Author: Kalayna Price

“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.

Chapter 11

Nina 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?”

James looked from his wife to me and back. For a moment I thought he’d refuse, and I’d have understood, Nina was in a rather…odd state of mind. But no matter how out of it she appeared, I didn’t think she would miss me questioning what to her would appear as thin air. I’d already said more to the ghost in front of her than I should have, but I hoped she wouldn’t remember.

After another moment of hesitation, the ghost nodded and followed me to my office. I shut the door behind us so that my voice wouldn’t carry to the woman in my lobby. When she came to, I didn’t want her to hear me and think I was talking to myself. Coming off as crazy isn’t a good way to impress clients.

“You can have a seat,” I told him as I stepped around my desk. “If the chair is there for you, that is.”

The ghost looked at the two chairs. “I don’t think they’d hold.”

I only shrugged. Roy could sit in them, but he was pretty juiced up on my energy half the time. This ghost, on the other hand, appeared less substantial than he had the day before. I remembered what Roy had said about the ghost looking like something had sucked part of Kingly out from the inside. I didn’t spot it at first, but then I saw the softball-sized area that was slightly less substantial than the rest of him.

“Your shade confirmed your story,” I told him, not surprised when he gave me a dull look in return. While I might have doubted him, he’d known he wasn’t lying. “The fact that your memory goes from the bar to being dead with three days missing in between makes me think you didn’t kill yourself, regardless of all the evidence to the contrary. The problem is, no magic I know of could force you to throw yourself off a building. Can you think of anything, anything at all, that could have happened at the bar or directly after you left that you’d be so ashamed of that you’d be forced to erase your own memory and jump off a building?”