“You got another dog?” Ethan croaked. He had covered himself with the throw I kept over the back of the sofa.
“It’s Luna’s ghost,” I said. “She showed up in the backyard.”
“Is that strange?”
“Ghost animals are rare, but it does happen,” I said. “It’s just that…” I paused, remembering a time not so long ago when I had seen another ghost animal—that cat Vicious at the apartment I’d cleaned with Larry. Larry had said the cat belonged to his brother, and I now knew that Trevor was Larry’s brother.
“I wonder if Trevor being a reanimator has anything to do with it,” I said.
“What?” Ethan said. I sighed and shook my head.
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t know what to make of this.”
Just then my stomach let out an unattractive growl, and I realized Luna was the only one who had been fed tonight.
“I’m going to order some food,” I said, heading to the kitchen and my drawer of menus. I ordered pizza and wings, took a hot shower just so I had something to do, then drifted back out to the living room dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, with my damp hair brushed back into a very short ponytail. When the food came, I ate it listlessly, then had a thought as I looked at Ethan, who still had not moved from his curled-up position on the couch.
“Do you feel hungry?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” he said. “I feel the hunger, but right now, I don’t feel like eating.”
I put a couple of slices of pizza on a plate and pushed it closer to him. He eyed it but didn’t move.
“I can understand why you’d feel hunger now that I know we are bound,” I said. “But have you felt any other human urges, like needing to go to the bathroom or feeling sleepy?”
“Not really,” he said.
“Interesting.”
My doorbell rang, and when I answered it, Micah was standing there, looking tired and holding a book under his arm. He glanced at Ethan before dropping into an armchair and grabbing a slice of pizza. I let him eat before I asked him anything, but he quickly noticed that there were two dogs romping on the ground in front of him, and one of them was a ghost. He looked at me in question, and I shrugged.
“Luna’s ghost showed up,” I said. “And reanimated Luna seems to like her just fine.”
Micah nodded and continued eating. When he had eaten four slices, he wiped his hands and slumped back against the cushions.
“The cat’s out of the bag,” he said. “Everyone at the office knows about Ethan’s body being the host for Larry’s ghost, but I made it seem like it was Larry who killed Andrew. Andrew’s body was taken to the morgue. I asserted my authority over the case and didn’t tell them too much though. It’s still up to me to rein Ethan’s body in.”
“Us,” I said. “It’s up to us.”
“Selene, you’ve been through a lot. You just lost…”
“My boss,” I said. I shook my head. “Look, what Andrew and I were…was complicated, but don’t think the reason I’m upset is because I was in love with him. That’s not it. I’m shaken up from finding Andrew’s body like that and knowing that I caused it, but I didn’t love him. I need you to know that, okay?”
Micah was quiet for a moment, then he nodded. “Okay.”
He looked a little relieved, so I knew I was right in thinking that Micah might have thought I fell apart because I was in love with Andrew.
“Larry wanted to take Ethan,” I said. “To Trevor, I assume. That’s why they were fighting. He said that ghost Ethan had to be destroyed, and I’m going to assume it has something to do with maintaining his habitation of Ethan’s body.”
“That can’t happen,” Ethan said.
“I’ll try not to let it,” I said, but I could hardly muster any conviction to put behind that statement.
“We have a lot to deal with, Selene,” Micah said. He slid off the chair so he was sitting on the floor like I was. Micah took the book he’d brought and opened it to a bookmarked page.
“When I went back to the office, Ilyse gave me this book,” he said. “She said you should read it so you understand everything about being bound to Ethan.”
“Can you paraphrase?” I asked, idly chewing on the crust of my pizza. I had no will to pore over some old book right now, even though the information it held was important to my precarious situation with Ethan.
“Since you’re bound to Ethan, your power has undergone a sort of evolution,” Micah began. He was looking down at the book and running his finger along the part he was reading. “Common knowledge is that reanimators have the power to take a soul directly from a living being and put it into a corpse, and that you can’t put an existing ghost into a body, living or dead, but reanimators bound to a ghost can do just that.”
I raised my head and stared at Micah, and even Ethan turned to look at him. I frowned as I thought. “Trevor must have known that. He probably bound himself to Larry and gained the power to put an existing ghost into a body.”
“Then why didn’t Trevor just use Larry’s own damn body?” Ethan said.
“Because Larry’s body is five years dead,” I said. “It wouldn’t be in any condition to get up and start walking around. The reanimation process can somewhat repair a corpse, as it did for Luna, but Larry’s corpse would be beyond saving at this point. Then again, who can really say? Since everything I thought I knew about this doesn’t seem to be all there is to know.”
“Selene, this means that you can do what Trevor did,” Micah said. “You can not only reanimate corpses with living souls, you can do the reverse and place a ghost inside a living body by first expelling the occupying soul. And I should add that this book says you can put a ghost back into its own body granted the body is still in good enough condition.”
Luna nipped at my toes, and I was about to nudge her away when I suddenly sat up straight and stared at the ghost dog currently bouncing around Micah.
“Wait, I can put ghosts back into their original bodies?” I said. Micah followed my gaze to the two dogs and raised his eyebrows. I looked at Ethan. “Ethan, this means that I could possibly put you back into your body once we get Larry out!”
“We’d need to capture Larry first,” Micah said. “And it doesn’t seem like that will be so easy.”
“But it’s possible,” I said. I looked at Ethan again. “This is the answer we’ve been looking for, Ethan!”
“It appears that way,” Ethan said. “But my body would have had a murderer in it. I don’t know how I can live with that.”
“You’ll have to come to terms with it,” I said, waving my hand. “Get some therapy or something. This is the answer!”
“I’m almost too scared to believe it,” he said. “How do we know you can really do it, Selene?”
“We don’t know,” I said, then I made a flourish at the dogs. “But what a nice coincidence that the ghost of my dog showed up tonight so that I can practice.”
“Might not be a coincidence,” Micah said. “Any ghost that rises near you now will be drawn to you.”
“Say what?”
“Your reanimation magic has intensified,” Micah said, again reading from the book. “It’s kind of like a beacon to ghosts now.” He looked at me with a grimace of a smile. “The book says that if a ghost rises around you, it will become attached to you because it will be drawn to the power you have to put it back into a physical body. It’s not the same as being bound though. And the book says the pull you have on the ghost will be so strong you might not be able to send it to the afterlife. It’s like you’d be anchoring it here.”
“Oh, wonderful,” I said, throwing my hands up. “Fucking fantastic. Now I have to be careful not to be around someone who may die because if his or her ghost rises, it will be stuck here? Won. Der. Ful.”
“Let’s deal with one nightmare at a time,” Micah said. “And you also have to remember that you have the Rot. You need to let Ilyse help you with that.”
“What?” Ethan said, sitting up so he could look at me. “You have the Rot?”
“Yes, Ethan dear, it appears being bound to you means your ghost energy is a constant presence, whether you’re near me or not, so the Rot has taken hold.”
Ethan just stared at me in shock. I waved my hand at him.
“Don’t freak out, please, I’ve had about as much of that as I can take today.”
“I’m sorry,” Ethan said, before withering back against the cushions.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. I had a thought as I was looking at the dogs. “Do you think putting Luna’s ghost back into her body could help me evade the roundup?”
“I don’t know,” Micah said. “It might, but even if you put Luna’s own ghost back, isn’t that still reanimation?”
“One way to find out,” I said. I picked Luna up and gave her a level gaze.
“Fish souls are well and good, but how would you like your own soul back?” She just barked and wriggled for me to put her down. “I’m going to try it. Does the book say if any special runes are needed, Micah?”
“Runes aren’t needed at all,” he said, which surprised me. “You are now strong enough not to need them.”
“Well slap my ass and call me Sally,” I said, which made Micah smile, and even Ethan choked out a laugh. “I can just use my power to draw souls out and put souls in?”
I was still holding Luna, and when I whistled, ghost Luna stopped jumping back and forth through Micah’s outstretched leg and ran over to me.
“Sit,” I told her. It was one of the few commands I’d found the time to teach Luna. Ghost Luna sat, then I put the other Luna down and commanded her to sit as well. “Okay,” I said, taking a few deep breaths to try and clear my head.
It was no easy task trying to hold back the horrors of the day, but I managed to find enough space to concentrate on the dogs. Ever since ghost Luna had appeared, my reanimation magic had been quietly active, like a soft hum vibrating under my skin. I opened it up more, finding that spark of red and realizing it had grown. I could feel that my reanimation power was stronger than it had ever been. My body felt electrified, and I had to breathe past the hair-raising power that whispered across my skin, engulfing my entire body until I felt cocooned in it.
I reached my hand toward Luna and held it a few inches away from her. She licked my palm. I then held my other hand in front of ghost Luna. She tried to lick it. I didn’t exactly know how I knew what I was doing, but the knowledge was somehow there. I closed my eyes and channeled power to my hands. My lips moved, whispering something I didn’t know before, and my power responded to whatever I was saying. At the same moment my reanimation magic dove inside Luna, I also felt it ensnare ghost Luna in an invisible cage of magic.
The power inside Luna found her borrowed soul and grabbed onto it, but instead of dragging the soul out, my power dissolved it. Luna immediately dropped to the ground, and I had a moment of panic where I thought I had killed my dog for good because I was doing something I only realized I could do five minutes ago. Then again, that was my usual style, so if I ended up with my dog dead again, it would only be my fault.
While I was having this internal battle though, my magic seemed to be working on its own. The hand I was holding out to ghost Luna shifted, and I felt the ghost move as well. After a few moments, ghost Luna sank into Luna’s body, and my reanimation magic flared throughout the small dog, stitching her soul back into place. Then my power receded back into me like a flow of water.
I opened my eyes and stared at Luna. Ethan had sat all the way up and looked on with a tentatively hopeful expression. I held my breath as though if I dared to breathe, it wouldn’t work.
Luna stirred, and I released my breath and sat back, feeling weak but happy. I gave her a few minutes to come to herself, and before long, she was on her feet with her front legs on my knee, staring up at my face. I picked her up and cuddled her to my chest, which made her squirm and start nipping me.
“I’m done reanimating you, I promise,” I said. I held her close to my face and she licked my nose. “Feels better to have your own soul back, right?” I put her down and she pranced over to her food bowls to drink some water. I smiled as I looked at Micah and Ethan.
“You did it,” they said in unison.
“From the tone of your voices, it doesn’t sound like you thought I would,” I said.
“I didn’t want to let myself believe,” Ethan whispered.
Micah shook his head, but he was smiling. “So maybe there’s hope for you to get your body back,” he said to Ethan.
“Yeah, once we get past the whole finding his body and finding Trevor thing,” I said. “Which should be super easy since they know we’re on their trail.” My sarcasm was thick.
“Wait,” Micah said. He was frowning and had his hand to his chin in that pose people use when they are thinking of something brilliant. “This tracking magic the government is about to unleash. Maybe we can use it to find them!”
Now the wheels in my head were turning. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“The dead witches will be using our own energy to track anything we may have reanimated,” I said.
“So we would need Trevor’s personal energy then,” Micah said. The discouraged note in his voice was over the realization that we didn’t exactly have a store of Trevor’s energy lying around.
Then I realized we did.
“Vicious!” I said excitedly. Micah and Ethan looked at me questioningly. “The ghost of Trevor’s cat was hanging around the apartment I helped Larry clean. Larry even said it was his brother’s cat and that he’d accidentally killed it, but I’m beginning to think it was no accident. Trevor was probably trying to practice reanimation. Anyway, the fact that Trevor killed the cat and its ghost rose means that Trevor’s energy will be a part of it, but…” I paused.
“What?” Micah prompted.
“The cat seemed to have disappeared once we were done,” I said. “I wonder if Larry encouraged it to run off.”
“We’ll go find out,” Micah said. “It’s the best lead we have. If we can glean some of Trevor’s energy from the ghost cat, then maybe Ilyse can help us use it to find Larry.”
I nodded, then yawned. “We’ll be doing that tomorrow, right?”
As much as I wanted to stop Trevor and Larry, I was beyond exhausted. I needed to recover from the day’s—hell, the past week’s—events.
“Sounds like a plan,” Ethan said, huddling up on the sofa. “I may not need to sleep, but right now, I don’t feel like going anywhere.”