over what was left of the body and immediately spotted the missing arm. It was affixed to the wall inside the door, courtesy of a large axe that had severed it at the shoulder. The arm hung by the remains of a sleeve that may once have been blue but was now a stiff purple mess.
Swallowing hard, I stared around, sweat already forming on my upper lip. The air-conditioning wasn't on, and despite an occasional breeze through a shattered window, it had to be ninety degrees in the apartment. But that wasn't the reason I was perspiring.
The rays of midafternoon sunlight seemed thicker than usual, clouded with dust and what I realized after a moment were a couple hundred flies. They were hovering over what at first appeared to be a random mass of body parts atop a king-sized bed, but which I finally identified as the corpse of a man. To put it nicely, it wasn't fresh. I'm no expert, but I seriously doubted that the newly dead would look like a fleshy balloon about to erupt with fetid gases and decay. The sight was gruesome enough that it took me a minute to notice that he had skin the color of an after-dinner mint, a chalky blue green.
"Djinn," Pritkin said curtly, before I could ask. "Do you see him?"
I looked at him incredulously. "He's a little hard to miss."
"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."