Eileen Wilks - Mortal Ties

It was so ludicrous she had to laugh. “Yeah, that’ll happen.” She collected Scott with a glance and started for the road. Drummond tried to grab her arm. His hand passed right through her, of course, so after a disgusted grimace he kept pace beside her. At least that’s what it looked like—as if he were walking, his feet pushing against the ground the way hers did.

“Look, I get that you don’t like me,” he said. “So what? I’ve worked with a lot of assholes. If it gets the job done, you live with it.”

“You’re a little limited in what you can do right now.”

“Maybe, but I can do things you can’t. Anywhere within about three hundred feet of you, I can check things out. Check things out on either side. For example, there are three ghosts here—pretty tattered, not much for conversation, but they’re here. And on your side of things, I know where your wolf man is. He’s hunkered down right over there.” He stretched out an arm to point at a dip in the ground.

One finger on that hand glowed faintly from the wedding ring he still wore. It caught her attention, that ring. Unconsciously she rubbed her thumb over the ring she wore—an engagement ring, not a wedding ring, but the same sort of token. Rule’s ring.

She looked away. “His name is Mike.”

“Whatever. The point is, I can help.”

They’d reached the narrow road that wound among the graves. She stopped. “And you think I should trust you.”

“I dealt straight with you. Once I saw what they were doing, I dealt straight with you.”

True. He’d risked his life to rescue twenty-two homeless people, then given it to save a friend. And after he died, he’d found the death-magic amulet so they could destroy it.

But first he’d betrayed the Bureau, nearly killed Lily’s boss, conspired in the murder of a U.S. senator, and damn near ended Lily’s career along the way.

Lily studied him a moment, then took out her phone.

He frowned. “Who are you calling?”

“A friend. She hears dead people all the time.” Lily had only chatted with one dead guy. This one. As for the big, fat “why” of this screwed-up situation…well, the expert she was about to consult used the analogy of a house. Most people didn’t see or hear the dead because their houses lacked windows and had only one door—a tightly locked, one-way affair. That door didn’t open until the person died. Because Lily had died once, her door didn’t lock anymore. It was a tiny bit ajar. Mostly that didn’t matter, but she’d been present at Drummond’s death, and somehow that had allowed their energies to get tangled up together.

At least that was the theory. It didn’t explain everything. Lily had been present when a lot of people died that day, including the man she’d shot. None of the rest of them had taken to tagging along with her.

She scrolled down to “Etorri” in her contacts list and selected “Rhej.”

The Rhejes were the clans’ wise women, or maybe historians or quasi-priestesses. They were all Gifted…and the Etorri Rhej’s Gift was mediumship. Lily had never heard the woman’s name because the Rhejes weren’t called by their names, but last month she’d given in to curiosity. Rhejes didn’t actually hide their names and Lily had the woman’s phone number, so it hadn’t been hard. The name of the Etorri Rhej was Anne. Anne Murdock.

Anne answered right away. Lily apologized for disturbing her, then said, “He’s back.”

“That ghost?” Anne was clearly surprised. “What was his name—Hammond?”

“Drummond. He just showed up again. He’s glaring at me right now.”

“He still seems coherent?”

“In the sense you used the word, yeah.”

Anne made a little huff of frustration. “I wish I could talk to him. I haven’t met a fully coherent ghost since I was seven, and she left soon after my mother spoke with her.”

Lily knew what Anne meant by “coherent,” because they’d talked soon after Drummond showed up. Most ghosts were more of a habit than a person—some ingrained action or fear or moment that played itself out over and over, a ripple cast by the soul’s departure rather than the soul itself. Others seemed like real people, able to interact, but in a limited way. They often didn’t make a lot of sense to those few of the living who could see and hear them.

But there were a few rare exceptions. Fully coherent ghosts, the Etorri Rhej called them, and the experts didn’t agree on what they were, how they came to be, or much of anything else, except that they were different from the rest. A coherent ghost seemed to be the whole person. He or she remained aware of the living world, seemed to perceive it through the same senses as the living, and used language the way the living do. Coherent ghosts were like the rest in one way, however. They were tied to something—a place or an object or, very rarely, a person.

How had Lily gotten so lucky? “He says he’s tied to me, but he was gone for over a month.”

“I’m afraid I can’t explain that.”

“Neither could he. He also says he thinks he’s supposed to be my partner.”

“Are you asking for advice?”

“Is there any way to sort the good ghosts from the rotten, lying sons of bitches?”

Anne chuckled. “Only the same ways we sort the living. If you want to know if he’s lying, that’s certainly possible. He could equally well be telling the truth, or the truth as he understands it. We may not know much about coherent ghosts, but we’ve no reason to think they’re any less muddled than the rest of us.”

Lily hesitated over her next question—but dammit, she wanted to know. “So could he, uh, think he needs to help me out because of unfinished business? And once he does, he can…go on?”

“I don’t buy the ‘unfinished business’ explanation for ghosts in general. Almost everyone leaves some kind of unfinished business behind, but hardly anyone lingers as a ghost more than a few moments. However, some of the more coherent ghosts strongly believe they can’t cross over. Either they’re right, or the strength of their belief itself holds them here.”

“So Drummond might be supposed to work with me, and he can’t, ah…cross over until he does that. Or pays a debt or something. Or he might be stuck here because he believes he’s stuck here.”

“Pretty much, yes. I’m not much help, am I?”

Not really. “One more question, and this may be outside your area of expertise, being more a matter of…ethics, I guess. Does this obligation thing go both ways? Does Drummond being tied to me give me any sort of obligation to him?”

Anne was quiet for a long moment. “I can only tell you what my mother told me, which is what her mother told her, and on back for generations. We have no more duty to the dead than we do to the living. And no less.”

That was not what Lily wanted to hear. She thanked the Rhej anyway, disconnected, and looked at the man—or what remained of a man—scowling at her.

“Well?” he demanded. “Did your friend tell you anything useful?”

“Maybe.” Making Drummond go away for good was high on her priority list. If he thought he had to help her out in some way…but she hadn’t exactly gotten a guarantee about that. “You were at the courthouse, you said. You know what Brian Nelson did.”

“Yeah.” He scowled. “Goddamn copycats.”

That echo of her own thoughts creeped her out. “That’s right. He and three of his gang wanted to raise death magic, so they captured two young women and slit their throats. They’d heard about what your pal Chittenden did. They were copying him.”

His expression shut down. “You want me to tell you I was wrong?”

“Oh, I figure you know now that you were on the wrong side. What I want to hear is that you’ve changed your mind about magic and the people who use it.”