court before, but I couldn’t quite place it all. It was part evergreen and part clean snow, but there were also floral scents that I couldn’t identify. Not that any of that information helped with this case, but it did provide a momentary distraction.
I expected more FIB agents to arrive. This scene should have had people flagging evidence and taking pictures so that everything could be bagged and taken elsewhere for processing. But no one had walked through the doorway. We’d been here a while now. Someone should have arrived by this point.
I tried to wait patiently, but after ten minutes I found myself shuffling my feet and tapping my toes. By the time Falin finally walked back to the doorway, I’d given in and begun pacing. Dugan had spent most of the time watching Falin and Nori as they discussed and analyzed the scene, but more than once I’d caught him watching me, his gaze assessing. I doubted I measured up to whatever scale was in his eyes.
“Can you sense anything about the bodies?” Falin asked, looking at me.
“Magically?” I shook my head. “No land of the dead here, remember? They could be constructs and I wouldn’t be able to feel the difference until we get them back to mortal reality.” Though, while it wasn’t widely known, my planeweaving ability allowed me to see through glamour as long as Faerie hadn’t accepted the glamour as real, so maybe that was what he meant. Or maybe he was being very literal and he actually meant sense as in my ability to sense magic. I was more closely attuned to witch magic, though I’d started sensing more fae magic in the months since the Blood Moon. The Aetheric plane was thin in Faerie, and the energy tended not to like the fae, so it wasn’t common to find witch magic in Faerie. That didn’t mean it couldn’t be here, though. I just hadn’t thought to look for it.
I cracked my mental shields, tentatively at first, and then letting the opening widen slowly. I didn’t have to worry about grave essence assaulting my psyche as soon as I opened my mind here; in fact, most of the planes I normally interacted with simply didn’t exist here or were too thin to make much impact. No rot or decay touched anything in my vision, and no wind or chill whipped out to surround me. The Aetheric plane technically existed here, but only the thinnest, horribly faded wisps of raw magic trailed sporadically through the air. Whatever plane souls existed on when still tied inside a body existed in Faerie, but the collectors’ plane didn’t, leaving the souls trapped in bodies that never decayed. With my shields fully open I could see the soft glow of silver emanating from deep within all of my companions as well as the butchered body on the bed. The goblin held no shimmering glow.
I frowned, narrowing my focus. Different souls looked different to my mental sight. Human souls emitted a happy golden-yellow light. Every full-blooded fae I’d met thus far emitted silver-ish light. Feykin, those of mixed blood but who favored their mortal heritage, tended toward blue colors, though their colors were a bit more amorphous, sometimes seeming more silver and other times gold enough that if I wasn’t paying attention, I could mistake a feykin for human. I’d never specifically looked at a goblin soul before, but I should have sensed something inside the body. Even the creatures from the land of the dead who had no soul in the way a living creature understood it, I could sense as darkness. But the goblin was empty.
I opened my shields wider, stretching my senses. The body looked real and it didn’t change in my vision as if coated with glamour. I didn’t sense any spells on the body either, though the dagger by his third hand had some sort of enchantment worked into it. The dagger’s magic was fae in nature and while I could feel something was there, I couldn’t begin to guess what it might be. There was no trace of magic on the body, though, no runes or glyphs either.
I must have been staring at the body too long, because Falin stepped closer to me. “Alex?”
“So, a few possibilities. One, goblins don’t have souls—unlikely. Two, that’s not a body—possible. Three, something that eats souls, or at least that can pull them out of bodies, is loose in the Winter Halls and took Kordon’s soul but