“Do you think it’s because my body is out of range or something?” Ethan asked.
“The stone would lead me to Africa if your body was there,” I said. “The only way it wouldn’t work was if your body was dead, since there’d be no living energy to resonate with the stone.”
“But it’s not dead!” Ethan said.
“I said if,” I said, though it did occur to me that I still only had Ethan’s word to go on about this body-jacking thing.
Even though I had my own questions about what kind of ghost he was, his body could very well be dead and something else going on here. But from the look on Ethan’s face, I could tell he was on the verge of a breakdown. Voicing doubts right now wouldn’t help.
“Look, I’m not sure why it isn’t working,” I said. “But I’m going to keep it active and keep it with me; maybe it will kick in soon.”
“Okay,” Ethan said, but he didn’t sound reassured. The stone had a hole, so I threaded it onto a chain and hung it around my neck.
“See, I’ll even sleep with it on, so if it starts working at five a.m., we’ll head right out.” I didn’t relish doing that, but I wanted to wipe that utterly dejected look from his face by giving him as much hope as I could.
Ethan just nodded, then got up and huddled on the sofa, turning away from me. I sighed and headed to my bedroom with the rune stone. Luna followed me, so I picked her up as I plopped into bed. She immediately started having her way with my hands, worrying at them like they were the enemy.
“Wanna switch lives, Luna?” I said, rubbing her little belly, which brought her endless amounts of glee. “You can track down a ghost beastie and help a depressed ghost find his stolen body, and I can lie back and have my belly rubbed?”
She barked at me.
“I guess that’s a no.”
Chapter Ten
Thursday morning when I came into the living room, Ethan was still moping on the couch and only spoke to me to ask if the tracking rune had started working. When I said no, he resumed his sulking and didn’t say anything else. I was true to my word and kept the tracking stone on me, tucked into my shirt to avoid questions, but it didn’t resonate. I found that increasingly strange.
At work, Micah and I didn’t make any progress on tracking who or what had killed Leslie, and forensics still didn’t have the results for us, so I spent most of the day catching up on overdue reports. And having sex with Andrew during lunch.
It started to rain while I drove home, but Luna still had to be walked, and damn her if she didn’t enjoy splashing around in the rain and getting muddier than she needed to be. I’d have to give her a bath. Maybe that was how she punished me for all the times I kept her waiting for food and to be walked.
When I came back inside, miserably soaked despite my umbrella, Ethan, who hadn’t spoken to me when I’d first come home, deigned to get off the couch and give me big, hopeful eyes as I tried to close my umbrella. If an umbrella was this difficult to close, it was long past the time to buy a new one, but umbrella shopping was never high on my to-do list. As I struggled with the rusty thing and tried to deal with Ethan’s impatience over the tracking rune’s not working, I dropped Luna’s leash. She immediately took that as her cue to dash through the door back into the rain, running through the gate, which had been left open.
“Damn it, Luna, come back here, you little fur ball!” I ran after her. Luna pranced around, barking happily, and my insides clenched when the senseless dog ran into the street. “Luna!”
The world seemed to condense into slow motion. Luna ran across the street like there was something she had to get to on the other side, and at the same time, someone on a Vespa zipped down the street, oblivious to the tiny dog in its path. Until he ran her over.
I stopped and screamed, then I was running again, feeling like my heart was in my throat. The Vespa and its rider had been upturned, but both seemed to be okay. The rider started babbling apologies at me, but all I could focus on was the broken body of my dog. My hands shook as I scooped her off the ground and cradled her in my arms.
She was dead; it didn’t take much to tell that. I stood there in rigid shock for a moment, with the Vespa guy in my face and the cold rain sliding down my neck, and couldn’t believe I was holding my dog’s dead body in my hands.
After a few moments, I snapped to my senses and saw that there was a small crowd looking at what was going on. I turned and ran back into my house, slamming the door behind me. I hardly knew what I was doing. I moved almost as though I was outside of myself. I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around Luna’s body, then shoved my coffee table and rug out of the way and lay her body on the floor. I then ran into my bedroom to retrieve my hidden bag of rune stones.
“Selene?”
I looked at Ethan, and whatever he saw on my face made him take a step back.
“I’ll just…stay out of your way,” he said.
I turned away from him and found my bag of rune stones, then marched back into the living room and over to my aquarium. I didn’t maintain the fish tank because I had some great love of fish. I maintained it because I had a rambunctious little dog who lost her mind every time it rained and didn’t know that running into the street might not end well for her. I grabbed the net and bowl I kept under the tank and took all six fish out, covering the bowl with a cloth because the fish almost flopped out of it. I placed the bowl next to Luna’s towel-wrapped body, then knelt in front of them.
Now I had to focus, because I couldn’t do this with my emotions all over the place. I wiped at my tears and took several deep, calming breaths before opening the pouch and getting out my powders and stones. I drew a powder circle, then used other powders to draw runes inside it.
After the runes were drawn, I placed Luna’s body in the middle of the circle and put one goldfish on each rune. The fish weren’t dead yet, but they were weak enough that they didn’t flop out of the circle. For the reanimation to work, the fish’s souls had to be drawn out while they were still alive, so I had to do this quickly. I could feel Ethan hovering behind me, but he kept his distance and stayed quiet.
I placed my hands over the circle and closed my eyes, tapping not into my necromancer magic, but into that streak of reanimation power that would allow me to draw the life force of the goldfish from their bodies. It was a different feeling than when I used my necromancer magic. My body quickly grew hot, and I felt electrified. My reanimation power poured from my hands over the fish, sinking inside their bodies and grabbing hold of their souls. When I had all six snared in my power, I pulled it back, and out came the souls.
I opened my eyes, and was able to see the fish souls as glowing, ghostly outlines of their physical bodies. In order for them to work in Luna, I had to manipulate them, so I moved my hands together and the fish souls started to waver and disperse until they no longer looked like fish. My reanimation power sparked like electricity around the souls until they melded into a glowing white cloud. Now they could be used as the life force for whatever I wanted. I directed the soul cloud into Luna, pressing it into her muddy, blood-soaked body. My throat tightened and tears threatened, but I kept myself together until it was done.
I continued to stream reanimation magic into Luna to give the souls enough power to mold into a new soul for her. It was draining, but I didn’t lose focus. Eventually, I could feel Luna’s body begin to knit together. I almost collapsed to the floor in relief.
It took almost an hour of channeling power into Luna’s body, but just when I felt like I was going to pass out from the energy depletion, I sensed that it was done. I dropped my hands and stared at Luna, who was unmoving, and held my breath, waiting to see if it had worked. I hadn’t practiced reanimation in years, and I prayed that I remembered how to do it right.
“Come back,” I whispered, staring at Luna’s body as though sheer will alone would make her leap into my lap again. “Don’t leave me, Luna.”
Before I had a dog, I used to make fun of people who doted and obsessed over their dogs like they were their children. However, having Luna for the past six years had made me understand that when you were having the shittiest day and it seemed like every two-legged creature in your life was trying to tear you down, it meant something that you could come home to a little animal that never judged you and that loved you as long as you loved her. I wasn’t about to lose Luna, which was why I hadn’t thought twice about doing what I’d just done. I’d make sure no one found out. Well, no one except Ethan, since he’d seen the entire thing.
After what felt like an eternity, I finally saw the faintest of movements from Luna. This time, I did slump over in relief before I carefully picked her up, still wrapped in the towel. She opened her eyes and blinked up at me, and I used my fingers to move her wet fur away from her eyes. She licked my finger and I almost cried, but I settled for cradling her to my chest.
“You came back,” I whispered.
Ethan came around and knelt in front of me, staring wide-eyed at the dog in my hands. It would take a little time before she was back to running all over the place, but she was okay now.
“You brought her back to life,” Ethan said. “I mean, I know you told me you were a reanimator, but to actually see it…It’s amazing.”
“I reanimated her,” I said, still hugging Luna. “She’s living on borrowed souls, and they won’t last forever. I’ll have to keep transferring souls into her every now and then if I want to keep her around.”
“Wow,” Ethan said. “How do you plan on doing that?”
“By keeping my fish tank stocked,” I said. I closed my eyes because I was starting to feel dizzy. I needed to rest before I passed out, but I had to take care of Luna first.
I forced myself to get up and took her to the bathroom, where I gave her a bath in the sink since she was small enough to fit in there. She was still slow moving but seemed to be coming back to herself, and she gave my fingers a couple of nibbles and licks. After I dried and brushed her, I gave her a treat and set her down on her doggy bed. She needed some rest too, what with being hit by a Vespa and reanimated and all.
I knelt next to her, petting her for a while as she dozed off. I knew she wasn’t the same as she’d been before she’d been killed because the energy she was living off of wasn’t her own. But the goldfish souls would keep her heart beating as long as I kept her supplied with them, and I was happy with that.
I left Luna fast asleep and dragged myself to my bedroom, taking off the tracking rune and putting it on the dresser. Then I took a shower.
“You took the rune off,” Ethan said after I’d changed clothes and told him he could come into the room. I was crawling into bed.
“Need to be rune free for a while,” I said. “I have to recover. I’ve been draining myself too much lately.”
“Okay,” Ethan said sadly.
I felt like I was hearing him from underwater; my exhaustion was dragging me down.
“Just…have faith, Ethan,” was the last thing I remembered saying.
* * *
I slept until late Friday morning, which didn’t surprise me since I had exerted an enormous amount of energy to reanimate Luna. The first thing I did after tumbling out of bed was go check on her. She was pawing around her empty food bowls and gave me a look that I swore was disdain as I got her kibble and gave her fresh water. She seemed to be adjusting to being reanimated quite nicely.
After I ate, I took Luna for a walk and almost gave one of my neighbors, who saw Luna get hit by the Vespa, a heart attack when she saw us, but I quickly muttered something about the accident being worse than it looked. I really should have thought to slap some bandages on Luna or something. Oh well. Back home, I got ready for work and headed to the office, leaving Ethan with the television on, as per usual. I was a little anxious about leaving Luna, but I told myself she was fine, and there was hardly any fatal trouble she could get into at home.
When I entered the suite, two hours late, I looked around to see if Larry was there. Most mornings, he could be found pestering someone until it was decided who was helping him for the day, but I didn’t see him. I hoped he was coping with Leslie’s death okay. In the meantime, there was still the case with Micah to work on. I went to see Micah and found him frowning over a file. His frown didn’t ease when he looked up and saw me.
“Have the dead witches been able to do anything with the rune stone?” I asked.
“Still working on it,” Micah replied. “And there have been no beastie sightings reported whatsoever.”
“A ghost monster kills one person, then disappears,” I said. “That’s so far outside the realm of normal ghost monster behavior that I don’t know what the hell to think.” I glanced at the papers in Micah’s hands.
“Are those the results from forensics? Did they get a match from the hair?”
“They did,” Micah said. “There were also fingerprints left on Leslie’s body and blood found under her fingernails. They all matched the same person.”
“Blood under her fingernails?” I said. “Interesting. Maybe she really was tussling with someone before the ghost beastie did her in. Who did the prints and whatnot match?”
Micah slid the file over to me so I could see the picture and information he’d been looking at. I froze as I looked at the man’s face, completely and absolutely shocked.
“What?” Micah asked. “Selene, hello? What is it? Do you recognize him?”
I closed my mouth, opened it, then closed it again and swallowed hard. I was staring at Ethan’s picture.
It had been Ethan’s hair, fingerprints, and blood found on Leslie’s body. Well, now I knew Ethan was telling the truth; his body had been stolen. And whoever was in Ethan’s body had sought Leslie out to kill her. Ethan’s hijacked body being the murderer could make all the inconsistencies make sense. The physical evidence found was obvious; Ethan’s body wasn’t a ghost, it was just inhabited by one, and that would also explain why there was ghost energy, but not a lot, found on the body. And it would explain why there was no rampaging beastie around. Whoever was in Ethan’s body had control over his actions. All in all, I didn’t like how things were adding up, because it meant that not only was I dealing with an oddly reanimated body, but I was dealing with an oddly reanimated body that was a murderer.