Something inside me twisted painfully. I always hated when shades said something hopeful for the future. Not that shades hoped for anything anymore. They had no emotions, no feelings. He was saving for a ring. The shade said the sentence as a simple fact, but I imagined the living man would have been a bundle of joy and nerves when discussing the ring and his plans.
“How did he contact Dr. Hadisty?” John asked when I followed my own train of thought a little too long without asking the next question. I repeated his words to the shade.
“The flyer had a quickchat number. I contacted it and he sent me a questionnaire to fill out and the first set of waivers to sign.”
Murmurs from the room on that one. Quickchat left no trace of the conversation once the session was logged off.
“You didn’t think it was odd this doctor was using quickchat?” That somewhat sarcasm-laced question was Jenson’s. We had a . . . strained relationship. I almost didn’t repeat it, as it would require the shade to make a judgment call, which he’d only be able to do if he’d considered it while alive, but I didn’t want to get accused of prejudice or ignoring a line of questioning.
“Quickchat is common on campus. It was unusual for it to be used for something official, but the questionnaire and waiver weren’t dissimilar from other studies I’d participated in, and the offered money was good.”
“Did you agree to meet as soon as you answered the questions?” I asked.
“No, he contacted me a few days later, via the quickchat app, and let me know I’d been approved as a candidate for the study. We agreed to meet the following evening.”
Which brought us back to the nineteenth. “Where did you meet?”
“An old funeral home. He claimed the place was haunted and it would be an ideal location to find ghosts.”
“Name, location?” John asked, looking up from the notebook he was furiously scribbling in.
It wasn’t a funeral home I’d heard of before, but then I didn’t have much cause to visit them. Cemeteries I would have known, but not funeral homes.
Questions kept coming. I shivered, dutifully repeating them. With five people interjecting lines of inquiry, the interview seemed to drag out. Remy described the ritual proceeding his death in detail—or as many details as he could. He wasn’t a witch and had no spellcasting training, so he hadn’t been paying much attention to Hadisty’s circle. He thought there might have been some sort of markings on the floor but was uncertain what they were. He either couldn’t understand or hadn’t listened enough to remember what words Hadisty had been saying before handing him something to drink. I was pretty sure Remy was the least observant person I’d ever encountered. That, or he’d shown up to the study to get paid and hadn’t cared about anything but the money promised.
Tamara quizzed Remy in great detail about the liquid he drank. She wanted to know any impressions about viscosity, smell, and taste. If he’d felt any immediate change, tingling, or numbness while drinking it. His answers didn’t seem particularly helpful. She’d run a toxicity screen on all the bodies since their cause of death was unknown, but the preliminary results had all been negative. She was still waiting on the more in-depth panel.
Finally no one had any more questions.
I released his shade, drawing back my heat and magic. I did not like how little of either were left after only the first shade. My trembling was so strong that my whole arm shook when I lifted it to guide the magic into the next body.
“We have to speed this up,” I said.
The next shade I raised was Annabelle McNabb. Her story was not that dissimilar from Remy’s. She’d seen a flyer for the study at a coffee shop, and while she didn’t need the money, she thought it would be nice to stuff it away as “mad money.” Her interaction with the researcher was much the same as Remy’s, except he’d claimed his name was Dr. Marcus Vogel. After making plans on quickchat, she’d met him at the funeral parlor with much the same results. If anything, her details were even vaguer than Remy’s had been. Thankfully, everyone kept their questions short and efficient and the interview was done in a quarter of the time it had taken with Remy.
The museum thief, Rodger Bartlett, had a story much the same except he’d met with Dr. Marcus Basselet after seeing the study in the classifieds. The location arranged on quickchat for the ritual had been different from the others as well. He’d been met at a dilapidated house that Basselet claimed was haunted.
“What day was that?”
“November fourteenth,” the shade said, which made him our earliest victim. Annabelle hadn’t died until the eighteenth and Remy on the nineteenth.
Rodger’s description of Basselet was more detailed than the others. He described him as a man in his midfifties of average build and height with hair more gray than black and dark eyes. There were enough similarities to the descriptions of Hadisty and Vogel—even if both had had hopelessly vague descriptions—that it was a safe assumption that all three were the same man using different names. A few more questions were asked, and then Rodger was returned to his body and I turned to the last corpse.
“What is your name?” I asked after the shade of the homeless woman sat up, and this time it wasn’t an obligatory question. We really didn’t know.
“Rosie Cranford.”
“Rosie, do you remember how you died? Can you describe the circumstances surrounding the event?”
“A nice gentleman was walking through the park early in the morning. I was just waking up, trying to get my old joints moving after a cold night. Dr. Moyer approached as I was rolling up my blanket. He said he was involved with the magical science of ghosts and was currently looking for volunteers for a case study. I wasn’t doing anything important, and I could use the fifty dollars he said the job paid, so I agreed to volunteer.” The shade related her story without inflection or emotion. The observations she’d made were not a part of her now, just a part of the story. “He drove me to an old funeral home and took me down to the basement where a circle was drawn. There were runes drawn around the circle, so many that some were several layers deep beyond his chalk line. I like runes, so I asked about them, but the more questions I asked, the more agitated he became. I started to get a bad feeling and was thinking about leaving when he handed me a goblet. It was a masterful piece, covered in even more runes. I drained the goblet as instructed and then . . .”
And then, like all the others, her soul had left her body.
“You said you asked him about the runes. Did you recognize any of them?”
“Most of them,” the shade said. “But he didn’t seem to be using them for their meaning. The way it was laid out, it seemed he was using the runes as an alphabet, writing out words.”
Finally, one victim who’d actually paid attention. And she appeared to know a bit about magic, or at least runes.
“Could you read the writing?”
“Not really. Way back in high school I joined a club studying runes. Thought I’d be able to learn magic that way. Never did manage to so much as set a circle, but I did learn a lot of runes. It has been a long time, though. That was why I was so curious.”
It was more than we’d had before, but it was less than I’d hoped for when her story began. The predictable round of questions began, and I repeated each one, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. I needed to end this ritual soon.
Rosie had been more observant than any of the other victims, but her information still only gave us small pieces of the puzzle. She claimed the drink in the goblet tasted like wine with frankincense and myrrh in it, which was an interesting detail but didn’t help figure out exactly what had happened or how.
Finally everyone ran out of questions and I withdrew my magic and heat from her corpse. It rushed back into me but was immediately consumed by the chill flowing through my veins. I’d been in touch with the dead for hours.
I let the vines that made up my mental shield slither around my psyche once more. The grave essence didn’t even fight me as I pushed it out. I had so little magic left that there was nothing to draw the grave to me. Once my mental shield was complete, I dug the charm bracelet out of my pocket. The external shields snapped into place as soon as the clasp closed around my wrist.