Affairs of the Dead (26 page)

Ilyse said all we had to do once we’d absorbed Trevor’s energy from Vicious was put the two stones near each other. Apparently they would work off each other, and the green stone would lead us to Ethan’s body. This had to work, because if the ghost cat wasn’t there, we had no other way of finding something that carried Trevor’s energy.

When I had gone up to the tenth floor, everyone was in a stupor over the news of Andrew’s death. Even though Micah kept his stance that, as lead on the investigation, he couldn’t talk about everything, he introduced ghost Ethan and told them that a reanimator had put Larry into Ethan’s body. There were, of course, questions about how that had even been done, but Micah said once the investigation was over, everything would come out.

When we reached the apartment building in the Bronx, I answered Micah’s question about how we were going to get in by giving Beth’s bell three short rings, the same as Larry had done, and again had to wait a while before Beth cracked open the door and peered out. Her eyes widened when she recognized me, but she looked less afraid than she had when she’d seen Larry.

“Beth, do you remember me? I’m Selene Vanream. I was here last week with the ghost of Larry Bianchi.”

She cringed at the mention of Larry’s name but nodded.

“We’re here on an official investigation, and I need the key to Larry’s apartment,” I said.

She looked past me to my entourage, and when her gaze landed on Ethan, she suddenly shrieked and tried to close the door, but Micah quickly put his hand out and kept it open.

“He’s dangerous!” Beth wailed.

I looked from her to Ethan, who stood a few feet behind me with his eyes slightly widened.

“You’ve seen him before?” I asked her. Larry had shown up here while he was in Ethan’s body?

“He beat my husband up in the lobby!” Beth said. She had given up trying to close the door since Micah was a lot stronger than she was. “He put him in a coma for three days. He’s still in the hospital!”

“When did this attack happen?” I asked.

“Last week,” she said, her voice laced with fear. “Couple of days after you were here with Larry.”

“Beth, did your husband know Larry?”

Beth nodded, which was the answer I expected.

“What kind of relationship did they have?”

Beth hesitated.

“I’m not here to find out about you or your husband’s shady dealings, trust me. I have other reasons for asking.”

“My husband worked for Larry,” Beth said. “Helped monitor his storehouses and…and helped him move his money around.”

“And did that relationship go sour at any point?” I asked. Again, Beth hesitated, but she finally nodded.

“My husband stole money from him,” she said softly. “It was to help pay for heart surgery that my mother needed, but when Larry found out, it…it wasn’t good.”

“Well, that explains the beat down your husband got,” I muttered. “Look, Beth, this guy behind me isn’t the same guy who attacked your husband. That was actually Larry, in this young man’s body. He’s a ghost.” I looked at Ethan. “Think you can do something ghostlike to prove it, or are you feeling too solid?”

“I’ll try,” Ethan muttered. He knocked his hand a few times against the stair railing, and after about the eighth time, his hand went through it. Beth gasped.

“There are reasons why that took a few tries,” I told Beth. “But he is a ghost, and Larry is the one in his body.” I jerked my thumb at Ethan. “Before I showed up here with Larry’s ghost, did anyone ask for the key to his apartment? Did he ask?”

“No one asked for the key,” Beth said. “I don’t know where he went after he attacked my husband. If the neighbors hadn’t shown up…I’m sure he would have killed him.”

“Can you please give me the key to the apartment? It’s all in the pursuit of tracking down Larry. He’s killed several people while wearing this guy’s face.”

“Okay…,” Beth said. She opened the door and let us in, and we followed her up to her second-floor apartment. We waited at her door while she went to get the key, and when she came back out, she handed it to me.

“Beth, did you know Larry’s wife?”

“I’m her cousin,” Beth said. Now that I really looked at her, I did notice a familiarity in her features with Leslie’s and Annette’s. “We always thought Larry’s ghost was hanging around to punish her for cheating on him, and…he did.” Tears filled her eyes. “Poor Leslie.”

“We’re going to stop him, I promise,” I said.

She nodded and shut the door. Micah, Ethan, and I headed up to the sixth floor, where I unlocked the door to the apartment.

“Okay, you’ll want to look for a ghost cat,” I said as we fanned out. “If you have a hard time remembering that, it’s a ghost that’s a cat, and it might respond to the name Vicious.”

Micah rolled his eyes and headed farther into the living room. Ethan checked the kitchen, and I headed to the bedroom. Out of curiosity, I opened the closet with the boxes Larry hadn’t wanted me to touch, and I wasn’t surprised when I saw they weren’t there. I was beginning to think getting access to this apartment had really been about getting some of Trevor’s belongings to him. I bet Larry had done it while I was buying cleaning supplies. Cleaning the apartment had been a ruse.

The three of us searched the apartment thoroughly, but it wasn’t long before we convened in the living room with the same conclusion; Vicious wasn’t here.

“So what do we do?” Ethan asked.

“I’m open to suggestions,” I muttered as I led the way out of the apartment. I knew all along that the chances of the ghost cat being here were slim. Even without Larry actively shooing it out, it could have just walked through a wall and slinked off somewhere else, but now that we were at a definite dead end, it was all I could do not to scream.

I decided to keep the key, since there was no reason to leave it, but as we walked down the stairs past the second floor, a boy came out of Beth’s apartment with a bag of garbage, and movement through the open door caught my eye. My eyes widened when I saw Vicious padding through Beth’s apartment.

I pointed it out to Micah and Ethan, who were just as surprised, and pleased, as I was. When the boy came back from chucking the garbage down the trash chute, I asked him to get Beth. He looked at me warily but darted inside and called loudly for his mother.

Micah, Ethan, and I crowded her doorway when she tentatively came out. Vicious was now curled up on the ground in front of the television where the boy was watching cartoons.

“Yes?” Beth didn’t look too happy to see us again.

“Beth, this is going to sound a bit strange,” I said. “But there’s a ghost cat in your living room, and it’s imperative that I have a word with it.”

Micah poked me in the back.

“I mean, I really need to get closer to it.”

Beth looked over her shoulder with wide eyes, then looked at me like she thought I was crazy.

“I’m a necromancer, remember?” I said. “I can see ghosts, and there’s one in your living room. Can you let us in?”

“A cat? A ghost cat?”

I fought the urge to heave a sigh. I didn’t want to waste time going back and forth with Beth about this, but it wasn’t like I could just barge into her apartment.

“Yes, Vicious the cat,” I said, somewhat impatiently. “Look, Beth, I need to get to the cat in order to get to Larry. The reason why is a long explanation, but I’m trying to round up the person who put your husband in the hospital. Please.”

Beth regarded us for a moment, all the while wringing the dishcloth she was holding in her hands. Finally she stepped aside and allowed us in. Micah, Ethan, and I immediately headed into the living room while Beth called her son to her side. When Vicious saw us advancing on him, he got up and started to run, but I ensnared him with my power so he couldn’t get away.

“So happy you didn’t go far,” I said. Vicious did not look pleased that he was trapped, and I was glad he wasn’t a real cat because we’d have long been clawed up and rushing off to the hospital to see if we’d contracted rabies. “Let’s just do this right here.”

Micah and Ethan stepped back to give me room. I knelt in front of Vicious and pulled out the two rune stones. I put the green one down, then held the black one out toward the cat, who looked none too happy about having a rune stone shoved in his intangible face. I wondered what sort of joy a cat named Vicious, who even as a ghost was still hostile, could have brought his owner. Maybe he’d been a guard cat or something.

I cleared my head and tapped into my power to activate the rune stone, and after a few moments, I felt the stone thrumming in my hand. I then focused on extending the power in the stone toward the ghost cat. After Vicious had been covered in the rune’s power, I went searching. It didn’t take long for the stone to find and attach to what it was searching for: Trevor’s energy. It was like a handprint all over the ghost of his cat, and I smiled as the stone absorbed that energy. When it was done, I placed the stone near the other one, then sat back and waited. Behind me, Micah and Ethan leaned over my shoulders, watching.

Suddenly, the absorption rune started shaking as it lay on the floor. Seconds later, a flash of power erupted from the tracking rune, and it started pulsing as well. I felt the energy being pulled from the absorption rune into the tracking rune. The tracking rune then started glowing and the other rune fell silent. I snatched it up and pocketed it, then carefully picked up the green one and held it in my palm.

Immediately, I felt it pulling me toward the door, and I smiled at Ethan and Micah.

“Let’s track down your body,” I said to Ethan.

We said a hasty thanks and good-bye to Beth, leaving Vicious behind since there was no time to take care of him, then left the building and headed back to Micah’s car. As he drove, I directed him on where to go, growing excited and hopeful that this time, we would be more successful against Larry.

The directions I felt from the rune took us out of the Bronx, back into Manhattan, and I wondered if Larry was with Trevor somewhere in the Underground. Maybe they’d just moved shop elsewhere. After about twenty minutes of driving, I told Micah to stop. We were in Harlem, outside a three-story brownstone. The three of us got out and faced the building.

“Here,” I said, feeling my anxiety grow.

Micah looked at me and nodded. He’d pulled out two rune stones that worked like our necromancer magic did when it came to immobilizing ghosts. Its purpose was to strengthen the invisible net we were able to throw out, and seeing how strong Larry was, we’d need all the strength we could get.

We ran up to the front door, and Micah kicked it in. It flew open with an explosive bang, and I took a split second to admire Micah’s strength before running behind him into the building. He kicked in another door at my direction, and we ran into a living room where we were met with screams. My eyes widened when they landed on not Larry or Trevor, but on a middle-aged man and woman sitting in a living room filled with antiques. The woman was clutching a Pomeranian to her chest.

Micah, Ethan, and I stopped so abruptly that we collided with each other. We stood there, staring at the woman, man, and dog. My reanimation magic suddenly gave a pulse, and my jaw dropped when I focused on the dog.

“What’s going on? What’s going on!” the woman shrieked.

Damn it. Why was I so slow on the uptake when it really counted? “The dog has been reanimated,” I told Micah and Ethan. “By Trevor, no doubt.”

“We’re s-sorry,” the man said. “We know reanimation is wrong, but we just missed Mr. Wellington so much when he died that we sought the help of a reanimator. We’re sorry; please don’t take our dog away. Please.”

It said a lot about their love for their dog that they were more concerned about us taking him away than they were about getting arrested for seeking the help of a reanimator. I sagged against the wall, feeling like the biggest idiot. Though I was highly amused by the pretentious name Mr. Wellington.

“Trevor has been making a living reanimating animals for the past few years,” I said. “So this stone isn’t going to lead us just to Larry; it’s going to lead us to every animal Trevor has ever reanimated.”

Micah and Ethan gave me mirrored looks of disbelief.

“Really, one of you should have thought about that before. Let’s go.” I stomped out of the apartment without bothering to say anything to the frightened couple. They could spend a few days living in fear of us coming back. Right now, we had a bigger issue on our hands.

The three of us convened in Micah’s car, where the stone was already telling me another direction to go.

“How are we going to make this work?” I said, staring at the glowing stone. “If we have to go through a hundred cats, dogs, rabbits, and birds first, Larry could slaughter half of Manhattan before we get to him. Though if he did, I guess we could just follow the trail of bodies, but somehow that seems like the least desirable option.”

I dropped my head back against the headrest. I’d gotten a rush of adrenaline when I thought we were about to confront Larry and Trevor. Now that it had waned, I felt drained. And discouraged. Micah and Ethan’s silence told me they didn’t have any suggestions for how to overcome this hump either. Which meant that we were left with following the stone to every animal Trevor had reanimated, until it led us to Larry.

“Let’s go,” I muttered. “The stone will eventually lead us to him.” Micah looked at me skeptically. “You have a better idea?”

He sighed and started up the car.

Chapter Nineteen

Three hours later, we had surprised over a dozen people at home or on the street as they walked their dogs, had driven through all of the boroughs and gone as far as Long Island, and still hadn’t come across Larry. We were discouraged, to say the least.

Micah’s jaw was doing the tight clench thing it did, and Ethan was slumped wearily in the backseat, which made me wonder if he was actually tired or if he was just trying to convey his frustration that we’d spent the last three hours tracking animals while a murderous ghost ran around in his body. I was too bummed to ask. Back in Manhattan, we headed uptown after confronting a young woman and her reanimated parrot. I listlessly gave Micah directions, still holding the rune stone on my palm, when Micah suddenly slammed on the brakes. I would have brained myself on the windshield if I hadn’t been wearing my seatbelt.