Grave Ransom

by Kalayna Price

  Whatever Briar’s thoughts were, she kept them to herself as she thanked the officer for his report. Then I followed her and Falin toward the scrap metal that had once been a car. I didn’t want to go near it—I could feel the grave essence rolling out of the vehicle from a dozen yards away. As we approached, the reek of decay wafted out of the smashed vehicle. This was going to be bad.

  Tow trucks were already loading up the hatchback and pickup, trying to clear more lanes of the interstate, but barricades had been erected around the smashed red car. It didn’t appear that rescue workers had made any attempt to remove the woman’s body from the driver’s seat. Of course, one look at her would have been enough to see that she was beyond help. Putrefaction had set in strong, making her flesh dark and bloated. Foul liquid leaked from her slack mouth, and fluid-filled blisters had lifted on her exposed skin. As I stood there, a clump of hair fell from her head, taking flesh with it and making a wet sound as it hit the leather seat.

  I turned away, breakfast rolling in my stomach, threatening to rebel. I wasn’t going to lose my breakfast a second day in a row. I refused.

  Neither Briar nor Falin had the same reaction. They stepped closer, examining the body. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Not being able to see her anymore wasn’t even enough, because I could still smell her, and I could feel the call of the grave reaching from her. It whispered the kind of secrets the grave always told me, like that she’d been young, maybe late teens or early twenties, and that she’d been dead for almost two weeks. That last part should have been a direct conflict with the fact that she’d clearly been driving the car only hours earlier, but walking corpses were no longer a shock in this case.

  I knew better than to take a deep breath to try to calm my stomach—I’d made that mistake one too many times at crime scenes, I’d learned my lesson. It would not help with this much decomposition in the air. Instead I closed my eyes, gave myself a moment, and then walked past the barricade without turning back.

  I started heading toward the car but then turned, heading in the direction where the pickup driver had said the passenger had limped away from the scene. Two lanes of traffic had opened again, but the drivers were all slowing down to rubberneck at what was left of the accident, so I had little trouble making it across the interstate. Two officers were on the shoulder of the interstate, taking pictures of what I assumed was the trail the woman had taken.

  “Any luck finding the passenger?” I asked, approaching the closer of the two.

  He looked up and gave me a quick once-over from feet to head before saying, “Miss, this is a crime scene. I’m going to have to ask you to move on.”

  “We’ve been invited to this scene,” Falin said, stepping up behind me. I hadn’t even heard him cross the street. He flashed his badge at the officer and said, “So what is the update on locating the passenger?”

  The man let his camera drop to swing around his neck and straightened slightly at the sight of Falin’s badge. “We’ve got an alert out to local hospitals, and we’re sweeping the shoulder and the woods beyond, but the dogs can’t get here for a few hours.”

  Falin nodded, an obvious dismissal, and the man took it, turning away and hurrying to go photograph evidence at a marker much farther away. When he was out of earshot, Falin turned to me.

  “What are you doing? Why’d you head here?”

  “I couldn’t be any help back there.” I jerked my head in the direction of the wreck without actually turning to face it. “But I can help look for the passenger.” I didn’t add that I would have gotten ill if I’d stayed by the corpse any longer.

  Falin scanned the tree line beyond the shoulder. There was no obvious path where the passenger had gone, and emergency vehicles had clearly pulled off onto the shoulder before anyone realized there was a missing injured party, so the ground was torn up with tire tracks and footprints.

  “How?” he asked after a moment.

  “The driver was obviously another walking corpse. Most likely the passenger was as well. I’m really good at finding corpses.” I tapped the spot beside my eye as I cracked open my shields.

  He watched me, his expression unchanged even though I knew my eyes lit up as if they were backlit by lanterns. Then I turned toward the woods, letting my senses stretch. The corpse behind us called to me, but I blocked it out as well as I could, looking for other whispers of the grave.

  There had been no ghost hanging around the car. While it was possible the spells holding the ghost inside the stolen body had broken after the crash, the witness report sounded more like a soul collector had been on the scene and collected the errant ghost. If that was true, then it was possible the soul collector had gone after the passenger as well. If not, well, she was probably still a walking corpse and might be giving out enough grave essence that I could feel her from a distance.

  I closed my eyes, concentrating on the cold whispers that grabbed at me. Most were lifting from small animals, the trails of essence thin and easy to ignore. One to my left was stronger, pulling at my mind and my magic. I turned, walking in that direction. Falin followed without a word.

  I walked down the shoulder for several minutes, then turned into the woods. The feel of the grave was almost overwhelming now as it clawed at my shields. It was a woman, not much older than the driver from the wreck, but this one didn’t feel like she’d been dead as long. We’d only passed the first few trees when I stopped abruptly, because we were almost on top of her. I looked around, letting my magic guide my gaze. Then I slammed my shields shut against the chill reaching for me.

  “There,” I said, pointing. I couldn’t actually see a body yet, but it was there.

  Falin walked forward slowly, careful not to trample through the heavy underbrush. I didn’t follow. I’d already seen one body today. I knew it was there, I didn’t need to see it. He stepped around a bush and stared at the ground.

  “I’d wager this is her,” he said, nodding to me.

  “I’ll go let those officers know,” I said, turning back the way we’d come. We weren’t even that far. I could still see the different-colored flashing lights from the emergency vehicles.

  The officer I’d spoken to earlier was the first I ran across. He looked more than a little shocked when I told him I’d found the passenger’s body. He radioed to someone over at the wreck site, and soon we had a small party headed to the second body. I left them as soon as they were close enough to spot Falin.

  No one stopped me as I made my way back to where Falin’s car was parked. I’d only noticed a hint of decomposition in the air when we first arrived, but now that I’d been close to the bodies, I couldn’t seem to escape the smell. It was like the scent had crawled into my nose and taken up residence.

  Tamara had arrived while I’d been in the woods. I could see her with Briar directing the team that was trying to extract the body without destroying it. They were having to cut the car apart to get to the driver’s body, and the machines were deafening, even from a distance and with the top of Falin’s convertible tightly sealed, but that was okay. I didn’t really want to hear myself think right now. Nothing good was floating around my head.

  I leaned the seat back and closed my eyes. Despite the hydraulic rescue tools loudly dismantling the red sedan, the press of gawking traffic, and the smell of decay, I fell asleep.

  • • •

  I was chased through my dreams by corpses. They herded me toward magical traps I sensed almost too late, and reached for me with hands full of rotting flesh that sloughed off when they managed to touch me.

  At the sound of someone banging on the car window, I jolted awake to find Briar staring at me through the glass.

  “You look a little green, Craft,” she said when I opened the door.

  “I don’t do dead bodies.”

  She frowned at me. “You’re a grave witch.”

  “Yeah, not by choice.
I just try to make the best of it.” I stepped out the car, rolling my shoulders to stretch my neck as I moved. “I’m good with shades and the magical part. Just not the blood and decay bits.”

  Briar shrugged with a sort of “whatever” expression, and I gave a cautious look around. Tamara was supervising a body in its black bag being uploaded for transport back to the morgue. As I couldn’t be sure how long I’d been asleep, I wasn’t sure if it was the driver’s or the passenger’s body, but things were definitely wrapping up quickly at the scene. Falin was speaking to a small cluster of cops near where what was left of Remy’s car was being loaded on a flatbed tow truck. Even the morning commute traffic had finally cleared, so only the occasional car passed on the open lanes of the interstate.

  “The ME says she can’t give us much information because of the advanced state of decay of the body,” Briar said, nodding toward Tamara. “But she did say only the driver’s lower legs were pinned, her rib cage and skull appear undamaged, and there isn’t enough blood at the scene to indicate she bled out. She’ll be able to tell us more post-autopsy, but right now, despite some obvious superficial damage from the crash, there is no obvious cause of death. Combined with the pickup driver’s statement about the driver yelling for her friend and then suddenly just dropping dead, this looks a whole lot like the other bodies that collapsed, dead, and then rapidly decayed, but this time you have a rock-solid alibi.”

  “Lucky me.”

  Briar frowned at me. “Who else can pull souls out of bodies?”

  I returned her frown. “Soul collectors?” I didn’t add the duh at the end. I should have gotten points for that. With such a bad multivehicle accident, a collector must have been called to the scene by the possibility that one of the living accident victims might have died. The two walking corpses had probably been collected as soon as the collector noticed they were already dead.

  Falin walked up. “I obviously missed something,” he said, glancing from me to Briar. “Anyway, the scene is wrapping up. They need to get this clear. We should head out.”

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  “Morgue’s our next stop,” Briar said, turning toward her hulking SUV.

  Goody. More dead bodies.

  Chapter 20

  I once again stood in the center of a magical circle while flanked by corpses. There were no uniformed officers this time, so either I was no longer being treated as a suspect, or they couldn’t find anyone else who could stomach being down in the morgue right now.

  The morgue had decent air purifiers, but they were no match for the two putrid bodies from the wreck. Jenson looked positively green and had already excused himself once, returning paler and covered with sweat. Even John looked a little queasy, and he typically had the constitution of a stone. Falin hid his disgust better, only the smallest tightening of skin around his eyes and nose revealing that the smell had any effect on him. Briar was cool as a corpse, but she had so much magic on her, she likely had a charm that mitigated the scent. That was the only reason I was able to stand in the circle. When I’d first walked into the morgue, Tamara had slipped me a charm that knocked out my sense of smell. Usually I was kind of touchy about losing another sense, but in this case I was grateful. Tamara, having the same charm, was also unaffected by the smell, but she did preemptively pull a chair up to the outskirts of the circle this time so she could sit.

  “Let’s keep this short and to the point so we don’t exhaust our grave witch,” Briar said as I prepared. “I might need her after.”

  “I second the short bit,” Jenson said, looking like he was about to lose anything still left inside his stomach onto his shoes.

  “I’m going to begin.” I nodded to John to turn on the camera and moved to unclasp my charm bracelet, but then hesitated. The bracelet contained the new protection spell Briar’s partner had given me. Taking off the protection from a premonition witch seemed like a bad plan. Instead I tapped into the charms with the shields and drained the magic back into my ring, deactivating them. It was a lot slower than just taking the bracelet off, and it would suck when I had to reactivate them after the ritual, but at least I didn’t lose the protection charm. As a side bonus, I also didn’t lose Tamara’s charm and suddenly get assaulted with the smell of decomposition.

  Closing my eyes, I poured magic into the body to my right. I wasn’t sure if she’d been the driver or the passenger, but I could tell she’d been dead slightly longer than the woman to my left. She was a few years older than the other woman as well. Neither body had been autopsied yet, or even removed from their black transport bags. It had been decided that a quick interview would be prudent. Then Tamara would begin her work.

  The shade of a woman in her early twenties sat free from the bag. Her dark hair had been pulled up high in a ponytail on the top of her head, and she wore a sports bra with tight spandex running shorts.

  “What is your name?”

  “Elisa Lambie.”

  Outside my circle, Briar and John pulled out notebooks and jotted down the name, but Tamara jumped out of her chair at the name. I glanced back at her, hoping the question in my expression was clear even though my face would be lit by the eerie green glow of my eyes. Tamara just shook her head, motioning me to continue.

  “How did you die, Elisa?”

  “I was running with my training partner, Linda. It was our normal path, but I’d had a headache all morning and I was considering turning back early. Then pain exploded in my head. My vision got weird. I fell to the ground. Linda started screaming. Someone loaded me onto a gurney and into the back of an ambulance. They kept shining lights into my eyes and asking my name, if I could squeeze their hands. Then a man stuck his hand into my chest and I . . .”

  Died.

  No one said anything for several heartbeats after the shade fell silent. Finally Briar cleared her throat.

  “Is it just me, or does it sound like she died in the back of an ambulance?”

  I nodded. “Or possibly at a hospital. Shades can be a little fuzzy on time when they were barely conscious surrounding their death, but it sounds like her soul was collected normally.”

  “So how the hell did she end up in that car this morning?”

  I had no idea.

  “Her body was stolen,” Tamara said, her voice so soft, I wasn’t sure I’d heard her at first. “I knew I recognized that name.”

  She marched off toward her office. I watched her go and then turned to John. He looked as confused as I felt. Tamara didn’t immediately come running back out, so I turned back to the shade.

  “Have you recently taken part in any studies involving ghosts or the dead?” I asked, because no one else had supplied any questions yet.

  “No.”

  John flipped back a few pages in his notebook and asked, “In the last few weeks have you met anyone with the last name Hadisty, Vogel, Basselet, or Moyer, or anyone who claimed to hold a PhD in any witchcraft fields?”

  I repeated the questions.

  “No.”

  Well, we were striking out everywhere.

  “What was the date of your last memory?” Falin asked, which I really should have thought to ask earlier.

  “November fifth.”

  Over two weeks ago.

  Tamara rushed back out of her office, a folder in her hands. “I was right. Elisa Lambie, suspected aneurysm,” she said, reading from a sheet of paper in the file.

  “You autopsied her?” Briar asked.

  Tamara shook her head. “She arrived at the hospital unresponsive. She was admitted but died later that evening and was moved to the hospital morgue. Because she was young and described as healthy, she was slotted for autopsy, but when the body movers went to pick her up, the body couldn’t be found. The hospital initially claimed it must have been a clerical error or a toe tag mixup, but after inventorying the cadavers, it turned out two bodies we
re unaccounted for: Elisa Lambie and Morgan McKenzie.”

  We all turned toward the body on the other gurney.

  “Anyone have any more questions for Elisa?” I asked, and received a chorus of “No.”

  I released the shade. She couldn’t help us. She’d never interacted with our necromancer, at least not while she was alive with her own soul in her body.

  I turned to the second woman and let my magic fill her. The shade of a woman around my own age sat up from under the sheet. A shock of recognition jolted through me. I must have made some sound because Falin stepped up to the very edge of my circle, but thankfully he didn’t actually touch it.

  “What is it, Alex?”

  “I know her, well, at the very least I’ve seen her.” I stared at the shade. The nature of being a shade had washed out some of her skin tone, and she’d had her hair natural when she’d died while her mental image of herself as portrayed by her ghost had worn dozens of braids, but she was the same girl. I was positive. “Her ghost was piloting Remy’s body.”

  “You’re sure?” Briar asked.

  I nodded. I’d only seen her for a moment, but she’d left an impression.

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

  “Angela Moore.”

  “And how did you die, Angela?”

  “I had been at the library, studying late for an exam. I live off campus, but only a few blocks away so I often walk home. Not many cars were on the road that night, so I noticed the one that slowed down as it passed me, but I didn’t think much of it until it pulled over. I started walking faster. I thought I was being paranoid until I heard the footsteps right behind me. I started to run, but someone grabbed my backpack, pulling me backward. I tried to slip out of it, but something cold pressed against my neck, and then heat and pain charged through me. I blacked out. When I woke, I was gagged and blindfolded, but I could hear a man chanting. When he stopped, I felt him move close to me. He pressed a knife into my chest. It pierced my skin and kept sinking. It hurt so bad. He pulled the gag out of my mouth and pressed something to my lips and then . . .”