I frowned, looking at all the ghosts in the clearing. Hadn’t they been through enough? I doubted they’d understood what was happening to them when they’d been stuffed into bodies that weren’t theirs and then been forced to stay there as the foreign bodies rotted around them. Of course, that was assuming all were simple beasts. Most were. The small ones certainly. But the magical creatures? As they’d charged at us as soon as they realized we were in the field, I’d assumed that all were as much animals as they appeared. But maybe they weren’t.
“Can any of you speak?” I asked, lifting my voice to be heard across the clearing.
Some of the ghost creatures looked at me. The wolf ghost growled. None answered.
Briar watched me as if I’d lost my mind. “Who are you talking to?”
“The ghosts.” I waved a hand to indicate the ghosts she couldn’t see. I could have expended energy to make them visible and more substantial, but that didn’t seem wise. For one thing, these creatures had attacked us when they’d been inside bodies. And for another, I was already trembling, and not just from the adrenaline letdown anymore. I needed to close my shields soon. I’d be blind, but the longer I stayed in contact with other planes, the longer that blindness would last. I wanted to check out the other body first.
“Are the ghosts human?” Briar asked, her gaze searching for the invisible-to-her ghosts.
I shook my head. “The same creatures we fought as well as others. A lot of others. Small creatures. Probably early experiments, as you said.”
I couldn’t feel the age of ghosts, so I had no idea how long any had been dead. I could get a sense of some of the small bones in the field; though there were too many to examine each, the oldest I could feel was no more than two months old. In contrast, the two bodies of the beasts who had been walking were newer, no more than three weeks old. Strangely, the largest beast was the most recent of the two, even though it had been the most decayed out of any of the walking creatures. Possibly because it hadn’t had a soul? I couldn’t get anything from the ash left from the incinerated beasts.
As I considered that possibility, one of the circling birds overhead swooped down, into the woods, and through the door I’d cut in the ward. I’d thought all the birds were vultures, but this one was a raven. A very large raven.
It didn’t fly to the two remaining corpses but to the ghost of the winged jungle cat. It landed on the ghost’s back, its claws sliding into the insubstantial form. The ghost glowed, flashing bright, and then vanished. It had transitioned and moved on. The raven flew to the next ghost.
No, it wasn’t a raven. It was a soul collector. An animal soul collector.
“Hello,” I said, trying to get the large bird’s attention.
“Now what are you talking to?” Briar asked. When I just waved her off without answering, she shook her head. “Sometimes I’m not sure if you aren’t legitimately crazy.”
I ignored her, making my way toward the raven collector. It looked at me a few times, cocking its head, but it kept flying from ghost to ghost. It had its work cut out for it, but it kept moving, swooping down to collect each soul, even the tiny mice. Once the clearing was free of ghosts, the raven turned and, without a wasted flap of its wings, it flew back through the door I’d cut and was gone.
Chapter 15
It took nearly two hours for the magical hazmat team to arrive.
By then I’d compared the spells on both of the creatures who’d left behind corpses. The big one was covered in indecipherable spells I couldn’t make sense of, but the smaller one, the one I’d ripped the soul out of, had minimal traces of magic, and what was left was too faint for me to get more than vague impressions. Briar was more than a little disappointed. After all, my specialty was the dead. But I dealt with shades, and occasionally ghosts. Despite the cheerily colored magical energy the necromancer used, whatever had happened to these creatures was very, very dark magic.
After I’d given up on detangling the spells, I released the grave and sat at the edge of the clearing, blind. Every time Briar made a noise I jumped, expecting the mysterious necromancer to appear. He still hadn’t shown himself by the time hazmat showed up. Briar talked to the team for a while, but she was done hanging out in the clearing. Someone was going to have to stake out the area in case the necromancer did turn up, but Briar was delegating that to local law enforcement.
Once the scene had been turned over, Briar was ready to leave. Unfortunately, I was still more or less blind. A few shadows of shapes had reemerged in my sight, but it wasn’t enough to get through a hike in the woods. I was too proud to ask Briar to guide me through—and I had serious doubts she would anyway—which meant opening my shields again. I wasn’t actually using any magic this time, just looking, so it didn’t do as much further damage as it could have, but I was still in no shape to drive the car when we reached it.
Which meant reluctantly handing my keys to Briar. And then sitting in the passenger seat of my car, more or less blind, feeling my newish-to-me car careening through the city. By the time she pulled into the parking lot of Central Precinct, I was clinging to the armrest and silently cursing my wyrd ability and my eyes.
I didn’t bother following Briar inside. I was done for the day.
My eyes weren’t as bad as they’d been the day before, but I was way below the visibility limit that I could legally drive with, so I called Rianna for the second day in a row. She was about ready to give up on her current case, but no new clients had stopped in, so she was still poking at the limp mess that was her search for her client’s missing bottle.
It was early afternoon, and I should have gone back to the office, but I was so done with the day. I was hungry after losing my breakfast after the fight, and I was mentally, magically, and emotionally exhausted. I just wanted to go home. So that was where I had her take me.
“You’ve been really quiet,” she said as we pulled into the driveway of Caleb’s house. “Mulling over the case?”
“Something like that,” I said, because I didn’t want to talk about it. In truth, my brooding had only been tangentially connected to the case. I was thinking about the clearing, and watching that creature fall after I took out his legs because I felt that learning what magic had made him was more important than ending his suffering quickly. I didn’t like what that said about me. And I was thinking about the look on that ghost’s face when I’d pulled her out of Remy’s body. His body was dead. She was dead. And I’d prevented people who were alive from being harmed or killed. Death had confirmed that more people would have died if I hadn’t acted. But I was starting to question whether I’d done the right thing. Maybe there had been some other way to stop them.
I climbed out of the car before realizing Rianna wasn’t following.
“You coming inside?” I asked, leaning down to squint at her through the still-open door. Desmond had already scrambled over the seats to take my place, so I mostly only saw a lot of black fur.