“Hey, Al, I—Whoa, who’s the ugly guy?” Roy asked, shoving his iridescent glasses higher on his nose.
“Malik,” I answered, and then winced when Malik turned at the sound of his name.
“Yes?”
I shook my head. Only I could see or hear Roy. I used to be so good at not talking to people no one else could see.
Of course, until recently, I couldn’t have heard Roy unless I’d tried. That was another thing that had changed.
“There’s a ghost,” I said by way of explanation. “He asked who you were.”
“A real specter?” Malik looked around, his dark eyes shining with interest. “Can he frighten the living by making the lights flicker or the table rock?”
“I don’t own a table.”
Malik frowned and glanced around the smal apartment as if he hadn’t noticed that before. “True.”
I turned back toward Roy. He’d been excited when he first floated through the door, before he’d gotten sidetracked by my visitors. “What’s up, Roy?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. So I was down visiting my grave, right?
They delivered the headstone, and I wanted to see it again.”
I nodded, waiting for him to get to the point. He’d spent twelve years watching his body walk around without him in it. Now that it was decaying in the ground like a corpse should, he visited his own grave regularly—kind of freaky in my opinion, but it was important to him, so I’d helped with the burial arrangements.
“So, yeah,” he said, continuing. “I was at my grave, and this couple entered the cemetery, looking a little nervous. I didn’t think anything about it, until I heard your name.”
I blinked at him. Then my mouth went dry. “Crap. The Stromowskis. What time is it? I was supposed to raise their grandmother.” I gave a glance at my slept-in clothes—I’d worn worse—and then I grabbed my purse. With al the excitement of Malik’s case, reappearing daggers, and excitement of Malik’s case, reappearing daggers, and Faerie courts, I’d completely forgotten I had another client.
Chapter 6
It was late afternoon before I drove through the warehouse district and headed for the old stone bridge to meet Malik.
Legal y I couldn’t drive for two hours after raising shades—
the havoc that grave-sight wreaked on a grave witch’s eyesight was wel documented—but even after I’d waited a couple of hours for my sight to recover, the dimness under the branches overhanging the road made me nervous. Of course, taking any of the back roads out of the city made me nervous.
Like any other large city in the nation, Nekros City had its bad neighborhoods and high-crime areas. But it was outside the city, once you left the suburbs behind, that gave most human citizens pause. The fae had initiated the Magical Awakening when they had come out of the mushroom ring, as some said, seventy years ago. Their announcement altered the course of the—until that moment
—technologyfocused world.
And that was only the beginning.
Ancient history might have been riddled with stories of witchcraft, but in the decades—maybe even the centuries—
before the Magical Awakening, magic was considered a myth. After the Awakening? Wel , then, as if the magic had just been waiting for humans to be primed to channel it, the veil between the Aetheric and mortal reality thinned. Magic was accessible, and a good third of the population proved capable of reaching it, of shaping it. When space unfolded, opening new areas, both the witches seeking a place where they could practice in peace and the norms who didn’t want to associate with the magical y inclined moved didn’t want to associate with the magical y inclined moved into the new territory. The two groups didn’t mix wel , and several violent clashes had occurred in the years fol owing the Magical Awakening, but witches and norms alike agreed on one thing—humans were safer in the city because strange, long-forgotten legends were waking in the wilds.
Now here I was, out in the middle of nowhere, searching for a carnivorous water horse.
I pul ed my car off the road and parked under a cove of tree branches at one side of the bridge. The bridge itself was a hulking gray stone monstrosity with no obvious seams, no bolts, and no metal infrastructure—just solid stone. As I pul ed up the soft top on the convertible—trees meant birds and I did not want to have to clean bird crap off my seats—Malik approached.