Grave Dance

Falin returned the towel to the bathroom. “Okay, I’ll be ready in five.”

I stopped halfway to the door. “I don’t think you should go with me.” After all, John hadn’t had the greatest reaction to my showing up with Falin at the crime scene.

“What if the constructs attack again?”

“If they get inside Central Precinct, past the wards, the guards, all the cops, and down to the morgue, I’m pretty sure I’m screwed. Even if you were there, I think it’s a safe bet we’d all die.”

Falin dropped me off at Central Precinct. I wasn’t thrilled about his driving around in my car, but he hadn’t replaced his after it was totaled a month ago, and he needed wheels to work the case. Besides, I wouldn’t be able to drive after I raised the shade—if Rianna and I managed to do it—so it made sense for him to take the car.

After I passed through security and signed in with the attendant in her fishbowl office, I clipped on my visitor badge and headed down to the morgue in the subterranean levels of Central Precinct. Halogen bulbs lit the unadorned corridors, making the underground halls bright, if not cheery. I hadn’t asked which medical examiners were working this afternoon. Considering that Tamara had been at the crime scene most of the night, I assumed it wouldn’t be her, so I was surprised when I ran into her outside the coroner’s office.

“I was already on the schedule,” she said, covering a yawn with the back of her hand. “So what’s happening? It best not be another emergency because I get off at seven and I swear if I don’t make it home to my bed and sleep through the entire night there will be hell to pay.”

“No emergency this time. Remember when we were at lunch the other day and you mentioned that you had several bodies in the freezer that you couldn’t find a cause of death for? Did you ever find one?”

She blew air through her teeth and pushed open the door to the autopsy room with all its stainless-steel gurneys and scary-looking medical equipment. “No, and now I have more of them. Why? You think you know?”

I had a theory.

“This is them,” Tamara said, rolling a second gurney to the center of the morgue.

I nodded. Tamara and I had discussed it and she’d picked the two most inexplicable deaths for me to question. She hadn’t given me any specifics about the victims, but even fully shielded I could feel that the bodies belonged to a male and a female. Young, too—my age or a little younger. I couldn’t tell more than that through my shields, but the grave essence in them clawed at the edge of my mind.

“I’m at my wits’ end,” she said, watching as I dragged the tube of waxy chalk I used to draw indoor circles on the linoleum morgue floor. “In the last two weeks, I’ve had over a dozen suspicious deaths of undetermined cause cross my table. These two came in together. They’re young, in good health, with no signs of foul play or disease. And yet they’re dead.” She shook her head, as if the movement could clear away the mystery. “I feel like the universe suddenly changed the rules and no one told me.”

I knew exactly how she felt.

Standing, I recapped my chalk and walked to the center of the circle I’d drawn. Then I turned to her. “Ready?”

At her nod, I tapped into the magic stored in my ring. I spindled out the smallest amount of energy and funneled it into my circle, which shot up around me, glowing slightly blue to my senses.

With the barrier separating me from the outside world, I unclasped my charm bracelet and dropped my mental shields. A frigid wind whipped around me, through me, and my grave-sight blazed into existence, making the world wither and decay. The grave essence in the corpses on the gurneys reached for me, raking at my body and mind with icy claws. I opened myself and let the chill in, let it fill me. Part of me railed against the invasion of the grave. My warmth boiled in my veins, trying to remind me I was a creature of life, of—at least limited—heat. I pushed that living heat out of me, sending it into the two corpses. Only then did the chill of the grave settle comfortably under my skin, as if I’d reached some sort of balance, a kind of equilibrium with the grave and the land of the dead.

I took a deep breath, and as I exhaled, I reached out with my magic. Using the part of my psyche that touched the dead, I guided the magic into the corpse of the girl, sending it deep into the shell that had once been a person. Her soul was long gone, everything that had once made her someone lost, but a shade, a collection of her memories stored in every cell of her body, had remained. She was recently deceased, and the shade was strong, emerging easily when I pulled with power.

A vaporish form sat up through the sheet that topped the body. She might have been nineteen when she died, her pixielike features round as if she hadn’t yet lost all her baby fat. There was no shock in her face, no sorrow. Any trace of personality or sentience had left with her soul; now all that remained was a recording of who she’d once been.

“What’s your name?” I asked, and the shade turned her head toward me.

“Jennifer McCormic.”

“And how did you die, Jennifer?”

The shade cocked its head to the side. “I don’t know. I stopped living.”

That’s what I thought.

“What was the last thing you remember?”

“I met my boyfriend, Andrew. We were going to go for lunch. We were walking across campus and . . .” She fell silent.

“And what?” Tamara asked, stepping up to the very edge of my circle.

“And she died,” I said because I knew the shade wouldn’t. Once her soul was gone, her body had hit the STOP button on the record of Jennifer’s life. That was it. The end.

“Did anyone approach you before you died?” I asked the shade.

She shook her head and I chewed at my bottom lip. Sometimes people caught a glimpse of their collector before they died, but not always, and Jennifer clearly hadn’t. Since she hadn’t seen the collector, it was possible that something else caused her death and she hadn’t been reaped, but the unsettled feeling in my stomach had me leaning toward cause of death being soul snatching.

“Rest now,” I said, pushing the shade back into Jennifer’s body. Then I turned to her boyfriend, Andrew.

“We were walking and Jennifer got this funny look on her face and collapsed,” Andrew said without a trace of emotion in his voice, though watching his girlfriend die in front of him had probably made his last moments some of the worst in his life. Of course, it didn’t sound like that moment had lasted long. “I turned, trying to catch her, and I saw this man. He stuck his hand in my chest.”

Bingo.

“The man you saw directly before you died, what did he look like?”

“Older than me, but not too old. He could have been a grad student or a postdoc. He had dark hair and he wore a long, dark coat.”

A trickle of icy sweat ran down my spine. That description sounded exactly like the collector I’d seen near the rift.

“How many of these unexplained deaths did you say you had?” I asked Tamara after I returned Andrew to his body.

Her cheeks caved inward as she chewed the inside of her mouth, and she glanced toward the cold room and the bodies stored inside. “More than a dozen. Maybe fourteen? But those are only the deaths deemed to be under suspicious circumstances.”

Which meant that if the reaper had hit a hospital or anywhere else that deaths would be written off as due to natural causes or at least expected, it was probable there were a lot more victims than we knew about. But we were fairly certain of fourteen victims, plus the two skimmers I saw him take. Sixteen souls. I wasn’t sure what process turned a soul into fuel for a spell, but the ravens had each dissipated into only small amounts of soul mist, so I guessed that the soul fueling them had been broken up somehow. So what, maybe three or four souls among the thirty-two birds? Adding in the soul for the cu sith attack, that accounted for no more than five of the victims. There were a lot of unaccountedfor souls out there.

And the potential for a lot of constructs.

Chapter 22

John arrived at the morgue at six thirty on the dot wearing the same clothes I’d seen last night, now wrinklier, and with bags large enough to house a pixie under his eyes.

“Jeez, John, did you get any sleep?” I asked, as Tamara pushed Jennifer’s body back into the morgue’s cold storage room.

He pressed his palm against one eye and dragged it down his face. “Recently?”

The air around John buzzed slightly with magic, which was weird because John was a null—no magical affinity at all. He could walk through a magical barrier without even noticing it existed. He had nothing against magic—obviously; he was, after all, my first contact with the police—but he never used charms. I let my senses stretch, tasting the magic.

“A stay-awake charm? John, those things are dangerous.”

“Yeah, well, it was this or an IV of caffeine. The charm was easier.” He focused on me for the first time. “You okay?”

I shrugged, a movement that turned into a tremble. Raising a pair of shades probably wasn’t the best way to prepare for a difficult ritual, but I now knew the reaper was stealing souls. I wasn’t sure what to do about that fact—I mean, what does a mortal do about a rogue reaper?—and I couldn’t yet prove he was supplying the souls for the constructs, but I was starting to put things together. Hopefully we would learn even more when we raised a shade from the foot.

“Rianna should be here soon,” I said, glancing toward the large steel doors. At least I hoped Rianna was on her way. I’d never sent messages via brownie before.

John rubbed a hand over the ever-expanding bald spot on his head. “So, what is the story with you working for the

FIB?”

Crap. I’d seriously been hoping he wouldn’t ask. A little overoptimistic there, Alex. “It’s complicated.”

“Yeah?” His mustache twitched, a quick swish of displeasure, but I was saved from having to answer any more questions by the morgue door opening.