Chapter 2 #2
Not murder victims or victims of sudden violence or trauma. I can’t tell if someone is about to walk out in front of a bus, for instance. But I can tell if someone is dying of an illness or injury.
The first time I saw it was in one of the other patients at Tranquil Brook.
That was in the early days, before I’d contracted Arcanavirus—not that I’d known that was what had happened to me, exactly, although I remembered wondering once or twice while coughing up substantial quantities of mucus.
They had let us interact for an hour or two a day with one another, so I’d been able to meet some of the other patients.
Her name had been Sara, no H. That’s how she’d introduced herself: Sara-no-H.
She was a kid—six or seven. I was… maybe fourteen or fifteen at the time.
It was hard to mark days and months and years in there.
I knew now how old I was, but only because of math.
I knew when I’d been born, and now that I knew what day it was, I knew that I was twenty-four years, nine months, and eight days old.
Sara-no-H had been one of the first people they’d drained of magic, and it had done horrible things to her. She’d gotten pale and weak, and there had been a shadow that crept over her, a shadow that had seemed to consume her from the inside out until one day she just collapsed in the common room.
And never got up again.
It happened again with one of the orderlies—one of the kinder ones, who had been efficient, but not rough.
And one day, he just hadn’t come back to work.
Another orderly—one I’d thought of as a friend—told me a few weeks later that he’d been diagnosed with cancer a year or so before and had to leave work because the treatments hadn’t worked. He’d died a few months after that.
All that told me that the red-and-purple-faced man wasn’t going to die on the spot from a cardiac condition.
There was part of me that thought that was too bad. If he did drop dead, that would solve this particular problem very quickly.
But I didn’t really wish the man dead—I didn’t know him—and I also knew that it would create a lot of paperwork and attention of the kind that Beyond the Veil didn’t need.
Which meant that I was still supposed to be polite.
It did not, apparently, mean that either Hart or Parikh had to be polite, though.
“Not that it’s any of your fucking business, but FBI,” Parikh snapped back, taking another step forward and pulling his coat back to reveal the badge clipped on his belt.
I was surprised at how angry his expression was, and, when I quickly looked over at Hart, I noticed that he also seemed a little surprised. And amused.
The man was also surprised, but definitely not amused. He gaped at Parikh.
“Now, you want to explain to me why you’re threatening Mr. Alvero?” he nodded at me.
The man stared at him.
Parikh waited a beat or two, then took another step forward, getting closer.
The man was probably an inch or two shorter than me, but heavy-set.
Parikh, however, was a good four inches taller than me and well-muscled.
He had to outweigh the shorter man by ten or twenty pounds, all of it muscle.
It was obvious to everyone in the room that Parikh would win if there was a physical confrontation.
Then Parikh spoke again. “I’m waiting.”
“I need to see the medium,” the man blurted.
Parikh’s gold eyes flicked over to me. “Is Mr. Campion here?” he asked, mildly.
“No,” I answered.
“I assume you communicated that to Mr…?” he trailed off, waiting.
I shrugged.
Parikh raised both eyebrows at the man, who looked mulish.
“See, dickhead, this is where you provide your name,” Hart put in. He was leaning up against the structural pillar in the middle of the room and was definitely entertained.
A slight twitch in Parikh’s jaw suggested he was irritated, possibly at both Hart and the man. But his expression otherwise didn’t change.
“That’s none—”
“We’re the FBI, asshole,” Hart interrupted him. “It absolutely is our business if we decide it is.”
The twitch in Parikh’s jaw got stronger.
The blotchiness of the man’s face acquired a third, pale layer, mixing sallow white with pink and dusky purple. “Rodney Buckley,” he mumbled.
“Well, Mr. Buckley,” Parikh said, shooing Hart a dark look. “What exactly did you hope to accomplish through threats and intimidation?”
Rodney Buckley was escorted out—after making an appointment, although the expressions on both Hart’s and Parikh’s faces suggested that neither one of them was happy about that fact, although I wasn’t completely sure why.
Buckley wasn’t exactly the most pleasant man, but he did need a medium, and that was the whole point of Beyond the Veil.
Specifically, he needed a medium because his brother had died—of a massive and surprising heart attack, apparently—without a will, and his two ex-wives and current wife were fighting over his estate.
They’d all agreed to abide by whatever the man’s ghost dictated, and Buckley had heard that Ward Campion was the best.
I had no doubt that Ward was the most powerful in the city—probably also the state, and possibly a wider region than that—and that he would easily be able to handle whatever the Buckley family had to throw at him.
He’d more than be able to handle it—it almost seemed like a waste of his skill to take on something so banal.
In fact, I was fairly certain that the living squabbling would be the bigger challenge, which was why I’d made sure to book both Mason and Ward.
I’d also informed an annoyed Mr. Buckley that he would have to wear a mask when he came back for his appointment.
Or he could borrow one of the disposable ones we were happy to provide.
He’d grumbled something about uppity kids on his way out the door, Hart shadowing him, while I tried to keep a bland expression on my face.
And then I cocked my head to the side, curious, as I noticed Hart throw the bolt on the door. “Come on, Rayn,” he said. “We’re going on a field trip.”
“But—” I frowned. I was responsible for running the office, especially when everyone else was gone.
“I already texted Ward and Doc, kid. You’re coming with us.”
I didn’t ask where we were going because I had the sinking feeling that I already knew. Or, rather, I had a couple guesses—either we were going to the necklace-wearing victim’s house or we were going to the hotel room where she’d presumably died.
It was the second.
I stood just inside the doorway of said hotel room, uncertain what to do or where to begin or how to avoid messing up a crime scene.
I didn’t know anything about crime scenes, although Ward and Mason definitely did, and I knew neither Hart nor Parikh would let me actually do anything to compromise a criminal case, so I would just have to move slowly.
I looked around the room, then swallowed.
I’d seen my share of horrors at Tranquil Brook, but they were of a very different kind than what you found at a murder scene.
A lot less blood, for one thing. Patients had been beaten at Tranquil Brook, but I’d never seen anyone beaten to death.
Death at Tranquil Brook usually came about because of treatments—electrotherapy, deprivation therapy, or magic removal—or suicide.
The latter usually because of the former and how it made us feel.
I knew that suicides from slit wrists were plenty bloody, but I’d never seen the aftermath.
I still felt like it was probably less bloody than the scene in front of me.
“You gonna hurl?” Hart asked.
I swallowed. “No,” I told him, truthfully. I felt horror, grief, and disgust, but I didn’t feel nausea.
“Are you alright?” Parikh asked.
I wasn’t entirely certainly what he meant by alright.
Because I was fairly certain this was going to give me nightmares, and I was a little concerned about that.
I’m what Mason calls a dreamwalker—on top of being a death witch—and my nightmares are far from normal.
The real problem with them was that sometimes they spread.
Contagious nightmares might sound fairly benign—and they are, in the grand scheme of magical problems—but I tend to target specific people when I have them. People I think might be able to help me resolve whatever it is that caused the nightmares to begin with.
It usually meant Ward, and I felt terrible every time it happened. It had only been twice in the last four years, but still. I didn’t want it to happen again.
“Rayn?” Parikh’s voice interrupted my thoughts. I blinked, then looked in his direction, flinching when I found that he had moved closer to me—close enough that if I’d reached out an arm, I could have touched him. He stepped back when he saw my reaction to his proximity, his expression blank.