Tapping into the energy stored in the ring on my finger, I activated the circle I’d drawn. A barrier sprang up between me and the rest of the living people. The magical barrier also stopped the flow of the grave essence from the other bodies in the morgue, but with four corpses trapped in the circle with me, that didn’t offer much relief.
I removed the charm bracelet, which contained, along with various other utilitarian charms I carried, the external shields that helped dull the grave essence that otherwise relentlessly battered my mental shields. As soon as the external shields went down, the full affront of grave essence from the bodies trapped in the circle hit the mental wall surrounding my psyche. It slammed against the living vines I imagined as the barrier encompassing my mind. I peeled them back, letting the grave essence inside, not resisting as the chill rushed into my body, warring with my own living heat. It hurt, but not in an unexpected way. More like an old wound that acted up.
Wind picked up around me, whipping my hair around my shoulders and stirring the sheets covering the gurneys. I had no need to check toe tags or pull back the sheets to see the bodies. I could feel that two were females and one was an older man, so the last, a young male, had to be Remy. I reached out with my magic and let the heat flow out of me into the sheet-covered body. My magic and living heat flowed through it, connecting all the tiny left-behind memories, forming them into a physical representation of the man he’d been at the moment of his death.
A teenage boy on the cusp of adulthood sat up through the sheet covering his body. While he would have been solid to me, he was as insubstantial as a hologram to anyone else, just a collection of memories held together with my magic. One of the officers by the door muttered something rather unpleasant sounding as Remy appeared, and the door creaked, the officer’s shoes scuffing on the linoleum as he rushed through it. I couldn’t handle gore; other people couldn’t handle shades. But Remy wasn’t a bad one. Aside from being a little spectral in color and substance, he looked like he should have been a healthy college-aged kid. I’d certainly raised shades in far worse condition.
Despite the fact that the corpse on the gurney had likely already had a full autopsy and wasn’t wearing anything more than a sheet, the image of Remy that appeared was exactly how his last memory had caught him in the moment of death. He wore a hat with the university’s icon on it over his dark hair. His football jersey sported his high school colors and looked well loved. I vaguely recognized it as the one he’d been wearing during the bank robbery. The real jersey was likely in an evidence locker somewhere; this one was just a memory of the original. His jeans were worn, a hole beginning to fray in his right knee. There was no obvious cause of death evident on his shade, but then there hadn’t been on his body either, so that wasn’t too surprising.
“What is your name?” I asked the shade, not because I didn’t know, but because this was an official interview being recorded. Shades had a lot of limitations, and I’d worked with the police for years, so I tried to put as much properly on the record as I could.
“Remy Hollens.”
I turned to John. He gave a slight nod, indicating the shade was loud enough. I focused on Remy again.
“Can you tell me how you died?”
“I volunteered to be part of a study to earn a little money. I had a few hours before I had to pick up Taylor, so I scheduled to meet the researcher. After filling out some paperwork, he told me he was going to begin and I just had to sit very still in the center of a circle. He chanted for a while, and had me drink something, and then . . .” The shade trailed off.
“And then what?” Briar asked once the shade failed to say anything more.
“And then he died. Or maybe fell unconscious and then died,” I said, but I was frowning.
Usually when a shade trailed off like that, it was because a collector had jerked their soul from their body. Once the soul left, the record button on a person’s life stopped, even if their bodily functions hadn’t quite caught up to realizing they were dead. But Death had told me he hadn’t collected Remy’s soul, and the way he said it made me think none of the other collectors had either.
A soul doesn’t just pop out of a body at death. If a collector doesn’t come, the soul tends to cling to the dead flesh, trapped inside the shell, the memories still recording as the body rots away around it. I’d talked to shades who’d experienced such fate. Their stories weren’t pretty. So how had Remy’s soul gotten out of his body?
“One problem here. We all saw this kid drop dead during a bank robbery. Not sitting in a magic circle,” Jenson said around his handkerchief.
“He was already dead.” I was starting to feel like a broken record telling people that. “Remy, have you ever been to First Bank of Nekros on Old Dunbar Road?”
The shade didn’t hesitate. “No.”
There was more than one sputter of dismay behind me, and even Tamara muttered something questioning how a shade could lie. Shades had no egos. They couldn’t lie, or even obfuscate the truth. Ask the right question, get a good, honest answer, at least to the best of the shade’s recollection. While Remy’s soul had been inside his body, he had never been inside that bank. After his soul was evicted . . .
“He’s not lying. He was already dead.” Yup, definitely a broken record. “Remy, what was the date and time of the last thing you remember?”
“November nineteenth. It must about been about seven forty-five because I arrived at the meeting right after seven.”
John glanced back through his notebook. “That would be the night before the bank heist.”
“And it would be consistent with the state of rigor during my initial observations at the scene,” Tamara said.
Jenson made a sound that was particularly growl-like. “So we are actually saying that the people who were walking, talking, and waving guns around were already dead at the time? Is that what I’m hearing?”
“If the shoe fits,” Briar said, and turned back toward me. “You said ghosts were piloting these corpses. Ghosts are just souls, right? How come the body didn’t start recording again when the foreign soul was inserted?”
I might have gaped at her for a moment. Not only because it was a good question, but also because she understood enough about grave magic to ask it. That was high-level grave theory she was using to reach those questions. And I didn’t have a good answer.
I probed at the body with my magic, searching for anything unusual. Memories were stored in every cell of the body, so it wasn’t like I could search for particular ones, but I tried to let my magic seek around for anything that didn’t feel connected to the shade I’d raised. There was nothing. Remy’s body and shade felt typical, strong even.
I shook my head, indicating that I didn’t know the answers to Briar’s questions. She sighed.
“We need more details about the man, the place, and the job,” she said.
I turned back to the shade. “What kind of study did you volunteer to join?”
“It focused on human interaction with the spirit world. I was being paid to see if an experimental spell could allow me to see into the other side and talk to ghosts.”
Well, he’d certainly gotten to see into the other side.
“Who was running this study?” Briar asked, and I repeated the question for Remy’s shade.
“His name is Dr. Marcus Hadisty.”
All the detective and investigator types in the room were suddenly busy scribbling in notebooks. The chill of the grave was already seeping deeper into me, making me cold to the bone, and I hadn’t even finished the first interview yet. I could guess the next series of questions, so I moved on.
“What did he look like?”
“Older. Graying hair. Very professor-like.”
Well, that was generic. I pressed for more details. “How old?”
“I don’t know. My parents’ age? Maybe older. At least forty.”
Remy was only a handful of years younger than me, but he still apparently looked at everyone over thirty as old. That wasn’t going to help us much.
“How did you meet Dr. Hadisty?”
“I saw a flyer on campus looking for volunteers for his study. It claimed it would pay two hundred for no more than two hours of time. The last study I joined paid only fifty dollars. I’m saving to buy a ring for Taylor, so I watch out for quick ways to make a little cash.”