“Time to look duly cowed, Craft. Let’s do this.”
She dropped the privacy bubble and we headed back to the table. It wasn’t hard to look like I was about to do something I didn’t want to do.
“Last chance,” Briar said as she slipped back into her chair.
Tiffany looked from Briar to me. Her eyes were wide, the whites shiny in the bright lighting of the interrogation room, but she remained silent.
“Okay, do it, Craft.”
I opened my shields, letting my psyche straddle the chasm between the living and the dead. A frigid wind ripped through the room, tossing my curls and catching the notepad Briar still had sitting on the table, making the pages flip noisily. Tiffany stared at me, the horror written in her open mouth, bunched brow, and staring eyes. She looked away, as if not looking into my glowing gaze could stop my power. It couldn’t, but as this was meant to be a bluff, looking away could lessen the intimidation.
I reached out and placed two fingers in the center of her forehead. It wasn’t necessary, and if I hadn’t spent the last few days exhausting my grave magic, it would have put me in danger of losing control, but the magic in me was sated so it behaved nicely. I let the smallest touch of the grave curl out from my fingers, spreading the chill of the dead over the broad forehead my skin touched. Not much; I knew from the previous walking corpses I’d encountered that the soul was not firmly attached to the body the way it would be in its own.
As I let the magic unravel, I searched for the spell binding Tiffany to her shell. It was easier to find than the one on Remy had been. The magical sutures were larger, sloppier, and in different spots. The spell tied her to the body at the head, heart, hands, and feet, and it looked like the spell had been reinforced in several places at least once. Tiffany had said she’d needed Gauhter for magical tweaking. More evidence that his ritual was evolving—but what was his end goal? A seamless soul swap? Why?
As the chill of my magic settled through her, her soul recoiled and Tiffany jerked, trying to get away from my touch. She bucked in the seat, ripping at where the cuffs bound her.
“I’ll talk, I’ll talk. What do you want to know? Please stop. Please.”
I started to pull back, but Briar slammed her palm down on the table, the sound booming through the small room. “You had your chance. Now we’ll question your ghost when you can’t lie or avoid our questions. Craft, keep going.”
That wasn’t the least bit true, and Briar knew it. Which was probably why she’d hidden the lie-detecting charm.
“Let her go. She said she’d talk,” Falin said, from behind me. Good cop coming into play.
I didn’t hesitate or wait for Briar to push, but sat back, closing my shields. The wind immediately stopped, and Tiffany sagged in her chair.
“Thank you,” she said, gazing at Falin like he was her savior.
“You’re welcome. I expect you to answer the investigator’s questions honestly and in full for my intervention.” As soon as the words left his mouth, I could all but feel the electric charge in the air as the price he’d set for her debt wrapped around her.
Clever fae.
Tiffany nodded enthusiastically, likely not even realizing the binding her own words of gratitude had tied around her. It had been well played. Very well played.
A wolfish smile spread across Briar’s face as the realization of what Falin had just pulled occurred to her. She gave him a quick nod of approval, and then she straightened the notepad that had gotten tossed about in the grave wind and looked at Tiffany. “Let’s try this again, shall we? Where were you supposed to take the book?”
“I’m not sure. Honest! Rachael had those details.”
“Rachael?” Briar asked, but I gasped. She turned to look at me, a dark eyebrow lifting.
“Rachael Saunders,” I said, the name jarring a memory of where I’d seen the face before. She’d looked different in my office than when I’d seen her outlined in a brilliant coating of magic in the woods, but now that I’d put it together, I could have kicked myself for not recognizing her earlier.
Tiffany frowned at me. “I only know her as Rachael. They don’t trust us. Not even me despite the fact that I agreed to help in exchange for keeping this body.”
Briar glanced at the charm concealed in her palm. It glowed a cheery green. Tiffany was telling the truth.
“Do you have any idea where Rachael might have planned to meet Gauhter?”
Tiffany shrugged.
Briar frowned at her. “Use your words.”
“Gauhter has a lot of different places he uses,” Tiffany said, and then looked surprised that she’d spoken.
Welcome to the binding compulsion of repaying a debt to the fae. I almost felt sorry for her. Except that she seemed content to work with a bad guy and hide his secrets.
“Where are these places?” Briar asked.
Tiffany started to shrug, but then her mouth opened as if she couldn’t keep the words back. “Some I think he rents. Some he just squats in for a few days at a time. He doesn’t seem to stay in the same place for long. Though I heard them mention ‘the cemetery’ several times over the last week or so. Rachael mentioned it earlier today, so maybe that’s where we were supposed to take the book, but they’ve never taken me to a cemetery before.” The confusion on her face knotted to anger as she spoke, but she couldn’t stop herself from answering Briar’s questions.
It didn’t surprise me that Gauhter had never taken her to the cemetery before. She was still a corpse. She would get stuck if she ever passed the gates.
“Which cemetery?” Briar asked.
If Tiffany answered, I didn’t hear her. A tingling feeling crawled over my flesh, like a spider creeping up my arm, except the feeling was everywhere. Then it intensified, no longer a tingling, but a burn, like I’d spontaneously caught fire.
I pushed away from the table, trying to stand, but tripped backward over my chair. I landed on my ass, all the air rushing out. Lack of air was the only reason I didn’t scream. I was on fire. I was burning.
Except there were no flames.
There was smoke. Though it wasn’t coming from stinging flesh but from my charm bracelet. The charm Derrick gave me.
This was the spell he’d given it to me to protect against. Gauhter had finally used my personal items as a focus to send his attack.
“What the hell, Craft?” Briar said, staring down at where I was trying to get my legs under me.
“Spell. Fire,” I managed to get out.
Falin knelt beside me. He grabbed my shoulders, and I felt cold pour down his hands, into my skin. It wasn’t the chill of the grave, but the cold of snow, of winter.
It didn’t help. The fire kept trying to burn through the protection charm. Any second now it would make it, and I’d burn from the inside out.