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Chapter Two
Damp, cold mud soaked through my fuzzy slippers.
“I didn’t think mediums needed access to a body to work.” Kase leaned against the side of the car as we watched a few of his associates digging up a hastily dug grave. We weren’t at a cemetery. No one had officially put the body to rest.
“Well, most of them are hit and miss. They take something the person was bound to and hope an echo of the person shows up. Colter doesn’t seem the type to accept ‘he didn’t show up’ as a good explanation.”
“True enough. He doesn’t take failure lightly.” Kase turned a side-eye on me. “Of course, that was a very clever way of skipping over why you do things differently.”
The bastard knew how to ask something without directly asking. Good thing I was excellent at answering without giving information.
In the darkness lit only by the headlights of the car, Kase appeared even darker than usual. His hair was pushed back and slicked with something that made it glossy. His suit fit to him perfectly, giving him the look of someone polished and powerful.
“Everyone is different,” I answered.
Even if I wanted to explain to him everything—which would be a lethal mistake—I had no idea whatwasdifferent about me. Why didn’t I do things as other mediums did? What made me different?
An entire life of those questions, and I had no more answers now than I had the first time I’d seen a ghost, when I had been young enough to not remember, when the behavior had gotten me thrown into the system because my mother didn’t want a freak for a child.
Kase gave up on the side-eye, choosing instead to stare directly at me. His eyes were a deep, dark brown with the thinnest red line on the outside the iris—like all vampires had. It was such a subtle detail that people usually missed it.
“So what’s the woman’s name?” I didn’t ask because I cared, but because I wanted something to take his focus down a few notches.
He answered, yet amazingly didn’t seem to lessen that intense look at all. “Her name was Rachel Deglo.”
“And the vampire?” At his harsh look, I added, “What if I see a bunch of vampires in her memories? I need to know who I’m looking for.”
The pause before he answered was long and full of annoyance. “Olin.”
That sharp response should have told me to shut up, but I’d never been good at that. “Why’d he kill her?”
“Because she asked too many questions?”
Well, I guess that ends the conversation…
“Done,” came a voice from one of the lackies. He had dirt on his pants and shoes, and the hunger in his gaze made me want to inch slightly closer to Kase.
Not that I trustedanyof them, but Kase at least didn’t seem hungry.
“It seems you’re up.” Kase motioned toward the open grave that sat beneath the large overpass.
“Right. Climbing into graves. What else is there to do in the middle of the night?” I continued to mutter as I slid down into the pit they’d dug. More wetness soaked into my shorts and I groaned at the knowledge of what I had caked to my legs.
Grave mud was the worst. It stuck and stained in way normal mud didn’t…or maybe that was just my brain refusing to let go of how it had been touching a dead body.
At the bottom of the pit, Rachel’s mangled corpse rested in a twisted pile. I was grateful for the darkness, because it meant I couldn’t see the details. Some things even I had trouble scrubbing from my brain, and I didn’t want to know what the body looked like, what had been done to it.
Vampires tended toenjoytheir meals, and it often showed in what was left over. That was one reason they took such care to hide their kills, because they could be quickly painted as a serial killer.
Which wasn’t so far off.
“How long do you expect this to take?” Kase crouched at the top of the pit.
“Why? Important date?”
“Yes. It’s called the sunrise, and sadly it isn’t the sort of thing I can reschedule.”
I leaned down, the scent of rot having taken hold already. Seeing spirits was one thing. I couldn’t avoid that, no matter how hard I tried. They found me, as if drawn to me, knowing I could see them when no one else could.
