CHAPTER 23
We reported back to my family on our failure. The reception was a mix of disappointment it hadn’t worked and relief no one else had been hurt in the attempt.
With nothing left to do but go to sleep, I bid my family goodnight and started toward Lunaris, but Kessian didn’t follow.
“Maybe we shouldn’t risk sleeping together tonight,” he said.
“Why?”
“After Amelia … I don’t want to have any more of those dreams.”
There was more to it, but I couldn’t fathom what. I hadn’t imagined his chilliness earlier, and it chipped at a chink in my newly donned confidence. I felt like I’d done something wrong.
“I’ll see you in the afternoon at the dress fitting?” he said.
“And the morning for the autopsy.”
He shivered. “Right. Of course. I’ll see you then.”
“Goodnight.” I leaned in to kiss him, and he turned so my lips brushed his cheek instead.
Definitely hadn’t imagined it. He was giving me the cold shoulder. A hairline crack splintered through my heart as I watched him go.
I had run out of anything to eat and had to make a trip to the newsagents, since anything with proper food had long shut.
After picking up a handful of granola bars, I found my gaze lingering on the bottles of liquor stocked behind the clerk.
In a moment of masochistic optimism, I asked for a bottle of gin based on the barren hope Kessian would join me for a drink next time I asked. If I had the courage to ask again.
Lunaris had two cups of tea waiting when I got in.
She seemed just as bewildered as me that Kessian hadn’t come.
I could understand the reason he gave, but I didn’t think it comprised the whole reason, and it hurt more than I dared admit to tuck myself into bed alone, wondering why—right after I’d let him in—he’d let himself out.
It hurt worse when the grief of Amelia’s death broke through my denial. She wasn’t coming back. No one ever did, except me.
Lunaris pulled the covers tightly around me in a hug, but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to be alone anymore.
The cemetery’s morgue smelled more like a hospital than it did of death.
The exterior had the look of a giant mausoleum, the interior a wash of cold white paint and fluorescent lighting with the odd religious symbol on the wall.
Kessian greeted me outside with a facsimile of his usual warmth, looking as sleepless as I felt.
The coroner, Ms. Carlisle, led us down a corridor, sterile tiles clicking cleanly under her heels, her starling familiar whisking after us.
“Normally, I wouldn’t allow a family member into the room for this sort of thing. Mr. Warwick insisted I make an exception in your case, but are you sure you’re ready?”
No, but I didn’t have much choice. Without a means to draw the wraith out, I had one less avenue for investigation into my grandfather’s murder.
I didn’t like the idea of seeing his body, though. I hadn’t wanted to see it at the funeral. It wouldn’t look any better a week later.
I said, “I’m ready.”
Kessian made no comment. He’d been unusually quiet.
Ms. Carlisle pushed through a door marked Morgue #5. “All right, well. This way.”
The fluorescent lights gave the room an icy feel as I took in the rows of metal drawers in the wall—a built-in cabinet of corpses—and the singular, thin figure on a table in the center, draped under a cloth. Standing over it was Warwick.
Kessian stiffened at the sight of him. I hadn’t expected him to attend either.
“Morning, boys,” he said. “Not the brightest way to start the day, digging up an old friend, but we might as well get on with it.”
“Do you need to be here?” I’d forgotten my manners, but couldn’t bring myself to regret asking.
Far as I was concerned, Warwick was still a suspect.
I didn’t need him sabotaging any evidence.
The fact he’d arrived before us already put me in doubt that anything we found here today would represent the truth.
Warwick’s expression folded in affront. “I know he was your grandfather, but he was my friend as well. I deserve to know what really happened to him.”
Ms. Carlisle cleared her throat, detaching a tablet from a clip under the table. “I can begin by telling you my own findings.”
She said it to reassure us that she’d made her own, unbiased report from the autopsy, but I couldn’t trust that, either. Warwick had bribed all the authorities necessary to make this happen quickly and quietly. He could do the same thing to uncover only what he wanted uncovered.
Kessian folded his arms. We were of one mind on this.
“Go ahead,” I told her. “But if it’s all right, I’d like to conduct my own investigation as well.”
Ms. Carlisle lifted her chin. “Provided you only use spells approved by the magical morticians’ board, then of course.”
I’d offended her, but that was an acceptable consequence to trusting Warwick.
She took the sheet and pulled it down to the waist.
I thought the sight of my grandfather’s corpse might set me on a downward spiral, but as I took in the sallow, gray features still clouded with makeup and preserved by embalming, I hardly recognized them enough to connect this body with the man I’d known all those years ago.
I tried to pick out anything familiar, and on a surface level his face had the same shape. But none of the life was in it.
It made all the difference. I could mentally separate the two. The body from my grandfather.
“During embalming, no signs of injury were present on any part of the body. The initial cause of death was presumed to be natural causes due to his age and general health. My autopsy confirmed the cause of death to be age-related heart failure.”
“So he wasn’t murdered?” Warwick asked.
“From the physical examination, that would be my conclusion, but I used a spell to detect any magic that might have been used to mimic natural causes. I’ll perform the same for you now so you can see the results for yourself.”
She directed this statement toward Kessian and me.
She’d probably have shown us the findings on that tablet if my doubt in her integrity hadn’t prompted her to show us firsthand.
I doubly didn’t regret offending her. Spells to detect magic were difficult to circumvent.
Warwick could have used a spell to cleanse all magical traces, but a lack of any magical residue on a witch would itself be suspicious.
Ms. Carlisle pulled the necessary tithes from drawers in a rolling cart next to her—an oak leaf, poppy seeds, and a jaybird feather.
She unfurled her fingers and cast the spell, green smoke sweeping over my grandfather’s body, leaving behind various runes, mostly along the wrist of his right hand.
I recognized the runes for wakefulness spells, used in place of caffeine, and for hygiene spells, used in place of shower.
All functional spells, except for the signature glowing from his chest, which was such a slew of runes I could hardly read them. They layered over one another like onion skin and seemed to shift the longer I looked at them, but then words started to jump out.
Not words. Names.
Florence Vanderghast
Simon Barkersfield
Nathan Ashborne
Dad. These were the names of everyone who’d died in the strid. Once Once seen, I couldn’t stop searching until I found Laurelie’s, and once I found it I could see it everywhere, appearing more frequently, like when your mind zeroes in on a single word in a puzzle and becomes blind to all others.
“It’s everyone who drowned nine years ago,” I said.
“But what does that mean?” Kessian asked. “Did all their ghosts rise up and kill him? Why? Because he was the Keeper and the strid was his responsibility?”
“I had the same thought,” Ms. Carlisle said. “But take a step back with me. I think from here you’ll see it best.”
We followed her a few paces from the table, viewing it from a diagonal.
Up close, the glow of runic names congealed into a formless glow, but from here the runes hovered three-dimensionally over my grandfather’s chest, together making an all-too-familiar shape.
It was the wraith’s antler, tines pointed downward, some half submerged. As if he’d been gored to death on the wraith’s horns.
“That makes no sense,” I murmured almost to myself. “The wraith’s connected to me. It goes where I go, and I was nowhere near Shearwater when Grandad died.”
“Are you sure?” Ms. Carlisle said.
I looked between her and Warwick, both looking at me now with uncertainty.
“This wasn’t me. It’s got to be a trick of some kind. Let me perform the spell. I want to see for myself it wasn’t tampered with.”
Ms. Carlisle pursed her lips, but she obliged me. She smeared away the remnants of her spell, the green runes and glowing antler drifting away like smoke.
I’d prepared the tithes this morning. Pulling them out, I cast the spell again, my magic less like smoke than sparks. They ignited along the same lines as those that came before, runes in tracery lines like veins, and a glut of them issuing from the spot on Grandad’s chest.
“It’s not possible,” I said again, though I couldn’t see any way this could be faked. “I was miles away.”
Warwick said, “I’m sorry, lad. It seems to me the wraith murdered him, too.”
Four family members. Four. Would it only stop once it had us all? Wiped the Ashbornes out of Shearwater?
I ought to tell them all to go, but they wouldn’t. They had the wedding, and besides, it had always been easier to make me go instead. Only that clearly hadn’t worked. Maybe it never had. I didn’t know why the wraith hadn’t taken anyone in nine years, but it got Grandad in the end.
Kessian was quiet the entire time. When I looked to him for reassurance, he still squinted searchingly at the glowing antler. He looked terrified.
Warwick noticed, too. “Do you see something else?”
He pulled me by the hand toward the spot where he stood and pointed. “There. Can you read them?”
I squinted, unsure which names he was pointing to at first. My heart stopped when I read the ones he meant.
“I’m not imagining it, am I?” Kessian said. “Those are our names.”