Grave Memory: An Alex Craft Novel (29 page)

“Where—?” Falin started, his blades stilling.

“There.” I pointed to where its retreating form darted toward the fleeing patrons. We couldn’t let it reach them, to ride another body. It vanished around the corner of the dining room.

I started forward, and my knees locked, my legs collapsing under me.
Fuck.
The struggle with the rider had lasted less than a minute, but I felt like I’d been through a triathlon followed by a boxing match.

Falin was at my side in seconds, helping me to my feet. I
shook my head. “You have to go after it.” The words came out slurred. I sucked down a deep breath. He
couldn’t
go after it. He couldn’t even see it.

But Rianna could, and her eyes were glowing like green ghost lights. She took one backward glance at me, but she didn’t need to be told to follow it. She broke into a run, Desmond at her side.

I attempted to stumble after it, but would have collapsed again if Falin hadn’t grabbed me. “We have to follow it,” I said, the unspoken “help me” conveyed in my eyes.

He nodded, the daggers vanishing to wherever he kept them—I’d figure that out one day. Then he wrapped an arm around my waist, and we half ran, half hobbled into the hall. We didn’t make it much farther. The stairs had transformed into a jumbled, chaotic traffic jam as people shoved and pushed, trying to get the hell out of the restaurant.

“I lost it,” Rianna said, her eyes still glowing. “It was there, and then gone.”

Damn it. That meant one of two things. If we were lucky, it had retreated farther into the land of the dead to lick its wounds—but I’d never had that kind of luck. Which left option two: it had jumped into a body. Rianna couldn’t see souls while they were inside a body, so it stood to reason she wouldn’t be able to see the rider either.

I scanned the crowd as they jostled for a spot on the stairs. With all the brilliant yellow souls, spotting the one coated in darkness wasn’t hard. It was inside a woman clinging to her husband’s arm. The yellow of her soul dimmed under the tarlike presence vying for control.

“That one,” I said, pointing. “The woman with the red shirt and black hair.”

“Ma’am, we need to speak to you a moment,” Falin said, releasing me so he could hurry toward her. She didn’t turn, didn’t stop. Falin reached the couple and took hold of the woman’s shoulder. “I’m with the authorities, and I need to speak with you.” He flashed his badge too quickly for them to identify which “authority” he might be.

“We didn’t see anything,” the man said, which was a lie—they’d been in the dining room.

His wife clung tighter to her husband’s arm. “I don’t feel so good,” she mumbled, swaying.

Her husband patted her arm. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll be home soon.”

Not likely. The darkness was winning, only the thinnest shimmer of yellow human soul left.

“I can’t let you leave,” Falin said, keeping hold of the woman’s shoulder.

“Please make him let go,” she said, giving her husband a pleading look—a look coated with the oily darkness of the rider.

How had the rider taken over so quickly? Of course, we’d noticed he was gaining control quicker with every victim, but he took her in what, a minute? Two tops. This was bad, very bad.

“Can’t this wait until we’re outside?” the man asked.

I stepped forward. “No, it can’t. Sir, I’d suggest you step back. That’s not your wife.”

The ridden woman turned, a hate-filled gaze aimed directly at me. “You’re becoming a nuisance.” The words emerged from the woman’s throat, but they no longer sounded like her.

“Becky?”

The woman sneered at her husband, pulling away from him. In the same movement, she swung and landed a solid punch in Falin’s stomach.

He grunted as the air was knocked from him, but it didn’t slow him. His daggers reappeared.

“Don’t hurt her. The rider will just jump to another host,” I yelled as the woman ran, not toward the stair, but back toward the dining room we’d abandoned.

I could all but see Falin’s teeth gritting as the daggers vanished and he gave chase. I stepped in front of the door, blocking it. The woman was a good eight inches shorter than me, but she charged me with the force of a linebacker,
knocking me to my ass. A fresh wave of pain burst through me as air rushed out of my body. My dagger fell from my hand, skittering across the floor.

Desmond vaulted over me and tackled the woman. The rider might grant her extra strength, but she was still a small woman and Desmond was several hundred pounds of barghest. She went down.

But it’s hard to pin someone who doesn’t care how badly struggling might hurt or damage her body. She thrashed, beating at the large doglike fae. Falin was there before Desmond did something drastic, like bite off one of her arms.

Falin slapped cuffs on the woman and dragged her to her feet. She went absolutely still. I waited to see if the rider would pour out of her now that its host was captured. It didn’t.

“The ABMU are on their way?” I asked Rianna as she ran her hands over Desmond’s fur, searching for injuries.

“They should be here any minute.”

Score one for the private detectives.
Okay, and the FIB. I smiled, dusting myself off. I would hurt like hell in the morning, of that I was certain, but we’d closed our first case. Actually, first two cases.

I walked across the room to retrieve my dagger and the rider watched me, that oil-slicked darkness coating the woman’s blue eyes. They held all the chill of the dead with none of the peace. It made my skin crawl.

“You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” it asked, the voice no longer sounding like the woman’s. It was colder, harsher.

Her husband charged into the room. “What’s going on? Why have you arrested my wife?”

I gave him a piteous look, but didn’t answer. Instead I addressed the rider. “No, I couldn’t let you continue your little spree, so don’t bother jumping bodies. I’ll follow you to anyone.”

“Then it seems we have irreconcilable differences,” it said and without warning, twisted hard. A snap cut through
the air as something in the woman’s shoulder ripped. The movement jerked her cuffed arms from Falin’s grasp.

She dashed for the picture window. The second before she flung herself through it, the woman glanced back, the rider grinning at me through her face. Then the earth-shattering sound of smashing glass filled the room. A man screamed. And finally, almost imperceptible compared to the rest, a thud sounded as her body hit the ground.

For a stunned moment, everything slowed. Then my feet moved as if they’d made the decision before my brain had time to catch up. I ran to the window, the others at my heels.

Blood tipped the remaining jagged glass, and outside, below, a woman’s broken body lay half on the sidewalk and half on the grass. The leap had been only one story, but her hands were cuffed behind her back, so there’d been no breaking the fall. Not that having her hands free would have saved her. Judging by the way blood sprayed from her, gushing less with each weakening beat of her heart, the glass had severed an artery.

From my vantage a floor above, I watched the rider pour out of her body.
Fuck.
But I could do nothing. I was too far away to physically attack the disembodied creature and as soon as it found a body…it had proven human lives meant little to it. And it had plenty of fresh bodies to choose from as it dashed into the crowd. I reached with my grave magic.

Too late.

It jumped into a new body. I cursed. My power couldn’t touch the living. Within seconds a man broke away from the crowd, running the opposite direction as the other patrons. At this distance, and still gazing across planes, all I could make out was that he was male.

Damn.

I glanced at the broken body of the woman who, twenty minutes ago, had simply been a woman having lunch with her husband.

Death stood beside her body, he met my eyes for only a moment before looking away. I swallowed, fighting the burn that always preceded tears. He’d warned me. Told me not to
stay, not to get involved. I’d thought he was trying to keep me out of danger. But maybe it was this…this utter waste and destruction of life he’d been trying to prevent.

And I pushed the rider to do it.

I glanced at the fleeing figure of the rider’s new host. Watched him turn a corner and vanish. Not that it mattered. I’d tried the direct approach. Tried to stop a serial killer. Not only had I failed, but now it was my fault that two innocent people were dead.

T
he Anti–Black Magic Unit arrived four minutes later. Of course, by then they were too late to do anything but clean up the bodies. Falin vanished before they arrived. His last words to me? That I wasn’t to mention the FIB involvement.

Great.

I knew most of the ABMU officers, either from dinners at John’s or drinks after cases, but I hadn’t officially worked a case with any of them, so they saw me as a civilian. Which meant, at a scene like this, I was either a witness or a suspect, possibly both. Considering I’d been with both victims directly before their deaths, one of whom wore cuffs that I’d refused to explain, I was lucky I wasn’t arrested on the spot. Though that was still a possibility as I was asked—without the option of refusing—down to the station to answer more questions.

Which was why, two hours later, I found myself in John’s office, shivering and partially blind. He’d rescued me from an interrogation room, but as red as his ever-expanding bald spot had turned, I thought I might be better off with the dispassionate woman who’d spent the last hour grilling me.

“What were you thinking, Alex?” John asked, not quite bellowing the question, but only just barely.

I ducked my head. “No one would believe that the deaths were homicides. I found the pattern, found the most likely next victim, and I made an attempt to detain him.”

“Yes, and we all know how that turned out.”

I sank lower in my chair, the heavy weight of physical and magical exhaustion mixing with the crush of guilt. “I fucked up, trust me, I’m aware.”

“You’re aware? Alex, your actions led to the deaths of two people.”

I cringed, but a grain of anger competed with the guilt, so even to my own ears my voice sounded flippant when I said, “Technically, both were suicides, so as you told me, not a homicide case. Or are you finally ready to admit that something is wrong with the string of suicides in this city?”

John stared at me, his face so still, not even his mustache twitched. Then he pushed away from his desk, walked to his ajar office door, and shoved it closed. The resulting bang rang loud through the too quiet room.

Every step John took echoed between my ears as he walked back to his desk, leaned against it, and then stood there with his arms crossed. I shrank under his hard stare, wishing I had an invisibility charm on me. It wasn’t the reprimanding posture that got to me, it was the disappointment in his eyes. I’d been seeing a lot of it recently, and that cut deep because I owed John. He’d set me up as a retainer for the police, and when I’d been floundering after Rianna’s disappearance, he was the one to encourage me to get my PI license and open the business anyway. He wasn’t just a coworker, he was a good friend, maybe even the closest thing I’d ever come to a father figure in my life. As he stared down at me now, I had the urge to pull my knees to my chest and hide my face.

“Tamara changed Kirkwood and Kingly’s manner of death from suicide to undetermined yesterday,” he said after what felt like an excruciatingly long time.

I frowned. Undetermined still wasn’t homicide, and these people hadn’t died by chance or simple misfortune—they’d been murdered by whatever had possessed them.

“Alex, do you really think no one but you sees the troubling connections in these cases?”

A queasy feeling crawled from my stomach to my throat. “You mean there’s an active investigation? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because the brass wants to keep this quiet. There’s a good chance we won’t be able to prosecute, so it was determined that keeping as much information from the press as possible would be best.”

“But people are dying.”

“Yes. From suicide.” He threw out his hand to stop my protest as he continued. “Are there suspicious circumstances in the suicides? Yes. Did the strange anomalies contribute to the deceased’s decision to take their own life? Possibly. But if that is the case, you’re looking at charges of misuse of magic. Maybe, with the right judge and jury, you might prove manslaughter, but everyone knows magic can’t force someone to kill themselves.”

“Except you’re not looking for a spell. You’re looking for an…entity.”

“Which is the conclusion the two ABMU agents working the case reached as well, and no, I won’t tell you who they are,” he said before I could ask.

“I could help.”

“Like you’re helping now? By kicking up dust on cases everyone was willing to accept were suicides? By making a public scene at a crowded restaurant?” He raked his hand over his bald spot. “This city is a powder keg. Too many unexplainable things have happened, too many magic-related deaths. People are scared. We’ve had multiple reports of hate crimes, Alex. Hate crimes—seventy years after the Magical Awakening. From property damage to actual violence against witches and fae. My parents told horror stories about the riots following the Awakening, and as close to boiling over as this city is, we may just see that kind of terror again. Is that what you want?”