I released his shade, drawing back my heat and magic. I did not like how little of either were left after only the first shade. My trembling was so strong that my whole arm shook when I lifted it to guide the magic into the next body.
“We have to speed this up,” I said.
The next shade I raised was Annabelle McNabb. Her story was not that dissimilar from Remy’s. She’d seen a flyer for the study at a coffee shop, and while she didn’t need the money, she thought it would be nice to stuff it away as “mad money.” Her interaction with the researcher was much the same as Remy’s, except he’d claimed his name was Dr. Marcus Vogel. After making plans on quickchat, she’d met him at the funeral parlor with much the same results. If anything, her details were even vaguer than Remy’s had been. Thankfully, everyone kept their questions short and efficient and the interview was done in a quarter of the time it had taken with Remy.
The museum thief, Rodger Bartlett, had a story much the same except he’d met with Dr. Marcus Basselet after seeing the study in the classifieds. The location arranged on quickchat for the ritual had been different from the others as well. He’d been met at a dilapidated house that Basselet claimed was haunted.
“What day was that?”
“November fourteenth,” the shade said, which made him our earliest victim. Annabelle hadn’t died until the eighteenth and Remy on the nineteenth.
Rodger’s description of Basselet was more detailed than the others. He described him as a man in his midfifties of average build and height with hair more gray than black and dark eyes. There were enough similarities to the descriptions of Hadisty and Vogel—even if both had had hopelessly vague descriptions—that it was a safe assumption that all three were the same man using different names. A few more questions were asked, and then Rodger was returned to his body and I turned to the last corpse.
“What is your name?” I asked after the shade of the homeless woman sat up, and this time it wasn’t an obligatory question. We really didn’t know.
“Rosie Cranford.”
“Rosie, do you remember how you died? Can you describe the circumstances surrounding the event?”
“A nice gentleman was walking through the park early in the morning. I was just waking up, trying to get my old joints moving after a cold night. Dr. Moyer approached as I was rolling up my blanket. He said he was involved with the magical science of ghosts and was currently looking for volunteers for a case study. I wasn’t doing anything important, and I could use the fifty dollars he said the job paid, so I agreed to volunteer.” The shade related her story without inflection or emotion. The observations she’d made were not a part of her now, just a part of the story. “He drove me to an old funeral home and took me down to the basement where a circle was drawn. There were runes drawn around the circle, so many that some were several layers deep beyond his chalk line. I like runes, so I asked about them, but the more questions I asked, the more agitated he became. I started to get a bad feeling and was thinking about leaving when he handed me a goblet. It was a masterful piece, covered in even more runes. I drained the goblet as instructed and then . . .”
And then, like all the others, her soul had left her body.
“You said you asked him about the runes. Did you recognize any of them?”
“Most of them,” the shade said. “But he didn’t seem to be using them for their meaning. The way it was laid out, it seemed he was using the runes as an alphabet, writing out words.”
Finally, one victim who’d actually paid attention. And she appeared to know a bit about magic, or at least runes.
“Could you read the writing?”
“Not really. Way back in high school I joined a club studying runes. Thought I’d be able to learn magic that way. Never did manage to so much as set a circle, but I did learn a lot of runes. It has been a long time, though. That was why I was so curious.”
It was more than we’d had before, but it was less than I’d hoped for when her story began. The predictable round of questions began, and I repeated each one, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. I needed to end this ritual soon.
Rosie had been more observant than any of the other victims, but her information still only gave us small pieces of the puzzle. She claimed the drink in the goblet tasted like wine with frankincense and myrrh in it, which was an interesting detail but didn’t help figure out exactly what had happened or how.
Finally everyone ran out of questions and I withdrew my magic and heat from her corpse. It rushed back into me but was immediately consumed by the chill flowing through my veins. I’d been in touch with the dead for hours.
I let the vines that made up my mental shield slither around my psyche once more. The grave essence didn’t even fight me as I pushed it out. I had so little magic left that there was nothing to draw the grave to me. Once my mental shield was complete, I dug the charm bracelet out of my pocket. The external shields snapped into place as soon as the clasp closed around my wrist.
As I worked on the shields, the people outside my circle all began talking at once. John and Briar were clearly both on the phone, while Jenson was giving directions to one of the uniformed officers. Tamara, who’d grabbed a chair sometime during the ritual because it had lasted a couple of hours and a pregnant woman shouldn’t stand for that long, stood to converse with the lab assistant, telling her which tests and panels they needed to run and how to prepare to take the samples they’d need.
I hadn’t fully closed my shields yet, or dissolved my circle. I glanced between the people in the room, memorizing where everyone stood because I knew what was coming. I walked to the edge of the circle and scooped up my purse. Then I closed the last gaps in my mental shield, blocking my psyche from gazing across planes, and the world fell into darkness.
I’d been prepared for it. Even short rituals burned out my vision quickly these days, and this had not been a short ritual. But even though I’d anticipated the blindness, a twinge of panic still jetted through me as the world fell dark. There were too many people present that I didn’t fully trust for me to be confident while this vulnerable. Not that there was much I could do about it. I could have left my shields open longer, but I was so drained, I wasn’t sure I had enough magic left to fight off any questing grave essence once my circle fell.
So I closed my shields, letting darkness surround me, and dissolved the circle.
Then I stood there, unsure what to do. I could feel the dead bodies, and Briar and Tamara wore enough magic that I could sense them, but the others in the room? I just had to listen for them to move.
A door whooshed as someone left the morgue. One of the uniformed officers? A gurney squeaked beside me, and I jumped in surprise. It was probably the morgue assistant, but I hadn’t heard her approach.
A hand landed on my elbow, hot and unexpected. I jumped again before I realized that the buzz of Tamara’s magic had approached while I was distracted by the gurney.
“Let’s find you a spot to recover,” she whispered.