“Okay, let’s try this again. Tell me about the prime.”

“I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t even realize we had ghouls until you told me.”

Briar watched her wrist as I spoke. Then she let out a string of curses, some of which I’d never heard before. Once she finished, she tucked her crossbow behind her back again. “Get your charm bracelet, your eyes are freaking me out.”

I was more than happy to comply. Grabbing the chain of charms, I clasped it around my wrist and immediately the pressure in my head eased. Unfortunately, while the overlay of other planes thinned, they didn’t vanish, as if my psyche was reluctant to let go. I pushed them away, and the wisps of color and signs of decay retreated to my peripheral once more. The room darkened. Not a full fade to black or even a graying out, but it dimmed as if one of the lightbulbs had gone out. Better than I expected.

I reclaimed my obsidian ring from the desk, but when I reached for my dagger, Briar stopped me.

“Not that,” she said, grabbing the dagger before I could pick it up.

As soon as her fingers closed on the hilt, her face tightened, her eyes widening as her lips thinned. Her hand spasmed open and the dagger clattered back onto the desk.

“Fuck. What the hell was that?” she said, ducking her head as she rubbed small circles in the soft spot just above where her jawbone met her ear.

I stared, dumbfounded. I’d always known the dagger had some form of awareness, and recently it had bonded with me to the point it followed me around in Faerie. Despite that, no one had ever had a problem touching it. Not that I walked around handing the dagger to people, but most of my friends had held it at one point or another. No one had ever had the reaction Briar just did.

Of course, Briar Darque isn’t a friend. And the dagger hadn’t liked her since she walked through the door. Still, what exactly had it done when she touched it? I’d never know if I didn’t ask.

Briar’s glare morphed into an uncertain frown at the question. “What do you mean what did it do? It screamed the most disharmonious wail I’ve ever—” She stopped, her brows creasing. “You couldn’t hear it, could you?”

I shook my head and Briar gave the dagger an appraising look. For a moment I thought she’d try to pick it up again—and I think she considered it—but her hand flexed in the air above it before dropping to a pouch on her belt. She pulled out a bag with an OMIH crest stamped on it. It wasn’t until she broke the seal on the bag that I realized it was a magic-dampening evidence bag.

She wasn’t seriously…? But she was.

“I’ll have to confiscate this,” she said as she flipped the bag inside out and put the inert side over her hand like a glove.

“You can’t just take my dagger.” Actually she probably could. Hell, for all I knew, I was still under arrest despite the fact I’d proven I hadn’t created the prime.

“You’ll get a reimbursement slip for the dagger’s value. But I’ve never seen an alarm spell quite like that. The guys at the lab will want to try to reverse engineer it.”

She’s seriously taking my dagger because she wants the spell? That was ridiculous. No, worse than that, it was government sanctioned theft. Hell, it wasn’t any better than some of the bullshit the FIB pulled. And lucky me, I currently answer to both.

She picked up the hilt through the charmed plastic, and her body went rigid, her shoulders hitching.

“Son of a—” She jerked back, dropping the dagger again. This time it landed pointed side down and the blade sank through the solid wood of my desk.

“Great,” I muttered as Briar continued to curse. But she didn’t stop me as I grabbed the hilt and pulled the blade free. It slid through the wood as easily as if the desk were room temperature butter. Sometimes having a blade that could cut through anything was less than convenient. Its slightly alien presence fluttered at the edge of my mind, urging me to attack Briar while she was still off balance.

And that was the reason carrying it was always a risk.

Propping one foot on my chair, I shoved the dagger into its enchanted sheath. I could still feel it in the back of my mind, but it was a hell of a lot easier to ignore it sheathed.

“Did you enchant that thing?” Briar asked. She’d recovered from the dagger’s second mental assault and now watched me with a predatory wariness, her weight balanced, ready for a fight.

I put my foot back on the ground and turned to face her, my hands in front of me and my body open and, hopefully, nonthreatening. “It was a gift, and your lab won’t be able to replicate the spell. It’s fae-wrought, the magic imbued in the otherworldly metal.”

She cocked an eyebrow, her expression evaluating as she studied me. Then she shifted her weight back so she didn’t look like she would lunge over the desk at any moment. About time.

“You’re full of surprises, Alex Craft, and definitely not what I was expecting.” She picked up the file she’d dropped on the desk earlier.

“Since you entered my office armed to the teeth, do I want to know what you were expecting?”

Her lips curled in something that passed for a smile only if you considered a tiger baring its teeth a sign of friendship. “Your OMIH files are very interesting, more because of what is missing than what is in them. You have no known next of kin, no birth records, and yet you have all the required paperwork to be a legal citizen. Even your academy records indicate nothing about your past as your fees were paid by an anonymous benefactor.” She looked up, searching my face for a response.

A response I didn’t give. I’d been through this particular line of questions before. When I’d changed my name my father had buried any and all paperwork that could tie me back to him. And when he buried something, he was thorough.

“Fine, we’ll ignore the mysterious past in which there are no records of your existence before you enrolled in academy at eight, and we’ll move on to more recent events.” Briar flipped the page. “Your file reads like a cover-up, full of redactions and missing reports. A notation mentions you being involved in an event at the governor’s house in which his daughter was maimed, and yet, while a record of the police being deployed exists, there’s no official report—or unofficial either. Nor is there any record of your rumored arrest on that night. More peculiar though, is that the first responders have no memory of ever reaching the governor’s house.”

I remained perfectly still, focusing on keeping my face blank. The event she was talking about had occurred three months ago, under the Blood Moon, and was when my life was turned upside down and inside out. And the governor’s daughter? Yeah, that was my younger sister. The blood I sported on my hands when I went to Faerie I’d earned trying to keep her alive.

“Another notation suggests that you might have a connection to a series of holes into the Aetheric. But again, there are no official records that mention your name. A warrant was apparently issued for your arrest by the FIB—which is more than odd as you’re a witch not a fae, but regardless, records of that warrant are also missing. Oh, and you’re rumored to have been involved in both the Coleman case and the Sionan River murders. Both of which are classified as closed despite the fact no one was ever apprehended. At least a record of those cases exist, though both were sealed—”

I didn’t miss the “were” in that.

“—But guess what. Once I got the order to have them unsealed, all details were vague and you weren’t mentioned. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

“That you base your judgment on rumors?”

Her glare could have pinned me to my chair as easily as one of her crossbow bolts.

“No, I’m thinking you have some very powerful connections who are covering your tracks. Something is rotten here, and it surrounds you.”

I couldn’t deny that someone was covering the truth about what had happened—my father most likely, so I sidestepped because I had to admit words like “rumored” and “involved” coupled with missing records did make me look suspicious. “I assure you, any involvement I had in the events mentioned involved working the case, not the crime.”

She glanced at her wrist, checking her lie detector spell. Her jaw clenched as she shook her head. “I don’t suppose you have a suggestion of who might know more about the prime ghoul?” she asked as she gathered the photographs she’d scattered over my desktop.

I didn’t, though there were a number of possibilities. While she was correct that I’d been the only local grave witch for most of the last four years, recently Nekros had been a hot seat for grave witches. Not counting Rianna—because she’d no more create a ghoul than I would—I could think of a half dozen grave witches who’d passed through Nekros in the last three months and not all of them were what I’d consider good guys. There were two in particular who I knew for a fact were bad news. But they were both dead—okay, one had started out dead, but now he wasn’t walking around anymore.

Ashen Hughes’s ghost might still be in Faerie, but even if I knew how to find him, I doubted I’d get any help out of him. The fact that he worked for a slaver who’d tried to soul chain me and sell me to the highest bidder and I’d sort of separated Ashen from his already dead body pretty much put a damper on our relationship. And as for Edana? Well, she’d screwed with reality and to stop her, I’d ripped reality from around her. Not even dust was left of her now.

But even as twisted as those two grave witches had been, I couldn’t think of any reason why they’d create a prime or how ghouls would have benefited either of their plans. A prime could be controlled to a certain extent, until it started killing people to create more ghouls. Then the hive mind mentality of the creatures overwhelmed the witch’s will and you ended up with a nest of corpse-eating walking dead. You’d have to be an idiot to create one.

“I have no idea.”

Briar snorted and turned toward the door, her dark braid whipping behind her. She hesitated at the threshold and glanced back over her shoulder.