Grave Witch

I blinked as my grave-sight turned on, and the decaying world of the dead superimposed itself over my apartment.The purgatory world’s crumbling plaster and weak gray light juxtaposed themselves over my solid beige walls, both real and not. I focused on the ghost.

His hair was a deep chestnut brown, and the frames of his glasses were the thick black plastic that tended to emerge and fade from fashion among sophisticates and emo kids alike. The flannel shirt he wore was almost as drab and colorless now as it had been when I was looking with my shields in place, but the baggy jeans were deep blue.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

The ghost frowned at me, and at first I thought he wasn’t going to answer, which would have been ironic considering how he’d been yelling while I couldn’t hear him, but finally he shrugged and said, “Roy Pearson.”

I nodded acknowledgment, but it wasn’t a name I’d ever heard mentioned at the station. Not that there was any reason for me to know about most of the corpses that passed through the morgue. Ghosts were more adaptable than shades, their appearance often reverting to their perception of themselves as opposed to the actual state in which they died, but if Roy was truly a male in his early thirties in decent health—well, decent if he weren’t dead—he’d probably wound up in the morgue by foul play.

It would have been polite to ask about him and how he’d died, but he’d been haunting me, I’d been shot at, and I had a swarm of reporters buzzing around. I wasn’t feeling polite. “So, Roy, what do you know about Coleman’s body? I’m guessing it’s stock, right? Something glamoured or otherwise spelled to look like Coleman?”

“Coleman.” His lips curled back as though he could barely stand the feel of the name passing over his tongue.

“Everyone keeps going on about Governor Coleman.”

He looked at me, his eyes bright behind the glasses.

“You bring justice to the dead, right? Like you did for that little girl.”

I frowned. “Little girl” had to refer to Amanda Holliday.

I’d already told Roy I didn’t get involved in avenging the dead. For one thing, ghosts were sentient, so they had agendas and could lie. For another, they didn’t have a currency.

“Listen; I’d like to help you, but—”

He cut me off. “That body everyone is so worked up about? It’s real, all right. It just doesn’t belong to Coleman. It’s mine.”

Chapter 6

“Back up. What do you mean, it’s your body?” Even as I asked, possibilities were running through my head.

“Just what I said.” The ghost shoved his fists in his pockets. “I’m the one who is dead on that damn slab.”

I frowned. I’d had nothing but questions since I’d seen the spell on Coleman’s body—not that I’d had much time to think about it. But my stock theory made the most sense, both because of the way my grave magic failed to latch on to the body and because of the basis of stock in folklore. Of course, most folklore was nonsense, but there were grains of truth in it. Even now, seventy years after the Magical Awakening and the fae coming out of the mushroom ring, stock had never been proven or disproven to exist. You can bet that every case of SIDS was carefully examined.

Though the stock theory did give me something to report to Casey to justify my fee.

But the problem with the theory kept circling back to the same question. If the fae were responsible for the assassination of the governor, why would they keep his body two weeks and then plant a fake? It didn’t make sense. Of course, Roy wasn’t disputing the fact the body was stock—or, at least, not disputing that it was something spelled to look like something else. He was saying it really was a body. Just not Coleman’s body. Which still didn’t explain why it didn’t register as dead.

I chewed at my lip and looked up at Roy. He was watching me, as if waiting for my thoughts to settle before he said any more.

Whatever he saw in my face seemed to reassure him, because he let out a breath. “You believe me. Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to tell someone?”

“I’m guessing about two weeks?” That was when the surveillance camera caught the shooting. Now that I really examined Roy, he did look as though he could have been Coleman’s unkempt younger cousin. His frame was right, and his hair, if cut, would have been identical. His eyes, too. It made sense that you’d find a body that already looked similar to the person you were making a stock of. Poor guy, murdered because of a vague resemblance.

Roy shook his head. “Two weeks? Try twelve years.”

“Wait. What?”

“Twelve years that bastard has been walking around wearing my stolen body. Then he goes and gets it shot and just abandons it. But will anyone ever know what happened to me? No. They’ll bury me under his fucking memorial, and my family, my girlfriend, will always be left guessing.”

My head reeled, and I backed up. My thighs bumped into my bed, and I sank onto the mattress. Twelve years?

That would be about the time Coleman showed up on the Nekros City political scene. If what Roy said was true, everything Coleman claimed to be, everything he claimed to believe in, was a lie. That is, if I believe the ghost.

“Prove it.” My voice was low, contained, and I was proud it didn’t waver with the uncertainty in my head.

Roy glared at me. “How the hell do I prove something like that?”

That was a good question. “How was it done?”

“I don’t know. I’m—I was—human. Coleman—he went by Aaron then—put me in a circle and ripped a hole in reality. This ghastly specter of a girl walked through, and between the two of them, they cast the ritual. I don’t remember all of it, just the shattering, tearing sensation as I was jerked from my body. Then Aaron collapsed, and my body stood up, walking around without me in it. Bastard is a body thief.” Roy paced as he spoke, and in my grave-sight I could see the air around him contracting and sparking. I was glad I’d circled him. He was one strong ghost.

My brain felt as though it was one step behind in this conversation. Every question Roy answered created a half dozen more. Who was Coleman? Scratch that—more important, what was Coleman? And what kind of spell could possibly rip one soul out of a body and let another one in?

I took a deep breath, trying to realign my thoughts.

Everything Roy had said was impossible, or at least highly improbable. And before the Magical Awakening, science and logic were the only truths. Even children didn’t believe in magic. I let out my breath.

“Okay, say I believe you. Does that mean Coleman is really dead or that he switched bodies?”

Roy looked at his feet. “He conned another sucker out of a body.”

“Who?”

He shrugged.

“Well, what did he look like?”

Roy’s face scrunched up as if the effort of remembering was hard on him. Then he shrugged again. “Middleaged guy. Brown hair.”

Great. That described half the men in the city. I glanced away, and my gaze dragged over my television.

It was hard to see the screen with my grave-sight insisting it was shattered, but I was still enough in the land of the living to make out the distorted image of my father, Lieutenant Governor Caine. Actually, Governor Caine, now that Coleman’s dead. I’d muted the TV hours ago, but now I walked over and turned up the volume. I can’t wait to find out what Daddy Dearest has to say about my film debut.

I didn’t get a chance to hear. By the time I got the volume up, Caine had stopped speaking and the anchor reappeared, a photo of my father superimposed in the background.

The anchor smiled so hard at the camera, his lips barely moved as he spoke. “It sounds like Governor Caine is picking up right where the late Governor Coleman left off.”

My mouth went dry as grave dust. My father was a middle-aged man. With brown hair. I whirled around, my eyes locking on Roy as I pointed at the screen.“Was it him? Was it Governor Caine’s body?”

The ghost squinted at the screen. He shook his head, and the world righted itself. I hadn’t even realized how worried I was until the weight lifted off my shoulders.

My father and I had our differences, and we might not have been speaking currently, and well, we’d pretty much disowned each other, but that didn’t mean I wanted his soul ripped out of his body and left to wander.

Roy finished his headshake with a shrug. “I don’t know. It could have been.”

The tension wrapped around me once again. “How can you not know?”

“I’ve been dead twelve years. After a while, the living I don’t know all start looking the same.” His bottom lip puckered out.

Perfect. A pouting ghost. Just what I need. The TV anchor had moved on to a new story, and I hit the mute button again. Then I walked to the bed and sat down.

The mindless movement gave me a moment to collect my thoughts.

“Okay, so it boils down to this,” I said, pulling my legs onto the bed and sitting cross-legged. “You have been following me because you want me to let people know your body was stolen. You say Coleman stole a new body before discarding yours, but you can’t tell me more than a vague description of the new victim. I miss anything?”

Roy smiled. “I might not know anything about the victim, but I know where the recent switch occurred. I can show you.”

———

I wrote down the address Roy gave me. I was vaguely familiar with the area, but when I cranked up my car, I didn’t head straight for the building. After all, if Roy was to be believed, I was about to break into the scene of a crime. I needed to make sure the press didn’t track me straight to it.

So I cruised downtown a while, constantly glancing in the rearview mirror to watch which vehicles were following me. Then I hit the interstate headed east toward Georgia.After about ten miles, I flipped around, passing Nekros to head toward the Alabama border. Once I was twenty miles away from the city proper, I made a quick exit and jumped on an old country road. There was no way anyone could follow me on the narrow unpopulated dirt road without my noticing.