Chapter 2

"The worst part about being a ghost,"the ghost confided, "is that you don"t get to pick who you end up haunting. I know that seems counterintuitive, but there"s a system. Of course, you can put in a request, but there are a ton of forms to fill out, which is a bitch if you"re noncorporeal. By the time all the paperwork goes through, what usually ends up happening is you get someone from the priority list—the list of people who deserve to have a demented spirit running around ruining their lives. And that," he added happily, clicking his long, pointed fingernails together, "is how I ended up here with you."

"Fantastic." I sighed.

All three of the ghost's faces were hideous. One visage was alight with excitement, his red goat eyes with their slit pupils zipping around my office, taking in the economical furnishings. Another set of eyes, so black that they seemed more like holes than actual eyes, focused on my MPI license where it hung, slightly crooked, on the wall above my head. The third set, the multifaceted eyes of a spider set in an arachnid head, were fixed on my face. His black robes moved as though hordes of beetles crawled on his body beneath the silk. An unidentified purplish-black goo dripped from his fangs. I had to give him credit: he was thoroughly gruesome.

I blew out a breath. "Look, nothing personal, but I'm probably going to have you exorcised. I can't afford to have a ghost on the payroll; the supe insurance alone would kill me."

Three sets of angry eyes focused on my face. "Is that supposed to be a joke about me being dead? Because I find that to be in particularly poor taste."

"Honestly, I really don't care."

Two monstrous mouths fell open in shock. One was full of rows of very sharp, jagged teeth, while in the other, spider fangs clacked in consternation. The third face—the one with the black-nothingness eyes—had no mouth. He'd probably been expecting a much different reaction, based on the form he'd chosen to take. I might not be his first haunting, but I was going to be his last. I had no use for petty ghosts who got their kicks trying to make living humans miserable, even if I had earned my spot on the "priority list."

Some would say that threatening exorcisms or making puns about death to a ghost was cruel, but I'd never really gotten the hang of being nice.

While the ghost sputtered in indignation, I picked absently at the underside of my new desk. A particularly disgruntled client with surprisingly powerful telekinetic powers threw a fit in my office a little over a week ago, and I was still trying to get repairs completed and the furniture replaced. The remains of the old desk, along with pretty much everything else that had been in the office, were now in the dumpster out back. The large cabinet behind my desk, a heavily warded antique, was the only piece of furniture to withstand the dwarf's tantrum. The sole other survivor was my framed mage private investigator license, though it looked a bit worse for wear.

The ghost finally recovered his power of speech and gave me a truly grotesque arachnid smile. "I see you're an MPI, Alice Evelyn Worth," he said silkily. "Surely someone in your line of work has use for someone with particular…talents?"

I scoffed. "How long were you in the Null since your last haunting? Ghosts aren't a new thing anymore. If I need to get results, I'd have better luck summoning a demon, or hiring one of those crazy half-vamps, a dhampir. At least people are scared of them. You. Are. Not. Scary."

The ghost's red goat eyes flared in anger. I met his gaze without fear. He wasn't the first nightmare-form ghost to show up in my life, and I'd dispatched all the others as quickly as they'd arrived. There wasn't anything he could do or say that would make me want to keep him around.

Of course, just as I thought that, he proved me wrong.

The ghost raised his clawed hand. Bright blue-and-green flames danced along his fingertips.

Drawing on my air magic, I threw up a protective circle around me and my chair just as my desk—and everything on it and in it—went up in cold bluish-green flames. In seconds, there was nothing left but ash.

It was my turn to be momentarily speechless. "Well, that's different," I said finally.

Turns out, the ghost had a very particular set of skills—skills that had apparently put him at odds with someone who decided he didn't need to be walking around alive anymore.

Now rather intrigued, I poured myself a cup of coffee from the coffeepot that had, thankfully, been sitting on the little table behind me and not on the second desk I watched get destroyed in the past week. I used my desk generally to make my office look more professional, and to create a psychological barrier between myself and my clients. I"d been forced several times to use a desk as a shield, and twice as weapon. The new desk hadn't been around long enough to be used as any of those things.

The ghost looked disappointed that I wasn't all that upset about the loss of my desk and its contents, but I'd long ago ceased to worry about the destruction of office furniture. When you're a PI specializing in the paranormal and supernatural, it didn't pay to get attached to office décor. Not all my clients left satisfied, and the nature of my business often brought angry supes of various species to my door—which, though heavily warded, has had to be replaced six times in three years. I wasn't very popular with the building's management.

The ghost watched me sip my coffee. I couldn't help but notice he was smirking. The spider mouth might also be sneering, but it was hard to tell. Well, I still planned to have him exorcised, so that ought to wipe those smiles right off. He'd thrown me a pretty epic curveball with the speed and precision of his cold fire, though, and I was curious about his past. If nothing else, I'd be adding to my knowledge of ghost abilities, and that was worth fifteen minutes of talking with this dead jerk.

"Tell me about yourself," I said. With no desk to put it on, I held my coffee cup and made unflinching eye contact with my uninvited guest.

The ghost's goat eyes sparkled with something like humor. Strangely enough, most ghosts found their situation funny, even when their deaths were violent and unexpected. I had yet to figure out why this would be the case. My working theory was that being in the Null for any length of time made them all a little unhinged.

"My name is…Malcolm," the ghost said slowly, as if recalling his own name took a moment. "I was a mage."

I snorted and gestured toward the pile of ash that had once been a perfectly respectable secondhand desk. "No shit."

He made a raspy, wheezing noise that I realized was laughter. While his goat head was speaking to me, the other two sets of eyes went back to looking around my office. The three pairs of eyes looking in different directions were starting to make me feel queasy.

"What kind of mage?" I asked.

"Earth," he said, confirming my suspicions. The cold fire was unique to earth mages. Then he surprised me again. "And water."

My eyebrows raised, despite my intention to stay only mildly interested. "Earth and water? That's very unusual."

I carefully opened my shields enough to get a better sense of the ghost's magic. I recognized the cool blue of his water magic and the peaceful green of earth magic. His aura sizzled along my senses. I realized he was definitely a high-level mage, and well trained; his control of his cold fire was precise.

"Unusual enough for me to end up on a good payroll," Malcolm was saying as my senses turned outward again. "It was a good living, for a while." He stopped talking, and the goat's eyes wandered over to look out the window. Since it looked out on the dirty bricks of the building next door, I figured he wasn't lost in the view.

"Let me guess," I said. All three sets of eyes suddenly focused on my face. "Everything was great at first. Then they started asking you to do things you didn't like, then things you didn't want to do, then things you'd swore you'd never do, and then things that made you not be able to sleep at night or look at yourself in the mirror. And then…." I stopped. I noticed that my hands had clenched and forced them to relax.

"And then, I died."

I nodded. These days, it was a common story.

"I worked for Darius Bell." For a moment, the ghost sounded almost proud, but then his shoulders slumped. I was sure at one point he'd been honored to be a part of Bell's cabal, one of the most powerful, wealthy, and well-connected on the West Coast. Hard on the heels of that flash of pride would be the recollection that his boss had him killed—and that for all his hard work and loyalty, he was rewarded with what had probably been a very unpleasant exit from this plane of existence.

The ghost—who I was grudgingly starting to think of as Malcolm, despite every effort not to, damn it—settled in to tell his story. Apparently tired of the effort it took to maintain all three nightmarish countenances, he suddenly re-formed with a single human face and head, with spiky, blond hair and bright blue eyes. His robes turned into a button-up shirt and jeans. His claws retracted into his sleeves, then pushed back out as normal, even delicate-looking human hands.

Transformation complete, he peered at me through the wire frames of quite unnecessary glasses—after all, who'd ever heard of a nearsighted ghost? The affectation was almost quirky, and completely unexpected after the gruesomeness of his nightmare form. I had no idea whether this was how Malcolm appeared when he was alive, but now he looked like a cute librarian.

The total package, I had to admit, was not unpleasant—you know, for a dead guy.

"I went to work for Darius right out of college," Malcolm said. "Well, I say that, but it's not really true. I left college to work for him. Two semesters to go before I had my chemistry degree and probably a decent career as a research chemist, and I let a recruiter hand me a signing bonus and the next thing I knew, I was signing a ten-year contract and moving across the country."

I whistled. A ten-year contract and a signing bonus? Malcolm must have had some serious talent. I looked at my noncorporeal guest with new respect.

I felt a familiar hollowness when I thought of the years I spent as a mage for my grandfather's cabal: the sleepless nights, the misery, the blood—both literal and metaphorical—on my hands. Even now, I could see the telltale signs of blood magic in my aura that even the strongest spellwork couldn't hide completely. If it weren't for my spelled tattoos, my bloody history would be visible for any ghost or sensitive to see.

I wrapped my hands around my mug and refocused my attention on Malcolm's face. Behind those superfluous glasses, Malcolm's eyes looked…concerned? Troubled? I raised my eyebrows, waiting for him to continue his story, and hoping he couldn't see anything in my aura but the light smudges of someone who'd only dabbled in blood magic once or twice.

Malcolm went on. "At first, they gave me the best assignments: bringing rain to crops that needed it, enriching the ground for farmers, shoring up land for housing developments, nothing bad or even questionable. I felt good about the work I did. I spent the first year wondering where all those horror stories about the cabals came from. I finally decided the stories were made up by anti-magic activists and people who weren't good enough to work for the cabals. I really believed it was all lies. God, I was so stupid." He hung his head.

I stayed silent. In a weird way, I envied Malcolm's lost innocence; as the granddaughter of Moses Merrum Murphy, I'd never had the luxury of not knowing the truth about the cabals. My earliest memories of magic involved the suffering of others, and always—always—the pursuit of profit and power, the two things Moses Murphy and Darius Bell and pretty much every other cabal leader, or Davo, lived for.

While there were certainly plenty of smaller cabals out there that had no interest in criminal activities and whose members used their magic to help rather than harm, all of the very powerful ones were organized crime syndicates. These cabals, like any other criminal organization, ran on brutal efficiency, demanded unwavering loyalty, and cared about two things: money and power. There were a dozen major cabals in the US and a host of smaller ones, each run by a powerful Davo and his or her lieutenants. Like the Mafia, cabals made money through various criminal enterprises. Mages bound to cabals did whatever was required to make these ventures profitable.

Malcolm was speaking again. "So, after about a year of getting the cushy, easy jobs, they started me on the ones I didn't really like very much: causing droughts and floods, destabilizing the ground under particular building projects, disrupting shipping routes. Then they came to me with the rough stuff: landslides, washouts, attacks on construction sites and building projects owned by other cabals. People were hurt. People died. I tried to refuse, but that contract…." He rubbed his wrists with recollected pain, and my own wrists throbbed in sympathy.

I remembered all too well the agony of trying to break a contract once I had been forced to accept it, the crippling white-hot lashes of pain that scoured my body whenever I tried to refuse to carry out an assignment. Even now, just hearing the word contract still brought on nausea at unexpected moments.

"It got worse and worse," Malcolm continued. "By that time, I realized the stories about the cabals were true—and they weren't even close to the worst things they were responsible for. But something tells me," he said, regarding me much too closely for my own comfort, "that you know that just as well as I do."

"What I know or don't know is none of your business, ghost," I snapped, setting my forgotten mug down on the side table so hard that lukewarm coffee sloshed over the side. I stood.

Malcolm's eyes went suddenly wide with fear. The familiar power of my magic surged and swirled around me. Unlike Malcolm's brightly colored earth and water magic, mine was black and red and purple, dark and malevolent and dangerous. Without me having to consciously call for it, the energy spooled around my fists, waiting to be unleashed.

"Blood magic," he whispered. If it was possible for a ghost to turn pale, Malcolm was doing it.

And now he knew how I got on that priority list.

The midmorning sunshine poured in through my office windows, glittering on dust particles in the air. The light was diffused as it passed through my guest and made strange, indistinct shadows on the floor. We stood unmoving, Malcolm frozen in place with fear, and me struggling to get control of my anger.

It took nearly a full minute, but I pulled the magic back inside myself, and the residual energy faded. When my arms finally stopped prickling, I breathed deeply, sat back down in my chair, and looked across the pile of ash at Malcolm.

Despite his initial fear, he looked calmer now that I no longer seemed like an immediate threat. It occurred to me then that his death could have been at the hands of a blood mage, and that my loss of control might have triggered some very unpleasant memories.

Malcolm eyed me with obvious unease. "I'msorry I upset you."

"It's fine." I started cleaning up the spilled coffee with a handful of Kleenex. Malcolm waited silently.

Finally, I dropped the gloppy, wet tissues into the trash can and turned back to him. "So, they were giving you assignments you didn't want…," I prompted.

Malcolm nodded. "I had no choice but to do what they told me. I belonged to the cabal for ten years, but I didn't make it that long, obviously. By my fourth year, I was fighting them every step of the way. I'd developed a tolerance for the pain, and it was taking them longer and longer to get me to comply. Sometimes I'd be unconscious for days and they'd end up having to use a different mage who wasn't as strong. I told them I wanted different work or I wanted out of my contract. This went on for another year."

I was surprised Malcolm resisted his contract so openly for that long and survived as long as he did. It was a testimony to how talented he was that a) he'd been strong enough to resist the power of the contract, and b) that the cabal had been unwilling to kill him for resisting. To the end, I doubted Bell really wanted to kill Malcolm. A strong mage with both earth and water magic was a rare gem, one that any Davo would be very reluctant to part with.

"So what finally got you killed?" I asked.

Despite the bluntness of my question, he laughed a little. "Well, that's pretty direct," he said. "I guess they finally got tired of my shit, figured out that I wasn't going to stop fighting. They handed me over to a blood mage. Three days later, I was dead."

I was right, then: he'd been killed by a blood mage. A normal person probably would have felt guilty for unleashing blood magic in front of a ghost who had died that way, but thanks to my grandfather, I had never really been any kind of a normal person. The best I could come up with was some empathy. Those three days had probably felt like three hundred years. I was willing to bet Malcolm had welcomed death in the end; after even an hour with a blood mage, many would. I knew that from personal experience.

Suddenly, realization hit me. "Wait…how are you here?" I asked in confusion. "How did you end up bound to me, instead of Bell's cabal?"

Malcolm shook his head. "I don't know. I was under contract when I died, so I should be back at the cabal." He shuddered. Bound ghosts were often simply "stored" in spell crystals and foci, where their energy could be used in spellwork and continuously drained like magical self-charging batteries. It was a horrible fate for any mage. "Unless Darius freed me, but why would he do that?"

"I have no idea. I can't imagine he would let a mage as powerful and skilled as you be unbound."

"But what other explanation is there?" Malcolm asked. "It's got to be punishment of some sort, but I can't think of a scenario where being a bound ghost isn't worse than coming back as a haunt. Sorry about that, by the way," he added.

I shrugged. "Not your fault."

"Maybe he expected me not to come back as a ghost, and instead end up in the Underworld. Considering the things I did, I can't imagine that would be very pleasant for me."

I sat back and thought.

Why would Darius Bell do something as unheard of as let a mage's ghost be unbound? Malcolm's theory of punishment was possible, I supposed; death wasn't necessarily the end of suffering. Ghosts, unless exorcised, remained incorporeally on earth, tied to a person or place, tormented by their inability to connect with their loved ones or find peace and rest. If exorcised, they went to the Underworld, but, as Malcolm said, there was no guarantee he'd find any peace or rest there. I didn't know the extent of the things he did while working for the cabal, but I could guess. There were a lot of theories, few of them cheerful, about what happens to those in the afterlife who caused suffering in this one, even if they were coerced into doing so.

So had Bell freed Malcolm so he would be unbound? If so, why? Had he wanted to ensure Malcolm ended up in the Underworld? He could just as easily have destroyed Malcolm's essence completely, wiping him out of existence, but it would mean Malcolm would no longer be suffering. So if punishment was the goal, I could see some kind of logic in sentencing Malcolm to a noncorporeal afterlife.

But somehow it didn't seem right. To say cabal mages never got their contracts nullified and their ghosts unbound would be an understatement. What was less frequent than never? Was there a word for that? Neverer? Neverest? That was how often it happened. So this had to be an extraordinary circumstance.

I raised my eyes to look at Malcolm, who clearly shared my unease. "You don't think it's punishment."

"I don't, not in the way you're thinking. It's something else. There's a plan for you. It may involve more suffering—in fact, it almost certainly does—but it's not as simple as just condemning you to being a ghost and haunting someone like me." I fell silent.

Malcolm's face went blank, but I could feel his disquiet as if it was my own. For some reason I couldn't quite articulate, there was something very disturbing about Malcolm's story, beyond the obvious parts about the things he was forced to do while under contract, or his terrible death at the hands of a blood mage. I couldn't shake the feeling there was something going on in Bell's cabal, and that Malcolm being bound to me was a clue to it, which meant I wasn't going to be exorcising Malcolm now or anytime soon, not until I had some answers.

I stood, and Malcolm floated back a few inches. "Well," I said with a sigh, "welcome to Looking Glass Investigations. You're the newest member of the team."