Remy shimmered for a moment, and then he solidified, the ghost looking exactly like Taylor’s picture of him.
“Whoa,” he said, running his hand over the football jersey he wore. “That was different . . .” He looked down at the body he’d vacated and his mouth twisted into a frown as he stared at the now-truly-lifeless body. “So that’s her? Man, why didn’t you tell me what a mess I’d made of her hair? I bet she would have been upset to know her body was walking around looking such a mess. I should have taken more care.” He glanced at me. “When you find out who she was, you’ll let me know, right? It seems wrong to not even know her name.”
I nodded and then motioned that the morgue attendant could cover the corpse. The inevitable rapid decay was not evident yet, but I guessed it would be soon.
“Is it done?” Briar asked, pushing off the wall.
Remy walked toward her. “What, you can’t tell?”
She never glanced his way.
I nodded to Briar, and John ran a hand down his mustache.
“The paperwork on this is going to be a nightmare,” he said, turning to leave.
“Tell me about it,” Tamara groused as she followed the gurney into the cold room.
Remy gaped between the two retreating figures. He had his back to Briar and didn’t notice her walking until her shoulder passed through him. He screamed, staring at the spot where, for a brief moment, they’d occupied the same space on different planes. I had it on good authority that it didn’t actually hurt ghosts when people walked through them, but it did feel odd.
“They can’t see you, Remy,” I said.
He whirled around. “Why can’t they see me?”
“Like I said earlier, you can’t interact with the mortal world the same way without a body. Did you ever see a ghost when you were alive? Most people can’t.”
His mouth fell open, as if he was going to say something, but no words came out. He looked around and seemed to see his surroundings for the first time. I’d closed my shields already, but I could guess what he saw—a wasted and rotted version of the mortal world.
“This sucks,” he finally said. “Put me back.”
I shook my head, the movement small, sympathetic. “I can’t.”
“I take it Remy’s ghost stuck around,” Briar said, and I nodded to her.
“As long as he avoids collectors, he can remain in the land of the dead as long as his energy lasts. Now that he’s not burning it fueling a dead body, that could be a very long time.” I said it more for his benefit than hers.
He stared at me, his expression torn between incredulous and angry. “You took me out and can’t put me back? This sucks. What good is being stuck in purgatory forever if Taylor can’t even hear me?”
“I told you that I would help you talk to her.”
Briar, who could only hear my half of the conversation, glanced at her watch. “Can you wrap this up, Craft? I’d like to go question our guest and see if we can’t get a line on Gauhter.”
“Yes,” Remy said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Let’s go find Gauhter. He at least can put me back in a body.”
I didn’t think that was likely to happen, but I didn’t argue with the ghost. I let Briar lead the way back out of the morgue as we went to deal with yet another dead body.
? ? ?
I once again sat in an uncomfortable chair in one of Central Precinct’s interrogation rooms. At least this time I sat on the interviewer side, not the interviewee. An empty chair sat to my right, waiting for Briar once she doused the theoretically sleeping dead guy with an antidote for the potion her foam dart had showered him with earlier. Remy was in the observation room, sulking. John and Jenson were also in the observation room, despite this being their case. I wasn’t sure exactly how they’d lost out to Falin, but the fae stood at my back, looking intimidating.
He’d spent the time I’d been in the morgue on the phone with one of his agents who’d been running down license plates. Most of the plates in the lot hadn’t matched the make and model car they were registered to, but it at least gave us a starting point and a partial list of names. Two of those names we recognized: Annabelle McNabb and Rodger Bartlett. We weren’t sure yet if we had plates that matched the body Remy had temporarily resided in, or the sleeping corpse in front of me, but Falin’s agent was working on pulling driver’s license photos that corresponded to registrations. She’d send us a file with them to review soon. Until then, the best way to find out more information was to question the corpse in front of me.
As I sat in the chair, I let my senses stretch to the corpse across the table. It was coated in a thin sheen of magic that was easily recognizable as the cocktail Briar had used to knock him out. Under that, I could sense a preservation spell, the kind you’d put on food to keep it from rotting. That was interesting. I hadn’t sensed such a spell on any of the other walking corpses. Of course, by the feel of him, this corpse was older than any of the humans I’d encountered while they’d still been inhabited by souls. Not quite as long dead as the two victims from the car wreck, but older than Rodger, the corpse I’d been able to feel on the street. Rodger hadn’t had a preservation spell on him. I wasn’t sure about the two girls, as they’d been collected before we found their bodies, but this fit with the evolution we’d seen in the necromancer’s magic. I definitely would have felt this corpse from a distance, while the newer victims, like Remy, had been caught at the moment of death, keeping the grave essence rising from them to a minimum.
Briar dripped two drops of the liquid from a small bottle on the corpse’s forehead. Then she capped the bottle and retreated back around to our side of the table, sliding smoothly into her chair.
“How long before we know if it works?” Falin asked.
“If it works on the walking dead? It shouldn’t take—”
Her last word cut off as the corpse’s eyes flew open and he tried to jump to his feet. His hands were handcuffed behind the chair with a chain leading to a loop bolted into the ground, so that didn’t go so well for him. He got his feet under him, but his top half didn’t follow and he crashed back into the chair. As the chair was also bolted to the ground, it didn’t budge. If he’d needed to breathe, he would have been sputtering, but as he didn’t, he just looked stunned. His gaze finally landed on us on the other side of the table, and his eyes narrowed.
“Who the hell are you?”
“We were actually going to ask you the same question,” Briar said, leaning back in her chair with a casualness she couldn’t possibly feel.