Affairs of the Dead (17 page)

I nodded, staring from the runes on the table to the remote in his hand.

“Well, after that happened, I started to just walk around, then all of a sudden, I hit the sofa instead of passing through it. I thought maybe I imagined it or something, but when I moved my leg, it touched the sofa instead of going through! Then I tried to pick up one of your cups, and it took a little while, but I was able to do it!” Ethan practically glowed with joy. Actually, he glowed a lot less, and he hadn’t even been a brightly glowing ghost to begin with. “That’s great, isn’t it? Have you ever heard of a ghost who could touch things without rune stones?”

“I can guarantee you that I haven’t,” I said, still not over my shock that Ethan was standing there, holding my remote with no help from me or runes. I shook my head. “Uh, it’s…it’s something, I guess.”

Ethan’s smile faltered when he saw my frown.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, just as I released a huge yawn. Man I was tired. Today had been a longer day than I anticipated.

“It’s unheard of for a ghost to be able to do that without help. I don’t know what to make of it. I can’t really say if it’s good or bad that you can touch things by yourself.”

“And eat things,” Ethan said. My eyes widened.

“You ate?”

“I suddenly started to feel so hungry,” he said, shrugging. “So I made a sandwich. You have frighteningly little to eat in your kitchen, by the way.”

“But I do have a drawer full of menus,” I said. Then I shook my head. “But back to the shocking topic of the evening. How the hell can you touch things and eat without having energy transferred into you?”

“Maybe it’s because of how I became a ghost?” he suggested. “I mean, you already knew some things were different about me; it didn’t work when you tried to absorb me.”

“Maybe,” I said slowly. The rules did seem to be different when it came to how Ethan had ended up outside his physical body. Which reminded me, I hadn’t yet told him what his body had been up to. As horrible as it would be to tell him, it would distract me from my shock over what he could now do.

“Ethan, I’m afraid I have some bad news,” I said. “I’ve been working a case since last week involving the murder of two women. Ghost energy was found on the corpses, which is why we were given the case, but there was also physical evidence, which beasties don’t tend to leave behind. The blood and hair recovered from the crime scenes…identified you as the killer. Well, whoever is in your body is the one who murdered the women.”

Ethan’s eyes widened, his mouth fell open, and I guess he lost whatever concentration he’d been using to hold onto the remote because it fell through his hand to the floor. Luna sat up and barked at the noise, then lay down again.

“I just came from the office,” I continued. “Three dead witches were murdered tonight, and their workroom was ransacked. My preliminary thoughts are that whoever is in your body did it so he could take the rune stones that contained the ghost energy left behind on the corpses of the two women he killed. The witches were shot though, so there was no ghost energy left behind this time.”

Ethan continued to stare at me, mouth agape.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” I said. “But I’m working on figuring out why your body-jacker is offing people.”

“I can’t believe this,” Ethan said. His eyes were still showing too much white. “If you had found my body, this could have been avoided! Now everyone will think I am a murderer! I can’t believe this!”

“Ethan, they won’t think you’re a murderer, because the truth about this whole thing will come out,” I said. “Please, just trust me.”

“Trust you?” He was getting angry now. “Why should I trust you when you’ve done absolutely nothing to help me?”

“That’s not true,” I said, getting a little angry myself. “I spent the entire damn week trying to help you.”

“No, you’re just tracking a killer who wears my face.” This was the first time I’d seen him this angry. He kicked out at the sofa and it connected. “If you were really helping me, then you would have found my body and figured out how to get me back into it, and I wouldn’t be out there murdering people!”

“These things take time,” I said, lowering my voice as I tried to reason with him, because both of us yelling wouldn’t help anything. Luna was fully awake now and threw in the occasional bark, but I couldn’t tell whose side she was on. “I have enough reasons to be invested in finding your body. I’m still going to help you, but you can’t expect me to snap my fingers and have this all work itself out. I’m just one person, and I don’t even know what the hell we’re dealing with.”

“Whatever,” Ethan muttered. “When I find whoever orchestrated this whole thing, I’m going to rip their head off.” He marched toward the wall but released a yelp of pain when he slammed into it instead of passing through it.

“Where are you going? I told you it’s better to stay indoors.”

He glared at me over his shoulder. “Just leave me alone, Selene.”

I tried to ensnare him with my power so he would be held immobile, but to my surprise, it didn’t work. Ethan walked out and slammed my door. When I ran out behind him, he was gone. I couldn’t begin to guess what an angry, somewhat tangible ghost would do wandering out there alone. And I had no way of finding him, so I’d have to wait for him to come back.

I sighed as I closed the door and headed to my bedroom. Ethan was turning into an even bigger enigma. He had picked up my remote, kicked my sofa, and walked into my wall, all while the depleted rune stones sat on the coffee table, and I hadn’t been touching him. What the hell was that about? I felt it was safe to conclude that whatever it was, it wasn’t good. The changes in Ethan and his angry exit on top of everything else I’d dealt with tonight was making me feel weary and old as I went to take a shower. I noticed my bath products had been arranged neatly in the caddy and the towels in the linen closet had been folded. Ethan had put his tangibility to use. Maybe I could keep him around as my ghostly housekeeper. Luna would never miss a meal again.

When I had changed and was emptying out the clutch I’d used tonight, I was surprised when I picked up the tracking rune and it resonated with me. I felt myself being pulled in the direction of the door so the stone could lead me outside. I quickly changed out of my sleeping clothes and slipped the stone around my neck, then grabbed my keys and headed out the door. It was close to midnight, and I was exhausted, but I couldn’t pass up this opportunity.

When I was seated in my car, I sat still for a moment so I could feel the direction the rune wanted me to go, then I drove off. Ethan would have probably wanted to come along for this ride, but alas, he was busy being angry at me, so I was on my own. I had a moment to wonder about what I would do if I encountered the body-jacker, and I really had no idea. Whoever was inside Ethan’s body was a murderer, and though I had my rune gun, it wasn’t like I could pump his body full of bullets. If I killed his body, there was no getting him back into it.

But planning ahead was never my strong suit; rushing into things headfirst was. My tactics had worked out in the past, so maybe they’d work out now that I was driving off to find a murderous ghost in another man’s body. Yeah, I had high hopes for myself.

The rune led me out of Brooklyn into Manhattan, and eventually, I realized I was heading to the part of the Underground located downtown. It made sense for Ethan’s body-jacker to be there, especially if the reanimator he was working with operated out of the Underground. Maybe I’d hit two birds with one stone and find them both tonight. Best-case scenario, here I come.

Since I was pretty certain the tracking rune was taking me to the Underground, I parked in a safer, much less seedy area and continued on foot, growing excited and anxious about what I would come across. After twenty minutes of jogging from where I’d left my car, I reached the Underground. I could feel that there were ghosts here, but I wasn’t out for them right now, and the rune was still leading me on a direct track toward my target.

The stone took me down many a street and alley until eventually, I caught sight of a man with blond hair that looked almost white up ahead. My anxiety and excitement spiked when I recognized Ethan’s body flitting through the crowd. I rummaged around in my bag until I found my pouch of rune stones. I pulled out a light pink stone like the one Micah had used to absorb ghost energy from Leslie’s body, held my gun in my other hand, and started running faster because I’d almost lost sight of him.

I wasn’t exactly running stealthily, so it wasn’t long before the body-jacker turned around and saw me barreling down on him. He looked shocked for a moment, then started running, and I picked up the pace even more.

He was fast, but I had my necromancer power on my side, and I wasn’t planning on losing him. He glanced over his shoulder every now and then and made even more of a commotion than I did with pushing people out of the way and upturning things that were in his path.

I soon realized that even with my ability to run faster than the average human, it appeared being reanimated gave him some extra speed too.

I chased the body-jacker until we were on the outskirts of the Underground. He made a sharp turn around a corner, and when I followed, to my joy and his dismay, we ended up in a dead-end alley. It was devoid of people, so I’d be able to make use of my gun here, which I did immediately, firing off three shots that he used his boosted speed to dodge.

The body-jacker faced me with a hostile look, and I edged closer to him. I didn’t want to waste shots if he was that fast at evading them, so I had to be careful with firing my gun. Plus, I only wanted to maim him, not kill him. I also wanted to try and get close enough to swipe some energy for the stone in case he did get away.

The body-jacker decided to fight fire with fire and took out his gun, but before he could get a shot off, I shot the gun out of his hand. He screamed in pain and clutched his bleeding hand as the gun skittered into the shadows. All the weekends I’d spent at the gun range had definitely paid off.

“Who the hell are you?” I demanded. I didn’t really expect an answer, and he didn’t give one. “I know you stole the body you’re in.” I moved closer, slowly and tensely. He didn’t back up. “And I know you murdered two women.”

He sneered. “They deserved it.”

It was jarring to hear those words spoken so harshly with Ethan’s voice, but it wasn’t hard for me to remember that it wasn’t really Ethan in there.

“So you were out to kill Leslie and Athena specifically,” I said, and his eyes narrowed as though he thought he’d said too much. I had only a hastily thrown together plan of what I wanted to do, but looking at how menacing he appeared, I wondered if I’d actually get a chance to do it.

“I ain’t stopping until I’m done,” he said. “And I’m far from done. You don’t have what it takes to stop me.”

Between one blink and the next, he was running toward me, and if I didn’t move out of the way, he would flatten me. Ethan was tall, and though he wasn’t as broad as Micah or Andrew, he wasn’t a skin-and-bones kind of man either. I got two shots off before I moved to the side and readied the stone. I’d already activated it; now I just had to make contact with Ethan’s body and hope I could glean something.

Ethan’s body-jacker seemed to have another plan though, because instead of trying to flatten me, he jumped, kicked off the wall in some crazy move you typically see in movie fight scenes, and came flying at me with his elbow aimed at my face. I quickly moved to the side and got a few shots off, happy to hear him scream in pain as he crashed into the wall.

I tried to use the opportunity to reach him with the rune stone, but he caught on to my game and rolled out of the way, cursing loudly as he did so. He flipped to his feet, and though his arm was bleeding along with his hand, it didn’t seem to stop him. He body slammed me before I knew what was happening, and the impact of hitting the wall made me drop the rune stone and my gun. Pain exploded throughout my body, and the wind knocked out of me, but I kept myself from falling to the ground.

“Tracking me down wasn’t the wisest decision,” he hissed into my ear. I felt the tracking rune being yanked from my neck, then I felt power rising, and I realized it wasn’t only coming from him. My body had flushed with heat, and my necromancer power flared to life, but it made me feel different than it ever had. I felt powerful all of a sudden, and before I knew it, I had shoved him in the chest and sent him flying across the alley. He hit the bricks hard but only halfway collapsed. When he looked up at me he was practically growling, and the look on his face said he couldn’t wait to return the favor.

He came at me again, but I was ready for him. I had no idea where this sudden strength and power was coming from, but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I took a slam from his fist but elbowed him in the side of the face before kneeing him in the stomach. He tackled me around the waist, and this time I hit the wall headfirst. The sound of your own skull hitting a hard object just isn’t one you ever want to hear. I crumbled to the ground like a rag doll.

My entire body was a throbbing mass of pain, and blood was trickling down my head into my eyes, blurring my vision. I tried to struggle away, but even though power was still coursing through me, my head injury was making me too unfocused to try and defend myself. I heard a gun click.
Fuck.

“Stop! Hey, someone called the police; he’s hurting her!” Someone had come across our scuffle and decided to be loud about it.

I could not have been more grateful even though the odds of someone calling the police to come here weren’t in my favor. More people started shouting though, and the attention made the body-jacker hesitate.

He ran off. I was sure no one made any attempt to stop him, but right now I had bigger problems. Like the fact that I had failed to use the stone on him, failed to cripple him enough to arrest him, and was falling into unconsciousness in a filthy alley in the Underground, and no one knew where I was.

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