Larry looked at me a little oddly, like he was on his way to wondering if I had lost my mind. Better spill the beans before he got to that point.
“Your wife is dead,” I blurted, then I cringed because I hadn’t planned just to say it like that. I was going to attempt to cushion the blow somehow.
Larry didn’t speak. He just stood there, his expression frozen.
“I’m sorry,” I said, releasing a breath. “I just came from a crime scene, and Leslie was the victim. It seems to have been done by a ghost monster.”
“Seems?” Larry said sharply.
“I mean, it was a ghost monster,” I amended.
Micah and I may have questions about what we’d found, but I wasn’t going to share our uncertainties with Larry. I at least knew sharing details about an investigation with a ghost client was a no-no.
“I’m really sorry, Larry,” I said. “We’ll hunt down the beastie and take care of it, don’t worry.”
“Leslie is dead,” Larry said. I couldn’t really decipher the emotion in his voice. He was quiet for a few moments, staring at the floor or around the office and frowning as though he was thinking.
I stood there, twisted my fingers around, and waited him out. Guess everyone reacted to bad news in their own way. I was thankful he hadn’t started wailing and making a scene though.
“But you know, maybe this is a good thing,” I said, because the silence was beginning to get awkward. “Maybe her ghost will stick around, and you can see her for a while, though hopefully her unfinished business won’t be a laundry list like yours. Or if her ghost doesn’t manifest, then she’ll be waiting for you on the other side for whenever you’re finally ready to go.” I shut up because I was rambling.
Larry nodded, then gave me a tight smile. “Thank you for telling me, Selene. If you’ll excuse me.”
He walked away, and I watched him go, wondering if he was just in shock and the reality of what I’d told him would catch up to him later. I shrugged. My work was done. If Larry wanted to come back and talk about it sometime…I sure hoped he talked to someone else. I wasn’t good at the hand-holding thing.
I sat down at my desk and made some notes on the case. Micah was the lead, but I still wanted to get some of my thoughts down because I had a feeling this case was going to be more complicated than the usual ghost monster hunt. Micah came over a few minutes later.
“I briefed Andrew on the investigation,” he said. I paused in my typing and turned to him. “Leslie’s body is in the morgue, and forensics has the hair you pulled from her nails. They’re a little backed up, so they aren’t going to have the results for maybe a couple of days. Did you talk to Larry?”
“I did,” I said. “Seemed like he was in shock. Thanks for sticking me with the dirty work.”
“You’re my sidekick; it’s your job to do the dirty work.” He headed back to his cubicle, but his parting words didn’t have the bite they usually did.
Maybe I was wearing him down. I tended to have that effect on people, though not usually in a positive way.
Since I had been taken off track and retrieve for the time being (hallelujah!) that meant I could leave work while the sun was still up, though I deflated when I remembered that I had an anxious ghost waiting for me to track down his body. I had planned to relax for the rest of the night, eat junk food, and watch movies, but you know, running around the city with Ethan in pursuit of his stolen body could be fun too.
Chapter Nine
Ethan was Mr. Chatty as soon as I walked through the door, but I ignored him as I went about my routine, starting with feeding Luna, then taking a shower. Ethan was so absorbed in pestering me about tracking his body that I had to make him aware I was about to take my clothes off, which meant he had to float back through my bedroom door and pester me from the other side. After I changed, I ordered Chinese food and took Luna for her walk. Ethan came along but seemed to have realized that I was going to go about my business before his, so he walked silently alongside Luna and me, looking pouty.
Once we were back home and I was happily eating my greasy dinner, I decided to pay some attention to Ethan.
“I’m going to do the ritual tonight,” I said. “You don’t have to harass me about it, you know.”
“Sorry,” he said, looking down at his lap. He was sitting on the sofa next to me. “I just want to be myself again. I can’t stand the fact that someone is walking around in my body. My friends and family must be wondering about me, because I for damn sure don’t think whoever is in my body has been keeping up appearances that he’s me. I just want to get back to my life.”
“Do you want me to call your family and tell them anything?”
“No,” he said immediately, which surprised me a little. “I don’t want them to know what happened to me.”
“Well I wasn’t suggesting telling them the truth,” I said. “But I’m sure they’re worried about you.”
“My mom must have left me a hundred messages,” Ethan said with a sad smile. “She calls me every day. I don’t need an alarm clock when I have her calling at seven in the morning.”
“One of those kinds of moms, huh?” I said. “Well, I definitely think we should reach out to them before your mother loses her mind.” Ethan was quiet for a while as he stared at the ground.
“E-mail them,” he finally said. “My mom hasn’t warmed up to technology much but my dad has an e-mail address. You can tell them…”
“Don’t worry, I’m pretty good at coming up with believable lies,” I said. I pulled my laptop out from under the coffee table and booted it up. Ethan looked over my shoulder as I wrote an e-mail to his father telling him that Ethan had taken an impromptu trip with his friends and wouldn’t have much access to e-mail. Ethan approved, so I sent it off, then he sat back and sighed.
“I could use one of my mom’s overpowering hugs right about now,” he muttered. “I can’t wait until I get my body back.”
That made me pause. “Look, Ethan, I need to tell you something.” Okay, here went the big letdown. “I may be able to track down your physical body, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to put you back into it.”
His head snapped up, and his eyes grew wide. “W-what? What do you mean? You can’t be serious!”
“We’re dealing with reanimation here,” I said. “At least I think we are. The normal process of reanimation involves drawing a soul out of a living body and putting it into a corpse, thus bringing it back to ‘life’ for a short amount of time. But I’m a little out to sea with what happened to you. Your living soul was kicked out, but it wasn’t so someone could put your soul into a corpse; it was so another soul could enter your body. It’s like some sort of reverse reanimation, and I’ve never heard of anything like that before. I wouldn’t know how to undo it.”
“But someone must!” Ethan said, shooting to his feet. “Selene, you can’t leave me like this. I’m not a dead guy. I’m not a ghost! I’m only nineteen; how can you do this to me?” Nineteen? He really was a young’un. I had seven years on him.
“I’m not doing anything to you,” I said. It was strange being the calm one for a change. “I’m just saying it might not be as easy as you think to get all this straightened out. There very well may be someone out there who can help, but I’m not spreading your story around until we know what we’re dealing with. I wouldn’t want whoever is in your body to catch on to the fact that you’re working with a necromancer to get your body back.”
Ethan sighed, seeming utterly deflated.
“Once we track down your body, I’ll get more people involved, and we’ll see if we can figure out who is in it and how to get them out.”
“And me back in?” Ethan said.
I hesitated. “Well…I…it’s just that reanimation has never worked when it came to putting someone’s ghost back into their own body.”
His eyes widened, and I sensed another outburst approaching.
“The rules of reanimation aren’t rules that we all understand, Ethan.”
“We?” Ethan said. “You mean you…?”
I bit my tongue, then figured what did it really matter if Ethan knew? If he ratted me out, then there’d be no one to help him, and he’d likely find himself subjected to a necromancer circle.
“Yes, I’m a reanimator, which may make me the best person to help you, but it doesn’t mean I can. Reanimation needs something alive and something dead to work. You have to start with a living body because the life aura of the individual will still be clinging to the ghost. That’s how a corpse can become reanimated. That aura dissipates quickly though, so that’s why putting an existing ghost into a corpse doesn’t work. Especially if it’s his own body.”
“But my body isn’t a corpse!” Ethan said.
“But if we got whoever is in there out, it would be, technically,” I said. “And right now, you’re a ghost, which means you are of dead energy. So you see…”
“This can’t be happening,” Ethan said, dropping his head into his hands. He released a choking sob, and I felt really bad for him. With a little burst of energy, I was able to place my hand on his shoulder.
“I didn’t tell you all of this to discourage you, though I guess mission failed,” I said. “I just wanted you to know the truth of what we’re dealing with. It would have been worse if I let you keep your hopes up only to reveal all of this once we actually had your body in our grasp.”
Ethan nodded, though he didn’t raise his head. Great, now I felt really, really bad for him. I patted his shoulder a couple of times, then went back to my meal. Ethan would have to work through this on his own, but I had already sensed that he was persistent enough not to let it be too much of a setback. Sure enough, once I finished eating and was clearing things up, he had regained himself and looked at me with a determined expression.
“I still want to find my body,” he said. “And if there’s some way I can be put back, I hope you’ll help me with it.”
“I’ll try,” I said, careful not to use the word “promise” in any context. I was dealing with too many unknown things to make promises. In truth, I was more concerned with the fact that someone out there had the power to shove out a living soul and put a dead soul into his body. It made me afraid about what the reanimator’s motives were, what kind of power he or she had, and what the motives of whoever was in Ethan’s body were.
The only way to figure any of this out was to find Ethan’s body, so I went into my bedroom and got a pouch of rune stones. They weren’t the ones I kept under the floorboard though. These stones were legal, but I’d swiped most of them from work because they were rather expensive. Was I a criminal or what?
I grabbed Ethan’s shirt and brought it out into the living room, kneeling in front of my coffee table and clearing it off so I had space to work. Ethan knelt on the other side, and Luna pawed at me until she realized I wasn’t going to play with her right this moment. She then stood near where Ethan was and seemed to be staring at him, which made me raise an eyebrow.
“It’s like she can see you,” I said.
Ethan looked down at the little dog and shrugged. “Only necromancers and dead witches can see ghosts, right?”
“Yeah, unless we make you visible using our energy or the runes I placed on you before. Maybe she just senses you. I’ve heard animals can be sensitive like that.”
Ethan moved his finger toward Luna, and she barked once, then turned and pranced off to where her toys were lying on the floor. I shrugged and turned back to what I was doing. I placed Ethan’s shirt on the table and took out a rune stone that was irregularly shaped and had a light pinkish color.
“This is the rune stone we use to track down ghost beasties,” I said. “It’s similar to the stone I was wearing when I tracked you down. That rune was attuned to let me know when any ghosts were nearby, and it helped me know which direction to go. This rune will be more specific because it will be attuned only to finding your physical body.” Ethan nodded along as I spoke.
“I took a class on runes, and I learned a lot of what you just said,” he said. “I always had an interest in this sort of thing even though I’m not a necromancer.” Classes like that were mandatory for necromancers and dead witches and electives for everyone else.
“Okay,” I said. I placed the stone in the middle of Ethan’s shirt. “I’m going to activate the stone by channeling some of my energy into it, and that will make it absorb your essence from the shirt. After that, we should be in tracking business.”
Ethan was looking more and more excited, so I figured I should begin before he started bouncing off the walls. Or, well, through the walls.
“Stay still and be quiet while I do this,” I told him. “No questions or commentary until I’m done.”
“Okay.”
I held my palms over the shirt, calling up my necromancer power and releasing a stream of it. It wasn’t something that could be physically seen, but I could feel it pouring from my palms like water. The energy sought out the rune stone and filled it up. Once the stone was active, it latched onto the essence left behind in the shirt and absorbed it. The entire process took about ten minutes. I picked up the rune stone, which was now glowing.
“Once the power settles, the stone should resonate with me, and I’ll be able to feel the direction of your body’s location,” I said. “Then off we go.” I only now wondered why I hadn’t put this off until the light of day, because now I’d be traipsing all over the place late at night. Thinking ahead really wasn’t my strong suit.
I held the stone in my hand for several minutes and waited to feel that tug that let me know it had located Ethan’s body. I frowned when minutes ticked by and nothing happened. The rune continued to glow, but I felt no pull from it, no urge to get up and start moving north, south, east, or west. That should have happened by now. I looked at Ethan, who was staring intently at the stone.
“Well, this was unforeseen,” I said.
“What? What’s wrong? Is it not working?”
“It appears…not,” I said. Ethan’s face crumpled. “I don’t know what the problem is. I know everything worked. I can tell it’s active, but it isn’t leading me anywhere.”
Ethan looked like he was about to cry. I kept holding the stone, hoping maybe it was just delayed, but I was beginning to think something else was going on that was keeping it from working.