Affairs of the Dead

by A. J. Locke

  I soon realized that even with my ability to run faster than the average human, it appeared being reanimated gave him some extra speed too.

  I chased the body-jacker until we were on the outskirts of the Underground. He made a sharp turn around a corner, and when I followed, to my joy and his dismay, we ended up in a dead-end alley. It was devoid of people, so I’d be able to make use of my gun here, which I did immediately, firing off three shots that he used his boosted speed to dodge.

  The body-jacker faced me with a hostile look, and I edged closer to him. I didn’t want to waste shots if he was that fast at evading them, so I had to be careful with firing my gun. Plus, I only wanted to maim him, not kill him. I also wanted to try and get close enough to swipe some energy for the stone in case he did get away.

  The body-jacker decided to fight fire with fire and took out his gun, but before he could get a shot off, I shot the gun out of his hand. He screamed in pain and clutched his bleeding hand as the gun skittered into the shadows. All the weekends I’d spent at the gun range had definitely paid off.

  “Who the hell are you?” I demanded. I didn’t really expect an answer, and he didn’t give one. “I know you stole the body you’re in.” I moved closer, slowly and tensely. He didn’t back up. “And I know you murdered two women.”

  He sneered. “They deserved it.”

  It was jarring to hear those words spoken so harshly with Ethan’s voice, but it wasn’t hard for me to remember that it wasn’t really Ethan in there.

  “So you were out to kill Leslie and Athena specifically,” I said, and his eyes narrowed as though he thought he’d said too much. I had only a hastily thrown together plan of what I wanted to do, but looking at how menacing he appeared, I wondered if I’d actually get a chance to do it.

  “I ain’t stopping until I’m done,” he said. “And I’m far from done. You don’t have what it takes to stop me.”

  Between one blink and the next, he was running toward me, and if I didn’t move out of the way, he would flatten me. Ethan was tall, and though he wasn’t as broad as Micah or Andrew, he wasn’t a skin-and-bones kind of man either. I got two shots off before I moved to the side and readied the stone. I’d already activated it; now I just had to make contact with Ethan’s body and hope I could glean something.

  Ethan’s body-jacker seemed to have another plan though, because instead of trying to flatten me, he jumped, kicked off the wall in some crazy move you typically see in movie fight scenes, and came flying at me with his elbow aimed at my face. I quickly moved to the side and got a few shots off, happy to hear him scream in pain as he crashed into the wall.

  I tried to use the opportunity to reach him with the rune stone, but he caught on to my game and rolled out of the way, cursing loudly as he did so. He flipped to his feet, and though his arm was bleeding along with his hand, it didn’t seem to stop him. He body slammed me before I knew what was happening, and the impact of hitting the wall made me drop the rune stone and my gun. Pain exploded throughout my body, and the wind knocked out of me, but I kept myself from falling to the ground.

  “Tracking me down wasn’t the wisest decision,” he hissed into my ear. I felt the tracking rune being yanked from my neck, then I felt power rising, and I realized it wasn’t only coming from him. My body had flushed with heat, and my necromancer power flared to life, but it made me feel different than it ever had. I felt powerful all of a sudden, and before I knew it, I had shoved him in the chest and sent him flying across the alley. He hit the bricks hard but only halfway collapsed. When he looked up at me he was practically growling, and the look on his face said he couldn’t wait to return the favor.

  He came at me again, but I was ready for him. I had no idea where this sudden strength and power was coming from, but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I took a slam from his fist but elbowed him in the side of the face before kneeing him in the stomach. He tackled me around the waist, and this time I hit the wall headfirst. The sound of your own skull hitting a hard object just isn’t one you ever want to hear. I crumbled to the ground like a rag doll.

  My entire body was a throbbing mass of pain, and blood was trickling down my head into my eyes, blurring my vision. I tried to struggle away, but even though power was still coursing through me, my head injury was making me too unfocused to try and defend myself. I heard a gun click. Fuck.

  “Stop! Hey, someone called the police; he’s hurting her!” Someone had come across our scuffle and decided to be loud about it.

  I could not have been more grateful even though the odds of someone calling the police to come here weren’t in my favor. More people started shouting though, and the attention made the body-jacker hesitate.

  He ran off. I was sure no one made any attempt to stop him, but right now I had bigger problems. Like the fact that I had failed to use the stone on him, failed to cripple him enough to arrest him, and was falling into unconsciousness in a filthy alley in the Underground, and no one knew where I was.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes and noted how heavy they felt and how foggy my head was, I knew I was drugged up. My eyes opened to light that was too bright, so I squinted as I tried to figure out where I was. The soft whirring of machines nearby clued me in before I was able to open my eyes fully and blink past the blurriness to see that I was lying on a hospital bed.

  When I looked to the side, I saw Micah dozing in a chair and couldn’t help but smile. I then tried to assess my body to see what damage I had taken. My left arm was in a sling, but not a cast, which meant it wasn’t broken. However, the pain in my side meant that I had bruised some ribs. Breathing wasn’t currently an enjoyable activity. There was also a bandage on the side of my head. My legs felt fine.

  I guess I wasn’t as banged up as I could have been seeing as Ethan’s body-jacker had left two women hacked up and others shot to death.

  “Micah.” It took a minute or two of croaking his name before he roused. He looked relieved to see me awake.

  “Hey,” he said, giving me a smile. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better than the body-jacker’s victims,” I said. “How did I end up here?”

  “Someone made an anonymous phone call about an attack downtown, and the police and paramedics showed up and found you,” he said. “When they saw your ID and realized you were from AOD, they called us to let us know, and I came right over. It’s early Monday morning now. You have a concussion and bruised ribs.”

  “Sounds like I’m gonna live,” I said.

  “What were you doing out so late, Selene?”

  “The tracking rune picked up Ethan’s body,” I said. “But he took it from me during the scuffle.” I felt around my neck, confirming that it was gone. “I tracked him to the Underground and confronted him in an alley where he kicked my ass and escaped. And, of course, he didn’t let me know who the occupying ghost was. I was going to try and use a rune to capture some of his essence, but I dropped it.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Micah asked. I shrugged.

  “I wasn’t really thinking about much other than the fact that the stone was responding,” I said. “I just jumped into my car and drove off. I did manage to shoot him though. And one thing I know for sure is that whoever is in there definitely wanted Athena and Leslie dead. He said ‘they deserved it.’ He also said he wasn’t done, so we’re going to have more bodies on our hands unless we stop him.”

  “We need to find a link between Leslie and Athena and who would want them dead,” Micah said, frowning.

  “You should get back to the office and keep working on it,” I said. “I’m fine, really.”

  He took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “It scared the shit out of me when the call came in that you were in the hospital,” he said. “I dropped everything…”

  That, and the look he was giving me made my heart flutter. “Why, Micah, it’s almost as though you care about me.”

  “I do,” he said. “I care about you, and I’m
mad at you for being reckless.”

  “But that’s my style, you know that.” I grinned, and his serious expression cracked and he smiled back. “Seriously, go back to the office and continue working on the case. I’m hoping that being shot will slow him down, but I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “Okay,” Micah said, standing up. Then he hesitated. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?”

  “I kinda do, but this is more important.” I flashed him a smile, and he gave my hand another squeeze before heading for the door.

  “Hey, Micah,” I called. He turned. “Does Andrew know what happened to me?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But he’s been wrapped up in meetings all morning.”

  “Oh, okay.” He nodded and left, and I wondered how I felt about the fact that Andrew knew I was injured but hadn’t come to see me, meetings or not. Then I wondered why I was even thinking about that. I shouldn’t have expectations of hospital visits from someone I was having an affair with, who had a wife in the first place. But I realized that I actually thought Andrew would have come, if not because he cared about me beyond what an amazing fuck he thought I was, then because he was my boss.

  I sighed. It was my fault for having expectations, even though I hadn’t known I had them. My twisted brain was trying to make me think a married man I was sleeping with would treat me like a priority. Micah, on the other hand, had dropped everything and come, even though I was only sporting a concussion and bruised ribs.

  Despite my thoughts about Andrew’s not visiting, I realized I was happier about Micah coming than I would have been if Andrew had. Imagine that.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A nurse had just finished helping me put my street clothes back on, which were worse for the wear but were all I had to go home in, when there was a knock on the door and I turned to see Ilyse standing there. I smiled at her, but her face looked troubled, so my smile faltered.

  “Nice of you to visit, but I’m on my way to sign the release forms and go home,” I said. “I’m not too badly banged up.”

  “I’ve been here for a while, actually,” Ilyse said. “When they called the office to let us know what had happened to you, they asked for a dead witch to come down since any ghost energy you carried could interfere with the medication they gave you. I volunteered to come since it was you.”

  I gave her another smile, but she still didn’t return it. “Thanks,” I said. “Nurse says I have to leave in a wheelchair. Want to push me around?”

  “Can we talk for a minute first?”

  The nurse left, and Ilyse sat down on the bed next to me. Ilyse was a quiet person by nature, but I had never seen her this serious before. There were bags under her eyes, and she looked tired and tense. I remembered she was still dealing with the deaths of her fellow dead witches.

  “How are you doing in light of Katherine, Lisa, and Ora?”

  “I’m as okay as I can be,” she replied. “But I’m really here to talk about you, Selene, and it’s very important.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Did they give me medication before you could draw the ghost energy off? If they did, I don’t feel any worse than I should.”

  “That’s not it,” Ilyse said. “It’s just that…Selene, I drew off a lot of ghost energy from you. A lot.” The way she emphasized the words “a lot” made my eyes widen.

  “Okay,” I said. “I know it’s never good to have too much ghost energy on me, but—”

  “I’ve detected the Rot, Selene,” Ilyse said softly, looking sad. I think my heart stopped for a moment. “How could you possibly have incurred that much ghost energy in only a few days? I worked with you a week ago, but it was like you’d been accumulating ghost energy for months without getting any of it siphoned off. It’s faint, but the Rot has definitely started.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was still waiting for my heart to feel like it was beating again and for me to remember how to speak. Ilyse had just said to me what no necromancer ever wanted to hear.

  “Selene, do you have any idea how this could have happened?”

  She had taken one of my hands, but I couldn’t even feel her touching me. I had gone numb. I swallowed past the dryness in my throat and tried to speak but only sputtered.

  “Selene?” Ilyse prompted.

  “I haven’t been around more ghosts than usual,” I finally managed to say, though my voice came out soft and hoarse.

  “But this is unusual,” she said. “It’s been years since there’s been any record of a necromancer having as much ghost energy on him or her as you did.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “It’s almost like you have a ghost bound to you,” Ilyse said. “You would have to be constantly connected to a ghost to rack up such a large amount of energy in such a short span of time.”

  My head snapped up at those words. “Bound?” I immediately thought about Ethan. “Is that…is that possible?”

  “It shouldn’t be in this day and age,” Ilyse said, her sharp eyes on me. “But I have read about a practice necromancers used to do a long time ago that involved binding ghosts to themselves to strengthen their power. Of course, in those days, the Rot and the damage it did were practically unknown, so those who bound themselves to ghosts met with a quicker death than they might have. The practice was viewed as black magic and eventually became forbidden.” She paused and regarded me. “I should add that not all necromancers could do this; it was specifically reanimators.”

  My heart plummeted even further. Ilyse glanced over her shoulder at the open door. She closed it, then sat back down next to me. She took my hand again and gave me a level gaze.

  “Selene, if you have something to tell me, now would be the time.”

  It made sense to tell Ilyse that I highly suspected something about being in Ethan’s presence had brought on the Rot in me, but I was hesitant to reveal to her that I was a reanimator. Despite drunkenly blabbering to Micah, I really did keep that fact about myself under wraps.

  But I had a level of trust with Ilyse that I didn’t have with any of the other dead witches at AOD. If anyone could help me, she could. I took a deep breath and immediately regretted it after a sharp pain erupted in my ribs.

  “I am a reanimator,” I said quietly. “And I’ve sort of been keeping the company of a ghost lately. He’s connected to the murder case Micah and I are working on, but it’s not your typical ghost monster case.” I told her the details of the case, and she listened intently. Her expression didn’t change, so I had no idea what she was thinking.

  I was freaking out that I had told her I was a reanimator. The part of me that was all about self-preservation was cursing me something fierce right now.

  “I see,” Ilyse said when I finished. Her hold on my hand tightened a little. “Selene, I have a confession to make. I always knew you were a reanimator.”

  I had no words to describe the shock those words brought forth in me.

  “Wh-what?” I sputtered. “How could you possibly have known?” It couldn’t have been through me drunkenly blabbing it to her like I did with Micah. Ilyse would never be caught dead in the seedy bars I liked to frequent.

  “Your grandmother and I were close friends,” she said, which made my eyes grow even wider.

  “You were friends with Gran?”

  She nodded. “Amelia and I were friends from childhood, and I was the only person outside of her family that she told about being a reanimator. When the power manifested in you, she confided in me about that as well, and when you started working here, she asked me to look out for you.”

  “But I never saw you around,” I said, looking at Ilyse with a frown. “Not once. Not even at her funeral.”

  Ilyse looked sad. “She told me it would be better for us not to seem too close. If she was ever found out as a reanimator, she didn’t want me implicated as well. The government has no mercy for secret keepers. So I never came around. I visited her grave after the funeral and said good-bye to
her then.”

  “Okay, but…all this time, you’ve known about me? And you never said anything?”

  “I liked that you were naturally drawn to me when you started working here,” she said. “And I figured if, one day, I earned that level of trust with you, you would tell me. But you were a smart girl to keep it to yourself.”

  Except when I was drinking heavily.

  “Something about you reminds me of Gran,” I said. “Now that I think about it. I guess that’s why I was drawn to you.”

  Ilyse smiled, but it was still a sad smile. “I’m happy we can talk about this now, but not happy about the circumstances under which it came up. Just being around this ghost isn’t enough to cause the amount of damage I saw in you. Is there anything else you’re not telling me?”

  I was about to tell her no, then I stopped myself as a thought occurred to me. Ethan had interrupted me when I was dismantling the circle I’d made to bind my reanimation magic to the binding rune. I was certain the circle had been inactive, but I remembered thinking that the runes had glowed faintly after he touched the circle, which shouldn’t have happened if it had really been inactive. Oh shit.

  “Ilyse, do you know how those reanimators used to bind ghosts to them?”

  “I don’t remember the specifics as I read these things from old history books a long time ago, but I’m pretty sure it involved a ritual using a specific rune stone.”

  “A rune stone that’s probably illegal and hard to find nowadays, right?” I said, swallowing hard.

  “I would think so,” Ilyse said.

  “Like a stone you’d swipe off someone’s table in the Underground.” I felt a little light-headed, and it wasn’t from the concussion.

  “Selene, what are you trying to say?”

  “I think I may have inadvertently bound myself to Ethan,” I said.

  She inhaled a sharp breath. “How is that possible?”

  I told her about the ritual I did to bind my reanimation power so it wasn’t detected, and the fact that Ethan had interrupted me just as I was finishing. I also told her about the binding rune I had stolen from Trevor.