Oh, I liked her theory—I didn’t think it was right, as none of the ravens Caleb, Falin, and the collectors destroyed had torn reality, but I wasn’t going to correct her. After all, if she ran with that theory for her story, the attention for the holes would shift off me.

Lusa squinted, pulling the paper closer to her face. “These are incomplete, right?”

“I left the upper left-hand corner unconnected.”

“Perfect.” She folded the page in half. “Can I keep this?”

I nodded. I could always draw another copy. “You were going to tell me how you found the tear.”

“Yeah.” She tucked away the page of runes. “Follow me,” she said, and carefully picked her footing as she and her designer shoes led me closer to the bridge.

We slid around the support pillar that the fence butted up against, and then Lusa ducked under the bridge, her ankles wobbling as stones skipped down the steep incline. Somewhere in the shadows under the bridge the river rushed by with an endless murmur. She grabbed one of the diagonal support beams to steady herself and then pointed beyond the beam.

“What do you see?”

I squinted, searching for what she was pointing at, but all I saw was inky darkness. “Nothing. Grave-sight has burned out my night vision.”

“Oh. I’d heard wyrd witches had trouble with their abilities burning out their senses, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Well, what you aren’t seeing is a tent city established by the homeless. I was looking into possible victims for the Sionan floodplain foot murders. That many people couldn’t have gone missing without anyone noticing, but there hasn’t been an abnormal rise in missing-persons reports. It didn’t add up.”

I nodded. I knew all this from what John had told me. She smiled and ran a hand through her brown hair, brushing it back from her face. “I went looking for people who wouldn’t be missed, and one of my searches turned up the fact that a homeless man who spent the night in jail for public intoxication seven days ago found all of his buddies missing when he was released the next morning. He reported it to the cops, but transient people disappear a lot. No one looked into it. “

No one but a reporter on the trail of a story.

“When I interviewed Eddie, the homeless man, he swore everyone had to be dead. That they couldn’t have just relocated because they’d left everything behind: clothes, shoes, possessions—when you don’t have anything you can’t afford to abandon anything. I came out here to follow up. Stumbling over the tear was a very happy accident, though if you quote me on that I’ll deny saying it.”

As she spoke, a car drove across the bridge and I jumped as a nearly deafening roar rumbled under the structure. The sound echoed against the supports, the bank, the columns, the water, and back again, like rolling thunder.

Thunder.

Thundering.

My head snapped up. From underneath a bridge, a bridge didn’t look like a structure that joined two landmasses. It looked like a portal that the river passed through. A gate. The kelpie’s “thundering gate” wasn’t a gate at all. It was a bridge.

Maybe this bridge, if Lusa is onto anything with her missinghomeless angle.

I cracked my shields, slightly, ever so slightly, so just bits of my psyche crossed the planes of reality. The chill of the grave, of the dead, hung in the air, the grave essence reaching for me. Grave essence that emanated from something very close. And fresh.

I opened my shields a little wider. The shadows in my vision rolled back to reveal the skeletal carcass of the rusted and collapsed Lenore Street Bridge. Beyond the bent and sagging support beams—which I was careful not to touch, as I did not want to be responsible for a bridge collapse—I could see the remains of dilapidated lean-tos and weathered tents huddled on the bank. Grave essence leaked from amid the abandoned tents. Not a lot, just the smallest string that whispered across my skin like a northern wind. But essence meant a body—or at least part of one. And this one was human.

“Your eyes are doing that creepy glowing thing,” Lusa said, staring.

I slammed my shields shut. “Lusa, I suggest you find your cameraman. This place is about to be deemed a crime scene.”

Chapter 19

I hung back at the edge of the crowd as I waited for the site to be declared a crime scene. I’d told Tamara what I found before I called John. The revelation that there was a body—or really, part of one—on the scene garnered a low groan from her, but she rolled her shoulders back and went to talk to the officer in charge.

John had been at home when I called him, but by the time I finished telling him where I was, what I’d sensed, and what Lusa had uncovered, he’d already been on a second line, waking up a judge for his warrant. He, the warrant, and cadaver dogs were on their way. Now all that was left was to wait.

A scream rang through the darkness and the crowd around me went silent as dozens of heads turned toward the sound. I couldn’t see the screamer, but the voice was masculine, though pained, and distant. One of the skimmers? I squinted even though I knew I had no chance of spotting him—after my brush with the land of the dead under the bridge, the shadows were even darker.

“What happened?” someone beside me asked.

“Not sure,” another said.

“Can we get closer?” asked a third.

That question seemed to reflect the sentiment of the entire crowd. Shoulders brushed against mine and a hot hand pressed into my back as people shoved forward. The crowd surged toward the fence, carrying me along with it as everyone jockeyed for a better view.

Somewhere ahead of me the scream mutated into a fullthroated howl of pain, and suddenly I could see. Not from a spontaneous reversal of years of damage, though until that moment I would have said that possibility was only slightly less likely than spontaneous combustion from magical overload. No, I could see because one of the skimmers ignited, the blaze casting the scene in grim light.

The flame engulfed the man in a single heartbeat, the raw Aetheric energy he’d gathered acting as fuel for the unnatural fire. It illuminated the group of skimmers surrounding the tear, splashing them in color as the fire spit out sparks of green, purple, and red.

I’d heard that drawing too much Aetheric energy could burn up a witch from the inside out, but the few cases of overload I knew of had resulted in madness or the inability to access the Aetheric after overexposure. I’d never heard of anyone actually combusting.

The skimmer’s scream broke, his voice hoarse from his howls. He flailed, but the other skimmers never looked away from the rift. They didn’t even appear to notice their burning companion.

“Let me through,” a woman wearing an official OMIH tag yelled as she charged the gate. A second official flanked her. “We can help.”

A contingent of Bell’s guards blocked the entrance, but the redheaded lawyer threw out his arms, motioning the guards to move.

“Get that gate open. Let them through,” he yelled at the guards, and then to the OMIH officials he called, “Hurry.”

The two officials and the lawyer ran for the burning skimmer. Forming a semicircle around the man, they pulled the raw magic brimming under his skin, drawing it out and dispersing it harmlessly into the air. I cracked my shields.

Different planes of existence snapped into focus before my eyes, making the night around me both crystal clear despite the darkness and almost too chaotic to perceive. The skimmers glowed with mottled light. Most witches resonated with only one or two colors of Aetheric energy, but the skimmers had been drawing down every wisp of raw magic that had escaped the rift. They swelled with a noxious mix of magic, each quite possibly in danger of being the next to ignite.

The skimmer who had ignited dimmed as the witches drew the magic from him. The Aetheric flames died as his broken scream faded to wracking cries. But it looked like he’d be okay.

Until the soul collector appeared behind him.

“Too late,” I whispered.

The witches didn’t know that yet, though. They continued drawing and dissipating the magic, their faces cut with hard lines of concentration and their shoulders stiff. Then the collector I’d first seen in Lusa’s footage reached forward, his hand passing through the skimmer.

The skimmer’s knees locked, his face freezing in a silent scream as sound failed him. His body collapsed facefirst, the empty husk crumpling to the ground. His soul remained standing upright, caught in the collector’s fist. Anytime I’d seen Death or the other collectors take a soul, they pulled it free and then flicked their wrist and the soul went wherever it was souls went. This collector didn’t.

He turned, his coat flaring around him with the movement and his hand still clenching the soul. The witches rushed forward, checking on the dead man. The collector stepped around them, dragging the soul with him. A soul that was staring at his own dead body.

I’d met several ghosts over the years, witnessed Death collect a handful of souls, and was even present once when a soul resisted collection, but I’d never before witnessed the very moment when someone was forced to confront the fact that his life had ended. The shock and confusion lasted only an instant and then the skimmer’s mouth fell open, his features twisting in a mix of agony and rage. He thrashed in the collector’s grasp and screamed. But there were no human lungs or living vocal cords involved in this scream. It was the scream of a soul and it made me want to reel back and clutch my ears. Several of the people in the press of bodies around me flinched—they might not have been able to hear the scream with their ears, but I think everyone present felt it.

The collector ignored the soul’s pitiable distress.

“Why doesn’t he send him on?” I muttered the question to no one in particular.

The man in front of me must have heard because he turned, and then he startled.

“Holy Mother—” He backed up and into the person beside him. “Your eyes,” he whispered. Then he pushed people aside as he retreated farther from me.

I barely noticed him, but his passage disturbed several other people, who turned. More exclamations sounded, more movement, and soon a ring of empty space opened around me. I was too intent on the events unfolding on the other side of the fence to care.