Briar had warned me I’d have babysitters at the morgue, but we now had enough people in the room to throw a party. Aside from Briar and me, we had been joined by John and Jenson, as they were the detectives in charge of the case; Tamara, since she had direct custody of the bodies, as well as one of her assistants; and two uniformed officers who stood by the morgue door looking very uncomfortable. It had been decided to pull out all of the bodies so that I wouldn’t have to lower my circle or start a new ritual to confirm stories between victims, if we needed to do so. The morgue wasn’t small, but it also wasn’t built to have four bodies on gurneys with eight living people gathered around them. We’d had to do a little rearranging, and I was still going to have to be very careful when I drew my circle to make sure all the corpses fit without trapping any of the living people in the circle with me.
The most uncomfortable part of the whole situation was how very quiet the entire group was. I dragged my waxy-chalk on the ground with seven gazes locked on me, the room silent except for the buzz of the lights and the whirl of the air purifiers. I tried to ignore them, but I could all but feel their eyes on my flesh. Tamara was the only one who looked friendly out of the bunch. Not that everyone else was strictly unfriendly. Briar looked impatient. The two uniformed officers looked a little freaked out and maybe a little queasy. I wasn’t sure if that was because I was about to raise shades or because the bodies were rather ripe. Jenson, well, he was definitely unfriendly as he scowled at me around a handkerchief he had pressed over his mouth and nose.
John stood off by himself beside one of the two video cameras trained on me for this ritual. He held his case notebook in his hand, pen gripped tight by his side in the other hand. I couldn’t see his mouth under a mustache that definitely needed a trim, but I could tell by the way his cheeks were drawn down that he was frowning.
When I finished my circle, I nodded first to Briar and then I turned to John.
“I’m ready. Who should I start with?”
“You’ll likely end up raising all,” he said, which was a nonanswer.
I chose to believe it was permission to use my best judgment and turned to Remy first. Four shades were a lot for one ritual. I could do it, but it would drain me. He was the one I was most invested in, and he was the one I wanted the most answers from. I wasn’t planning to charge Taylor for any more of my time—after all, this ritual was now bought and paid for by Briar—but if I could find more information for her, something to give her closure, I would.
Tapping into the energy stored in the ring on my finger, I activated the circle I’d drawn. A barrier sprang up between me and the rest of the living people. The magical barrier also stopped the flow of the grave essence from the other bodies in the morgue, but with four corpses trapped in the circle with me, that didn’t offer much relief.
I removed the charm bracelet, which contained, along with various other utilitarian charms I carried, the external shields that helped dull the grave essence that otherwise relentlessly battered my mental shields. As soon as the external shields went down, the full affront of grave essence from the bodies trapped in the circle hit the mental wall surrounding my psyche. It slammed against the living vines I imagined as the barrier encompassing my mind. I peeled them back, letting the grave essence inside, not resisting as the chill rushed into my body, warring with my own living heat. It hurt, but not in an unexpected way. More like an old wound that acted up.
Wind picked up around me, whipping my hair around my shoulders and stirring the sheets covering the gurneys. I had no need to check toe tags or pull back the sheets to see the bodies. I could feel that two were females and one was an older man, so the last, a young male, had to be Remy. I reached out with my magic and let the heat flow out of me into the sheet-covered body. My magic and living heat flowed through it, connecting all the tiny left-behind memories, forming them into a physical representation of the man he’d been at the moment of his death.
A teenage boy on the cusp of adulthood sat up through the sheet covering his body. While he would have been solid to me, he was as insubstantial as a hologram to anyone else, just a collection of memories held together with my magic. One of the officers by the door muttered something rather unpleasant sounding as Remy appeared, and the door creaked, the officer’s shoes scuffing on the linoleum as he rushed through it. I couldn’t handle gore; other people couldn’t handle shades. But Remy wasn’t a bad one. Aside from being a little spectral in color and substance, he looked like he should have been a healthy college-aged kid. I’d certainly raised shades in far worse condition.
Despite the fact that the corpse on the gurney had likely already had a full autopsy and wasn’t wearing anything more than a sheet, the image of Remy that appeared was exactly how his last memory had caught him in the moment of death. He wore a hat with the university’s icon on it over his dark hair. His football jersey sported his high school colors and looked well loved. I vaguely recognized it as the one he’d been wearing during the bank robbery. The real jersey was likely in an evidence locker somewhere; this one was just a memory of the original. His jeans were worn, a hole beginning to fray in his right knee. There was no obvious cause of death evident on his shade, but then there hadn’t been on his body either, so that wasn’t too surprising.
“What is your name?” I asked the shade, not because I didn’t know, but because this was an official interview being recorded. Shades had a lot of limitations, and I’d worked with the police for years, so I tried to put as much properly on the record as I could.
“Remy Hollens.”
I turned to John. He gave a slight nod, indicating the shade was loud enough. I focused on Remy again.
“Can you tell me how you died?”
“I volunteered to be part of a study to earn a little money. I had a few hours before I had to pick up Taylor, so I scheduled to meet the researcher. After filling out some paperwork, he told me he was going to begin and I just had to sit very still in the center of a circle. He chanted for a while, and had me drink something, and then . . .” The shade trailed off.
“And then what?” Briar asked once the shade failed to say anything more.
“And then he died. Or maybe fell unconscious and then died,” I said, but I was frowning.
Usually when a shade trailed off like that, it was because a collector had jerked their soul from their body. Once the soul left, the record button on a person’s life stopped, even if their bodily functions hadn’t quite caught up to realizing they were dead. But Death had told me he hadn’t collected Remy’s soul, and the way he said it made me think none of the other collectors had either.
A soul doesn’t just pop out of a body at death. If a collector doesn’t come, the soul tends to cling to the dead flesh, trapped inside the shell, the memories still recording as the body rots away around it. I’d talked to shades who’d experienced such fate. Their stories weren’t pretty. So how had Remy’s soul gotten out of his body?
“One problem here. We all saw this kid drop dead during a bank robbery. Not sitting in a magic circle,” Jenson said around his handkerchief.
“He was already dead.” I was starting to feel like a broken record telling people that. “Remy, have you ever been to First Bank of Nekros on Old Dunbar Road?”