Death frowned at him without answering. Then he looked at me. “Are you ready for this?”
I had no idea what I’d see inside, but I could feel the malevolence of whatever spell had been worked. It seeped out of the room like spreading darkness. It made my skin crawl, as though my flesh was trying to get farther away from the magic. Some part of me screamed to turn around, to run. I ignored it. Nodding, I stepped around the gray man, around Death, and into the scene of a dark ritual murder.
Chapter 12
The cops were the first thing I noticed. They were moving. It’s a survival instinct—when you’re frightened, you always notice the moving things first.The cops were working in small teams to take pictures, put down markers, and bag evidence. Falin stood on the far side of the room, talking to the coroner.
Then I noticed the furniture.Yesterday this room had been deserted without so much as dust to disturb the emptiness.Today plush throw rugs covered the floor. On the rugs were dozens of large mood candles, most still lit. The candles were gathered around an ornate bed in the very center of the room. And the center of the circle.
A small round table stood to the side of the bed, a bottle of champagne and two flutes on top. A white silken cord looped around the bedpost closest to me, the white turning scarlet where it was attached to a crimson object.
I stared at it, knowing it would be bad when my brain took time to puzzle out the red lump.
A bloody foot.
I took a deep breath, hoping it would help the tightness in my stomach. It didn’t, but I forced my eyes to move on. To move up the bloodstained leg, over the bare hip. My gaze snagged on what logic told me was a torso—all I saw were wet, dark shapes flowing from the crimson skin. Bile crept up my throat and burned my tongue, and I forced my gaze higher. The woman’s face was washed in red. Her glazed, sightless eyes stared out at the room, her lips twisted in an endless scream.
It was too much.
I swayed. Only Death’s arm sliding around my waist kept me standing as my knees gave out and I doubled over. My stomach heaved, and I gritted my teeth, fighting the convulsions in my throat. I will not get sick at the crime scene.
Death’s cold hand moved to the back of my neck.
“Breathe, Alex. Just breathe.”
The cold helped calm the sick heat gripping me, and I nodded, obediently gulping down air. As I fought my body, the magic in the room grated against my mind, trying to worm its way inside my defenses. The circle was down, but the dark, cutting magic in the air was still very active.
I have to get out of here.
I straightened, ready to run as far as my shaky legs would take me, to flee and never look back. Death stopped me. His arms wrapped around my shoulders, dragged me against his broad chest.
“Come on, Alex. Deep breaths.”
The gray man made a rude sound somewhere behind me. “This is your idea of help?”
The cutting iciness of Death’s touch was fading, replaced by a growing numbness. It crawled over my cheek, across my chest, down my legs. Numb is good. Or it meant I was dying.
Death released me and stepped back. His hand moved to my numb cheek, and he tilted my head back. My gaze dragged up to meet his. The cool depths of the grave reflected in darkness in his eyes. The chill, already saturating so much of my skin, seeped deeper, drawing out the part of me that touched the dead. My shields ripped away and my heat fled as a gray patina washed over the room. Without a circle, inside a room with malicious magic, I was now straddling the chasm between the living and the dead.
Death dropped his hand, a pained expression crossing his face. He didn’t change in my grave-sight—he was exactly what he was—but the walls behind him crumbled, the rusting supports underneath revealed. I took a deep breath. The air was warm, but my breath condensed as I blew it out. I turned.
The gray man was staring, his cane suspended in midspin.“
That was risky,” he whispered, and I had no idea if he was talking to me or to Death.
Death stepped closer, but he didn’t touch me. He pointed toward the center of the room. “You asked if we collected the soul of the victim.We did not.We could not.We need you to find what is left and pull it from the body.”
I blinked at him. “The soul is still in the body?” I turned. In the center of the blood and entrails was the faintest glow of blue. A dim soul still locked inside dead flesh. Even filled with the calm chill of the grave, my stomach twisted.
I shook my head. “No.”
Death raised an eyebrow. “No what?”
“She can still feel …” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
The woman—not breathing, her heart not in her body, her skin in threads—was somewhat alive. Somehow, on some level, she had felt everything that had happened to her.
I squeezed my eyes closed. That didn’t help. I was seeing things on a psychic level, so if anything, closing my eyes brought the faint pulse of her soul into sharper focus. I looked down at the floor, and as I stared at the crumbling cement under my feet I realized something was missing. The rugs.
I looked up.There were no rugs, no candles, no round table with a bottle of champagne on top. My gaze moved to the woman. She was very much still there, her soul pulsing weakly, but the ornate bed she’d been tied to was now a cheap folding table.
“I don’t understand. What am I seeing?”
“You are Seeing,” Death said, as if that meant anything.
“You are looking through planes of existence, through truth.”
Nothing in this room exists? Well, not nothing. There was the folding table and the markers the cops were setting down; while those were rotted in my grave-sight, they were in fact real.
I stepped forward but stopped before crossing the inactive circle. It had been broken, not released. I could feel the backlash still threading through the remnants.
The ritual was interrupted?
I crossed the edge of the circle, and it was like stepping into a vortex. Every dark, angry wave of energy that crashed into me during my first visit was like a single raindrop compared to the tempest of what I stood in now. My body shook under the onslaught. I could see the sickly black strands and dangerous red knots of magic in the air, and for a moment I thought I’d been jettisoned into the Aetheric. But no. There was just that much magic here.
I took another step forward, and as if the magic could sense me, black and red tentacles of magic snaked toward me. A dark tendril reached me. It twined up my boot to encircle my bare calf.
Pain pulsed into my skin as the magic attacked what few personal shields I had remaining while consumed by grave magic. The pain turned to a burn, and I backpedaled out of the latent circle. Death knelt, his hand moving to my leg, and the magic dissipated, leaving a dull throb behind.
“We’ll have to get her through,” Death said, looking at the gray man.
“I was afraid you’d say that.” He lifted his cane straight in front of him as if it would ward off evil. Then he walked across the edge of the circle. “Come on, then. We’re running out of time.”
I shot an uncertain look at Death.
“Walk where he does, and stay close. I’ll guard your back,” he said.
Okay. Next time I was asking for more specifics before agreeing to any favors for Death. I fell in step behind the gray man, crossing the circle where he had.
Again the onslaught of magic cozied up to my senses, leaving oily marks on my mind, but the tendrils of magic didn’t attack this time. They flowed around us, opening like a tunnel before the gray man. Behind me, Death walked backward, his palm out. They looked as though they’d formed a protective bubble.
“Hey, who are you?” a cop yelled to my side. The collectors didn’t stop, so neither did I.
“You two can’t be in here!”
Two? They can see Death?
“Alex Craft!”
That voice was Falin. Definitely.
I kept walking.
“Sir, they just walked through the table.”
Oops. He must have meant the table with the champagne I’d seen when I first entered. I couldn’t see it at all now.
“What the hell is going on?” Falin again.
The cops closest to us drew guns.
“Don’t shoot,” Falin yelled. “Alex, get over here. Now.”
We reached the bed, or table, as it now appeared in my grave-sight.
“Now what?” I whispered.
“Get her out of that body,” Death said, still behind me.
How the hell do I do that? I looked down at the body and winced as I saw the glowing glyphs cut into her skin.
When all I could see was blood and gore, I’d thought the attack on her had been savage, but now I saw it had been precise, each slice purposeful. One symbol was repeated over and over. The foreign glyphs were both similar to and different from what I’d seen on Coleman’s body.
As I watched, the glow of her soul faded further as the crimson glyphs burned brighter.
The gray man grabbed my arm. “If you can free her, do it now.”
I nodded, and I thrust my power into her. There was a struggle of life and death in the corpse, and life wasn’t winning. I wished my power could heal her body, her soul, but it couldn’t. My power was with the grave.
I could feel the spell on her body burning into my own skin. An icy, cutting spell. Pain stabbed through my shoulder, and I knew my personal soul-sucking spell was growing, devouring me. I recoiled, drawing my power back. Then I felt her soul.
In all the darkness of the spell, her soul was a thing of light and warmth. Like a moth drawn to flame, my power reached for her. But souls and the grave don’t mix. The soul, weak from fighting the spell, sank deeper into her being. Hiding.
I poured everything I had into the corpse. My body temperature fell, but I barely noticed. I had no more heat, no more life-power to feed the body, so I filled the body with grave-chill. My power chased after the soul as it retreated. Her soul sank into the space her shade should have filled, and I found a misshapen, shredded shade. Just like Bethany. My power flooded the space, and the soul retreated farther. I pushed on.
The spell was sluggish and methodical. I wasn’t. My power swept deeper faster, both recoiling from the spell’s touch and pursuing the soul. I reached the innermost base of her being and filled it with everything I had, every ounce of power.