Grave Visions(115)

Oops. Apparently, now that I had my independent status, Faerie had moved my castle out of limbo and into my new territory: the mortal realm.

This was going to take a little explaining. . . .





Read on for a special preview of the next Alex Craft novel by Kalayna Price, coming from Roc Books in 2017.





The first time I realized I could feel corpses, I had nightmares for a week. I was a child at the time, so that was understandable. These days I was accustomed to the clammy reach of the grave that lifted from dead bodies. To the eerie feeling of my own innate magic, responding and filling me with the unrequested knowledge of how recently a person died, their gender, and the approximate age they’d been at death. When I anticipated encountering a corpse, I tightened my mental shields and worked at keeping my magic at bay, but usually that was only necessary at places like graveyards, the morgue, and funeral homes—places one might expect to find a body.

I never expected to feel a corpse walking across the street in the middle of the Magic Quarter.

“Alex? I’ve lost you, haven’t I?” Tamara, one of my best friends and my current lunch mate, asked. She sighed, twisting in her seat to scan the sidewalk beyond the small café. “Huh. Which one is he? I may be married and knocked up, but I know a good-looking man when I see one, and, girl, I don’t see one. Who are you staring at?”

“That guy,” I said, nodding my head at a man in a brown suit crossing the street.

Tamara glanced at the squat middle-aged man who was more than a little soft in the middle, and then she cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’ve seen what you have at home, so I take it this is business. Did you bring one of your cases to our lunch?”

I ignored the “at home” comment, as that situation was more than a little complicated, and shook my head. “My case docket is clear,” I said absently, and let my senses stretch. When I concentrated, I could feel grave essences reaching from corpses in my vicinity. All corpses. There were decades of dead and decaying rats in the sewer below the streets and smaller creatures like insects that barely even made a blip on my radar, but like called to like, and my magic zeroed in on the man.

“He’s dead,” I said, and even to me my voice sounded unsure.

Tamara blinked at me, likely waiting for me to reveal the joke, but when I pushed out of my seat as the man turned up the street, she grabbed my arm. “I’m the lead medical examiner for Nekros City, and I can tell you with ninety-nine point nine percent certainty that the man walking down the street is very much alive.” She put extra emphasis on the word “walking,” and on any other day, I would have agreed with her.

My own eyes agreed with her. But my magic, that part of me that touched the grave, that could piece together shades from the memories left in every cell of a body, disagreed. That man, walking or not, was a corpse. Granted, he was a fresh one—the way he felt to my magic told me he couldn’t have been dead more than an hour. But he was dead.

So how the hell had he just walked into a shop specializing in high-end magical components?

After dropping enough crumpled dollars on the table to cover my portion of the bill and tip, I sprinted toward the shop across the street. Behind me, Tamara grumbled under her breath, but after a moment I heard her chair slide back as she pushed away from the table. She hadn’t quite caught up as I reached the door to the shop.

The shop’s wards tingled along my skin as I stepped through the threshold. I’d never been in this shop before. The types of magic I could create didn’t require any outside components aside from the occasional storage vessel, like the silver charms dangling from my bracelet—not that I’d created most of those either. I sucked at traditional spell casting. But my ability to sense magic was acute, and the wards on the doors had some hard-core theft deterrents that prickled at the edge of my senses. Of course, most magic that used components required items that were rare or hard to acquire, or were just plain dangerous, so it probably wasn’t surprising that such extensive wards were in place.

Not everyone could feel wards though. Clearly the corpse I’d followed in didn’t comprehend the extent of the shop’s theft-deterrent system.

I’d entered only minutes behind him, but he almost barreled into me as I stepped through the door. His shoulder brushed me at the same moment he hit the antitheft wards, and several things happened at once. The wards snapped to life, blaring a warning to the shopkeeper to let him know something was being stolen. Simultaneously, a theft-deterring paralytic spell sparked across the would-be thief, locking his body—and the merchandise—in place.