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“The spirit!”
I shook my head. If there was a ghost on the premises, he was keeping real quiet. Or maybe he’d passed out from the stink of whatever was seeping out of a gash in the djinn’s side. At least the flies seemed to like it; about a hundred had congregated there in a working black mound. I gagged hoarsely and tried to breathe through my mouth. It didn’t help.
“Careful, Cass—you look about as green as he does,” Billy commented. “Tell the mage that the only ghost around here is me, and let’s get outta here. This place is giving me the creeps.”
I swallowed hard. “Do you sense anything?” If anybody could round up a freaked-out ghost, it was Billy.
“No, but I’ll check around, just to be sure. Sometimes the new ones hide.” He doesn’t get generous very often, so I must have really looked bad.
“Thanks.” I started edging toward the door, intending to catch a breath of comparatively sweet-smelling smog, assuming I could get a living room window open. But Nick was in the way.
I hadn’t seen him come in, and he startled me. I gave a yelp and pulled back so hard that I would have fallen if Pritkin hadn’t caught me. “I doubt he’s here,” he said curtly, setting me back on my feet, “even if part of him survived. He’d be after the murderer.”
“What could a ghost do to anyone?” Nick scoffed.
Pritkin and I exchanged a glance. He’d seen firsthand the damage a couple of pissed-off ghosts could do. But he didn’t mention it. “I’m going to check the rest of the apartment,” he said instead, and left.
“He may be the Corps’ best demon hunter,” Nick said, scowling after his friend, “but I’ll bet you know more about ghosts. Saleh could have left one, right?” He looked from me to the body, but it didn’t answer. That wasn’t too surprising, as it no longer had a head.
“I don’t know.” I’d never met a djinn before, but I assumed that the same laws governed them as ruled other non-human magical creatures, none of whom left ghosts. Of course, neither do most people. It’s actually a pretty rare condition all the way around, so whatever information this one had carried into the great beyond was likely to stay there. But I didn’t feel up to giving a long explanation at the moment. “Billy’s gone to take a look around. If there’s anything left of him, he’ll find it.”
“Anything left? He’s either a ghost or he isn’t!” Nick seemed a little stressed, with a vein throbbing insistently beside his right eye. He looked like the office type to me; maybe fieldwork didn’t agree with him, either.
“It’s not that simple,” I explained. “Not all ghosts are permanent. Some spirits linger around their bodies for a while before accepting things and moving on.”
“How long?”
“A few hours, maybe a few days. No more than a week, unless they’re planning to stick around for the long haul.”
“Based on the condition of the body, he couldn’t have died more than four days ago. By your calculations, his spirit could still be here.”
“Maybe. But I don’t sense anything.”
“Try harder,” Nick urged. “He’s no longer in a position to make demands. If you can contact him, he may be willing to tell us something.”
“If he’s here, Billy will find him. If he isn’t—” I shrugged. “I don’t do anything to attract ghosts, so I can’t ‘try harder.’ They just tend to show up when I’m around.”
“We can’t afford to stay much longer.” Nick spoke quietly, but there was a warning note in his voice that I didn’t like. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder why the place wasn’t overrun with war mages. It was their job to investigate murders in the supernatural community, and there looked to be enough bodies here to occupy them for a while. I’d just spied a foot—of a much more human golden brown—sticking out from behind the bed. I didn’t look to see if it was still attached to anything.
“How long before anyone else shows up?” I asked uneasily. Pritkin and his fellow mages weren’t exactly on good terms, and I would just as soon miss the reunion.
“There’s no way to know. But Saleh was under interdict by the Council.” Nick saw my expression. “It’s like parole,” he explained. “And when he doesn’t show up for his weekly meeting, someone will be sent to check on him.”
“Crap.” I started for the door, but Nick grabbed me.
“What if you were to touch the corpse itself? Would that make for a stronger connection?”
I stared at him in horror. “I’m not touching that thing!” The very idea made my skin crawl.
“What about something he owned, then?” Before I could stop him, Nick crossed the room to tug at the dead man’s shirt. I think he intended to rip a piece of fabric off for me, but the dead flesh peeled away with the cloth, flaking off the bone like a well-done fish. The shirt gaped open where he’d grasped it, giving me a glimpse of a belly that moved on its own. When I realized I was seeing maggots teeming beneath the skin, I gagged and almost lost it.
“That’s it. I’m done.” I staggered through the door and bumped into Pritkin coming up the hallway. “Is there a bathroom?”
“Two doors down to your left. There’s no one in there.”
For a second, I didn’t know what he meant. There were only three of us along on this crazy errand to interrogate a dead man—unless you counted Billy, and he hadn’t needed to use the facilities in quite a while. Then I realized that he was implying that the bathroom was free of corpses. I got a mental image of the bloated body behind me, choked and fled.
The dress seemed to like the bathroom better than the bedroom-turned-morgue. The mirror reflected back to me a hesitant pale rose, like the sky just before dawn. But although I stood over the sink for a long minute, trying not to heave up lunch, the sun didn’t rise. I didn’t blame it.
