I had a theory.
“This is them,” Tamara said, roling a second gurney to the center of the morgue.
I nodded. Tamara and I had discussed it and she’d picked the two most inexplicable deaths for me to question.
She hadn’t given me any specifics about the victims, but even ful y shielded I could feel that the bodies belonged to a male and a female. Young, too—my age or a little younger. I couldn’t tel more than that through my shields, but the grave essence in them clawed at the edge of my mind.
“I’m at my wits’ end,” she said, watching as I dragged the tube of waxy chalk I used to draw indoor circles on the linoleum morgue floor. “In the last two weeks, I’ve had over a dozen suspicious deaths of undetermined cause cross my table. These two came in together. They’re young, in my table. These two came in together. They’re young, in good health, with no signs of foul play or disease. And yet they’re dead.” She shook her head, as if the movement could clear away the mystery. “I feel like the universe suddenly changed the rules and no one told me.”
I knew exactly how she felt.
Standing, I recapped my chalk and walked to the center of the circle I’d drawn. Then I turned to her. “Ready?”
At her nod, I tapped into the magic stored in my ring. I spindled out the smal est amount of energy and funneled it into my circle, which shot up around me, glowing slightly blue to my senses.
With the barrier separating me from the outside world, I unclasped my charm bracelet and dropped my mental shields. A frigid wind whipped around me, through me, and my grave-sight blazed into existence, making the world wither and decay. The grave essence in the corpses on the gurneys reached for me, raking at my body and mind with icy claws. I opened myself and let the chil in, let it fil me.
Part of me railed against the invasion of the grave. My warmth boiled in my veins, trying to remind me I was a creature of life, of—at least limited—heat. I pushed that living heat out of me, sending it into the two corpses. Only then did the chil of the grave settle comfortably under my skin, as if I’d reached some sort of balance, a kind of equilibrium with the grave and the land of the dead.
I took a deep breath, and as I exhaled, I reached out with my magic. Using the part of my psyche that touched the dead, I guided the magic into the corpse of the girl, sending it deep into the shel that had once been a person. Her soul was long gone, everything that had once made her someone lost, but a shade, a col ection of her memories stored in every cel of her body, had remained. She was recently deceased, and the shade was strong, emerging easily when I pul ed with power.
A vaporish form sat up through the sheet that topped the body. She might have been nineteen when she died, her body. She might have been nineteen when she died, her pixielike features round as if she hadn’t yet lost al her baby fat. There was no shock in her face, no sorrow. Any trace of personality or sentience had left with her soul; now al that remained was a recording of who she’d once been.
“What’s your name?” I asked, and the shade turned her head toward me.
“Jennifer McCormic.”
“And how did you die, Jennifer?”
The shade cocked its head to the side. “I don’t know. I stopped living.”
That’s what I thought.
“What was the last thing you remember?”
“I met my boyfriend, Andrew. We were going to go for lunch. We were walking across campus and . . .” She fel silent.
“And what?” Tamara asked, stepping up to the very edge of my circle.
“And she died,” I said because I knew the shade wouldn’t. Once her soul was gone, her body had hit the STOP button on the record of Jennifer’s life. That was it.
The end.
“Did anyone approach you before you died?” I asked the shade.
She shook her head and I chewed at my bottom lip.
Sometimes people caught a glimpse of their col ector before they died, but not always, and Jennifer clearly hadn’t.
Since she hadn’t seen the col ector, it was possible that something else caused her death and she hadn’t been reaped, but the unsettled feeling in my stomach had me leaning toward cause of death being soul snatching.
“Rest now,” I said, pushing the shade back into Jennifer’s body. Then I turned to her boyfriend, Andrew.
“We were walking and Jennifer got this funny look on her face and col apsed,” Andrew said without a trace of emotion in his voice, though watching his girlfriend die in front of him had probably made his last moments some of front of him had probably made his last moments some of the worst in his life. Of course, it didn’t sound like that moment had lasted long. “I turned, trying to catch her, and I saw this man. He stuck his hand in my chest.”