Part of me railed against the invasion of the grave. My warmth boiled in my veins, trying to remind me I was a creature of life, of—at least limited—heat. I pushed that living heat out of me, sending it into the two corpses. Only then did the chil of the grave settle comfortably under my skin, as if I’d reached some sort of balance, a kind of equilibrium with the grave and the land of the dead.
I took a deep breath, and as I exhaled, I reached out with my magic. Using the part of my psyche that touched the dead, I guided the magic into the corpse of the girl, sending it deep into the shel that had once been a person. Her soul was long gone, everything that had once made her someone lost, but a shade, a col ection of her memories stored in every cel of her body, had remained. She was recently deceased, and the shade was strong, emerging easily when I pul ed with power.
A vaporish form sat up through the sheet that topped the body. She might have been nineteen when she died, her body. She might have been nineteen when she died, her pixielike features round as if she hadn’t yet lost al her baby fat. There was no shock in her face, no sorrow. Any trace of personality or sentience had left with her soul; now al that remained was a recording of who she’d once been.
“What’s your name?” I asked, and the shade turned her head toward me.
“Jennifer McCormic.”
“And how did you die, Jennifer?”
The shade cocked its head to the side. “I don’t know. I stopped living.”
That’s what I thought.
“What was the last thing you remember?”
“I met my boyfriend, Andrew. We were going to go for lunch. We were walking across campus and . . .” She fel silent.
“And what?” Tamara asked, stepping up to the very edge of my circle.
“And she died,” I said because I knew the shade wouldn’t. Once her soul was gone, her body had hit the STOP button on the record of Jennifer’s life. That was it.
The end.
“Did anyone approach you before you died?” I asked the shade.
She shook her head and I chewed at my bottom lip.
Sometimes people caught a glimpse of their col ector before they died, but not always, and Jennifer clearly hadn’t.
Since she hadn’t seen the col ector, it was possible that something else caused her death and she hadn’t been reaped, but the unsettled feeling in my stomach had me leaning toward cause of death being soul snatching.
“Rest now,” I said, pushing the shade back into Jennifer’s body. Then I turned to her boyfriend, Andrew.
“We were walking and Jennifer got this funny look on her face and col apsed,” Andrew said without a trace of emotion in his voice, though watching his girlfriend die in front of him had probably made his last moments some of front of him had probably made his last moments some of the worst in his life. Of course, it didn’t sound like that moment had lasted long. “I turned, trying to catch her, and I saw this man. He stuck his hand in my chest.”
Bingo.
“The man you saw directly before you died, what did he look like?”
“Older than me, but not too old. He could have been a grad student or a postdoc. He had dark hair and he wore a long, dark coat.”
A trickle of icy sweat ran down my spine. That description sounded exactly like the col ector I’d seen near the rift.
“How many of these unexplained deaths did you say you had?” I asked Tamara after I returned Andrew to his body.
Her cheeks caved inward as she chewed the inside of her mouth, and she glanced toward the cold room and the bodies stored inside. “More than a dozen. Maybe fourteen?
But those are only the deaths deemed to be under suspicious circumstances.”
Which meant that if the reaper had hit a hospital or anywhere else that deaths would be written off as due to natural causes or at least expected, it was probable there were a lot more victims than we knew about. But we were fairly certain of fourteen victims, plus the two skimmers I saw him take. Sixteen souls. I wasn’t sure what process turned a soul into fuel for a spel , but the ravens had each dissipated into only smal amounts of soul mist, so I guessed that the soul fueling them had been broken up somehow. So what, maybe three or four souls among the thirty-two birds? Adding in the soul for the cu sith attack, that accounted for no more than five of the victims. There were a lot of unaccountedfor souls out there.
And the potential for a lot of constructs.
Chapter 22
John arrived at the morgue at six thirty on the dot wearing the same clothes I’d seen last night, now wrinklier, and with bags large enough to house a pixie under his eyes.
“Jeez, John, did you get any sleep?” I asked, as Tamara pushed Jennifer’s body back into the morgue’s cold storage room.
He pressed his palm against one eye and dragged it down his face. “Recently?”
The air around John buzzed slightly with magic, which was weird because John was a nul —no magical affinity at al . He could walk through a magical barrier without even noticing it existed. He had nothing against magic—
obviously; he was, after al , my first contact with the police—
but he never used charms. I let my senses stretch, tasting the magic.
“A stay-awake charm? John, those things are dangerous.”