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I stepped up to the shrouded figure, who was around my height. “Welcome, Speaker of the Shrouds.”
There was a rhyme we’d chanted in childhood, a charm to keep the bogeymen at bay.
Lips to lips, mouth to mouth,
Comes the speaker of the shrouds.
Suck in the spirit, speak the words,
Let the secrets of the dead be heard.
But bogeys were as real as the Corpse Talkers, and not nearly as worrisome as the speakers of the shrouds. Corpse Talkers were an unknown factor in so many ways, and there were rumors of them going rogue, wandering the wastelands of Otherworld, sucking souls from the living. How true it was, I didn’t know, but I didn’t really want to find out.
The Corpse Talker nodded. “Has the body been touched?”
“I checked them over briefly to look for a cause of death. That’s why you’re here. I couldn’t figure out why they died. But I didn’t touch them much.”
“Move back.” The order was direct, blunt, with an expectation of obedience.
We all shifted, moving away from the dead elves. I didn’t relish telling Queen Asteria that two of her guards had died on our land, but it would help if we could tell her why. They were noble men; they were honor-bound and would have put up a struggle if it had been any normal foe, so I had the feeling that we weren’t facing anything in the way of normality here.
The Corpse Talker knelt beside the first body and leaned down, pressing her lips to the lips of the elf. It was disconcerting watching her kiss the cold body, but then—who was I to talk? Nerissa kissed me, and technically I was dead. Well, undead. Vampires walked two worlds—we were truly the living dead, but at least we were sentient and still had our souls.
After a moment, the Corpse Talker raised her head, and again, all we could see were the gleaming steel eyes, but there was something else—a nimbus around her, a mist swirling. It was the spirit of the elf, which she had drawn into herself with her kiss. She stood and turned to me.
I bit my lip, trying to think of the first question. I’d have anywhere from one to five questions before the spirit would speed away.
“What killed you?”
“The soul sucker.” The voice that emanated from the Corpse Talker’s lips was a rattling breath, leaves quivering in the wind.
I frowned. Soul sucker. That didn’t give us much of an answer. There were any number of creatures who could suck out souls from the living.
“What did it look like?”
“A flash in the night. A swirl of flame and light. There was no body, only a ghostly apparition.”
I turned to the others. “I need more questions, now. What else should we ask?”
Shade stepped forward. “Spirit, tell us, how were you attacked?”
The Corpse Talker inhaled sharply and the voice of the elf fluttered through once more. “It ate away the magic in my soul.” And then—with a whoosh—the elf’s body jerked on the ground. The connection had been severed and his spirit had left to the Land of the Silver Falls, to join his ancestors.
As Camille murmured our prayer for the dead, I shook my head. We didn’t know that much more than we had at first, except that some ghostly creature had attacked the elves before they could defend themselves.
The Corpse Talker knelt by the second body but shook her head. “This one has departed already.”
“Then take your payment.”
The Corpse Talker pulled up the shirt of the body of the elf she’d communed with, then took out a thin, sharp blade. She deftly sliced a thin line down the elf’s chest, and then, with fingers cloaked in the shadow of night, reached into the cold cavity and withdrew the heart. How she severed it so quickly from the body, we couldn’t see, but she placed it in a small box and shut the lid, then ran her hand over the wound and it pulled together again.
I stared at the elf’s body. I’d never seen a corpse after the Corpse Talker took her payment, so I had no clue that they were able to mend up the wound like that. The dead elf would return to Otherworld seemingly intact. And the Corpse Talker would take his heart and eat it, in a bloody communion.
She stood and turned to Shade. “I will return now.” Without a word, Shade stepped forward and the Corpse Talker allowed him to loosely wrap his arm around her waist, and they vanished into the Ionyc Seas.
Camille let out a long breath. “What could have attacked the guards? I don’t recognize that description of any ghosts I know about. It’s wasn’t a revenant. But maybe, a shade?”
Revenants weren’t as dangerous as shades; they could suck out all the warmth from the body and leave you frozen, but shades…a single touch from a shade could give a human a heart attack, and they could do nasty things to the Fae, too. But I didn’t think they were responsible for these deaths.
