I recognized all three collectors. Anyone who expected skeletons in black robes carrying scythes to reap the dead would be sorely disappointed. The dark-skinned woman was a blinding display of neon colors, from her bright orange dreadlocks down to her go-go boots. I’d nicknamed her the Raver, and she was a stark contrast to the man beside her, whom I’d nicknamed the Gray Man because of his monocolored gray suit and gray cane topped with a small silver skull. The third man I just called Death. I’d known him my whole life, and recently, rather intimately. As in intimately enough to know what it felt like to fall asleep with my fingers tangled in his chin-length hair. But I didn’t know his name.
Roy gave a curse at their sudden appearance and vanished, withdrawing deeper into the land of the dead. Soul collectors collected souls, and ghosts were just wandering souls, fair game to collect anytime they were caught.
The Raver’s eyes landed on me and she shook her head, making her long dreads dance over her shoulders. “Damn, girl, you have a knack for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, don’t you?”
I gave her a thin smile and made the smallest waving motion with a single finger to Death.
“What the hell?” the homeless woman yelled, spinning to level her gun at the small band of collectors. “Where the hell did you come from? Get on the ground.”
The collectors frowned at the woman in unison, surprise evident on each of their faces. Remy and the shotgun lady also spun, their guns moving to the collectors.
“Well, that was unexpected,” the Gray Man said, lifting his cane to push his gray fedora back on his head.
“On the ground,” Remy yelled at the same time Country Club said, “On your knees!”
The mortals already on the ground looked around the room, faces showing fear, puzzlement, and panic. They couldn’t see the collectors. Only grave witches could see collectors, and only when spanning the chasm between the living and the dead. And planeweavers like me, of course, but to my knowledge, I was the only one of those in this realm. Maybe some other rarely encountered magic users could see collectors, but Remy was theoretically human. The other two? I wasn’t sure, but I was guessing human. The only time mortals saw collectors was in the moment before their death, and at that point, the collector typically had their hand wrapped around a soul already.
So what was going on?
A woman pulled her legs to her chest and sobbed into her knees. A man began muttering. A prayer? A spell? To my left, the security guard’s hands were slowly dropping, moving toward the gun at his belt. This situation was about to escalate quickly.
I met Death’s eyes. I wasn’t close enough to see if the colors in his irises were spinning, if all the possible scenarios of different potential futures were playing out before him, but I could guess they were. Soul collectors were forbidden from getting involved, from leading mortals toward one possibility over another, but their sudden appearance had thrown them into the thick of this mess. The question was, who were they here to collect?
Death slowly lifted his hands and nodded to his companions. “It’s okay. See, we are getting down.”
He knelt as he spoke, and the Gray Man followed his lead. The Raver shook her head again.
“This just isn’t right,” she muttered, but she knelt as well, lifting hands with neon-colored nails.
“See,” Death said again, putting emphasis on the word. He wasn’t looking at the robbers now. He was focused on me. When he’d told me to See in the past, he always meant he wanted me to gaze through realities.
I cracked my shields, letting the wall I mentally pictured as a hedge of vines peel apart so that I could gaze across the planes. A cold wind cut across my skin, the world around me changing as different planes of existence overlaid reality. I was only seeing across the planes, not weaving them together, so I saw without actually touching the swirls of raw magic waiting to be gathered and directed. The putrid colors of fear soaked into the floor around the cowering bank patrons. The polished marble of the floor looked dull and cracked. The wood of the teller’s booth rotted, becoming pitted, half of it crumbling. All around me, purses and clothing, paper and briefcases weathered, becoming thin and full of holes. But the patrons on the floor remained the same, their life force separating them from the decaying touch of the land of the dead, their souls twinkling bright, merry yellow from beneath healthy flesh.
The three robbers were a different story.
With my shields up, I hadn’t caught a hint of death or decay from them, but now that my shields were cracked, my magic reached for them like it would any other corpse. But they weren’t like any corpse I’d ever encountered. The last walking corpse I’d seen had felt dead, even if he hadn’t looked it until after the soul inside him—not his soul—vacated his body. These bodies were dead, my magic was sure of it, but it was like the moment of death had been paused, drawn out to keep going endlessly. They walked, they talked, but I realized the only time I’d seen any draw a breath was directly before they spoke. Robbing a bank was a tense, adrenaline-pumping kind of activity. At least one should have been sweating with nerves, breathing a little too fast. But no. When they stood still, they were eerily still . . . they were dead.
Remy, my client’s boyfriend, the person I was supposed to find, was dead.
His soul was wrong as well. All three robbers’ souls were wrong. Souls didn’t overlay a person with a duplicate image. They weren’t clear and defined the way Roy’s ghost appearance was, though he was, in fact, a soul. That level of definition didn’t occur until after the soul separated from the body. Inside a body, souls were more like an internal glow that radiated outward, surrounding the person in a warm, auralike glow. All three robbers glowed the faint yellow I associated with a human soul, but the glow didn’t encompass their bodies right, like the soul inside didn’t quite fit.
Country Club had turned back to the teller, urging him to fill the bag with cash faster. The homeless woman kept her assault rifle trained on the three collectors. To my left, the security guard had his weapon in hand and was pushing off the ground. Remy was just starting to turn. He hadn’t seen the guard yet, but when he did . . . Regardless of who shot first, if anyone started shooting, the other two robbers would as well. And people would get hurt. Die.
I could see the possibilities on Death’s face as he stared at me. He mouthed my name, inclining his head as if giving me permission, or urging me onward. Because I could stop it.
Remy finished his turn. Saw the guard. His gun lifted, aiming, his mouth opened to yell something. I didn’t have time to think, to weigh my options. I let my mental shield fall, let the icy touch of the grave rip through me as I let my own magic stab outward and coil around the robbers. Their dead flesh offered no resistance, letting my magic slide right through to the warm, glowing souls beneath.
The souls tried to recoil from the icy touch of my magic, but they were weak, diminished from being trapped inside dead flesh, and the smallest tug of my magic pulled them free.
Three bodies hit the floor simultaneously. Inanimate. Truly dead.
Three souls stood beside them, looking confused, scared. Not one soul matched a body on the ground.
Chapter 6
My ears were ringing, and it took me a moment to realize the security guard had fired a shot before the robbers’ bodies hit the ground. People were screaming, crying. I tried to look around, but I hadn’t had time to use any finesse when opening my shields, I’d just thrown them wide, and the cacophony of information barraging my senses was overwhelming. I squeezed my eyes closed, but it barely helped. I managed to keep my new secondary shield in place, though, the one that kept my psyche from reaching out and merging planes until everything I saw became part of mortal reality. So, while the racking wind from the land of the dead was whipping my hair around and had caught a stack of deposit envelopes, at least the building wasn’t in danger of decaying around me.
Someone brushed by me on their dash to the door. The heat of the brief contact felt scalding even through the light jacket I wore. I needed to get my shields under control. Taking a deep breath, I drew my magic back and then focused on closing the walls I kept around my psyche. Slowly, piece by piece, the living vines I visualized forming my mental shields slid into place. The wind around me died down, but the chill that had snuggled under my flesh remained.