“Or the morgue,” Rianna added cheerily, and I frowned at her.
“Yeah, I’m really not even holding that out as an option.”
She just shrugged and handed the charm to me. The tracking spell was contained in a blue microsuede bag suspended on a nylon cord. The components were nothing fancy, but my ability to sense magic told me the spell inside was strong and good. Rianna had always been an excellent spellcaster. As soon as I touched the cord, I felt a distinct tug from the tracking charm. Remy was north. Somewhere.
“This is great,” I said, in lieu of thanking her.
Rianna nodded, silently accepting the words as they were intended. She was a changeling, not a fae, so while she didn’t share my particular need to avoid particular phrases, she understood the limitations.
“Well, Desmond and I are going home to do an early lunch, I think.” She buried one hand in the black fur of the doglike fae who was her ever-present shadow. He leaned into the touch, his red-pupiled eyes gazing up at her with affection. “Have fun tracking your missing person. I want all the details tonight.”
With that, she turned and headed for the front door. I just shook my head as I tied the nylon cord of the charm around my wrist. She had a lot more confidence that this case was going to be interesting than I did. Or maybe I was still distracted thinking about the walking corpses.
I’d just double-checked that I had both Remy’s home and dorm addresses in my notes and uploaded to cloud storage when a figure floated into my room and hovered by the door. Well, not literally; ghosts more or less obeyed the laws of physics, their plane of existence just didn’t always mirror ours perfectly so they often appeared to float through solid objects.
“You have a case?” asked Roy, ghost and junior detective—hey, no one ever said a guy couldn’t have career aspirations after death.
“Missing person. You tagging along?”
He shrugged as if he didn’t care one way or another, but not even being slightly translucent hid the excitement that lit up his features. “Yeah, I could do that.”
I closed the laptop and returned it to my bag before sliding my cell into my back pocket. “Hey, if you’re too busy, I get it,” I said as I walked past the ghost and toward the front door.
“Well, I have . . . I mean . . .” His shoulders hunched and he pushed his glasses farther up his nose. “No one ever hires a ghost detective. You should really add my name to the door.”
I pushed open said door, stepping onto the street, and then paused, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the bright, nearly noonday sun. “What would that do besides confuse people who wouldn’t be able to see or hear you, and thus still wouldn’t hire you?”
This was an old argument, almost a script at this point, and the ghost sulked as he followed me toward my car.
“Maybe if my office was bigger, nicer . . . Maybe Icelynne would . . .”
“Leave the castle?” I offered when he trailed off. He nodded and I patted his slumped shoulder. “She’ll leave when she’s ready. She’s still adjusting to being a ghost.”
He only nodded again, but it was a halfhearted movement. One that acknowledged my words but didn’t agree with them. I couldn’t fault him. He’d fallen hard for the frost fae when we’d been investigating her murder, and she’d seemed interested in him as well, but when I’d finally solved the case and been granted my independent fae status, the castle that had been hanging out in limbo since I’d inherited it had forced itself into mortal reality, unfolding a small pocket of space that was both reality and Faerie perfectly entwined. Icelynne had taken to haunting the castle since it felt the most like the home she could never return to, and she hadn’t left since. It wouldn’t have mattered how big or nice Roy’s office was. She didn’t particularly like the mortal world, preferring the castle and its strange meld of mortal and Faerie planes.
I sucked at consoling people, so once patting Roy’s shoulder started to feel awkward, I dropped my hand and climbed into the car. He followed moments later.
“So where are we headed?”
I lifted my hand with the charm secured to my wrist and pointed. “That way.”
“Anything more specific?”
“Not yet, but I thought we’d head toward the university unless the charm pulls us in a different direction first.”
“Very scientific.”
I shrugged and pulled the car away from the curb. “Hey, it’s magic, not science.”
• • •
The college was a bust. The charm kept pulling, indicating we had farther to go. I keyed Remy’s home address into my GPS, but it was in the opposite direction of where the charm was leading us. So I just drove, trying my best to follow the pull of the charm despite the fact that streets were not designed to go in one straight line for extended periods. Several times the street we were on would curve and I’d have to consult the map screen of my GPS, searching for the nearest street that would send us in the right direction again.
We’d long ago crossed the river that separated the Magic Quarter from Nekros City proper. Once we’d left downtown the streets had become less organized, with intersections appearing farther and farther apart and side streets that dead-ended into neighborhoods or empty lots, making following the charm that much more difficult. Now even the outlines of the city’s skyscrapers had vanished on the horizon, and I hadn’t seen another street to turn onto in over a mile.
“Why are we stopping? He can’t be here,” Roy said, indicating the boarded-up building whose overgrown parking lot I’d pulled into.
I shook my head and frowned at the charm around my wrist. “I think this thing is malfunctioning,” I said, giving the charm a shake—as if that would actually change anything. It continued to convey the same confusing information. “It’s telling me Remy is in two different directions.”
“Huh,” Roy said. “Maybe he was murdered and his body is actively being scattered across town.”
“Gross. And may I add what a positive outlook you have today?”
The ghost only shrugged.
I shook my head and prodded the spell with my ability to sense magic. It felt exactly as it had when I’d examined it in my office. Unless it had always been flawed, and I didn’t think it had, it didn’t seem to be a magical issue.
“Maybe it’s the focus. I pulled several dark hairs from Taylor’s brush for the charm. She might have lied about who she let use it.” That was the most likely scenario. Roy’s suggestion, though gruesome, was also possible, but I was guessing highly unlikely.
“He could have a twin.”
“Only child.”
“Separated at birth?”
I frowned at the ghost.
He shrugged again. “Hey, I’m only offering ideas. So which way?”
I didn’t answer but returned to trying to decipher the information from the spell. Tracking spells weren’t terribly sophisticated magic. Tricky to cast, yes, but they were simple in function. The spell pulled in a straight line toward its subject. As the charm’s holder got closer to the spell’s subject, the pull grew stronger. This charm had appeared to be functioning perfectly until just a few moments ago. The pull had gradually grown stronger for the nearly two hours we’d been driving. But now the charm seemed confused, trying to pull in two different directions in a tug-of-war-like sensation.
I looked around. We were in the outskirts of the city, past the sprawling suburb, and approaching the wild areas where there were few humans and fewer paved roads. The road we’d just pulled off was one of the few remaining tributaries that eventually fed back into the highway that was the only way in or out of the unfolded space containing the entirety of Nekros City.
“I think he might have passed us,” I said, moving my arm back and forth between the two warring directions. They weren’t completely opposite directions, more like whatever the second reading was coming from had passed by on a road slightly to the north of us. I’d have put money on the fact that both trails had been in the same area not long ago. But then one source had broken off, heading back to town. That one seemed to still be moving. And it was close—closer than the one pulling either toward the wilds or possibly out of the folded space and into the next state. So who could Taylor have been sharing her brush with who would have been out in the wilds or beyond with Remy? Why? And most importantly, was Remy the one headed back into town, or was that the unknown source?