Grave Visions (Alex Craft, #4)(39)
After taking in as much of the room as I could stomach, I averted my eyes. I’d missed details—I knew that—but I’d seen enough, more than I wanted, and for what they needed, only the bodies were important. Unfortunately, I’d have to move the couple to draw my circle. With their positions and relation to the furniture, there was no other way.
Unless I work without a circle.
Just the idea made my skin crawl. It was dangerous, but we were actually fairly far away from any cemeteries and the only two bodies I felt in the immediate area were the couple. Of course, I’d light up like a beacon as soon as I straddled the chasm between the living and the dead. And nasty things lived in that wasteland. I really didn’t want to encounter one of them.
“We’re going to have to move them,” I said, nodding at the couple while keeping my eyes averted.
“Is it possible to perform the ritual without disturbing them?” Falin asked.
“I can’t draw my circle. The bed is in the way.”
The three men conferred quietly. I meant to listen, but the two ghosts poking around the scene distracted me. Roy kept kneeling and pointing at this or that while Icelynne followed him, her dark eyes a little too wide. I couldn’t catch everything he said, but I clearly made out the words “arterial spray” and “signs of struggle.” Roy had been a computer programmer in life, and Tongues for the Dead didn’t typically work active scenes, so he had to be guessing, most likely based on crime shows, but Icelynne hung on every word he said, clearly impressed with his prowess as an investigator. I left them to it.
While I’d watched the ghosts, Jenson must have left the room, because he walked back into the door as I turned, two morgue techs behind him.
“Where do you need the bodies moved?” a young tech with a flush of pimples on his cheek asked.
I glanced around the room. I wanted to disturb the scene as little as possible, which meant I didn’t want to walk—or draw my circle through—any of the blood. I probably shouldn’t move the furniture either if I could help it. It was going to have to be a very small circle. Fine by me, but I still needed enough clear space to do it. It was a nice hotel, but the room was far from large.
I pointed to the largest clear spot in the room. One of the techs spread a drop cloth—which I hadn’t even considered before—and then the techs moved first the boy and then the girl side by side on the cloth. They were both in full rigor mortis, so while the techs tried to lay the boy on his side, the position was unnatural, his knees bent and arms and head curled forward like the overanimated pose of someone pretending to be scary for the benefit of a child. The girl was just as stiff, her legs twisted at awkward angles and one arm up as if she’d been shielding her face, but at least she lay flat.
Once the bodies were moved, I pulled out my wax chalk and drew my circle tight around the couple, being sure to keep to the drop cloth. I actually stood on the outside to draw it, because inside the circle the open spaces were too narrow and awkward for me to squat while ensuring I didn’t accidentally brush against the bodies.
With my circle drawn, I glanced at Falin, John, and Jenson. “Ready?”
John nodded and pulled out a camera that I guessed shot still and video based on the small red light that began blinking when he hit a silver button on top. I doubted the video would be as good as what was shot at the morgue, but it would do to document the ritual.
Falin glanced at the camera. “You know I’ll have to confiscate that if this officially becomes a FIB case.”
“Yeah, you can file for it with the main office. Alex, go on.”
I didn’t wait to see if the argument would continue, but activated my circle, dropped my shields, and embraced the grave. The chill rushed into me, the unearthly wind tossing my curls around my face. The boy was closest to me, so I reached for him with my magic, my power sliding into the corpse.
The shade I found was weak. Not impossible to raise, and not as weak as the male victim Jenson had me raise days before had been, but noticeably weaker than a fresh body should have been. I paused. Raising a weak shade would take a lot more energy than raising a normal one. And I didn’t have a lot of energy to spare. Time to check the girl. Hopefully, she could give us all the information we needed and I wouldn’t have to expend energy into the weak shade.
I drew my magic back from the boy and reached out to the girl. Sometimes, when I hadn’t performed a ritual in a while, my power all but hemorrhaged out of me, rushing toward any corpse in my vicinity. But I’d used my grave magic a lot recently, and I wasn’t at my strongest, so it reacted placidly as I guided it into the girl.
I frowned. Her shade was even weaker than the boy’s.
“Something has damaged them,” I said, opening my eyes to look at the men in the room with me.
Jenson huffed out a breath between his lips. “Well, I’d say that is stating the obvious.”
I turned a glare toward him. “No, I mean their shades. What was done to their bodies shouldn’t have weakened their shades. But . . . something did.”
“You can’t tell what?” Falin asked.
I shook my head. I’d felt shades that had been shredded by a soul-eating spell before—this wasn’t like that. It was more as if they’d burned out, like a candle that had run out of wick. “Something used them up. Wore them out.”