Grave witch Alex Craft is no stranger to the dead talking. She raises shades, works with ghosts, and is dating Death himself. But the dead walking? That’s not supposed to happen. And yet, reanimated corpses are committing crimes across Nekros City.
Alex’s investigation leads her deep into a web of sinister magic. When Briar Darque of the Magical Crimes Investigation Bureau gets involved, Alex finds herself with an unexpected ally of sorts. But as the dead continue to rise and wreak havoc on the living, can Alex get to the soul of the matter in time?
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Excerpt
Chapter One
The first time I realized I could feel corpses, I had nightmares for a
week. I was a child at the time, so that was understandable. These days I was
accustomed to the clammy reach of the grave that lifted from dead bodies. To
the eerie feeling of my own innate magic responding and filling me with the
unrequested knowledge of how recently the person died, their gender, and the
approximate age they were at death. When I anticipated encountering a corpse, I
tightened my mental shields and worked at keeping my magic at bay. Usually that
was only necessary at places like graveyards, the morgue, and funeral
homes—places one might expect to find a body.
I never expected to feel a corpse walking
across the street in the middle of the Magic Quarter.
“Alex? I’ve lost you, haven’t I?” Tamara,
one of my best friends and my current lunchmate, asked. She sighed, twisting in
her seat to scan the sidewalk beyond the small outdoor sitting area of the café
where we were eating. “Huh. Which one is he? I may be married and knocked up,
but I know a good-looking man when I see one, and girl, I don’t
see one. Who are you staring at?”
“That guy,” I said, nodding my head at a
man in a brown suit crossing the street.
Tamara glanced at the squat, middle-aged
man who was more than a little soft in the middle and then cocked an eyebrow at
me. “I’ve seen what you have at home, so I take it this is business. Did you
bring one of your cases to our lunch?”
I ignored the “at home” comment, as that
situation was more than a little complicated, and shook my head. “My case
docket is clear,” I said absently, and let my senses stretch. When I
concentrated, I could feel grave essence reaching from corpses in my vicinity.
All corpses. There were decades of dead and decaying rats in the sewer below
the streets, and smaller creatures like insects that barely made a blip on my
radar, but like called to like, and my magic zeroed in on the man.
“He’s dead,” I said, and even to me my
voice sounded unsure.
Tamara blinked at me, likely waiting for
me to reveal the joke. Instead I pushed out of my seat as the man turned up the
street. Tamara grabbed my arm.
“I’m the lead medical examiner for Nekros
City, and I can tell you with ninety-nine point nine percent certainty that the
man walking down the street is very much alive.” She
put extra emphasis on the word “walking,” and on any other day, I would have
agreed with her.
My own eyes agreed with her. But my magic,
that part of me that touched the grave, that could piece together shades from
the memories left in every cell of a body, disagreed. That man, walking or not,
was a corpse. Granted, he was a fresh one—the way he felt to my magic told me
he couldn’t have been dead more than an hour. But he was dead.
So how the hell had he just walked into the
Museum of Magic and the Arcane?
I dropped enough crumpled dollars on the
table to cover my portion of the bill and tip before weaving around tables and
out of the café seating. Behind me, Tamara grumbled under her breath, but after
a moment I heard her chair slide back as she pushed away from the table. I
didn’t wait for her to follow me out as I all but sprinted across the street to
catch up with the walking corpse.
The museum’s wards tingled along my skin
as I stepped through the threshold. I’d been inside the museum a few times, and
the collection of rare and unusual artifacts from both pre- and post-awakening
was impressive, but I was a sensitive, capable of sensing magic, and between
all the security wards and the artifacts themselves, the museum tended to be
overwhelming. Definitely migraine-inducing in large doses. I noted that the
magic in the air was particularly biting today, like one of the security wards
had recently been triggered. I sucked in an almost pained breath, trying to
adjust to the sudden crush of magic all around me. The extra sting of the
deployed ward didn’t help.
I should have walked the extra few steps
to clear the entrance wards.
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Publisher: Berkley / Ace
Pub Date: July 4, 2017
