Affairs of the Dead (22 page)

“So last night was different, and I could strangle Andrew for trying to force himself on you, but what about before? How long have you been sleeping with him?”

“About eight months,” I said hollowly. That angry spark was back in his eyes.

“Why?” he said. “You know he’s married, and he’s our boss! Why did you do it?”

“Look, I get that you’re mad because of what you thought I did the other night, which I just explained was far from what you thought, but what business is it of yours what I was doing with Andrew when you and I were nothing? It’s not like you haven’t made your way around the office, me included!”

“None of them were my boss, and none of them were married,” he said. “Have you no sense of morality, Selene? I wouldn’t think it’d be that hard for you to find a lay, so why Andrew? I can only assume you had some ladder you wanted to climb.”

“Fuck you, okay?” I said, and I think the force of my words caught him off guard. Tears stung my eyes, but they were angry tears because I hated myself for ending up in this position. “I didn’t do it for status. If anything, I got downgraded if you recall.”

“Then why, Selene?” He slammed his hand against the steering wheel again. “I know it should be none of my business, but when I think about you with him, him touching you…” He closed his eyes and took a shuddering breath. “Can’t you understand why this would bother me?”

“I did it because I was bored, okay?” I said. “At least I think that’s why I did it. I don’t know, damn it.” We turned to each other at the same time, and our eyes locked. “What do you want me to tell you, Micah? That even though I slept with our boss for eight months, I felt bad about it because he was married? Well, I didn’t, and you know why? Because Andrew didn’t seem to give a fuck about screwing me behind his wife’s back, and that made it easier for me. I thought it was the best-case scenario, sex without any attachments or expectations, because that was all I could get.”

He made a sound of disbelief. “Yeah, right.”

“It’s true,” I said fiercely. “I became used to one-night stands, but you know what, in the morning, none of them wanted to make me their girlfriend. Except you, I guess, but you gave me the cold shoulder instead of saying anything, and I never put any effort into finding someone who didn’t just want me for one night. Doing it the noncommittal way was easier, and fun, and you wanna know something else? I was the one who seduced Andrew; he didn’t seduce me. That was all I was worth.” I crossed my arms tightly and sat back, staring out the window, because I couldn’t bear to look at his face. “Call me a slut, tell me I have no morals all you want, I deserve it. And I’ll deserve whatever comes my way from Andrew after this. He didn’t fire me, but he stuck me with Larry’s file to organize. And if I quit, he’ll blacklist me so no other agency will ever hire me.”

“You’re worth more than that,” Micah said after a few moments of tense silence. His voice was calmer. “Don’t ever think Andrew is the best you can do, because he’s not. And if he tries to ruin your career, I promise he won’t get away with it.” We looked at each other, and I could see the hostility on his face cracking.

“Micah…”

He looked away and started up the car. “Let’s go back to the office and see if we can figure out where to go with the case.”

I guess painful, emotional conversation time was over. I was glad we had it out, but I still didn’t know where I stood with him. But the murderous ghost in Ethan’s body took precedence, I guess. I buckled my seat belt and spent the ride back staring out the window and feeling drained in more ways than one. I wanted to get past this with Micah, but it wasn’t something I could fix just by being aggressive about it. Micah would have to decide on his own if he could accept me after finding out I’d been sleeping with our boss for over half a year.

We got back to the office and had taken only a few steps into the suite when someone called my name. I turned to see Ilyse standing behind us. She held an old book, and I didn’t like the look on her face. Seeing her made me remember the whole business about the Rot taking hold of me. It just kept coming, didn’t it?

“Selene, we need to talk,” Ilyse said. “It’s important.”

I sighed and started forward, but Micah grabbed my arm. I turned to him with an eyebrow raised. Ilyse was already back to the elevators.

“Can I come?” he asked.

“Are you sure you want to?”

He nodded, so I shrugged, and we went with Ilyse to her office. She regarded Micah, then me, and I knew what she was asking.

“He knows everything,” I said. “You can say whatever it is you have to say in front of him.” Micah and I sat in front of her desk.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” Ilyse said.

I checked my phone and saw that my battery was depleted.

“Dead battery,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I will get in more trouble than you can imagine if it’s found out that I shared this information with you,” Ilyse said, her voice low and her face still looking troubled. “But I care for your well-being, so I am risking myself to give you this warning.”

Micah and I exchanged looks, and I suddenly felt as though every organ in my body had clenched up in dread of what Ilyse was about to say.

“The dead witches affiliated with the government have come up with a different way of tracking reanimators,” Ilyse said. “Apparently, the search last week had an ulterior motive. They used their rune stones to capture some of your personal essence and are going to use it to track not the reanimator, but the thing that’s been reanimated.”

My eyes widened, as did Micah’s.

“W-what?” I sputtered, trying to wrap my head around this.

“It’s genius,” Micah said. “If someone’s personal energy leads them to a reanimated person or animal, they’ll know for sure they have a reanimator to round up.”

“Yes,” Ilyse said.

I was still sitting there, stunned. Personal energy was different from necromancer or reanimator energy, because unlike my reanimation power, it wasn’t something I could strip off myself and hide in a rune stone. You can’t hide your own life energy, nor can you stop it from being left behind. If we channeled our own energy into ghosts, they ended up with some of our energy on them, and vice versa. That was why ghosts gained tangibility from us, and we gained the Rot from them. Fair trade, no?

It also meant that when I reanimated Luna, some of my own essence was left on her, like a handprint, and that was what the dead witches would use to sniff out reanimators.

“Selene? Selene?”

I brought myself out of my thoughts and realized Micah and Ilyse were staring at me.

“This shouldn’t affect you, right?” Micah said. I looked from him to Ilyse and could almost feel the tension within them.

“Luna,” I said, my voice sounding hoarse. “My dog…last week…she died…and I reanimated her.”

Micah looked shocked, then he swore.

“What do I do?” I whispered. I had gone through so much to strip my reanimation power every time we had a search to endure. Now, it seemed the witches thought doing their random searches wasn’t enough and had come up with a way to seek out not us, but whatever we had reanimated. Shit. Shit. Shit.

What were my options here? Kill Luna again but leave her dead so she couldn’t be tracked? The thought of having to do that twisted something unpleasant in my stomach, and I knew I could never do it. Micah was holding my arm, but I could hardly feel it. I had gone numb.

“I appreciate you warning me, Ilyse, but there’s nothing I can do. I reanimated my dog, and now I’m going to get caught.” I sagged back against the chair, feeling boneless.

“When are the dead witches supposed to start tracking?” Micah asked.

“Within the next few days,” Ilyse said. “They’ve already started working with dead witches affiliated with companies like Affairs of the Dead to teach us how to work the magic. We’re all supposed to be involved with tracking down reanimators.”

“A few days,” I said wearily. “I’m going to be found and stripped within a few days.”

“Maybe not,” Ilyse said.

My head snapped up and I stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“This ghost bond, while not entirely a good thing, could help you avoid being stripped if you’re found out.”

“Really?” Micah said, and I could detect a hopeful note in his voice.

“I found out a lot more information about reanimators who are ghost bound,” Ilyse said. “If they strip you while you’re bound to a ghost, it could kill you.”

“But our goal is not to keep me ghost bound,” I said. “Because Ethan wants to get back into his body, and if we stay bound, eventually the Rot will take me. So I’m damned either way, right?”

Ilyse and Micah’s silence was answer enough. I sighed.

“I know this is serious,” Ilyse said. “But you need to know the things I found out about being ghost bound, Selene.”

I forced myself to sit up straighter and pay attention, even though I really wanted to find a deep, dark hole and throw myself into it. Micah was holding my hand now, but I could barely feel it even though I could see from the strain in his knuckles that he was holding me tightly. Ilyse opened her book and flipped to a page somewhere in the middle.

“There’s a lot that will happen once you have a ghost bound to you. Some of it you already know, like gaining stronger necromancer power, being infected with the Rot, and the ghost siphoning energy from you and becoming more of a physical entity, but one of the most surprising things I found out was that the connection between you two goes so deep it affects your emotions.”

“How?” I asked warily.

“I read that oftentimes, reanimators used their bound ghosts as a weapon,” Ilyse said. “Because it was easier for them to get close to their foes using a face their opponent didn’t know. A lot of the time, what fueled the ghost to act for their bound reanimator was the reanimator’s own feelings. Hatred, vengeance, anger. If any emotion is strong enough in the reanimator, it gets channeled to the ghost and can cause the ghost to act on those emotions. Sometimes the ghost even acted independently of what the reanimator wanted it to do.”

I felt like my blood was running cold.

“Selene, this could pose a very serious problem for you. You’re already inclined to have an unstable temperament”—oh how well she knew me—“and it will definitely affect Ethan. It could cause him to act on certain feelings if they reach him.”

“Well, I don’t think we have anything to worry about right n—” I cut myself off when I thought about the rage I had felt toward Andrew the last time I’d seen him.

My power had responded to that rage, which was unusual, and I had threatened to kill him. I shot to my feet, gripping the edge of Ilyse’s desk and fixing my stare on her.

“Are you absolutely sure about this, Ilyse?”

Her eyes widened at my reaction, but she nodded and pushed the book toward me. “You can read it for yourself,” she said. “Personal weapon was the main use of bound ghosts, and if their acts were fueled by emotions from their reanimators, they were that much more effective.”

“Then I have to go,” I said, turning around and running out of Ilyse’s office.

“Selene, wait! There’s more I have to tell you, and I wanted to scan you. You can’t give the Rot reason to take hold more!”

I didn’t want the Rot to spread, but that wasn’t my priority right this moment. If what Ilyse had just said was true, then I was more afraid than I could say that my rage at Andrew could have reached Ethan and caused him to seek Andrew out.

“Selene!” Micah caught up to me by the elevator banks, grabbed my arm, and spun me around. “What the hell is going on? Where are you going?”

“Andrew might be in danger,” I said, chest heaving under the pressure of this sudden realization. “What Ilyse just said…what I felt toward Andrew the other night…what I said to him…Micah, I’m afraid that Ethan…”

“Shit,” Micah said. He got it. “We have to find Andrew.”

The elevator door opened and I slammed my fist into the button for the first floor as though that would make the elevator move faster. My body felt weak, but I had to keep it together.

When we got to the first floor, we ran out of the building to Micah’s car, and he drove off.

“His home. We check his home first, right?” Micah asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I felt like a meteor was about to smash into my head. If Ethan killed Andrew, Cecelia would lose her husband; AOD would lose its boss; and, despite the fact that I now found him lecherous, I didn’t actually want him dead.

While Micah flirted with breaking the speed limit, I called Andrew. First his business phone, then his personal phone, but both rang out before going to voicemail. Andrew always answered his phone. Even if he was in the shower. I’d had many a business call with him where he’d felt free to mention that he was exfoliating. Now he wasn’t answering either of his phones. Being the mistress, I didn’t have his house number. That sick feeling in my stomach intensified.

After a drive that seemed too long, Micah double-parked in front of Andrew’s condo, and we rushed through the door, stopping only long enough to notice that the guard and concierge were lying on the ground, dead.
Shit.
We ran to the elevator and up to Andrew’s floor. My heart felt like it had crawled up my throat, and I prayed that we would find Andrew alive.

Micah and I broke into a run toward Andrew’s front door once we got off the elevator, but we paused when the thumps, crashes, and grunts we heard could only mean that a fight was going on. I felt both good and bad about that, because even though my fears that Ethan had tracked down Andrew would be confirmed, if the fight was still going on, then it meant Andrew was still alive.

Andrew’s door had been broken down, so Micah and I ran into his sprawling living room…and stopped short at the scene that met our eyes. There was a fight going on, yes, but Andrew wasn’t a part of it. Ghost Ethan was fighting his body-jacker.

Chapter Seventeen

“Ethan!” Obviously, I was screaming for ghost Ethan, but they both stopped their grappling and looked up sharply.

One of them looked relieved, and the other looked even more menacing. The relieved Ethan was the one getting his ass handed to him. Ghost Ethan used the moment of distraction to wrench himself away from his body-jacker, and he tried to crawl across the floor to us, but he was so badly beaten that he sagged to the ground instead.