“To reach the house quicker. A bicycle would cut down the time it took for us to respond to things happening outside the folded space.”
“True.” I accepted a plate of rolls as Caleb passed them my way. “But you’d get pretty sweaty on a bike. Wouldn’t a vehicle of some sort be faster and more convenient? “
Caleb shook his head. “How would you get a vehicle through the door, not to mention my house?”
“An ATV could work,” Falin said, finally sitting down. “Though we might have to carry it through the door and put the wheels on once it was on this side.”
The others at the table frowned at him, and I wasn’t sure if it was because he’d joined their conversation or if they disagreed.
“That could work,” I said between mouthfuls of food.
Ms. B shook her head. “Those things are loud and the wheels rip up the ground. You’ll give our poor gnome a fit.”
The elusive garden gnome. I was starting to think he was a myth. I still hadn’t met him.
“Well, I bought a bike,” Holly said, setting down her fork and leaning back in her chair. “Maybe it will help me work off all these elaborate feasts.”
I laughed and shook my head. “It’s Faerie food. I’m pretty sure it magically lacks calories.”
“It has to have some calories,” Rianna said from the door. “Otherwise we’d all starve while gorging ourselves. But we do seem to be able to indulge rather more than we would in mortal food.”
“Well, in that case,” Holly said, picking back up her fork, “someone cut me a thick slice of that German chocolate cake.”
Caleb and Ms. B chuckled, but I was focused on Rianna. She crossed the room slowly, leaning heavily on Desmond as she moved. She was paler than she’d been when I saw her in the office earlier, her movements labored. When she finally reached the chair across from me, she sank into it gratefully. Desmond fussed at her side a moment longer, as if ensuring she wasn’t going to collapse sideways out of her seat, and then he turned and climbed into the chair beside her. I might have commented on the huge black dog sitting at the table, but the barghest wasn’t really a dog, he was a fae, and he actually had a man-shaped form, though I’d only seen it twice.
Rianna’s movements remained stiff and slow as she served both herself and Desmond, but they smoothed out as she went. By the time her plate was full, they seemed much less laborious.
“You’re frowning at me,” she said as she filled a mug from a pitcher on the table.
Oops. “I’m just concerned. Maybe you should go to the Eternal Bloom for sunrise and sunset.”
She shook her head. “I’m fine. It’s a little uncomfortable during the transition, but it wears off fast. Besides, here I don’t have to worry about losing time to the stupid doors.”
That much was true. The doors at the Bloom sometimes deposited people back into mortal reality hours later than anticipated even when every precaution had been addressed. Still, sunrise and sunset, the times when Faerie’s magic was weakest in the mortal realm, were hard on Rianna. As a changeling, she relied on the magic of Faerie to hold off the centuries she’d lost while a captive in Faerie. If she were ever to be caught in the mortal realm during sunset or sunrise, all those years would catch up to her, aging her hundreds of years in a moment. A mortal couldn’t survive that. The castle, with its strange blend of planes, prevented those transition moments from being deadly to her, but there was still enough of the mortal world here to make sunset and sunrise draining for her.
“I’m fine,” she said again. “Nearly back up to full strength already. Now tell me how the investigation went today?”
I groaned. “Not so hot. I ended up being taken hostage in a bank robbery.”
Around me, the chatter at the table went silent, and I could feel all eyes turn on me, particularly the silent fae at my side who was part spy, part protector, and, despite his attempts to distance himself, my friend.
“Obviously I walked away from it okay,” I said, though with the rash of recent walking corpses, maybe that wasn’t quite so obvious as it should have been.
“Another bank robbery?” Holly asked, breaking the growing tension, for which I was grateful. “That’s what, the third in a week? Was it the same three people? Did they catch them this time?”
“Uh . . . sort of?” They certainly wouldn’t be robbing any more banks. But Remy had only gone missing last night. While there had been three robbers, he couldn’t have been involved with the previous robberies, could he? “What did the people from the other two robberies look like?”
“Haven’t you been watching the news?” Holly asked, raising one of her perfect strawberry-blond eyebrows.
I shrugged. “Not so much. No electricity in the castle and I’ve been busy at work.”
She granted me that one with a begrudging nod as Caleb jumped into the conversation. “None of the robbers wore masks, but only one has been identified. Annabelle something or other. Her husband had reported her missing a couple days before the first robbery. The other woman and the man have not been identified yet, but the media has been splashing their pictures around.”
Huh. That sounded eerily similar. I made a mental note to look up the coverage as the conversation around me moved on to how we could get electricity and Internet in the castle. I was still deep in thought, mindlessly attacking my food, when I realized Falin was staring at me.
“What?” I asked, turning to face him.
His icy blue gaze swept over me, filled with worry and warmth. “You’re okay?”
I waved a hand, gesturing at my still whole and unharmed body. He studied my face, as if he could find the truth to any nonphysical pains I might be hiding.
“I’m fine,” I said, and I meant it. I didn’t like what I’d done. Seeing those seemingly living bodies drop like marionettes with cut strings would probably join the other nightmares that regularly woke me, but I stood by the fact that I’d done the right thing. They’d already been dead, and my actions meant no one else got hurt.
But it would haunt me.
Falin’s frown deepened, and I changed the subject before he could pry further. “Do you know any fae who could move a soul between bodies?”
“Like Coleman?”
I thought about it and then shook my head. “No, what he did when he stole a body left a lot of magic and glyphs on the body. And the bodies he stole were still alive. I’m looking for something that could put a ghost in a corpse without leaving a magical trace.” I thought about the female ghost I’d pulled out of Remy’s body and how she’d begged to be put back inside. “The ghosts may be cooperative, but I think they need someone else’s help to inhabit and take control of the stolen body.”
“Alex, what’s going on?” Rianna asked, her food forgotten in front of her. Her reaction made sense, as Coleman had been the one to hold her captive in Faerie. He’d used her to facilitate his body thieving, so she might know more about moving souls between bodies than any other living person. At least any I had access to. I hadn’t wanted to rehash what I’d encountered at the bank again until I got a chance to talk to Death at length, but it seemed I didn’t have much choice.
I summarized the story the best I could, focusing most of my details on what little I knew about the walking corpses. Falin listened silently, the scowl on his face darkening. Rianna interrupted to ask questions a few times, but by the end, she was shaking her head.
“That definitely sounds like necromancy,” she said, her voice thin, strained.
“So you know something about it?” Did I sound a little too hopeful to hear that one of my best friends had knowledge of forbidden magic?
“Eh, probably not much more than you,” she said, an apologetic note to her voice. “Coleman used death magic, true, but not necromancy. He wanted his bodies still alive and functioning.”
“Oh.” That made sense. I sighed. It had been worth a shot.
I focused back down on my plate, pushing the food around more than actually eating it. When I glanced back up, I noticed the soul collector watching me from beside the fireplace. I hadn’t expected Death to return tonight, but there he was, waiting and glaring at where Falin sat beside me. I swallowed the food I was currently eating and excused myself. Rianna started to protest, but I wasn’t sure how long Death could stay. When your boyfriend could be called away at any moment, there was no time to dally.