Instead I focused on the body under the rotted sheet. With so much of my magic filling the corpse, it took only a twitch of my will to form the man’s memories into a shade. It sat up through the sheet, seemingly unaware of its crushed and misshapen head and broken body. I averted my eyes from the mangled mess. Unlike ghosts, which tended to look like how the person had perceived themselves during life, shades always appeared as the body existed the moment before the soul was collected.

With the shade raised, I focused on a new mental shield I’d spent the last month constructing. It sprang up in my mind’s eye like an opaque bubble around my psyche. Immediately the layers of different realities dimmed. They didn’t disappear, and the shield didn’t stop the grave essence, but in theory it helped prevent my powers from reaching across those planes of reality. Also, from previous rituals, I’d noticed that my eyesight took considerably less damage when my psyche only looked across the planes through the shield, as opposed to having an open channel.

Shield in place, I turned back to the shade I’d raised, though I couldn’t bring myself to look directly at its misshapen form.

“What is your name?” I asked. I knew his name, of course, but usually when I raised a shade in the morgue, it was for an official police case, and the shade had to identify itself for the record. It had become habit.

“James Kingly.”

“James, do you remember how you died?”

The shade sat perfectly still, not answering. Shades always answered immediately, unless the question was outside the scope of what the body remembered. His death shouldn’t have been hard to recall.

A bubble of panic built in my chest, pressing against my lungs so it was hard to breathe. Shades were nothing more than memories held together by grave magic and the witch’s will, but my magic had become erratic recently and I’d filled the corpse with a hell of a lot of it.

Then the shade spoke, the delay, which had felt like forever, only a few seconds. “There was blood and pain. Things were broken. I was on my back and then…” He trailed off, which meant that was the moment a collector had freed his soul and the RECORD button on his life had stopped.

Okay, so he’d described the moment of his death. I’d asked that same question to hundreds of shades and most described the events leading up to their deaths, not just the last moment. Did my grave magic go wrong? It was the one magic I’d always been able to rely on behaving. My spellcasting sucked, and the whole planeweaving thing was new and a mess, but I’d always been able to raise shades, and I was damn good at it. So what the hell was going on?

“Before the blood and pain, what were you doing?”

No hesitation this time. “Sitting in Delaney’s draining my second beer.”

I stared at the shade, speechless. That isn’t possible.

From outside my circle Tamara said, “How can he not remember jumping? His blood alcohol level wasn’t near high enough for him to have stumbled over the edge of that building in a drunken stupor. And where the heck is Delaney’s—I’ve never heard of it. I thought shades couldn’t lie.”

“They can’t.” Or at least they weren’t supposed to be able to. They were just memories. All will, ego, and emotion had left with the soul when it was ripped from the body.

“Rest now,” I told the shade, pushing it back into the body. I drew part of my magic out of the corpse, and then called the shade again. It returned, slightly more translucent than before. I asked the shade the same question, and got the exact same answer.

“That’s not possible,” I said, seriously wishing I had a chair inside the circle because collapsing into a seat sounded like a plan. But that wasn’t an option. “James, do you remember being on the roof of Motel Styx?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been to Motel Styx?”

“No.” No hesitation. No emotion. It was the type of response I expected. Except it wasn’t true. I knew, without a doubt, that he’d been at that building.

What the hell?

“I think the OMIH might have to reevaluate the honesty of shades,” Tamara said, pacing the edge of my circle.

Maybe, but…“James, did you jump off the roof of Motel Styx?”

“No.”

“Have you had suicidal thoughts in the last six months?”

“No.”

“Did you lie to your wife about meeting clients and instead go to an Irish pub?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” I hadn’t had a chance to ask James’s ghost that question before his wife returned, but then he’d been dodgy about admitting he’d been at the pub for any reason other than what he’d told his wife. I much preferred the shade’s direct, unemotional answers.

“When Nina got pregnant, we both agreed that since she couldn’t drink, I wouldn’t either. But I needed a beer.”

Or two, apparently. “What time did you leave the pub?”

The shade didn’t answer.

Tamara stopped pacing and frowned at the shade through the blue haze of my circle. “What is wrong with him, Alex? Doesn’t he have to answer you?”

He did. Unless he doesn’t know the answer. I no longer feared my magic had gone awry. Everything the shade said confirmed what the ghost had told me in my office. But that meant that James Kingly had lost three days of his life, including the moment he’d decided to die.

Chapter 6

I put the shade back in its body because there was nothing more it could tell me, and then I reclaimed my heat and wrapped up the ritual. Tamara wheeled James Kingly’s body back to the cold room as I stood there blinking at the thick gray film coating my vision.

“How are the eyes?” Tamara asked, and I turned toward the sound of her voice. As she crossed the room, I could track her movement, but as soon as she stopped, she blended into the bleakness. Either my expression or my silence was answer enough because she said, “That bad, huh?”

I shrugged, hating the pity in her voice nearly as much as I hated the blindness. Times like this were when it was tempting to open my psyche and see across planes. It could be confusing, seeing multiple layers of reality stacked on top of each other, but at least I could see. Of course, that would only exacerbate the problem when I finally locked my shields again. Currently the shadows were gray, not black, and I could make out the outline of the shelves and tables in the room, so hopefully my vision would soon clear enough that I could safely navigate to the elevator. Until then…

“You want some coffee?” Tamara asked, as if reading my need for a distraction.

“That would be great.” And warm. I shivered. I should have brought a jacket. Except I hadn’t planned on raising a shade when I’d left the house, and September in Nekros was not what you’d describe as cold. Sometimes the nights were chilly, but after the blistering heat of July and August, September was downright comfortable. Of course, that meant I sometimes forgot to carry a jacket.

Reaching a slightly trembling hand toward what looked like the outline of one of the autopsy tables, I started in the direction of Tamara’s office.

“You need help?” she asked, and if I’d had any heat left, it would have rushed to my cheeks.

I hated being treated like an invalid, more so because sometimes it truly was necessary. But not right now. “Just lead the way,” I told her, because as long as she was moving, I could see her.

I followed her gray shadowlike form, managing to graze only one counter…and slam my shoulder against the doorframe of her office. The small “mmph” that escaped me on impact made her stop, but, thankfully, she didn’t mention the misstep. All and all, not my most successful pathfinding.

If my eyesight continued to degenerate this rapidly, I might need to look into some alternatives. Maybe I could train PC as a Seeing Eye dog. Of course, I couldn’t even get the six pound Chinese crested to walk on a leash without pulling. Who knew where we’d end up if I relied on his guidance.

I shuffled around Tamara’s office, searching for a place to sit. As I sank gratefully into Tamara’s spare chair, I heard the coffeemaker turn on. Central Precinct was infamous for the burnt sludge most of the cops choked down, but here in the morgue, Tamara kept her own machine and a stash of good dark roasted coffee beans.

“So did anything strange stand out in Kingly’s autopsy?” I asked as the smell of rich coffee wafted through the small office.

“Let me glance over my notes,” she said, and I could almost hear the frown on her face, even if I couldn’t see it. I knew her well enough to guess she was kicking herself, sure she’d missed something.

“He likely jumped, even if he can’t remember,” I said as I heard the sound of her file cabinet opening. “You weren’t wrong about that.”

Paper crinkled as she riffled through a file. “All the physical evidence pointed that way. But there had to be a spell involved, right?” She paused. “Or could brain damage have caused the memory loss?”

I considered the idea. Memories were stored in every cell of the body, but they were limited to what the soul experienced and remembered. Dementia, brain damage, brainwashing, or spells affecting memory—if powerful enough—could change what the body recorded and what the shade reported. But I didn’t think brain damage was the issue in this case. “Kingly died too soon after impact for the damage to have changed his memory.”

“Alex, he died on impact.”

I didn’t bother arguing if life ceased when the body died or when the soul left the body. Remove the soul, and the body dies. Even if it takes a couple minutes for the person to be considered medically dead, the shade would have no memory of that time. On the other hand, a body could be medically dead but the soul still in it, and the shade would know everything that happened to the body after death until the soul was finally freed. Which equalled true death? It was a topic on which a medical professional and a grave witch were unlikely to ever agree.