After so long in Faerie, it felt odd to walk through the VIP door and into mortal reality, but it wasn’t the draining sensation it had been before I’d been granted independent status. I rolled my shoulders and turned toward the bouncer. It was the same slightly dim troll who’d been working when I’d entered with the queen.
“What’s the date and time?” I asked.
He gave me a confused look, and held up his wrist where he wore a small clock as a watch. I couldn’t help but smile. I’d lost only four hours in Faerie. Sometimes the freaky doors actually worked for me. Grinning, I all but skipped as I made my way to the front door.
My phone beeped as Falin and I walked out of the Bloom, indicating a new voice mail message. I dug it out of my purse and glanced at the display.
Caleb.
I played the message as I followed Falin toward his car.
“Al, what did you do now?” Caleb’s agitated voice asked in the message. “Why did Rianna just walk out of a castle that materialized in my backyard?”
Oops. Apparently, now that I had my independent status, Faerie had moved my castle out of limbo and into my new territory: the mortal realm.
This was going to take a little explaining. . . .
Read on for a special preview of the next Alex Craft novel by Kalayna Price, coming from Roc Books in 2017.
The first time I realized I could feel corpses, I had nightmares for a week. I was a child at the time, so that was understandable. These days I was accustomed to the clammy reach of the grave that lifted from dead bodies. To the eerie feeling of my own innate magic, responding and filling me with the unrequested knowledge of how recently a person died, their gender, and the approximate age they’d been at death. When I anticipated encountering a corpse, I tightened my mental shields and worked at keeping my magic at bay, but usually that was only necessary at places like graveyards, the morgue, and funeral homes—places one might expect to find a body.
I never expected to feel a corpse walking across the street in the middle of the Magic Quarter.
“Alex? I’ve lost you, haven’t I?” Tamara, one of my best friends and my current lunch mate, asked. She sighed, twisting in her seat to scan the sidewalk beyond the small café. “Huh. Which one is he? I may be married and knocked up, but I know a good-looking man when I see one, and, girl, I don’t see one. Who are you staring at?”
“That guy,” I said, nodding my head at a man in a brown suit crossing the street.
Tamara glanced at the squat middle-aged man who was more than a little soft in the middle, and then she cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’ve seen what you have at home, so I take it this is business. Did you bring one of your cases to our lunch?”
I ignored the “at home” comment, as that situation was more than a little complicated, and shook my head. “My case docket is clear,” I said absently, and let my senses stretch. When I concentrated, I could feel grave essences reaching from corpses in my vicinity. All corpses. There were decades of dead and decaying rats in the sewer below the streets and smaller creatures like insects that barely even made a blip on my radar, but like called to like, and my magic zeroed in on the man.
“He’s dead,” I said, and even to me my voice sounded unsure.
Tamara blinked at me, likely waiting for me to reveal the joke, but when I pushed out of my seat as the man turned up the street, she grabbed my arm. “I’m the lead medical examiner for Nekros City, and I can tell you with ninety-nine point nine percent certainty that the man walking down the street is very much alive.” She put extra emphasis on the word “walking,” and on any other day, I would have agreed with her.
My own eyes agreed with her. But my magic, that part of me that touched the grave, that could piece together shades from the memories left in every cell of a body, disagreed. That man, walking or not, was a corpse. Granted, he was a fresh one—the way he felt to my magic told me he couldn’t have been dead more than an hour. But he was dead.
So how the hell had he just walked into a shop specializing in high-end magical components?
After dropping enough crumpled dollars on the table to cover my portion of the bill and tip, I sprinted toward the shop across the street. Behind me, Tamara grumbled under her breath, but after a moment I heard her chair slide back as she pushed away from the table. She hadn’t quite caught up as I reached the door to the shop.