue, flooding it with a harsh light that simultaneously washed out color while making everything still seem cast in shadows. The thud of my boots on the linoleum bounced along the walls as I walked, making the area feel hollow and abandoned. I’d never liked the ambiance of this hallway, and as on edge as I was now, if zombies had shambled out of the large morgue doors, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Though zombies weren’t likely. What I was really afraid of were faeries.

  Oh, I know, who is afraid of Tinker Bell, right?

  Me, that’s who.

  Okay, so I wasn’t afraid of all fae, but ever since I’d learned I was fae and I’d gained the attention of the Faerie courts, life had gotten a lot more complicated. I was currently unaligned, something that just didn’t happen in Faerie, and the courts didn’t like it. I was also a planeweaver, which meant I could not only see and interact with multiple planes of existence, but I could tie those planes together. I was the first since the age of legends, and every court wanted to add me to their numbers. Personally, I was more interested in maintaining my freedom, so I reserved a healthy amount of caution when it came to fae and Faerie.

  And Jenson was fae.

  Or at least half fae.

  I’d assumed Jenson was independent fae, but you know what they say about assumptions. If he was court fae . . . this could end very badly for me.

  Alex, you’re freaking yourself out. After all, if one of the courts was going to snatch me away to Faerie, they surely wouldn’t do it in front of dozens of cops at Central Precinct. Besides, as far as I could tell, Jenson hid his heritage even deeper than I did.

  With that thought in mind, I took a deep breath and pushed open the morgue door.

  Jenson waited in the center of the room with his back toward the door. It was early, so I expected at least one medical examiner and some morgue attendants to be present, but the room was empty aside from the plainclothes police detective.

  I stopped, frowning. Tamara Greene, the lead ME and one of my closest friends, wasn’t there, of course—she had the next few days off to prepare for her wedding and then she’d be off on her honeymoon—but I’d expected someone else to be there. After all, people didn’t stop dying just because the ME took time off.

  “Jenson,” I said, not trying to hide the suspicion in my voice. At my calf, the enchanted dagger hidden in my boot buzzed lightly, either sensing danger or just responding to my own nervousness. The magic imbued in the fae-wrought weapon made it somewhat aware and reactive to my surroundings, which had saved my neck in the past, but it was also bloodthirsty, so I was never sure if it could warn me of danger or if it just liked to be drawn and would use any excuse it found. I didn’t draw it now, at least, not yet.

  Jenson turned. He wore the glamour that made him look human, hiding the oversized jaw and tusks that marked him as part troll. Surprisingly, he looked relieved when he saw me, though all he said was, “Craft,” as he gave me a curt nod and then headed for the cold room where the bodies were kept.

  Okay, if he planned to pull out a body, he’d definitely called me here for a ritual, but this was not the way these things worked.

  “What’s going on, Jenson?” I asked, but I didn’t move any farther into the large room. “And where is everyone.”

  “Mandatory seminar.” He emerged pushing a sheet-topped gurney. “We have only about forty-five minutes, so do your thing fast.”

  My thing?

  “Uh, back up. One, there is paperwork that needs to be signed before I begin, and two, why do we have to complete the ritual before the seminar is over?” I didn’t add that I hadn’t yet agreed to take the case. “And where is John?”

  Jenson’s jaw locked, his lips screwing together in a scowl. I met the expression with my own level stare. Until I knew more about what was going on, I wasn’t raising any shades. I didn’t like the situation. It felt wrong. And the hurried secretiveness worried me.

  Our silent stare down lasted only a moment before Jenson growled, a low rumbling that didn’t sound like it should have emerged from anything human-shaped. Then he shook his head and let go of the gurney.

  “There is no paperwork, and there can be no witnesses. As you might have guessed, I didn’t invite you down here for a sanctioned ritual.” He sighed. “I walk a fine line here, Craft. And this case . . .” He shook his head.

  “You think fae are involved?”

  He winced and looked around as if afraid someone might overhear. “Let’s just say I have a bad feeling, but I hope I’m wrong. You going to raise this shade or what?”

  I frowned at him. Jenson was not quite asking me for a favor. One that could be dangerous on several levels. Without approval of the family or authorization from the cops, raising a shade at the morgue was illegal. Also, I was attempting to limit myself to one ritual a week for the sake of my eyesight. The previous day’s ritual may have ended up being a short one—the police tended to respond quickly to shots fired—but even a truncated ritual did a number on my eyes. I’d be willing to break that self-imposed—and rather new—rule of one ritual a week to begin mending fences with NCPD, but for an unsanctioned ritual for Jenson . . . ?

  “Does John know about this?”

  Jenson shook his head. “My fears aren’t a human concern.”

  Right. Great. I worried my bottom lip. Jenson could get into as much trouble as I could if we were discovered, so clearly he thought questioning this particular victim was important. And goodness knew the firm could use the money.

  “Okay . . .” I trailed off and took a tentative step into the room. Jenson didn’t strike me as a big risk taker, so I had to admit to a certain amount of curiosity. Reaching ever so lightly with my senses, I let that part of me with an affinity for the dead stretch to the corpse on the gurney. It was a female, a couple of years younger than me, but if I wanted to know more about who she’d been or how she’d died, I’d have to raise her shade. Or ask. “Why her? What is it about this case?”

  Jenson’s frown deepened. “Things aren’t adding up at the crime scene. No sign of a break-in. Doors and windows locked from the inside. No disturbance or blood outside the apartment, but dozens of bloody tracks inside that don’t lead to any exits.” He stared at the sheet-covered figure, as if she might sit up and explain what had happened. Which, if I performed this ritual, she would. Or at least, her shade, a collection of all the memories from her life given shape by my magic, would.

  “The killer could have had
a key and locked up after he or she left. Maybe showered before leaving?”

  Jenson’s head shot up. “Don’t you think we’ve considered that, Craft? Something is off about this case. I should alert the FIB, but no one wants the case hijacked over speculation. And besides, we don’t need any more bad press in this city.”

  It took me a second to realize the “we” Jenson referred to was the fae, not the police. And he was right. The fae, or really any of the magical community, definitely didn’t need another mysterious case laid at their feet, which was exactly what would happen if the media caught wind of the FIB—the Fae Investigation Bureau—taking over a murder case.

  In the last several months Nekros had seen the mysterious death of a governor, grisly ritual murders, rips directly into the Aetheric plane, disembodied body parts, ghouls, and a series of murders disguised as suicides. The city was teetering on a precipice. One more blow and the whole city might topple into chaos. Well, maybe at this point, it would be better to say further chaos.

  “So if her shade indicates the fae are involved . . . ?” I started.

  Jenson met my gaze. “I’m duty-bound to alert the FIB, but let’s hope that’s not the case.” He looked tired, but earnest. If this was anything other than what he’d indicated, I’d seen no hint of deception from him. “Now what do you want in exchange for raising the shade?”

  “I have a standard fee if you want to hire me.” I’d even be willing to do it at the rate I charged the Nekros City Police Department, which was less than a ritual for private clients, but I didn’t add that. Not yet.

  At my words, Jenson’s eyes widened ever so slightly in surprise, and for the briefest moment he cocked his head to the side as if he was the one looking for a catch. Then his features went carefully blank—the expression of someone who thought he was cheating the other out of a good deal. Digging his wallet out of his back pocket, he pulled out several large bills.

  I didn’t cross the room. Not immediately at least. Something here doesn’t add up. In folklore, fae would sometimes pass glamoured leaves or rocks off as money. At sunset or dawn the glamour would vanish. That practice was, of course, illegal, but Jenson was acting rather suspicious. I had to check.

  Cracking my shields, I let my gaze travel through planes of reality. I’d recently discovered that I could pierce glamour when my shields were down. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet learned how to discriminate which levels of reality I peered into, so as my shields opened, colorful tendrils of magic from the Aetheric plane popped into view and the room around me appeared to decay as my psyche touched the land of the dead.

  I glanced at the money Jenson still held toward me. It withered in my gravesight, but it didn’t change into anything else, so it was real. Slamming my shields shut, I pushed the other layers of reality away. The momentary touch made the room dimmer, but that might have been more a reaction to the loss of Aetheric color than damage. Or at least I hoped so. Stepping gingerly across the room, I accepted the money.

  Jenson studied me as I folded the bills and shoved them in my back pocket. He still looked like he’d just dodged a bullet by paying me in cash—what did he expect I’d want? Of course, the currency of Faerie was largely debts and power, so maybe he’d expected me to ask for a boon. But I lived in mortal reality.

  And I planned to keep it that way.

  “There is still paperwork to sign.”

  Jenson scowled. “We don’t have time to waste discussing all the reasons that is a bad idea.”

  As this was an active police case, my raising the shade could be seen as interference. Without either police or family authorization, it was my ass on the line if we were caught. There was no way I was going any further without paperwork.

  My expression clearly spoke for me, because after a moment Jenson let out a breath and said, “I’ll sign something acknowledging I hired you. After the ritual. My word. Nothing official or specific, mind you, but something that will cover you legally. Now can we get moving?”

  As a fae’s word was fairly well unbreakable, I accepted with a nod, but then Jenson looked uncertain as he glanced first at the gurney in front of him and then around the room. He’d seen me raise shades before, but only once or twice. Like I said, John was my typical contact with the police. Or Tamara, if I had family authorization to see a body in the morgue.

  “The center of the room would be best,” I said, nodding in that direction as I dug through my purse for a tube of waxy chalk.

  Jenson pushed the gurney to the spot I’d indicated. “There might be a second one,” he said, stepping back.

  “A second what? Body?” I asked as I duckwalked, dragging the chalk along the linoleum floor to form the physical outline of my circle. “Another shade will cost more.”

  “Fine, we’ll sort that out if it comes to it. Can you do that any faster?”

  I didn’t bother answering that question. “Are you going to set up the camera?”

  “I don’t want any record of this. Things get out sometimes.”

  I cringed. Yeah, I knew that firsthand. I’d become infamous a couple of months back because of a leaked recording made right here in the morgue.

  I finished the circle and stood. “Well, then, I’ll get started.” I tapped into the energy stored in the obsidian ring I wore, intending to activate my circle, but as I began channeling magic into the circle I stopped and looked around. “Detective, mind your toes.”

  Jenson glanced down at where his shoes crossed the thin chalk line. Then he backed up, color crawling to his cheeks. Nodding, I closed my eyes.

  Channeling energy into the waxy line, I activated my barrier and it sprang up around me. The barrage of grave essence fell away so that I could feel only the essence lifting from one corpse, the girl in the circle with me. I kept additional shields in charms on a bracelet I wore, so I removed it first, then I opened my personal shields.

  I’d always imagined my outer shield as a knotted wall of vines—maybe I’d watched Sleeping Beauty too often as a child—but I’d always found a living shield helped guard me from the touch of the grave best. I let those thorny vines slither apart now, opening the shield, but simultaneously I envisioned a thin, clear barrier springing up between my psyche and the world. This shield was new, one I’d had to fashion after I’d begun accidentally merging reality. It helped keep my powers from reaching out and pulling layers of the world into contact with one another, but the real trick was keeping it thin enough that my grave magic could still pass through it.

  A cold wind picked up around me, whipping my hair. It wasn’t anything that existed in the mortal world but blew across the chasm between the living and the dead. I opened my eyes and focused on the sheet-draped form. My power rushed into it, filling the corpse with my living heat as the chill of the grave swept into me.

  The woman’s shade sat up, out of the body. She wore a tank top with a faded cartoon character on it and a pair of men’s boxers. Sleepwear, I guessed. The shade made no sound, showed no emotion. She was far past alarm at being dead, and felt no pain despite the fact she appeared to be covered in small puncture wounds. She was memory given form. Nothing more.

  I frowned, studying the wounds. There were several different sizes of punctures, but all were circular and appeared on her body in pairs. Like fang marks.

  I glanced at Jenson. “How did you say she was killed?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Obviously. It was impossible to tell if the wounds were the cause of death, and if they were, if that was because she’d bled out or been injected with something. Vampires, to my knowledge, were a myth. Of course, seventy years ago fae were just myth and folklore, so maybe there were bloodsucking entities out there. But, if she’d been killed by some sort of bloodsucking creature, it—or really they—would have to have been small. Some of the punctures were only a few centimeters apart, others were upward to an inch.

 
; “What is your name?” I asked the shade.

  She looked at me, her eyes empty and dispassionate. “Emma Langley.”

  “And how did you die, Emma?”

  “I was giving myself a pedicure in my room and I heard Jeremy scream,” she said, and I glanced over at Jenson. His face gave away nothing, so I wasn’t sure if the Jeremy she’d mentioned was the killer or another victim. “I went to the living room to see what was wrong and there were snakes, everywhere. He was buried under them. I ran to the kitchen, grabbed the fire extinguisher, and tried to clear a path to him, but the snakes wrapped around my legs. I fell, and they were everywhere. Biting me. Pain shot through my arms, my chest, and . . .” She trailed off.

  And she died. Or at least lost consciousness. The shade would have stopped recording as soon as her soul left her body.

  I studied the bites covering her. They were literally everywhere. I couldn’t have pressed my hand to her skin without touching at least two at once. I shuddered. I’d always had a healthy respect for snakes, but never a fear of them. Emma might change that.

  I glanced at Jenson. “What did animal control make of the snakes? Venomous, I’m assuming?” But where would that many snakes have come from?

  “There were no snakes when the bodies were found. And there is no trace of venom in the bodies.”

  I blinked at him. How—? Well, he’d said he had a bad feeling about this case. That was why I was here after all. I turned back to Emma.

  “Do you know where the snakes came from?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hear anyone enter the house before Jeremy screamed?”

  “No.”

  Okay . . . I looked to Jenson to see if he had any guidance of where he wanted this interview to go, but he only stared at the shade, frowning.

  “Did Jeremy like snakes?” I asked.

  The shade shook her head. “He was terrified of them.”