Grave Dance Part 22

"I'm glad you made it," I said, since I couldn't thank her for coming. Then I accepted her hug as she tossed her arms around my neck.

She pulled back quickly. "You're cold."

"It happens." I introduced her to John and Tamara, who both gave me questioning glances when I used Rianna's name. It took me a second to realize why. They were both good enough friends to know that my roommate in academy was another grave witch, named Rianna McBride-they also knew she'd disappeared a handful of years ago. I hadn't told anyone I'd found her, and I certainly wasn't going to get into her being a captive of Faerie. "So which foot do you want us to try to raise a shade from?" I asked, trying to keep the focus on the business at hand.

"How about the one from last night? It's a good puzzle." John glanced at Tamara, who nodded and walked back to the cold room.

She returned pushing a gurney covered with a white sheet. A sheet with only the smallest lump in the center.

"That's it?" Rianna asked.

"I know it's not much to work with, but we'll try."

She nodded, but her lips turned down in a grimace. I didn't blame her. Even together, if we managed to raise the shade from such a small specimen, it would be a miracle. With Rianna terrified of leaving Faerie for extended periods of time, my asking her to venture out for a nearly impossible task probably didn't rate high in her book. Still, the two of us had raised some seriously impressive shades in the past. We might be able to raise this one.

"So, you know where the foot was found," Tamara said as she rolled the cart to the center of my already drawn, but inactive, circle. "Like the other feet, it was severed by unknown means just above the ankle bone. And like all the others we've found, it's a left foot."

Why only left feet? Why no other body parts?

"We won't know gender until DNA results come back," she said, "but from an initial examination the foot appears to have belonged to a-"

"Male," Rianna and I said in unison. There might not have been much of a body, but there was enough to sense gender.

John shook his head. "Okay, geniuses, you'll get your chance to show off in a minute." When we'd first met, John hadn't believed I could always tell the gender of a corpse. Always. He'd rolled gurney after gurney out for me to identify. "Here's what I bet you don't know," he said. "The boot the foot was found in was laced and double-knotted. Not like it was being pinched shut but like there was a leg in it when it was laced. And here's the real mystery. The foot was severed almost four inches below the top of the boot, but there's not a drop of blood inside the boot and there's no more damage to the boot than what would be expected of an old, worn-out shoe."

"So the foot was shoved inside after being severed?" And drained of blood. But why? "Or are you thinking the person throwing feet in the river missed it because it was hidden inside the boot?"

"Yeah, that's one of several theories floating around-none of which is leading us anywhere." John rubbed at his bald spot again.

"Any luck untangling the spells on it?" I asked, glancing at Tamara.

She shook her head. "I was hoping that since this one hadn't spent any time in the water maybe I'd glean something. But it's just like the other feet we've found."

If we were lucky, we'd be able to ask the shade. I turned to Rianna. "You ready to try this?"

She nodded and held out her hands, palms up. "Are you leading or am I?"

Rianna was the better witch when it came to spellcasting, but I'd always had a stronger connection to the grave. "I'll lead."

I placed my palms flat against Rianna's and then looked at John. "We're going to start now," I told him, and he reached over and flipped a switch on the video recorder. I turned my focus inward.

It took only a small string of magic to reactivate my circle, and it sprang up around us, buzzing softly. Once it was in place, I nodded at Rianna.

"My magic to your will," she whispered, and though the words themselves held little meaning, she laced them with magic, giving them shape and purpose.

"I will guide it," I said, tapping into the energy stored in my ring and giving power to my own words.

The spell activated like a key sliding home in a lock, and where Rianna and my palms touched, her magic poured up to the surface, slipping into my flesh, my blood. Sharing someone else's magic is a strange, personal, and innately wrong feeling. Like drawing a breath directly out of someone else's lungs. Being the one giving up magic feels even worse.

Rianna didn't complain, though the skin around her eyes pinched in a wince. Time to get on with it. I dropped my shields.

Only the smallest tendril of grave essence reached for me from the foot. I drew it into me, accepting the chill into my body as I released what little heat I had left into the amputated part. Wind tore through the circle, whipping curls that escaped my ponytail into my face and making Rianna's lank red hair fan out around her. A patina of gray crawled over the room as the linoleum under us wore away, revealing crumbling concrete underneath. The sheet on the gurney turned dingy and frayed, the worn holes exposing rusted metal. The Aetheric bloomed into twisting colors around us, strands of magic glowing in a low ebb and flow, like a giant magical pulse.

"Is this what it's always like for you?" Rianna asked, her green eyes glowing brightly as she looked around us.

"The land of the dead? Yeah, recently." I wasn't going to mention anything about the Aetheric, especially not while being recorded. I hadn't realized that she would share my ability to see across the planes when we shared our magic.

I reached out with magic before she could ask any more questions. My ability to raise shades had nothing to do with the amount of Aetheric energy I could channel and everything to do with the wyrd ability that both Rianna and I had been born with. I reached out with that portion of me that touched the dead, and Rianna's magic answered, reaching with mine. As I poured the two magics into the foot, they flowed together, twisting, twining, not like they were one single note of music, but like two harmonious notes vibrating together, building toward a crescendo.

I reached deep with the magic, searching for a shade. In theory, every cell in the body stored the life's memory-the trick was having enough magic or the body having enough copies of those memories to give form to the shade. A new body with lots of cells took only a little power to raise. An old body reduced to dust and bones needed a lot of magic to fill in the gaps between the memories. With just a foot? We needed to pump enough magic into the shade to fill out the missing body. Difficult. Impossible alone. But together? Maybe. Just maybe.

Our magic filled the foot and flowed beyond it. I felt the shade forming before I even opened my eyes.

It worked.

Or not.

I stared, horrified, not at the shade of a man but at the single, ghastly glimmer of a foot. Just a foot.

The foot-shade hopped across the gurney, and though we'd poured enough energy in it to raise ten shades, the stump at its ankle led to nothing.

"What the h.e.l.l?" John stepped through my circle, making both Rianna and me shudder-I had talked to him about crossing active circles. He leaned closer to the foot, watching its strange dance. "Where's the rest of it?"

Good question. One I had no answer for. I glanced at Rianna. Her eyes were wide, the whites glimmering as she watched the ill-formed shade bounce across the gurney.

"Does that mean it was severed prior to death?" Tamara asked. She at least respected the edge of my circle. Of course, as deeply entrenched in magic as she was, she'd have had to shatter the circle to cross.

"No," I said, and Rianna shook her head. "I've raised shades that have been dismembered. This isn't the result. Remember that case three years ago when the parts were found in three different trash bags?" And the bag with the head and right arm had been found almost a week after the rest. The vic had died of exsanguination as his limbs were sawed off one at a time. It still made me sick to think about that case, but even though I hadn't had the full body to raise a shade from, and several of the limbs had been severed prior to death, the shade had still remembered that it once had a full body-the parts had just appeared dismembered. This shade . . . it was like the foot was all the man had ever been.

"Okay, so then what is this?" John pointed to the flailing foot.

"I don't know." Unhelpful. That's what it was. How could a foot forget it had been part of a body? "It's like the rest of the body just ceased to be."

John grunted. "You sound like the tracker I consulted. Good reputation, best tracking spells in the country. But he tried to track the rest of the body on each of the feet, and each spell failed. He said he'd never seen anything like it and it was like there was no rest of a body out there to find. How is that possible?"

I had no idea. The shade jumped off the gurney and hopped across the floor. It bounced against the edge of the circle, sending a tremor through the barrier. I shook my head. "Why is it stuck in perpetual motion?" I asked aloud, though I knew no one could answer. Would the other dismembered feet do the same?

I thought back to the circle at the vacant lot and the rage- and pain-filled shadows I had almost been able to see around me. They'd been writhing and circling. Was this shade still stuck in whatever had happened inside that circle? I watched the foot hop about. There seemed to be a pattern to its movement, but with only the one foot I couldn't guess what it was.

"We should put it back," Rianna said, her voice wavering. Chill b.u.mps had broken out down her arms, though I wasn't sure if they were from fear or cold, and she looked exhausted, overused. Not that I wasn't.

I nodded and began drawing the magic back, preparing to lay the shade to rest. Then the morgue door banged open. I jumped at the sound and a familiar silver-souled fae stormed into the room.

"Alex," Falin said, coming to a stop inches from my circle, "we have to go. Now."

Chapter 23.

John rounded on the FIB agent. "We're conducting an investigation here," he said, the shiny bald spot on the top of his head flushing to red.

"And it's over. Alex, let's go." Falin rapped on the edge of the barrier as if he were knocking at a door.

Sparks of light flashed through the circle around his knuckles, and my knees locked as spikes of magical backlash tore through me. Reminds me of the first time we met. Unfortunately, I wasn't the only one affected.

Rianna swayed, her eyes rolling back to show too much white. I grabbed her wrists before her hands fell away from mine. We were still sharing magic. If we broke contact at this point, the results could be disastrous. Possibly deadly.

"Unless you want to drag me out of here unconscious, get the h.e.l.l away from my circle," I said, glaring at Falin as I tried to keep Rianna standing.

Falin glanced at his fist, as if only now considering the result of his action. Then he dropped his hand and stepped back a foot. The urgency in his face didn't change, though, and I didn't ignore it. Something must have happened. Regardless, certain magics couldn't be rushed, and I was in the middle of one.

I drew back the power that gave the ghastly foot form, and it vanished, the sound of its clomping dance fading. Rianna let out a breath, swaying as she did so, and I squeezed her fingers. I hastily pulled my heat from the corpse, the bit of living warmth accenting just how cold I'd grown while immersed in the grave. I shivered, but I wasn't done yet. I still had to break the ritual with Rianna.

"What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours." As the power-laced words left my mouth, Rianna's magic washed out of me.

She dropped my hands and sagged into herself, then sank to her knees. Her already pale skin blanched to the gray of a corpse, and she gasped, as if she couldn't quite catch her breath. She was the better witch, hands down. I'd seen her cast spells I could never dream of attempting. h.e.l.l, she'd healed me from being half dead after my fight with Coleman. But the gap between our grave abilities? It had clearly widened in the years we'd been apart.

"You okay?" I asked. I was exhausted, but I was still standing, and I'd raised way more shades today than I should have-I would probably pay for that one soon. And hard. I was already trembling, and I hadn't released my hold on the grave yet, which was never a good sign.

Rianna hugged her knees to her chest, and I watched her blink furiously. Finally she looked up, her eyes unfocused.

"Al, I can't see." Her voice was thin, frightened.

c.r.a.p.

I knelt beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. She'd just shared my magic and looked through several planes of realities for the first time. And now she was paying the price.

"It'll come back. Give it time."

A tear leaked from the corner of her blind eye. Okay, I'm officially the worst friend ever.

"Alex. We have to go," Falin said again.

d.a.m.n. I couldn't abandon Rianna blind and in the middle of the mortal realm. It would be dusk in a few hours, and if her magical backlashes were anything like mine tended to be, it would be a while before her sight recovered.

"We'll have to take Rianna . . . home," I said to Falin as I climbed to my feet, pulling Rianna up with me.

"We don't have time."

I frowned and Rianna's nails dug into my bare arm as if she was afraid I'd walk away and leave her. I patted her hand, partially to rea.s.sure her and partially in hopes that she'd let go before she drew blood.

"I can take her," Tamara said. "I was supposed to clock out eight minutes ago."

I gave her a feeble smile. "That's okay. It's on our way." Okay, so I didn't actually know where Falin was dragging me out of here to go, but Rianna had to make it into the VIP section of the Bloom and then beyond to Faerie and finally to Stasis. It wasn't exactly a mortal-friendly trip.

"Fine," was all Falin said, but I could hear the irritation as well as the unspoken "Just hurry up."

I turned to John. "I have to go. I-"

He cut me off. "Yeah. I see that. I'll wrap things up here." But he didn't sound happy about the situation and I had the feeling I'd be getting a lot fewer calls for cases in the future.

Oh, good, now Rianna's blind, Tamara thinks I'm brushing her off, and John is upset with me. I was doing absolutely splendid things to my friendships today.

Falin crossed his arms and drummed his fingers on his elbow, and I released my connection to the grave. The icy wind that had been ripping through me died as the vines surrounding my psyche closed and darkness fell over my eyes like a heavy blindfold.

Well, not like that was unexpected. Or something I wasn't getting used to navigating through.

I dispelled my circle and then knelt, fumbling for my purse. Someone pressed the leather strap into my hand.

"You can't see, can you?" Falin asked, his voice low and close by.

Rianna, who still gripped my arm, was probably the only person close enough to hear. Her fingers tightened. "Al?"

I shrugged. "The blind leading the blind, and all that."

I couldn't see Falin's expression, but I swear the sound he made was some sort of growl. His warm fingers lifted Rianna's clammy ones from where they gripped my arm, and his arm slid around my waist.

"Come on. We have to go." He set a quick pace, nearly dragging me as I stumbled along beside him.

"Wait. Rianna-?"

"I'm with you," she said, her voice broken by her gasps but sounding like it came from the other side of Falin.

I knew we'd reached the morgue doors only when I heard him press the panel for the automatic doors-a feature that no one typically used. I twisted back around, almost grateful I couldn't see John or Tamara's expressions as Rianna and I were hustled out.

"Bye!" I yelled and received halfhearted replies. Then we were out of the morgue, our shuffling steps squeaking and echoing in the long hallway.

"What's going on?" I asked once I felt us turn the first corner.

Falin was quiet for so long that I thought he might not answer. Then he said, "The Winter Queen sent down an order. The FIB is coming to drag you to Faerie."

"Stay inside. Don't even answer the door," Falin said as he ushered me into his apartment.

Rianna was still downstairs in the car. Falin didn't want to risk taking me all the way to the Magic Quarter, and his apartment wasn't far from Central Precinct and the morgue. The hope was that no one would think to look for me at another FIB agent's home. He would drop Rianna off at the Bloom, and then-well, I hoped he had a plan because I didn't.

"I'll be back in half an hour," he said, but then hesitated.

"Go. I'm fine." Okay, so I couldn't see and I was being sought by the FIB, but other than that . . . All right, maybe fine is a gross exaggeration. "Go," I said again.

"Alexis." My name, just my name. His heat filled the air around me, like he'd moved closer or leaned in toward me.

My lips parted as his breath tumbled against my skin, but the touch was just air. He'd said orders had reached the FIB that the queen wanted me taken to Faerie. So why was he helping me escape? I reached toward him, or toward the heat that filled the s.p.a.ce between us, and that heat withdrew.