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“Nope…it has no will of its own. Or mind, really. It follows instructions, and it’s hungry. It feeds off energy and flesh. And they have a natural charm that creates hallucinations in their intended targets.” He turned away. Over his shoulder, he added, “The Corpse Talker has arrived. I suggest you dispatch this thing now.”
Smoky gave it one more blow, and then he let out a long sigh. “You all right?”
I checked the heel of my boot, which was truly broken now. “No, not really. But I guess I’ll have to be. I just hope I didn’t fuck up Roz too bad.”
“The incubus will live. Come, we’d best go interrogate the dead before they refuse to give up their secrets.” And with that, he motioned for me to go first, and we slipped back through the trees to the clearing where the dead elfin guards were lying.
Shade was there, with the Corpse Talker. A faint blue glow emanated from within the folds of the cloak, and those luminous steely eyes peered out of the hood. I swallowed my revulsion—they really were squirrelly, but they had their place and were very useful.
Camille stood to one side, Roz sitting on the ground beside her, looking dazed. Moon Witches and Corpse Talkers weren’t the best of friends. In fact, something about their energies produced a volatile mix and the result could be a nasty implosion, explosion, or some kind of ’plosion. And Delilah didn’t like Corpse Talkers. So I’d be the one in charge of this little venture.
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.”
