Falin glanced at the camera. “You know I’ll have to confiscate that if this officially becomes a FIB case.”
“Yeah, you can file for it with the main office. Alex, go on.”
I didn’t wait to see if the argument would continue, but activated my circle, dropped my shields, and embraced the grave. The chill rushed into me, the unearthly wind tossing my curls around my face. The boy was closest to me, so I reached for him with my magic, my power sliding into the corpse.
The shade I found was weak. Not impossible to raise, and not as weak as the male victim Jenson had me raise days before had been, but noticeably weaker than a fresh body should have been. I paused. Raising a weak shade would take a lot more energy than raising a normal one. And I didn’t have a lot of energy to spare. Time to check the girl. Hopefully, she could give us all the information we needed and I wouldn’t have to expend energy into the weak shade.
I drew my magic back from the boy and reached out to the girl. Sometimes, when I hadn’t performed a ritual in a while, my power all but hemorrhaged out of me, rushing toward any corpse in my vicinity. But I’d used my grave magic a lot recently, and I wasn’t at my strongest, so it reacted placidly as I guided it into the girl.
I frowned. Her shade was even weaker than the boy’s.
“Something has damaged them,” I said, opening my eyes to look at the men in the room with me.
Jenson huffed out a breath between his lips. “Well, I’d say that is stating the obvious.”
I turned a glare toward him. “No, I mean their shades. What was done to their bodies shouldn’t have weakened their shades. But . . . something did.”
“You can’t tell what?” Falin asked.
I shook my head. I’d felt shades that had been shredded by a soul-eating spell before—this wasn’t like that. It was more as if they’d burned out, like a candle that had run out of wick. “Something used them up. Wore them out.”
“What can do that?” John asked, stepping to the very edge of my circle. I tensed—John was a null with absolutely no magical sensitivity. He had a bad habit of walking through my circles.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Some sort of massive energy drain before death?” I’d read a study once that explained how a death due to magical depletion damaged a body down to its DNA. Maybe it could damage the shade as well. It was so rare, I doubted it had ever been studied. “Do we know if either of these victims was a witch?”
John pressed his lips together and then shrugged. “They attended public high school, but that’s not always a good indicator. As high school students, of course, neither had achieved any OMIH certifications, so they aren’t card carriers. Without questioning them or their friends and family, or running a Relative Magic Compatibility test, it’s hard to say. What are you thinking?”
What was I thinking? Magic couldn’t cause knife wounds. Sure, there were offensive spells that could rend flesh, but I doubted that was what we were dealing with in this situation. For one thing, that would still require an outside caster to have delivered fatal blows to both kids, which meant they hadn’t been the ones performing a ritual that had gone out of control and drained their life essence. And if the wounds were magical backlash, they should have been inflicted from the inside out, and while I was no medical examiner, even I could tell the wounds started at the flesh and not vice versa.
I turned back toward the bodies. “I’m going to raise the boy now.”
No one said anything as I pushed my magic into the boy’s body again. It took a lot of magic, and I felt the strain before my heat even rushed out of me, but the shade sat up, solidifying. While the corpse was a mess of lacerations, the killing blow must have come pretty quickly because the shade looked fairly normal, at least from the front. I could have walked around and seen how much damage he’d taken premortem, but I wasn’t that curious.
“What is your name?”
The shade turned his head toward me, his eyes dull, unfocused. Not surprising. “Bruce Martain.”
I nodded in acknowledgment—not that the shade noticed, but even if they weren’t sentient, they looked like people and I tried to be polite. Then I turned toward John. I could have questioned Bruce without guidance—I’d done this dance before—but he’d hired me, so I’d take his lead. Besides, he was recording this. It was better if the cop directed the questions.
“How did you die?” John asked, and I repeated the question for the shade.
“The clown crawled out of the TV. It had a knife.”