Grave Ransom

by Kalayna Price

  “You want some coffee?” I asked, nodding at a small coffee shop down the street.

  “There’s coffee inside the station.”

  “Central Precinct? I’ve had it before. Trust me, it’s not coffee.”

  She frowned at me but glanced between the doors of the station and the coffee shop down the street. Finally she shrugged.

  “Coffee. Sure, why not?”

  We trudged down the sidewalk in silence. At the coffee shop, I ordered my coffee black; she had hers with hazelnut and cream. When I stepped toward one of the round tables at the front of the shop, she shook her head and led me to the very last table in the corner. She took the chair against the far wall, which gave her the best vantage point to watch both the door and the rest of the patrons in the coffee shop. It also put my back to both, which I wasn’t completely comfortable with. I turned my chair so my back was to the side wall. Briar gave me an amused smile as I sat sideways at the table, but she didn’t comment.

  We sat in silence as we sipped our coffee. The coffee shop clientele had been trickling in slowly when we entered, but the morning rush hit soon after we took our seats. The tables around us filled quickly, and disappointed patrons searching for empty seats wandered through the shop, some hovering around people they thought might abandon their table soon. None hovered around us. In fact, everyone seemed to avoid our table. Not in an I’m trying but failing to not stare at the heavily armed, leather-clad woman in the corner way, but like their gazes just naturally slid away from Briar and her surrounding area.

  “Do you keep those charms active all the time?” I asked, turning to face Briar. I could feel that her look-away charm was active, but I was apparently inside the covered radius, because I had no issue focusing on her.

  Briar shrugged. “When I’m in public, typically.”

  “Don’t you ever want to get noticed? To stand out?”

  “If I want someone’s attention, I put a really big weapon in their face.” Briar set down her coffee. “What are we doing, Craft? I’m not interested in girly chitchat or becoming best friends forever.”

  “I don’t think there is any danger of that,” I said, taking another sip of my coffee.

  She stared at me a moment, and then a smile cracked across her face. “I like you, Craft. Not that I’m about to gossip about shoes or purses or whatever girlfriends talk about.”

  “I often discuss dead bodies with my best girlfriends.”

  Briar looked like she might choke on her coffee. I shrugged.

  “My best girlfriends include a medical examiner, a prosecutor, and a grave witch.” And my best guy friends were a soul collector and an assassin. We sure sounded like a morbid bunch, huh?

  Briar laughed and held her coffee cup up in a faux salute. “I knew there was a reason I liked you. Now back to the case. Derrick’s making headway in getting you access to the bodies. This is so wrapped up in red tape it might as well be a present, but we need to talk to those shades.”

  Derrick, the mysterious partner. He apparently did the paperwork while she did the ass kicking.

  I watched two women dressed too casually to be part of the morning business crowd scan for a table, their brightly patterned purses hiked up high on their shoulders and the heels they wore with their jeans clicking on the tile floor with their annoyance.

  “Have the police found any commonalities between Annabelle McNabb and Remy Hollens?” I asked.

  Briar lifted an eyebrow. “You figured out who another of the robbers was. You didn’t know that during our interview yesterday.”

  “Yesterday I also didn’t know the bank robbery was part of a spree. One of my housemates mentioned it last night, and I looked up what little I could find online.” I set down my now-empty cup of coffee and considered whether it would be worth it to buy a refill. The line was now out the door, so probably not. “Yes or no on any common points of interest between Annabelle and Remy? Or should I spend today digging up whatever background I can find on those two, which you and the police likely have already begun?”

  “A soccer mom and a college freshman? No, last I heard there was nothing to connect them, besides the obvious of both being dead after robbing a bank together. They didn’t live, work, or shop anywhere near each other. It’s possible they had a strangers-on-the-train kind of relationship, but we can’t pin down where they would have crossed paths.”

  Which was exactly what I was afraid of.

  Briar nodded toward my wrist, where I still wore the tracking charm. “When it did have a second trail, did you narrow down what area of the city it wanted you to head toward?”

  “Not in the city at all. It was tugging toward the wilds to the northeast of Nekros.” And since Nekros was completely inside a folded space, the wilds had never been fully charted.

  “You’re sure it wasn’t pulling toward someplace outside the folded space?”

  I shrugged. “It didn’t seem to lead toward the road out.” And as far as anyone knew, there was no consistent way out of the folded space through the wilds besides the two interstates that acted as doors.

  Briar started to ask another question, but then her phone buzzed. She dug it out, glancing at the screen, and a smile spread across her lips. She stood and tossed her empty cup a good fifteen feet across the room at the trash can. It passed through the narrow opening without even touching the sides.

  “Grab your stuff, Craft,” she said, marching toward the door.

  “Where are we going?” I called after her as I hurried to the trash can—no way could I make the shot she had, and I didn’t want to apologize for beaning someone in the head with an empty cup.

  “Looks like the red tape wasn’t as bad as I thought. You’ll have babysitters, but you’re cleared to raise some shades. Let’s go talk to dead people.”

  Chapter 11

  Briar had warned me I’d have babysitters at the morgue, but we now had enough people in the room to throw a party. Aside from Briar and me, we had been joined by John and Jenson, as they were the detectives in charge of the case; Tamara, since she had direct custody of the bodies, as well as one of her assistants; and two uniformed officers who stood by the morgue door looking very uncomfortable. It had been decided to pull out all of the bodies so that I wouldn’t have to lower my circle or start a new ritual to confirm stories between victims, if we needed to do so. The morgue wasn’t small, but it also wasn’t built to have four bodies on gurneys with eight living people gathered around them. We’d had to do a little rearranging, and I was still going to have to be very careful when I drew my circle to make sure all the corpses fit without trapping any of the living people in the circle with me.

  The most uncomfortable part of the whole situation was how very quiet the entire group was. I dragged my waxy-chalk on the ground with seven gazes locked on me, the room silent except for the buzz of the lights and the whirl of the air purifiers. I tried to ignore them, but I could all but feel their eyes on my flesh. Tamara was the only one who looked friendly out of the bunch. Not that everyone else was strictly unfriendly. Briar looked impatient. The two uniformed officers looked a little freaked out and maybe a little queasy. I wasn’t sure if that was because I was about to raise shades or because the bodies were rather ripe. Jenson, well, he was definitely unfriendly as he scowled at me around a handkerchief he had pressed over his mouth and nose.

  John stood off by himself beside one of the two video cameras trained on me for this ritual. He held his case notebook in his hand, pen gripped tight by his side in the other hand. I couldn’t see his mouth under a mustache that definitely needed a trim, but I could tell by the way his cheeks were drawn down that he was frowning.

  When I finished my circle, I nodded first to Briar and then I turned to John.

  “I’m ready. Who should I start with?”

  “You’ll likely end up raising all,” he said, which was a nonanswer. />
  I chose to believe it was permission to use my best judgment and turned to Remy first. Four shades were a lot for one ritual. I could do it, but it would drain me. He was the one I was most invested in, and he was the one I wanted the most answers from. I wasn’t planning to charge Taylor for any more of my time—after all, this ritual was now bought and paid for by Briar—but if I could find more information for her, something to give her closure, I would.

  Tapping into the energy stored in the ring on my finger, I activated the circle I’d drawn. A barrier sprang up between me and the rest of the living people. The magical barrier also stopped the flow of the grave essence from the other bodies in the morgue, but with four corpses trapped in the circle with me, that didn’t offer much relief.

  I removed the charm bracelet, which contained, along with various other utilitarian charms I carried, the external shields that helped dull the grave essence that otherwise relentlessly battered my mental shields. As soon as the external shields went down, the full affront of grave essence from the bodies trapped in the circle hit the mental wall surrounding my psyche. It slammed against the living vines I imagined as the barrier encompassing my mind. I peeled them back, letting the grave essence inside, not resisting as the chill rushed into my body, warring with my own living heat. It hurt, but not in an unexpected way. More like an old wound that acted up.

  Wind picked up around me, whipping my hair around my shoulders and stirring the sheets covering the gurneys. I had no need to check toe tags or pull back the sheets to see the bodies. I could feel that two were females and one was an older man, so the last, a young male, had to be Remy. I reached out with my magic and let the heat flow out of me into the sheet-covered body. My magic and living heat flowed through it, connecting all the tiny left-behind memories, forming them into a physical representation of the man he’d been at the moment of his death.

  A teenage boy on the cusp of adulthood sat up through the sheet covering his body. While he would have been solid to me, he was as insubstantial as a hologram to anyone else, just a collection of memories held together with my magic. One of the officers by the door muttered something rather unpleasant sounding as Remy appeared, and the door creaked, the officer’s shoes scuffing on the linoleum as he rushed through it. I couldn’t handle gore; other people couldn’t handle shades. But Remy wasn’t a bad one. Aside from being a little spectral in color and substance, he looked like he should have been a healthy college-aged kid. I’d certainly raised shades in far worse condition.

  Despite the fact that the corpse on the gurney had likely already had a full autopsy and wasn’t wearing anything more than a sheet, the image of Remy that appeared was exactly how his last memory had caught him in the moment of death. He wore a hat with the university’s icon on it over his dark hair. His football jersey sported his high school colors and looked well loved. I vaguely recognized it as the one he’d been wearing during the bank robbery. The real jersey was likely in an evidence locker somewhere; this one was just a memory of the original. His jeans were worn, a hole beginning to fray in his right knee. There was no obvious cause of death evident on his shade, but then there hadn’t been on his body either, so that wasn’t too surprising.

  “What is your name?” I asked the shade, not because I didn’t know, but because this was an official interview being recorded. Shades had a lot of limitations, and I’d worked with the police for years, so I tried to put as much properly on the record as I could.

  “Remy Hollens.”

  I turned to John. He gave a slight nod, indicating the shade was loud enough. I focused on Remy again.

  “Can you tell me how you died?”

  “I volunteered to be part of a study to earn a little money. I had a few hours before I had to pick up Taylor, so I scheduled to meet the researcher. After filling out some paperwork, he told me he was going to begin and I just had to sit very still in the center of a circle. He chanted for a while, and had me drink something, and then . . .” The shade trailed off.

  “And then what?” Briar asked once the shade failed to say anything more.

  “And then he died. Or maybe fell unconscious and then died,” I said, but I was frowning.

  Usually when a shade trailed off like that, it was because a collector had jerked their soul from their body. Once the soul left, the record button on a person’s life stopped, even if their bodily functions hadn’t quite caught up to realizing they were dead. But Death had told me he hadn’t collected Remy’s soul, and the way he said it made me think none of the other collectors had either.

  A soul doesn’t just pop out of a body at death. If a collector doesn’t come, the soul tends to cling to the dead flesh, trapped inside the shell, the memories still recording as the body rots away around it. I’d talked to shades who’d experienced such fate. Their stories weren’t pretty. So how had Remy’s soul gotten out of his body?

  “One problem here. We all saw this kid drop dead during a bank robbery. Not sitting in a magic circle,” Jenson said around his handkerchief.

  “He was already dead.” I was starting to feel like a broken record telling people that. “Remy, have you ever been to First Bank of Nekros on Old Dunbar Road?”

  The shade didn’t hesitate. “No.”

  There was more than one sputter of dismay behind me, and even Tamara muttered something questioning how a shade could lie. Shades had no egos. They couldn’t lie, or even obfuscate the truth. Ask the right question, get a good, honest answer, at least to the best of the shade’s recollection. While Remy’s soul had been inside his body, he had never been inside that bank. After his soul was evicted . . .

  “He’s not lying. He was already dead.” Yup, definitely a broken record. “Remy, what was the date and time of the last thing you remember?”

  “November nineteenth. It must about been about seven forty-five because I arrived at the meeting right after seven.”

  John glanced back through his notebook. “That would be the night before the bank heist.”

  “And it would be consistent with the state of rigor during my initial observations at the scene,” Tamara said.

  Jenson made a sound that was particularly growl-like. “So we are actually saying that the people who were walking, talking, and waving guns around were already dead at the time? Is that what I’m hearing?”

  “If the shoe fits,” Briar said, and turned back toward me. “You said ghosts were piloting these corpses. Ghosts are just souls, right? How come the body didn’t start recording again when the foreign soul was inserted?”

  I might have gaped at her for a moment. Not only because it was a good question, but also because she understood enough about grave magic to ask it. That was high-level grave theory she was using to reach those questions. And I didn’t have a good answer.

  I probed at the body with my magic, searching for anything unusual. Memories were stored in every cell of the body, so it wasn’t like I could search for particular ones, but I tried to let my magic seek around for anything that didn’t feel connected to the shade I’d raised. There was nothing. Remy’s body and shade felt typical, strong even.

  I shook my head, indicating that I didn’t know the answers to Briar’s questions. She sighed.

  “We need more details about the man, the place, and the job,” she said.

  I turned back to the shade. “What kind of study did you volunteer to join?”

  “It focused on human interaction with the spirit world. I was being paid to see if an experimental spell could allow me to see into the other side and talk to ghosts.”

  Well, he’d certainly gotten to see into the other side.

  “Who was running this study?” Briar asked, and I repeated the question for Remy’s shade.

  “His name is Dr. Marcus Hadisty.”

  All the detective and investigator types in the room were suddenly busy scribbling in notebooks. The chill
of the grave was already seeping deeper into me, making me cold to the bone, and I hadn’t even finished the first interview yet. I could guess the next series of questions, so I moved on.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Older. Graying hair. Very professor-like.”

  Well, that was generic. I pressed for more details. “How old?”

  “I don’t know. My parents’ age? Maybe older. At least forty.”

  Remy was only a handful of years younger than me, but he still apparently looked at everyone over thirty as old. That wasn’t going to help us much.

  “How did you meet Dr. Hadisty?”

  “I saw a flyer on campus looking for volunteers for his study. It claimed it would pay two hundred for no more than two hours of time. The last study I joined paid only fifty dollars. I’m saving to buy a ring for Taylor, so I watch out for quick ways to make a little cash.”

  Something inside me twisted painfully. I always hated when shades said something hopeful for the future. Not that shades hoped for anything anymore. They had no emotions, no feelings. He was saving for a ring. The shade said the sentence as a simple fact, but I imagined the living man would have been a bundle of joy and nerves when discussing the ring and his plans.

  “How did he contact Dr. Hadisty?” John asked when I followed my own train of thought a little too long without asking the next question. I repeated his words to the shade.

  “The flyer had a quickchat number. I contacted it and he sent me a questionnaire to fill out and the first set of waivers to sign.”

  Murmurs from the room on that one. Quickchat left no trace of the conversation once the session was logged off.