Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,3

long was his body hidden?” I asked, trying to figure out the weirdness of his spirit traces—not to mention the timetable for the missing girl.

Logan was obliging with answers. “All night. We know that the driver was supposed to take the girl into the city to go clubbing. She never showed up, but her friends didn’t think anything about it until she didn’t come to class this morning. A search turned up the body shortly after that.”

So Alexis was the type of girl likely to ditch the club scene but rarely miss class. Not exactly the stereotype of a mafia princess.

“Okay,” I said, rubbing my hands together, getting blood and psyche flowing. “Let’s see what Bruiser has to say.”

I crossed the short distance to where his body had lain for twelve hours or so. The grass had been trampled by the crime techs, but the ground was soft from the misty rain. I squatted and dug my hand into the dirt where blood and brains had seeped from the hole in Bruiser’s skull. Since he’d been moved there after the fact, there wasn’t more than a trace, but gray matter always made the best connection.

It should have taken just a fraction of willpower to bring him into focus, like tuning in to the right radio station. But nothing about this remnant was behaving normally.

Normally the death imprint and the actual spirit of a person are closely linked this early in the game. The spirit moves on quickly; the remnant—what most people call a ghost—erodes and fades unless something keeps it here.

This spirit was in tatters, something that usually happened with time. But the shreds were strong with personality, which I only Saw with the newly dead or remnants kept vivid by the memories of the living.

The wisps tangled around me, creeping over my skin, crawling up my sleeves and down my collar. I grabbed the threads and knit them together, exerting my will on the frayed—no, torn—edges until they started to mesh.

What could tear apart a ghost?

Suddenly it was done, and the shade of Bruiser stood in front of me—big and brawny, shadowed by his sins and screaming like the hounds of hell were after him.

My psyche was the bungee cord holding him together, and his terror earthquaked across that link with a discordant screech. Instinct said to let go, but I clamped down tighter, gripping the reins on Bruiser’s visceral panic.

“Stop it!” I shouted over the scream in my head. The agents jumped; they couldn’t see or hear Bruiser. I was just a long-legged, red-haired college freshman squatting in the soggy ground, yelling at the air.

“No one is going to hurt you,” I said, my voice less shouty but still pitched high with effort. I didn’t have to speak aloud, but thinking at him was too much work. My psyche, that invisible ghost of myself, staggered under the effort of keeping the shade knit together. If my attention slipped, he started to dissolve back into bilious fog and discordant screaming.

Seriously. Weird.

A tattered remnant should have been too weak to pull apart once I brought it together. And, yeah, with murder victims, panic was normal sometimes. But this was extreme. I didn’t like to admit there was anything ghost-related I hadn’t seen before. But this was something ghost-related I had never seen before.

Finally, the shade stopped yelling. He looked around, bug-eyed with terror, jerking with surprise when he saw me.

“Who are you?” Bruiser demanded. “What’s happening?”

“I’m here to help you.” It wasn’t a lie. He could be the vilest vile thing on the planet, but it went against my principles to let a spirit suffer on this side of eternity.

Bruiser was dressed as he had been when he died, in a dark suit and white shirt, jacket bulging over his muscles and a pretty obvious shoulder holster. The shade’s hand jerked toward his weapon when he noticed Taylor beside me and Chief Logan and Agent Gerard behind him. “What about them? Cops? I didn’t do anything.”

“They don’t care about you,” I told him with authority. You have to let freaked-out spirits know you’re in charge. “We just want to ask you some questions.”

“What’s he saying?” demanded Gerard, who clearly believed enough to boss me around while I was doing my job. “What happened to the girl?”

“Give her a chance,” said Taylor. Then, to the confused Chief Logan, he explained, “We can’t see or hear what Daisy sees and hears. Whether the ghosts see or hear us depends on the type.