Mortal Ties (3 page)

The dead might not scare her, but they could be damned annoying. “If you’re here to
give me more of your pearls of wisdom—”

“No. At least…” He paused uncertainly. “I don’t think so.”

Drummond had been many things in life.
Uncertain
wasn’t one of them. The novelty of it interrupted her more thoroughly than his words,
stirring an unwanted curiosity. “What, then?”

“I don’t know.” He crossed his arms, scowling. “You think I picked you to fix on?
You think this is my idea of a great way to spend eternity—popping in to watch you
brush
your goddamn teeth? What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”

Lily stood. Whatever she’d hoped for today, it wasn’t happening now. Not with Drummond
hanging around. “In what way can that be considered any of your business?”

“Just curious. It makes things easier for me, but somehow I don’t think that’s why
you came.”

“What do you mean, it makes it easier for you?”

“Easier for me to show up. Places like this, the veil is thin.”

Amusement jabbed at her, half funny and half painful. “I wish Mullins could hear you
talking about ‘the veil’ like some TV psychic.”

He snorted. “That would chap his ass, wouldn’t it? You like to hang out at the graves
of people you’ve killed?”

“How do you know whose grave this is?”

“I can read.”

“And you know who Helen was.”

“Did you think I didn’t do any digging before I set out to get you?”

Drummond might have gone spectacularly wrong, but he’d been a good agent before that—savvy,
smart, and thorough. Of course he knew who Helen was, knew that Lily had killed her.
God only knew what else he’d dug up about her. “Go away.”

“Don’t get all huffy. I’ve got a proposition.”

“Does it involve you leaving me alone?”

“And where the hell would I go?”

“How should I know? Obviously you don’t have to hang around me every minute. You were
gone for over a month.”

“A month?” That rattled him. “I was…I think I was sleeping. But not the whole time.
I was at the courthouse with you just now when—”

She scowled. “I didn’t see you.” Supposedly Drummond couldn’t see or hear the world
without manifesting, at least to the drifting-white-mist stage.

“You didn’t look up, and I was…” His mouth kept moving, but all she heard was silence.
He stopped, scowled,
and tried again. Midway through, his mouthed words became speech again. “…show up
all the way in some places. And talking is goddamn hard, too, so stop interrupting.”

“You’re not really talking, you know. No movement of air, which is why no one else
hears you.” It had to be some kind of mindspeech, however much it sounded like regular
speech to her.

He snorted. “Like I hadn’t figured that out. Listen, I think I know what I’m supposed
to do. Why I didn’t just die or go to hell or whatever.” His eyes burned with intensity.
“I’m supposed to be your partner.”

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.”

He was silent.

“That’s what I thought.” She started walking again.

“Okay, so we won’t be partners. I’m still a resource, and you’re wasting me. I’ve
got twice your experience. You can’t ignore that.”

He was right. That, too, was annoying. She stopped and looked at him. “Mostly you
haven’t hung around long enough to be much use. You pop in; you pop out.”

“I…can be more available now.”

She waited. He didn’t elaborate, so she asked, “Is the ‘why’ to that one of those
things you can’t explain?”

“Since I don’t understand it myself, the answer would be yes.”

“You told me you never met Friar.” Robert Friar, who’d started a war—or was resuming
one begun over three thousand years ago. Robert Friar, who’d seen the slaughter of
hundreds of people on his own side as a great way to take down the lupi, the Gifted,
and everyone else who stood in the way of the one he served. Like the U.S. government.

“Just his buddy, Chittenden.”

“But you researched him. If you dug into my background, you must have checked him
out, too, before throwing in on his side.”

“Sure, but I doubt I know anything you don’t. I used the Bureau’s files, talked to
a couple people.”

“I’m asking for your professional opinion, not the details of your background check.
Given what you learned then and what you know now, would you say he’s a sociopath?”

“Huh.” He thought that over, frowning and silent for a long moment. “Could be. There’s
no record of the usual markers, like torturing baby bunnies when he was a cute little
toddler. But sociopaths aren’t identical. Could be he’s what they call
high functioning
.”

“Really good at hiding what he is, you mean.”

“That, yeah, but also with better impulse control. Most sociopaths aren’t good at
restraining themselves.”

“Most of the ones we know about. The ones who get locked up.”

“True.” He cocked his head. “You’re trying to get to know Friar better.”

She nodded and started walking again, but slowly. “Him and the one he serves.” The
Old One who wanted to take over the world and remake it according to her standards.
The one they never named, because that could draw her attention. The Great Bitch had
to act through local agents because she was barred from their realm, thank God. Or
thank the Old Ones who’d opposed her, like the lupi’s Lady, who’d shut the door on
themselves in order to lock
her
out.

“That’s why you came here.” Drummond sounded pleased, like he’d turned a puzzle piece
around and finally saw where it fit. “Not to poke around in your own psyche, but to
try and dig into hers. Helen Whitehead’s. Whitehead belonged to that Old One you told
me about.”

“She did. And she seems to have been a sociopath, too.”

Drummond’s eyebrows lifted. “Yeah?”

“As was, possibly, one Patrick Harlowe…the other agent of
hers
that I know about.”

“That doesn’t say good things about the Old Bitch.”

“It doesn’t, does it? If—” A muffled gong sounded in her purse—the ringtone for calls
forwarded from her official number. She dug out her phone. “Agent Yu here.”

It was T.J., aka Detective Thomas James, the man who’d
trained Lily when she was a shiny new homicide cop. As he talked, Lily gave her watch
one wistful glance. She owed T.J. a lot more than one delayed supper, though, so she
spoke briskly enough when he paused. “Sure. I’ll be there in fifteen.” She put her
phone away and glanced over her shoulder at Scott ten feet behind her. “Did you hear?”