Briar pursed her lips and toed the body with one of her black biker boots. “I’m not sure. I mean, I’m guessing he started out dead, so yes. But will he wake up when I counterspell the sleepytime and immobility spells I hit him with? I honestly don’t know.”
I considered opening my shields and looking to see if the soul was still inside, but it wasn’t outside the man, and the body was in good shape for how long dead it felt, so I gambled that it was still inside.
“Do we call the police?” I asked, taking in the broken door, turned-over chairs, and seemingly dead body. This would be fun to explain.
“Yeah, we’ll need them to come process everything, see if we can identify any prints in this room, maybe find Gauhter’s real name, those of his accomplices, and possibly more victims. Speaking of which, I take it you didn’t catch the woman?”
Falin shook his head. “She had an invisibility spell.”
“And an oddity for this case: She wasn’t dead,” I added.
Briar cursed under her breath and pulled out her phone. “I’ll send GPS coordinates to the locals. Hopefully at least one officer is close by who can take custody of this scene. I want to question this guy, if we can wake him.”
“It’s gone,” Remy said, scooting out from where he’d squeezed himself under the dilapidated bed frame in the corner of the room.
“What’s gone?”
“The backpack,” he said, clenching his hands by his sides.
A cold stone dropped into my stomach, weighing down my guts with dread. “And the book?”
Remy nodded. “It was inside.”
Fuck. The woman must have taken it. That meant Gauhter would soon have the alchemist’s journal and whatever was hidden in those magical illustrations. I didn’t know what secrets the spelled pages contained, but the fact that Gauhter wanted them worried me. His magic was strong and evolving, and left a lot of dead bodies in its wake.
Chapter 25
“This has to be the oddest thing that has ever happened in my morgue,” Tamara said with a shake of her head as Remy climbed up onto one of the gurneys.
“It’s really cold,” he said, sitting on the gurney and staring dubiously at the shiny metal surface.
Tamara laughed. “Really? I’ve never had a customer complain before.”
I let that one go. “Remy, you should lie down.”
“Don’t I need to sign a release or something? Maybe some sort of lost-and-found form?”
John, who was here as a witness, shook his head, but he didn’t say anything.
“Briar recorded your witness statement on the drive here. Do you need more time to think this over? You burn your own soul’s energy while you are in that body, but I don’t think a few hours would make much difference,” I said, keeping my voice pleasant, calm. He’d decided he wanted to do this, but I wasn’t going to force it if he needed more time. He was about to save his soul but lose even the semblance of the life he’d been clinging to inside his stolen body. It was a hard decision.
“Maybe I should see Taylor first. Just in case,” Remy said, starting to slide off the gurney. “There are so many things I never got to say.”
“Kid, do you really want her last memory of you being this?” Briar asked from across the morgue where she was leaning against the wall. She had the tact of a charging rhino. “We need to get this over with. I want to interview the walking corpse upstairs.”
I shot a glare over my shoulder at her but forced my features to soften again before I turned back to Remy. “You’ll actually be much more recognizable once you’re a ghost, but you won’t be able to interact with the mortal world in the same way you do inside a body. I will try my best to ensure that you talk to her once this case is over.”
Remy stopped sliding off the gurney and sighed, his shoulders dropping with the movement. Then he twisted, pulling his legs up, and lay down.
Tamara snorted under her breath. “I wish all corpses were so agreeable.”
I shot her a look that was part amusement but mostly asked her to stop mumbling jokes loud enough for Remy to hear. I knew it was her way of dealing with a situation that made her uncomfortable—after all, most corpses didn’t walk in and pick out their own gurney—but she wasn’t helping. She gave me a shrug, the movement jerky with nerves.
“I’m ready,” Remy said, and closed his eyes, looking for all the world like any other inanimate corpse.
I nodded to Tamara, who stepped closer to the gurney.
“Before Alex begins, I’m going to do a very quick sweep for spells, okay?” Tamara asked as she lifted her hands, palms flat, several inches above Remy’s still form.
He didn’t open his eyes as he nodded his consent.
She moved her hands slowly through the air over his body, working from head to feet. Once she reached the bottom of the gurney, she shook her head, biting her plump bottom lip as she looked up at me. “I almost sense something. Like there is a spell I can’t quite wrap my senses around, but nothing blatant. Nothing that screams magic.”
Which was what I’d suspected because that was all I could pick up as well, at least with my shields closed, but while I might have been a skilled sensitive, Tamara was quite possibly the strongest in Nekros. There had been a chance she would have sensed something I couldn’t. She stepped back, and I took her place by the edge of the gurney.
I opened my shields, reaching for my grave magic. It took a moment to gather enough to be usable—I’d really been burning through it quick the last few days. I reached out with the magic, slipping it into the corpse on the gurney. The magic easily crept through the dead skin and sank deep, trying to fill all the space. I kept the trickle slow, trying not to oust Remy’s soul before I could feel around a bit. His soul was so loosely connected to the body, I almost ejected it by accident before I managed to stop the slow dribble of power.
I opened my eyes, my magic whipping around me. The body Remy was wearing hadn’t been dead long, maybe ten hours at most, so the decay I could see in my gravesight wasn’t as horrible as it could have been. Beneath the rotting flesh, Remy’s soul glowed a brilliant yellow, almost vibrating as it tried to cringe away from where my magic filled the body around it. Death had told me the spell was on the souls. I searched for it, and even gazing across several planes of existence, I nearly missed the seven small clumps of magic sewn into the soul at Remy’s chakra points. They loosely secured the soul to the shell. I mentally reached for the magical suture in the center of Remy’s forehead. The spell was the tightly constructed magic I’d come to expect in this case, and while I could feel the familiar signature of power, untangling how the spell worked was beyond me.
On the gurney, Remy’s features had formed into a sharp grimace, and his soul writhed, jerking against the spell I was examining as my focus brought my own grave-chilled magic closer. I pushed with my magic, giving his soul the smallest shove. The magic binding him to the body snapped and his soul popped free of the dead body it had been trapped inside.