Grave Destiny (Alex Craft, #6) - Kalayna Price Page 0,32

said, “As a whole, the more important the fae, the harder it is for them to travel through different parts of Faerie. A goblin isn’t terribly important, but they are rather unliked, so I wouldn’t guess he’d have an easy time entering.”

“But regardless, someone inside winter would have to help, right? Someone would have had to let the killer in through their own private lands?”

Falin’s expression turned grim, but he nodded. It wasn’t good news, and he’d likely already reached the same conclusion. Winter had a traitor in its ranks. How else would outsiders have passed through without notice?

We reached the alley in front of Tongues for the Dead before anything more could be discussed. Normally I insisted on cars being parked on the main street, but considering the guys were carrying bodies, I let it slide. I locked the door behind us and left the sign in the window that stated the investigators were currently in the field, the words followed by a phone number where potential clients could leave a voice message. While questioning a couple dead people wasn’t at all unusual for me, doing it in my office was. My luck was that if I left the door open, my first real—human—client in weeks would walk in while I was midritual and subsequently flee in terror.

“Where should we put them?” Falin asked, glancing around. His gaze moved toward the love seat in the lobby, and I quickly pointed toward my office door.

“There is a circle in the far corner of the room.” Not that I’d drawn it intending to raise shades in it, so it was small, meant to be a place just big enough for me to comfortably sit with maybe a few supplies to craft or recharge my charms. But it was a permanent, reinforced circle, so I’d make it work.

Dugan and Falin placed the bagged bodies in the circle. Kordon fit without issue, but Stiofan’s form inside the bag was longer than the widest part of my circle, the head and foot of the bag hanging over the carefully etched line in the floor. I stared at the dark bag. I could feel the fact that the material of the bag included the pretty standard body bag spells that helped keep smells as well as all liquids inside and blocked the contents from outside magic. Well, most witch magic, at least. I’d yet to find one that warded against grave magic. But the spells on the bag meant that the material couldn’t be allowed to touch my circle—let alone cross it—or it would interfere with the barrier.

I’m going to have to touch the body.

Well, the bag at the very least. Stiofan was tall, and the large lump comprising his head rested on the edge of my circle, but there was excess bag on either side of his form. Now that we were back in the mortal realm, the grave essence reached for me, clawing at my senses, and there was no denying the lumps were anything but dead bodies. I could feel the weight of their deaths. Could tell without even thinking that both bags contained males and that they were old. Older than my magic knew how to calculate. With humans I could usually guess the deceased’s age to within a few years, but I couldn’t narrow it down to decades or even centuries for either dead fae. The grave essence coming off a murder victim or someone who died far too young always seemed to feel slightly colder, sharper, than when I encountered a body that died of natural causes, but that biting chill felt even more exaggerated with fae corpses, as if the abrupt loss of potential centuries of continued existence gave the grave essence teeth.

Falin must have seen me staring and realized why I hadn’t moved or made any attempt to start the ritual. He squatted beside the foot of the bag and gently rolled the contents, moving Stiofan until the body formed a C contained inside my small circle. I shot him a relieved smile by way of thanks—I really hadn’t wanted to touch the body, even through a bag.

One major problem still remained: Stiofan’s soul was inside his body. Ejecting it would be easy enough, but then it would be stuck inside my circle. Shades were harmless collections of memories, but souls transitioned to ghosts as soon as they left a body, and ghosts had wills and personalities, just like the living. While ghosts were usually fairly harmless—it