I didn’t like where this was going, but I nodded. She gave me an evaluating look. “Think you could cut through this one?”
“Without triggering it?” I trailed my senses across the ward again. While strong, it was thin, no more than an inch thick. The fae dagger probably wouldn’t trigger the ward; it was almost undetectable to witch magic. I moved to retrieve the dagger but then hesitated. My hands were still bound in gauze. This is going to suck. I held out my hands to Falin. “Unwrap me.”
He didn’t look pleased about the plan, but he didn’t argue. When he finished, I studied my unbound hands, flexing my fingers. It hurt, but not as bad as I expected. The healing spells in the gauze had done a good job, and the blisters were already flat, the fluid gone. Not bad. I took the gauze from Falin and shoved it in my pocket—it was covered in my DNA and no way was I leaving it lying around when there was a necromancer sending killing spells after me. Then I knelt and pulled the dagger from my boot.
The hilt bit into the healing flesh on my fingers and palm, but I forced my hand to grip it and hold firm. I crept up the steps, stopping just outside the threshold of the open door. The ward buzzed along my skin. This was going to hurt so bad if I was wrong. Here goes nothing.
I plunged the dagger into the ward and waited. Nothing happened. No spells reached out to engulf me, no alarms sounded, and no necromancers rushed out of the house at me. So far, so good. I dragged the blade down the doorframe, mere centimeters from the wood. I followed the full outline of the doorway and floor, until the ward, no longer attached to anything, dissolved in the door opening. The threshold was bared.
I crouched by the edge of the porch. I couldn’t see anything in the shadows, but I knew Briar and Falin were there. “Done.”
A moment later, both joined me on the porch.
I stepped aside so Briar could take the lead. I thought Falin would go next, but he fell in behind me, covering my back. He had his gun drawn, pointed toward the ground, while Briar had her crossbow loaded with more of her nonlethal, triple-threat darts. I gripped my dagger, barely feeling the pain through the adrenaline pumping through my veins.
“Okay,” Briar said, lifting the crossbow. “Seventeen minutes until sunset. Let’s do this.”
Chapter 27
The first room we entered was a small living room. Toys were scattered across the floor, most mangled beyond recognition. A child-sized plate of food sat untouched on the coffee table beside a cup filled with juice, also untouched. The living room opened to a small kitchen, the open floor plan making it easy to see that both rooms were empty. Briar pushed open a door to reveal a small bathroom, also empty. There was only one other door besides what had to be the front door. Briar pulled it open, sweeping her crossbow in both directions, but there were only stairs, no people.
The small house was a split-level, with stairs going both up and down. Briar glanced at me, a question in her cocked eyebrow. I let my senses stretch.
“There is magic in both directions. But there are dead things below us. A lot of dead things. Maybe buried in the basement. Maybe walking. I can’t tell.”
Briar nodded, and then she lifted a hand to indicate we’d search the upstairs first. Her steps were soundless as she walked up the steps, as were Falin’s behind me. I felt loud by contrast, every scuff of my boots seeming to echo in the narrow stairwell. When we reached the floor above, we found a small hallway with three doors.
The first door revealed a room with two beds, one larger and unmade, the other smaller and covered with a pink ruffled comforter and a filmy pink canopy. The Saunderses’ room, but wherever Rue Saunders was, he wasn’t here. The next door revealed another bathroom. I grabbed Briar’s arm before she could open the third door.
Ward, I mouthed silently. Then I frowned, because the ward wasn’t an alarm or a booby trap, but that strange configuration I’d felt in the clearing. The one that kept soul collectors out. Which was overkill, as we were inside a cemetery anyway, and soul collectors couldn’t enter. I nodded, motioning that it was okay to cross the ward, and Briar pushed the door open softly, her crossbow at the ready.
This room wasn’t empty, but its occupant also wasn’t a threat, and Briar lowered her weapon a hair. At first I thought the woman in the bed was old, but as I looked at her, I realized she was probably only in her forties, illness having aged her. Magic surrounded the bed in heavy layers, tied through both artifacts and medical machines. The tablet that had been stolen from the museum hung above her head, heavy lines of magic connecting it to her. A basin of dark liquid saturated in magic had tubes trailing from it, leading to one of the bags connected to her IV pole. Runes were scrawled on the floor around the bed, as well as other arcane languages I couldn’t recognize but could feel the power lifting from.
The woman was alive, but she shouldn’t have been. The mix-match of machines and magic connected to her were keeping her heart beating, her lungs breathing, but the soul inside her was dim, tired. A chair sat beside her bed, close enough that a person sitting in it could talk to her, hold her hand. A pillow and blanket sat crumpled on the chair, as if whoever used it regularly slept in it, keeping vigil. A single silver-framed photo sat on the arm of the chair, showing the woman as she must have looked when she was healthier, wearing a wedding dress and smiling as she stood arm in arm with a man I guessed was a young Gauhter. We backed out of the room soundlessly, though she was beyond disturbing.
Once the door closed, we looked at each other.
“Well,” Falin whispered as we crept down the stairs. “You surmised that the Saunderses are part of this because they wanted their daughter back. I think we just found Gauhter’s motivation.” He nodded back toward the dying woman’s room.
I thought about the items Gauhter had stolen, the evolution of his ritual, of the fact that the earlier bodies felt very dead but the new ones had gotten increasingly better preserved—at least while a soul was still inside them. He’d been creating better and better vessels for the souls, probably in preparation of moving her to a new body once he perfected his ritual. He was trying to save his wife.
And in the process, he’d murdered at least half a dozen people.
We descended all the way to the basement level. The stairs ended at a door, which was closed. The moisture in the air thickened as we reached the bottom of the stairs. The smell of mold, mildew, and rot permeated the air.
Briar glanced at me before reaching for the doorknob.
“No wards. But a lot of magic. And a lot of dead things.” I shivered, the grave essence tracing over my flesh like a pair of frigid hands. It was the same dark, inky essence I’d felt coming from the soul-eating child. Which meant the dead things I felt weren’t buried but were walking around. And animated with things that had never been meant to exist in this plane.
“Thirteen minutes,” Briar whispered, then shoved open the door.