Author: Kalayna Price

“But she’s alive.” The ghost’s voice was like a whisper carried on the wind. I was surprised he’d managed to cling to his identity. Most ghosts as far gone as him were merely haunts.

“Yes, I’m alive,” I said, and turned to Roy. “I thought you said ghosts didn’t do the social thing? What’s going on?”

Roy shrugged. “Special circumstance. I found him trying to coax his body out of a graveyard.”

Why was it the more he explained the more lost I became? “I think you better start at the beginning.”

Roy looked over at the other ghost. “Steven?”

“My body, it’s stuck in Sleepy Knoll Cemetery—not that it’s listening to me anyway.” The ghost wasn’t whispering, but he might as well have been. It was hard to listen to.

“Give me your hand,” I told the ghost.

Steven backed farther into the wall. “Why?”

“So your voice doesn’t sound like wind rustling through dry reeds,” I said, taking a step forward and lifting my palm toward him.

The ghost stared at my outstretched hand. “But, you’re alive.”

“Yeah, we covered that part already. Trust me, okay?”

Steven reached out a tentative hand so transparent that for a moment, I was afraid he was so far gone we may not be solid to each other. But as his trembling fingers touched the tips of mine, I could feel the resistance, the weight, of the other being.

His nearly clear eyes flew wide, staring at where the tips of our fingers touched. I stepped forward and wrapped my hand around his. Those eyes, wide with both fear and amazement, stared and I felt him preparing to jerk his hand away, but after the initial flicker of panic that made his entire body jolt, he went still.

Opening my shields a crack, I channeled the slightest bit of power through my body and into the ghost. Chill bumps lifted on my skin, the lightest breeze crossing over from the land of the dead. The ghost’s shape filled in, becoming more solid. I’d raised a lot of shades over the last few days, plus the crash course in glamour, so I didn’t give him much energy, not even enough to bring about more than a hint of color, but the trickle I channeled into him carried him closer to the land of the living.

“Wow,” he whispered, his voice stronger, clearer. Which was what I wanted. I closed my shields and dropped his hand.

“I think I’m jealous.” Roy made the comment light, like a joke, but he shoved his hands into his pockets with more force than normal and his shoulder slouched so far forward that he looked like he had a humped back.

Nothing sexual existed between Roy and me, which meant if he was jealous it was all about power. “You start treating me like a food source and I’m cutting you off,” I warned him and the ghost gave me a big-eyed “who me?” look before shoving his glasses farther up his nose and looking away. I shook my head with a sigh—sometimes I really didn’t know about that ghost.

I turned back to Steven.

“You said something about your body being stuck in a cemetery—that’s where your body is supposed to be. You’re lucky you were smart enough not to follow it or you’d be stuck there too.”

“No, you don’t get it, my body, it’s walking around the cemetery. Well, really, more like scuttling. And what it’s doing…” He shuddered. “It ate a woman. I mean, she was already dead, but my body ate her.”

I went still, my pulse crashing in my ears. “Your body is a ghoul? When were you attacked and where?”

The ghost frowned, and Roy stepped closer, elbowing me lightly. “This is the really good part. Tell her, Steven.”

“I, I don’t remember being attacked. I remember fixing myself a bowl of bran cereal—my wife has been on a real health kick lately—and the next thing I knew it was night and I was squished under a park bench and something dark and frightening was sliding into my body, pushing me out.”

That doesn’t sound like a collector.

“Then this guy showed up and told me it was time to go, but my body was all wrong and it was shambling away. So I fought with the guy, because I couldn’t just let my body walk away like that. And the man let me go, telling me he’d be there when I was ready.”

Now that sounded like a collector. In fact, it sounded like Death—he’d told me the exact same thing once, only it hadn’t been my soul in question. Choice. It was the hardest damn lesson I ever learned, and I was only five.

Steven continued his story without notice of my momentary distraction. “I followed my body, trying to figure out how to make it stop. I mean, if I was dead, I should be properly dead, right? It headed straight for the closest cemetery, and I almost followed it inside, but the gate felt wrong, so I waited. That’s when I noticed the moon. I’m a bit of a star freak, and I’d been using my telescope the night before—only it wasn’t the night before. Somehow between breakfast and waking up under the park bench, I lost three whole days.”

Oh crap. That sounded awfully familiar. The rider’s victims always lost three days, at least before he killed them. But they weren’t ghouls—they were just corpses.

“Steven, I need you to think hard. When you were following your body, did it look hurt? I mean, claw marks, or signs that you might have killed yourself and not remember?”

The ghost shook his head. “No. I mean, I didn’t look like myself. I was thin, my skin drawn back tight, and I had scary-ass teeth and talons, but I didn’t look hurt.”

The blood drained from my face and a shiver shook me. I’d never seen a ghoul, never thought about what they looked like. Briar had mentioned something about a transition, but I hadn’t considered the physical changes. Like the sharp teeth that allowed them to rip through flesh—teeth like I’d seen in Kirkwood’s burnt body. And then there was the rapid burning of all fat and desiccation of the body, which every one of the rider’s victims displayed to some extent or another.

The rider wasn’t committing suicide just to jump to a new host—he was killing his host before his presence turned the body into a ghoul.

Chapter 31

“Larid,” I said again to the bored-looking secretary at the front desk of the local branch of the OMIH. “L-A-R—oh for goodness sake, I’m sure he’s the only possessed guy that came in here two days ago. I’m not trying to see Larid, I just need to talk to the official in charge of his case, or study, or whatever you guys call it.”

“And you are again?”

I sighed and passed her my identification, for the second time. “Alex Craft. I’m the person the thing inside Larid was trying to kill.”

She touched a charm on her desk and a privacy bubble enveloped her as she picked up her phone and made a call. One day I was going to have to learn to read lips. The conversation was a short one, which hopefully meant I got a pass, not a quick “no.”

“Well, Ms. Craft,” she said after she deactivated the privacy charm. “You’ll be relieved to know he won’t be a problem to you anymore.”

A cold jolt of warning shot up my spine. “Why’s that?”

“He died an hour ago.”

“He died?” I repeated, my voice lifting high enough to be just this side of panic. “Was it suicide?” Please, please have been suicide. If I fully understood the implications of what Steven had told me and the physical evidence I’d seen, the rider remaining in a body caused eventual death and ghoulification. It had only been two days. The rider never discarded a body until it started to turn ghoul—which apparently took about three days—unless cornered. So Larid couldn’t have turned yet, could he? It had to be suicide.

The secretary gave me a look that questioned my intelligence. Of course Larid hadn’t died from suicide—the OMIH would have kept him secured and possibly sedated.

“Where is the body now?”

“I’ve told you all I can, Ms. Craft.” She looked down at her computer, dismissing me.

Damn it. If he’d drained the body, I had no idea how long it took between being deemed medically dead and becoming a ghoul. Surely he was circled at the time of his death, but did they contain the rider before breaking the circle to check the body?

“I need to talk to the official in this case. I have information.”

“He isn’t in the office.”

“Then where is he? This is urgent.”

She gave me an unimpressed glare.

“You have a problem and your official needs to know,” I said, trying to keep my voice polite and avoid imagining hitting the woman with one of Briar’s triple-threat darts. “That body might have been dead an hour ago, but chances are good that it will be up, walking around, and hungry very soon. If it’s not in a circle anymore, it needs to be. So pass that along to the official or let me know who I can talk to with the authority to contain that body.”

Her expression shifted toward unsure, but not actually convinced.

I trudged on. “There is a high probability Larid will become a ghoul, so someone needs to take a couple of preventative measures to ensure that doesn’t happen.” I wasn’t sure exactly what those measures were, but I figured cutting off his head would work—cockroaches were the only thing I knew that could survive a beheading, otherwise it was a pretty equal opportunity killing method. Briar would know for sure, but I had no idea how to contact her.

As if my thoughts summoned the woman, a black leather–clad figure walked into the lobby. “Craft, I’ve been looking for you. I don’t like it when my suspects close shop and disappear.”

The secretary’s eyes widened at the word “suspect” and I lost any ground I’d gained with her. She was never going to give me any information now.

I whirled around to face Briar and had to unclench my jaw before I could speak, but I figured if anyone would know what to do about the rider/ghoul situation, it would be her. She listened, her lips thinning as I spoke. Once I finished, Briar marched over to the secretary and flashed her badge.