Author: Kalayna Price

I closed my laptop. Damage control time.

“I shouldn’t have used magic without your permission. I should have called an ambulance,” I said. I’d apologize if I had to—a debt was better than getting sued—but I wasn’t ready quite yet.

She shook her head, a stray tear falling from the corner of her eye. “You saved my baby.” She cradled her belly. “He already wants to come early, but the doctor insists we try to give him at least another week. He suggested bed rest and that I keep my stress down.” She laughed, a hard, ugly sound. “As if that’s possible, given the circumstance. But if I had lost James’s baby…” She pulled more paper from the roll. My wastebasket was already half full of crumpled white paper.

I’d have to put more toilet paper on the list along with tissue.

“I must look a fright,” she said, scrubbing under her eyes. “And I owe you the rest of your fee. I’ll write a check.” Her hands shook as she pulled her checkbook from her purse. “How much do I owe you?”

I blinked at her, still reeling from her drastic swings from threatening to sue me to all but thanking me and then to calmly moving on to business.

“Ms. Craft?” She looked at me, her pen hovering over her checkbook.

“I’d like to continue investigating this case.”

Her eyes narrowed. “My husband killed himself. I’m going to have to accept that.”

“It is possible.” Maybe even likely. “But there are still a lot of questions that don’t have answers. Like the memory lapse his shade experienced.”

She pushed away from the desk, crossing her arms over her chest. “Your magical failings are something you can look into on your own dime. I was a fool to go against my beliefs, but I was out of options, and I suppose, you did get me information.”

Gee, now isn’t that a compliment.

I worked hard to keep my smile in place. “Don’t you want to know where he was for the three days he was missing?”

The stern set of her crossed arms loosened, but didn’t drop. She looked away. “Of course. But you said the shade couldn’t tell you. Did he”—her voice caught—“could he even tell you why?”

“No. And despite the fact he was alone on that roof, there is still some possibility he didn’t intend to jump.”

She went still, then, as if in slow motion, her head turned. Tear-reddened eyes, a little too wide, locked on me. “You’re talking about magic.”

“I haven’t dismissed the possibility.”

Her hands locked into fists, and her lips quivered as if she were caught between screaming and crying. But she did neither. Instead, when she spoke again, it was in a hard, low voice, so quiet it was barely above a whisper. “That explains it. He didn’t leave me.” Her head snapped up. “Then he was murdered.”

I took a deep breath. Let it out. “Like I said, I haven’t dismissed the possibility. But, if there had been overt magical evidence, the police would already be investigating. Magic has limitations, and forcing someone to commit suicide is out of the scope of witchcraft.”

Her nostrils flared. “Then it must have been a fae.”

“I’m not drawing any conclusions until I have all the facts,” I said, working hard to keep my face empty. Right now, she’d grab on to any doubt she spotted. “Mrs. Kingly, do you have a photo of your husband. Something recent.”

The question threw her off balance, her mouth opening and closing like a fish. Her anger didn’t waver, but confusion tightened her features. Confusion and distrust. Her eyes narrowed and she searched my face as if she were studying a trap she knew would spring if she didn’t disarm it. “Why?”

“I have a theory,” I said, and when her expression didn’t change, I asked. “Was your husband ill?”

“Ill? Heavens no. James rarely even caught a cold.”

Which was what his ghost had said as well. “And how much would you say your husband weighed on the day he disappeared?”

Her glistening but stony eyes flew wide. “That is an inappropriate question.”

I waited, but when it became clear she wasn’t going to answer I said, “On the day he jumped from the Motel Styx he weighed only a little over a hundred pounds.”

“That…” Mrs. Kingly shook her head and dug her phone out of her purse. “No, that can’t be. This is my James.” She opened a photo app on her phone before passing it across the table.

I picked up the phone and studied the picture. I knew what James Kingly looked like, of course, as his ghost had been in my office for the last hour, but ghosts were almost always idealized projections of a person’s self-image. The ghost James was neither fat nor thin, but an average, healthy looking balance. He also had a full head of hair. The James in the picture was beginning to bald, and while he wasn’t overweight exactly, he had plenty of padding—and not from muscle. Neither image fit the disease-wasted man who’d jumped from the top of the Motel Styx.

“When was this photo taken?” I asked, passing the phone back to her.

“I took it a week before he…” She stopped, her eyes misting, and she gazed down at the photo, a small, broken smile touching her lips. “We wanted to see the fall colors in the Botanical Garden. That’s where it was taken. It was a wonderful day.” She pulled more toilet paper from the rapidly dwindling roll.

One week. He had to have lost the weight in the days he was missing. And nothing natural could make a man drop seventy pounds in three days.

“Mrs. Kingly, I want to continue investigating your husband’s case. The police may have dismissed the case as suicide, but I think there are too many questions to be satisfied with that answer.”

“And why should I hire a witch instead of a reputable investigator?”

I ignored the implication that the two were mutually exclusive. “You should hire me because if magic is involved—and at this point, I’m inclined to believe it is—you’ll need someone not only familiar with magic, but able to detect spells. You won’t find another investigator in Nekros with as high a sensitivity to magic. Another PI might use charms to detect magic, but charms can be unreliable and they can’t determine what the magic does. I can.” I leaned forward, clasping my hands on the table. “I am capable of following this case wherever it leads, magical or mundane.”

“How do I know you wouldn’t cover for a fellow witch?”

“Would you cover for a murderer simply because he couldn’t perform magic?” I asked, and she sniffed, but I wasn’t expecting an answer. “Can you e-mail me that photo, so I can show it to people as I track his movements over the missing days?” As an afterthought I added. “And a personal item, something he used a lot or carried with him, would be good.” I couldn’t do a thing with it, but Rianna might be able to concoct a spell that would help.

Mrs. Kingly’s lips flattened as the edges of her mouth tugged downward. “I’m not agreeing to anything yet, but answer me one question. And really answer this time.” Her eyes fixed on me, hard enough to pin me to the chair. “Do you think my husband was murdered?”

I thought of the photo of a healthy man with round, smiling cheeks, of the emaciated man who’d thrown himself from a roof, of the shade with absolutely no memory of the days prior to his death. Then I lifted my gaze to the ghost who looked as eager to hear my answer as his wife because he honestly didn’t know what happened.

“Yes, I do.”

Mrs. Kingly nodded. “Then get me a contract. You’re hired.”

Once the Kinglys left I considered my next step. I had two obvious starting points: head to Delaney’s, the bar where James’s last memory ended, or look into the suicide case he’d witnessed. I glanced over the notes I’d taken from the ghost’s account of the suicide. Besides the timing, and the fact both suicides had been public, one major detail struck me. James had described the man as being just skin and bones. Which was exactly what James looked like before he threw himself off a building to crash onto a populated street.

I chewed at the end of my pen, glancing over everything I’d written. It was still midmorning, so I doubted the bar would be open. That left tracking down the crispy corpse. There had to be some connection between James’s vagrant and what had happened to James himself. I just didn’t know why. Or how. James was the last one in contact with the man before he killed himself. Had a spell spread to him like a virus? Stranger things had happened. I’d once contracted a soul sucking spell from contact with an infected shade.

I was still staring at my screen when Rianna walked into the room.

“So does Tongues for the Dead have our first case of real investigative work?”

I nodded. “Yeah, but it’s kind of ironic. I’m looking at where to start my investigation, and I’m leaning toward a conversation with a shade.”

“I thought you already raised the Kingly shade and didn’t get anything out of him.”

“And that’s what’s so significant.” Between last night’s fiasco at dinner and the fact the Kinglys had been waiting for me when I arrived this morning, I hadn’t had an opportunity to fill Rianna in on more than the most basic details of the case. It was past time to update her. After all, she was the mystery nut, and this puzzle was right up her alley.

“You’re right, the earlier suicide is definitely worth checking out,” she said after I’d brought her up to speed. She’d perched on the edge of my desk, and despite the fact we were talking about not one, but two horrific deaths, she was grinning, her eyes distant as if she were visualizing different scenarios. “And a spell spreading like a virus is an interesting idea, though it still circles back to one major problem.”

“How or if it forced the men to kill themselves,” I said, knowing exactly what she was thinking. It was the same stumbling block I’d been running into since I took the case.