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The screen told me it was eleven thirty. I’d been asleep for around six hours as far as I could tell. I’d missed Shado’s phone calls and two text messages from Jackson. One told me he was at the station, running Nadia’s name through their system to see what he could dig up. The other was a warning: hee expected me to let him know the moment Shado was ready for me to do my thing. He didn’t want me driving to the morgue alone.
I messaged him back an “okay” and put the ambrosia back on its cart with my glass. I had no intention of telling Jackson that I was on my way. His presence at the morgue would only distract me. Jackson always distracted me. He was my constant thought, my nag, my daydream, and the desire that haunted me most all wrapped up into one. I’d call him after my work was done. At least then, with any luck, I’d know who killed Nadia.
My ride to the morgue wasn’t nearly as fraught with anxiety as my ride home from the cemetery. This time I was able to enjoy it. Motorcycles are the ideal transportation for people like me. My bike made me feel safe. The single seat left no room for other passengers bumping my arm and accidentally overwhelming me with a vision. On my bike, I was free to relax.
I parked in the garage across the street from the morgue, waited a few seconds for the street to clear, and then walked to the door on the side of the building without stopping. A couple of people standing out front looked my way, but when you move with purpose, most people assume you’re supposed to be there.
The door itself was hidden at the bottom of a small set of stairs, with the words “Employees Only” painted across it. Beside the handle on the wall, they’d installed a small metal keypad with worn out buttons and a security camera that I’d blinded with a spell ages ago.
I keyed in Shado’s code and the door popped open. I wasn’t worried about getting spotted. No one ever seemed to be around to notice anything in Shado’s half of the building. Everyone else got to work in the big exam rooms on the other side. My cousin was reserved for the small ones. The ones with outdated machines and storage boxes crowding the corners. They thought it was a punishment for her being the weirdest of them, but Shado loved it.
Halfway down the hall, I heard the Ramones echoing from behind one of the silver doors. I pushed it open and found my cousin standing with her back to me, her hips swaying to the music. An empty exam table sat in the center of the room between us, but I could see she had a notepad in one hand and a red pen in the other.
I cleared my throat, but she couldn’t hear me. So, I shouted, “I thought you said—”
“Bah!” She spun around on her heel and threw her notepad across the room.
I smiled and flexed my fingers, catching it with a whip of telekinetic energy before it could hit the ground.Magic buzzed along my skin, and with a small exertion of will the notepad floated back into her hand.
Shado glared at me. “Warn a girl before you sneak up on her like that. Wear a bell or something.”
I snorted. “If you’re that jumpy, then maybe you should turn down the music.”
“Are you nuts? You can’t turn down genius,” she said as the song changed.
“Okay, Einstein, butIneed quiet.”
Shado rolled her eyes and pulled a thin silver remote from the pocket of her white coat. She clicked a button and the music stopped. “Is that better?”
“Perfect.” I chuckled, sauntering into the room. “Where’s Nadia?”
“Right this way,” she said, twirling around to the wall of square silver doors behind her. They were the refrigerators reserved for any active cases the police were still investigating. Shado grabbed the handle of the center door and pulled it open. Inside, an old woman lay on the sliding table.
“Are you sure that’s the right drawer?” I asked.
“Oh, this is Nadia, alright.” Shado pulled on the slide, and it rolled the body out between us.“She started changing a few minutes after you answered the phone. I put her back in her cell to make sure no one else saw it.”
My heart stopped. Nadia’s skin had stretched over her bones like melted wax paper. Her once brown shoulder-length hair was now well past her waist and pure, solid white. For a woman who was forty-five years old, she looked to be at least eighty. She looked like she had in my original vision of her death.
Shado adjusted the sheet draped over Nadia’s chest. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
I couldn’t answer her. My mind was spinning. It wasn’t just that I’d seen her like that in my vision. I’d seen someone like this before Nadia. Someone close to me.
“Bex?” Shado’s voice sounded like it was a mile away. “Are you okay?”
“Ye-yeah. I have,” I croaked. “Viktor looked li—”
I couldn’t finish my sentence. The day I’d found my uncle’s corpse at the cabin, he’d gone full macabre Santa Klaus. His hair had grown from a buzz cut to shoulder length silver. His beard had grown from a goatee into a long and flowing mat across his chest. Something more was going on here. A connection I had yet to make sense of. I needed to get inside Nadia’s head.
Shaking the tension from my hands and shoulders, I removed my gloves. For my abilities to work, I needed prolonged skin-to-skin contact. It was the only way I ever got visions from the dead. I could bump elbows with a living person and get a vision.But the dead made me work for it.
Shado shuddered beside me. " I always hate this part.”
“Then don’t watch,” I said, shifting to stand behind Nadia’s head. Magic tingled in my chest, and I willed it down into the tips of my fingers. My hands hovered in the air beside her temples and blue sparks jumped off her skin, melting into my flesh. Each of them danced like chunks of solid ice through my bloodstream, leeching the life from my veins. I exhaled a cloud of white smoke and the cold permeated into every inch of my body.To speak with the dead, you had to accept death, take it in, and absorb it.
I touched Nadia’s skin and my legs went numb. The scope of my sensation filtered down to the tips of my fingers. Her skin sparked again, and my eyes closed, embracing the cold darkness of true death.
Slowly, the shadows transformed into a familiar and quiet gray world.
