Grave Memory: An Alex Craft Novel (22 page)

The girl looked at the ground, but that didn’t stop me from seeing the flush that lit her face. “He’d had a bad couple of days. Something happened at football practice, and
then he started feeling ill. I’d talked to him the night before, when he’d canceled our study session—I was tutoring him in math. He said he had to cancel because he was coming down with the flu. He sounded awful, actually sick. Not like the times he claimed he was and then went to a party. So I picked up breakfast at the cafeteria for him and took it to his dorm room. I felt bad for him, you know? Until I got there and discovered he definitely wasn’t sick. He’d blown me off. Again. Not completely surprising, I mean, he was a football player and I’m a math nerd.” Her ears turned the color of strawberries and I could almost see the heat coming off her flushed face. “But then he invited me in and I, uh, missed all my morning classes. I’ve never skipped classes before but…”

By the depth of her blush, I guessed they hadn’t made up the lost tutoring time. “You had sex?” I asked, and when she cringed, I inwardly cursed myself for my bluntness. Tact wasn’t my strongest trait.

She pushed off the ground and ran a hand through her dark hair so that it fell into her face. “I have to go.” She turned all but running for her dropped backpack.

“Wait,” I yelled, after her. She didn’t stop.
Damn it.
I broke my circle and rushed after the girl. The planes were still overlaying my vision and I tripped over a bouquet of flowers that had been so withered in my vision I hadn’t noticed them.

I didn’t catch up with Allison until the cemetery gate. “Wait,” I said again, catching her arm.

She jumped, chill bumps shooting across her bared skin. “Damn, lady, you’re cold.”

In more ways than one
. Because I was about to grill her about her dead crush. “When you were…with Daniel on Wednesday, did he seem odd. Different?”

“Yeah, he picked me instead of one of the coeds who would have loved to jump into his bed. That odd enough for you? Clearly sleeping with me was a sign of severe mental stress.”

Her lips quivered and she made a sound that could have
been a laugh or a sob—was probably both. Angry tears made her long hair stick to her cheeks, and her shoulders trembled, even though she didn’t make a sound. I guessed it wasn’t just the first time she’d slept with Daniel, it was the first time she’d slept with
anyone.

When Allison wasn’t hiding behind her hair—or blotchy from crying—I bet she was a very pretty girl. A girl who deserved better than a football player that used her to keep his GPA high enough to play. I wanted to hug the girl, to tell her it would be all right. That she’d find someone better. But even though only seven or so years separated our ages, she was still more teenager than young adult, and I knew she wouldn’t believe me—I wouldn’t have at her age. Hell, with the state of my love life, I wasn’t in any position to offer advice.

But I could give her one thing. “He really was ill Tuesday night. He said he went to bed early and shades can’t lie.”

She looked up, blinking at me. “Really?”

I nodded, giving her my best sympathetic smile, because I was about to push her again. “Allison, I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, but when you were with Daniel, did he seem confused?”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” She turned down the sidewalk.

I kept pace with her. “Did he use your name?”

Her head shot up and she rounded on me. “Of course he—” She stopped. Her mouth opened slightly as her jaw went slack, and her shoulders shook as a new tear slid down her cheek. “No. Not once. And after…after he asked if I knew where he parked his car.” Lines of frowns creased her forehead. “He didn’t have a car. I thought he was hinting that he wanted to borrow mine. I gave him the keys and told him which garage it was in. That was the last time I saw him.”

Her eyes were too wide as she looked up at me. “There was something wrong with him when we…” She trailed off. Her lips, her nose, her chin, and just about every muscle in her face quivered. She hugged herself, tucking her hands in her armpits.

I wished I could have lied. Could have told her that his shade said he’d wanted her for a long time or that it was the happiest morning in his life. But his shade didn’t even know that morning existed. And I couldn’t lie. So I remained silent.

She stared at me for several more seconds, and then turning on her heels, she all but ran away.

A hard knot of guilt twisted my stomach as I watched her go. I’d just taken what was probably a bittersweet memory of the last bit of time she spent with someone she cared about and torn it to shreds. But I’d needed to know if Daniel was himself, or if he was someone else entirely.

It sounded a hell of a lot like the latter.

I
called Rianna for a ride before releasing the other planes of reality and surrendering to the inevitable darkness. The world was still little more than inky blackness by the time she picked me up.

“Your instincts were right on the mark,” she said as I climbed blindly into the car—only to find a barghest in the front passenger seat.

“It’s my car, I’ve got shotgun,” I told him, and the doglike fae huffed, but climbed into the back. After slamming the door, I fumbled with the seat belt as Rianna pulled away from the curb.

“So you found a restaurant where Kingly ate?” I asked once the satisfying click of the buckle latching finally sounded

“A restaurant? No. I found three. And get this, as I was showing the photo around, I warned people he might have been considerably thinner. The staff at all three restaurants said he looked exactly like he had in the photo. Including the five star joint he ate lunch at on Friday.”

“But…” I blinked in the darkness, my thoughts racing. Tamara had said he’d eaten within hours of his death. I’d seen the pictures of the skeletal figure on the roof. Hell, I’d seen enough of the shade to know he wasn’t a husky man
when he dove off that building. “That means whatever sucked the health and vitality out of him did it in hours, not days.”

That or he’d been processed by something that could use glamour to make the withering body
look
unchanged.

“Here’s another interesting thing,” she said and I heard her flip on the turning signal. “After striking out at the nicer-looking restaurants close to Delaney’s, I did a search on my phone for five-star joints—the types of places that would serve caviar and escargot. It took me a couple of hours and way too much driving to figure out, but he hit them in alphabetical order. I mean, he started in the middle of the list, but despite the restaurants being scattered across town, he went to Maven’s on Wednesday, Ophelia’s on Thursday, and Pandora’s Delight on Friday—which might explain why he was in the Magic Quarter though not how he ended up on the roof of a seedy place like Motel Styx.”

I gave a low whistle at the named restaurants. The first two were pricey and hard to get into without making reservations weeks in advance. Or so I’d been told. I’d certainly never been to either. Hell, I didn’t even own any clothes likely to meet the dress code for such places. But Pandora’s Delight? Now that was a different story altogether. Oh, they still served five-star cuisine, but it was a members only establishment, largely due to a floor show that included a lot of sex appeal and even more magic. I’d been inside once, by invitation of one of the owners who’d been under the mistaken assumption that magic as showy as grave magic might both frighten and captivate his members. I’d taken advantage of the free meal before turning him down flat. I didn’t disturb the dead for entertainment purposes.

“How did Kingly get in to Pandora’s Delight? He was Humans First Party—no way was he a member.”

“I asked the same question. He had money. And was quite generous with it, apparently. That was one reason the doorman remembered him,” Rianna said, the car slowing as she stopped for a light. The darkness was finally peeking
back from my vision, but not enough that I could puzzle out our location from the shadows surrounding the car.

“I wonder where he got the cash,” I said, more to myself than to Rianna. She answered anyway.

“His own bank most likely. He used his name and credit cards most of the time so it wouldn’t surprise me if he used his bank card to pull funds.”

I frowned. “He was reported missing. You’d think the cops would notice the charges on his cards.”

My vision was clear enough that I could see Rianna shrug. “I don’t think he was missing long enough.”

Maybe not. I chewed at my bottom lip. But if Kingly used his own card, tracking his movements would be a hell of a lot easier.
And if Kingly did, would Kirkwood and Walters have as well?

It was definitely worth looking into.
And speaking of Daniel Walters
…I filled Rianna in on what I’d learned from Daniel’s shade as well as Allison’s comments about his actions during the time the shade couldn’t remember.

“This isn’t a spell, is it?”

“Doesn’t seem that way.” And if it wasn’t a spell, the prospects that left were terrifying because possession was moving up the list. The thought about possessed bodies reminded me of the ghouls and Briar, which I hadn’t told Rianna about. Considering Rianna was also a grave witch, Briar was likely to jump her next. She could use a heads-up about the militant inspector. I was just finishing recounting the conversation as the familiar tingle of magic from the Quarter filled the air.

“Ghouls, seriously?” Rianna shook her head. “I always assumed they were the boogeymen of grave witches. You know, horror stories the teachers told us to ensure we always worked within a circle.”

“Apparently not,” I said as she pulled to a stop in front of our office. We were officially closed for the evening by this point, but I needed my laptop and, with dusk approaching, Rianna needed to return to Faerie.

As soon as I climbed out of the car, Desmond crawled to
the seat I’d abandoned. I frowned at the barghest, who was little more than a large black blob to my bad eyes. Color was seeping back into the world, but the late evening sun didn’t help. My thoughts had circled back to Kingly and Walters’s strange behavior, and before shutting the car door, I turned back toward Rianna. “When Coleman—”

She cut me off. “Whatever we’re dealing with, it couldn’t be like him. It took elaborate rituals for Coleman to switch bodies.”

And the body thief hadn’t burned through and discarded bodies anywhere near as fast as whatever we were dealing with. There was also the fact the shades were still in the body at death. It didn’t add up. The more we learned, the less everything fit together.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to take you home?” Rianna asked as I slung my purse over my shoulder.

“Make you drive out to the Glen only to have to return to the Quarter so you can get to the Bloom before sunset?” I shook my head, which throbbed with my tangled thoughts. “It’s not worth the risk. What if you hit a traffic jam? I’ll be fine, but it would be nice if you could ask Holly or Caleb”—if he was speaking to me yet—“to pick me up after dinner.”

“Sure,” she said, and I noted the relief in her voice. Shutting the door, I stepped back so she could get to the Bloom. She wasn’t exactly cutting it close, but it was closer than she liked.

I waved at the blur that was my car before letting myself into the offices of Tongues for the Dead. Only the smallest amount of the evening sunlight filtered through the front window, which pretty much left the lobby pitch-black to me. I sighed, feeling along the wall for the light switch when a crash sounded from farther inside the office and a shimmery head popped through the door of the broom closet.

“Hey, Alex,” Roy said, stepping though the door once he saw it was me. “Where have you been? Someone stopped by the office while you were gone.”

Just my luck. “Do you know who it was?”

“She left a note. I put it on your desk.” The accomplishment
in his voice at moving a piece of paper from one room to another was so thick that I couldn’t help smiling.

“Good work,” I told him and the ghost beamed.

“So are we on the same case? What can I do?”

“Yes, to the first and as to the second, I’m not even sure what I can do,” I said, my smile falling away as weariness from a day filled with two rituals, a visit from a militant official, and too many questions without any answers settled on me once again.

The ghost’s glowing happiness evaporated. “Oh, well, I guess if you need me I’ll be in my office.” He floated back through his door without another word.

If I could have thought of a single thing I needed that he could accomplish, I’d have gone after him, but I had nothing, so I retreated to my own office. As Roy had promised, a folded note sat in the center of my desk. I picked it up and found it contained a name, Kelly Kirkwood, followed by a phone number and the words
please call me
in all capital letters.

I woke my computer and squinted to make out the time on the screen—it was quarter till seven. After business hours for sure, but not actually late.
But am I up to talking to the widow of a man I identified this morning?