I didn’t cross the room. Not immediately at least. Something here doesn’t add up. In folklore, fae would sometimes pass glamoured leaves or rocks off as money. At sunset or dawn the glamour would vanish. That practice was, of course, illegal, but Jenson was acting rather suspicious. I had to check.
Cracking my shields, I let my gaze travel through planes of reality. I’d recently discovered that I could pierce glamour when my shields were down. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet learned how to discriminate which levels of reality I peered into, so as my shields opened, colorful tendrils of magic from the Aetheric plane popped into view and the room around me appeared to decay as my psyche touched the land of the dead.
I glanced at the money Jenson still held toward me. It withered in my gravesight, but it didn’t change into anything else, so it was real. Slamming my shields shut, I pushed the other layers of reality away. The momentary touch made the room dimmer, but that might have been more a reaction to the loss of Aetheric color than damage. Or at least I hoped so. Stepping gingerly across the room, I accepted the money.
Jenson studied me as I folded the bills and shoved them in my back pocket. He still looked like he’d just dodged a bullet by paying me in cash—what did he expect I’d want? Of course, the currency of Faerie was largely debts and power, so maybe he’d expected me to ask for a boon. But I lived in mortal reality.
And I planned to keep it that way.
“There is still paperwork to sign.”
Jenson scowled. “We don’t have time to waste discussing all the reasons that is a bad idea.”
As this was an active police case, my raising the shade could be seen as interference. Without either police or family authorization, it was my ass on the line if we were caught. There was no way I was going any further without paperwork.
My expression clearly spoke for me, because after a moment Jenson let out a breath and said, “I’ll sign something acknowledging I hired you. After the ritual. My word. Nothing official or specific, mind you, but something that will cover you legally. Now can we get moving?”
As a fae’s word was fairly well unbreakable, I accepted with a nod, but then Jenson looked uncertain as he glanced first at the gurney in front of him and then around the room. He’d seen me raise shades before, but only once or twice. Like I said, John was my typical contact with the police. Or Tamara, if I had family authorization to see a body in the morgue.
“The center of the room would be best,” I said, nodding in that direction as I dug through my purse for a tube of waxy chalk.
Jenson pushed the gurney to the spot I’d indicated. “There might be a second one,” he said, stepping back.
“A second what? Body?” I asked as I duckwalked, dragging the chalk along the linoleum floor to form the physical outline of my circle. “Another shade will cost more.”
“Fine, we’ll sort that out if it comes to it. Can you do that any faster?”
I didn’t bother answering that question. “Are you going to set up the camera?”
“I don’t want any record of this. Things get out sometimes.”
I cringed. Yeah, I knew that firsthand. I’d become infamous a couple of months back because of a leaked recording made right here in the morgue.
I finished the circle and stood. “Well, then, I’ll get started.” I tapped into the energy stored in the obsidian ring I wore, intending to activate my circle, but as I began channeling magic into the circle I stopped and looked around. “Detective, mind your toes.”
Jenson glanced down at where his shoes crossed the thin chalk line. Then he backed up, color crawling to his cheeks. Nodding, I closed my eyes.
Channeling energy into the waxy line, I activated my barrier and it sprang up around me. The barrage of grave essence fell away so that I could feel only the essence lifting from one corpse, the girl in the circle with me. I kept additional shields in charms on a bracelet I wore, so I removed it first, then I opened my personal shields.
I’d always imagined my outer shield as a knotted wall of vines—maybe I’d watched Sleeping Beauty too often as a child—but I’d always found a living shield helped guard me from the touch of the grave best. I let those thorny vines slither apart now, opening the shield, but simultaneously I envisioned a thin, clear barrier springing up between my psyche and the world. This shield was new, one I’d had to fashion after I’d begun accidentally merging reality. It helped keep my powers from reaching out and pulling layers of the world into contact with one another, but the real trick was keeping it thin enough that my grave magic could still pass through it.