Grave Memory: An Alex Craft Novel (14 page)

It stung. Even if I knew why. The rule was no fraternizing. Shop talk only.

So I got down to business and told him everything I knew about the events surrounding Kingly’s death. Falin stopped me a few times for clarification, but mostly he just
listened. When I finished, he was silent long enough that I checked to make sure he hadn’t hung up again.

No, we were connected.

“Falin? Are you there? Could a fae be behind this?”

He answered my question with a question. “The police are not looking into this as anything more than a suicide?”

“Since the shade can’t say he was murdered, no, they won’t open an investigation.”

Silence again. Thick, and heavy, even through the phone. Moments dragged, as if he were putting off what he didn’t want to say. And I soon understood why—it certainly wasn’t anything I wanted to hear.

“There is no reason for the FIB to get involved in the case.”

“But—” I started.

He cut me off.

“If the FIB opens an investigation, even discreetly, it would imply we believed the fae or fae magic was involved. Even if an investigation proved otherwise, the humans would be suspicious of the next suicide and many more after that. Do you know how many people attempt suicide every hour in this country? It reeks of a potential political nightmare.”

My free hand curled into a fist, my nails biting into my palm. “So because no one is questioning Kingly’s death, it’s okay to let a murderer go free so that it doesn’t create bad press for your queen.”

“This is not an FIB matter.” Cold. Hard. Matter of fact. There would be no arguing.

And it hurt.
Sticks and stones my ass.
It wasn’t even the words, it was his tone that could cut.

“Fine,” I sounded defensive. I could hate it, but I couldn’t help it. “Can you at least tell me if there are any fae in the city capable of the kind of magic it would take to force a mortal to commit suicide?”

“Ask your green man.”

“I can’t. Caleb is currently pissed and threatening to evict me because of your raids.”

The silence was different this time. Sharper, with an edge of surprise. Then he sighed and I could imagine him running his fingers through his long blond hair the way he did when lost in troublesome thoughts.

“Some fae can intensify emotion, turning irritation into rage or sadness into despair,” he finally said. The hardness had left his voice, in its place what could be described only as weariness, but not actually friendship. “And as you guessed, some fae can create illusions so flawless a mortal could walk into their death while seeing something benign. But force a man to jump from a building using compulsion?” He paused. “No, our magic could no more do that than a witch’s could.”

I wanted to thank him. I opened my mouth to do just that. Then I closed it again. It would be reckless and foolish to create a debt over a bit of information. Falin belonged to the Winter Queen. If I was indebted to Falin, she was the one who could call it in.

“Okay.” The word was flat, not showing the appreciation I wanted, but I was tired. This conversation, this
game
we were playing—it was too hard.

“Anything else?” he asked.

Yes.
I had so many questions. But none pertained to the case. “No.”

He paused a long moment, then said, “Sleep well, Alexis,” his voice once again warm, soft.

I tried to savor the kindness in that tone. To let it take away the sting and the awkwardness of our conversation, to let it remind me that he wasn’t avoiding me on purpose.

It wasn’t enough.

And yet, I’d call again if I could. I knew I would.

“G’night,” I whispered.

Too late. He was already gone.

“That sounded tense.”

I whirled toward the direction of the voice. Roy sat in the
corner of the room, slowly and deliberately picking up one block at a time.

“How much did you hear?”

The ghost shrugged and a green block with the letter B on it slid through his fingers. He let out a string of curse words that made my ears burn.

“Leave them,” I said. “I’ll gather your blocks and take them to your broom closet in the morning.”

“You mean my
office
.”

Nope, I’d meant broom closet, but I kept my mouth shut. If he wanted to call it an office, it would be an office. Stretching my arms over my head, I yawned, and my jaw popped. Clearly I’d been gritting my teeth too much lately. Though if that was Ryese’s fault or the fact the case kept leading me in circles, I couldn’t be sure.

“I’m going to bed,” I told the ghost, which by long-standing agreement, signaled that he had to leave. “Wish me a solution to this puzzle in my sleep as opposed to good dreams, will you?”

“Case not going well?”

“Understatement.” Though in truth, I didn’t have a case. Not yet at least. I’d been hired only to perform a ritual, but I was invested in this mystery so I hoped Nina Kingly would hire me to continue the investigation.

“Anything I can do. I am a private investigator, after all.”

I rolled my eyes. I’d given him an office and now he was a PI? “Roy, you know you have to have a license to be a PI in Nekros, right?”

“So what, I need to take a test?”

I yawned again, my eyes momentarily tearing from exhaustion “Yeah, a test. And about forty hours of classes, which, as the teacher wouldn’t be able to see you, you would be hard-pressed to prove you attended.”

“That’s discrimination.”

“Well, you could gather a bunch of ghosts and protest discrimination against the corporeally challenged. Unfortunately, no one would notice.”

He frowned, but the look wasn’t just unamused, it was…frightened?

I’d been headed to the bathroom to brush my teeth, but that look stopped me. It also made me remember how Roy had acted around James earlier in the day.

“You don’t get along with other ghosts, do you?”

“You wouldn’t either, if you were dead.”

“You’re right. Ghosts are intolerable,” I said, giving him a pointed look. I was tired. It was time for bed.

His frown didn’t change, if anything, it etched itself deeper in his face. “A better word would be insatiable.”

Huh?

“You ever see a ghost fade?” he asked, wrapping his arms around his chest as if holding himself together.

I nodded. Most cemetery haunts were so faded they no longer remembered who they’d once been.

“Yeah, well, there’s only one way to keep from fading, and that’s to maintain a certain level of leftover life force. By whatever means necessary.”

I had the feeling I didn’t like where this was going.

“I’m guessing not too many ghosts attach themselves to planeweaving grave witches who pump them full of power?”

Roy stared at me, the unmistakable “duh” written across his face.

I swallowed, forgetting how tired I was. “So ghosts cannibalize each other for their life force?”

He nodded.

That was…well, I had a lot of deplorable words to describe it, but what made my skin crawl was much more personal. I saw a soul being sucked dry in my nightmares. And not my soul, because I was the cannibal. The scary part was that the nightmare wasn’t just a bad dream. It was a memory. Yeah, there was a reason I had blood on my hands when I visited Faerie.

“So when you and Kingly were sizing each other up…?”

“Hey, I’ve got you,” Roy said. “I was just making sure he wasn’t going to jump me. Something’s obviously been sucking
on him. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess he’d been dead years, not a week.”

Interesting.
“Can you be more specific?”

“Not really. Might have been another ghost, but I’m thinking something nasty from the waste. Everything is energy in the land of the dead, and most of the really bad stuff hangs out in the wastelands.”

I’d read that last bit in school years ago. It was why grave magic should be performed only in a circle.

“So what makes you think something ate part of our ghost?” I asked, leaning against the bathroom doorjamb.

“Are you kidding? He’s newly dead so he should be at the strongest he’ll ever be unless he starts hunting and draining other ghosts. Instead he looks like someone stuck a straw in him and sucked out a chunk of his core. Kind of weird though. It’s like he’s fading from that one section outward. Sort of like how rot spreads.”

I stared at Roy.
Well, maybe he does deserve his own office.
I certainly hadn’t noticed anything odd about Kingly’s ghost. Granted, what he’d said only added one more question to my already long list, but maybe if I knew the right questions to ask, I’d hit the right answer.

N
ina Kingly was waiting for me when I arrived at Tongues for the Dead the next morning. Clearly she’d missed the part of my message about making an appointment. In fact, there was only one portion of my message she appeared to have heard.

“What do you mean they have pictures of James alone on the roof? I want to see them,” she said before I could so much as insert my key in the lock.

I waited until I’d unlocked the place and turned on the lights before answering. “I don’t have the photos. They are part of the official police file.”

She stared at me with too much of the whites of her eyes showing. “I need to sit down,” she said, her voice wispy, breathless.

Crap, I was about to have a pregnant woman hyperventilate in my office.

Grabbing her by the elbow, I guided her to the secondhand love seat in the lobby. She collapsed onto it.

“It’s true. It’s all true,” she said between gasps, her arms wrapped under the bulge of her stomach. “He left us.”

Her husband’s ghost knelt at her side. “I didn’t, sweetie. I didn’t. Calm down. Please calm down.”

But she wasn’t calming. Her breaths were fast, shallow.

The ghost twisted around, looking right at me. “Do something.”

Like what?

I knelt beside him. “Mrs. Kingly?”

She didn’t even look at me.

“Nina, you’ve got to calm down,” I said, touching her arm.

No reaction.
What will happen to the baby if she passes out?
I was guessing nothing good. I had to get her calm.

Except she didn’t know me. Wasn’t responding to a thing I said. I briefly considered manifesting her husband, but seeing the ghost might shove her over the edge. That left me with one other option. One I wasn’t sure would work but was positive she’d despise.

She can bitch at me after she’s calm.

I unhooked my charm bracelet and pulled on her arm so I could clasp it around her wrist. She didn’t fight me, which was probably a bad sign.

“What are you doing? Help her,” the ghost yelled.

“I am.”

My bracelet contained mostly shields, but I had a couple of other charms I kept on reserve. One of which was a spell I used when I couldn’t calm myself enough to center and project my psyche into the Aetheric. It was like a double dose of Xanax and an hour’s worth of meditation all rolled into a couple of seconds. Clamping my hand around her wrist so that I pressed the charm against her skin, I channeled a trickle of magic from my ring, activating the charm.

Nina Kingly stilled. She leaned back against the love seat, her body going limp, boneless as she took a long, slow breath. Her head rolled to the side, and she looked at me, making a sound that may have been a moan or a really elongated “Oh.”

“That’s nice,” she said, smiling and sinking farther into the love seat—which I wouldn’t have said was possible until she did it. “Did you know your eyes glow?”

She didn’t sound the least bit disturbed by that fact.

“What did you do?” James asked, his hands clenched at
his sides as he looked from me to his now placid and listless wife.

“I calmed her,” I said, reclaiming my charm bracelet.

As soon as the clasp closed around my wrist, Mrs. Kingly’s brow scrunched together, but she didn’t lift her head from where it lolled against the back of the couch.

“The lights went out,” she mumbled, staring at me.

Okay. Clearly too much happy charm for her.

“Mrs. Kingly, do you remember what we were talking about earlier?” I asked, standing across from her.

She nodded, the movement so exaggerated it would have been comical if it hadn’t accompanied her saying, “James killed himself.”

“That’s what the police believe,” I said, “but there are a lot of pieces that don’t add up.”

“You mentioned that on the phone” she said, her words slurred.

Right.
She was out of it. I wanted her to consider what I’d found and hire me to continue investigating, and right this moment she probably would have. But it would be an agreement under magical influence, which was not only unethical. It was illegal.

Which meant any business talk was going to have to wait.

“Well, when you’re feeling up to it, if you would like to talk about what I found, I’m going to be in my office,” I said, and when she only smiled, added, “It’s right through that door.” I pointed, but her expression didn’t change.

Okay then.

I turned toward the ghost. “May I speak with you privately?”