The Dead Won't Let Me Rest

Chapter 8: The Woman With the Silver Badge

The man at the bottom of the stairs was old in the way certain buildings were old: structurally sound, visibly weathered, and somehow more present than things that hadn't been around as long.

He was short and lean, with white hair cut close to the skull and a face that had been arranged by decades into an expression of permanent mild amusement. He wore a dark work coat over a grey shirt, and his hands, resting easily at his sides, were the hands of someone who had spent a long time working with them. He was looking up at Kael with the unhurried patience of someone who had waited longer than this for more difficult things.

"You have his eyes," the man said. "Gerald's. Suspicious of everything, including people trying to help."

Kael came down three steps. "Who are you?"

"Silas Graves. I was your father's embalmer for nineteen years." A pause. "You can call me Graves. Everyone does."

"My father's embalmer." Kael looked at the key in the man's hand. "With a key to the building."

"He gave it to me. In case something happened to him." Graves glanced at the torch Kael was still holding. "He was right to, as it turned out."

Kael came the rest of the way down the stairs. Up close, something about Graves was slightly off in a way he couldn't immediately identify. Not threatening. More like the quality of light in a room where one of the bulbs was a different temperature from the rest. Present, but differently present.

"You knew about Vail," Kael said.

"I knew your father was keeping him. That's a specific thing, keeping a body. It means the dead person has unfinished business and the Keeper has agreed to hold the space for them."

"Keeper."

"We'll get to that." Graves moved past him toward the kitchen with the ease of someone navigating a familiar space. "Have you eaten anything today that wasn't from a petrol station?"

"Corner shop."

"Same category." He began opening cupboards. "Sit down. I'll tell you what I can while I still have time, and you can decide afterward how much of it you believe."

They were twenty minutes into it, Graves talking and Kael listening with the ledger open in front of him, when the knock came at the front door. Sharp, official. The kind that expected to be answered.

Graves stopped mid-sentence and looked at the front of the building with an expression that suggested he knew exactly who it was and found it inconvenient.

"Don't volunteer anything," he said. "And don't let her inside if you can help it."

"Who?"

But he was already moving toward the back of the kitchen, and then he was simply not in the room anymore, which Kael did not have time to examine because the knock came again, harder.

He went to the front door and opened it.

The woman on the step was perhaps a year or two older than him, with dark hair pulled back from a face that was composed and precise and giving away nothing. She wore a charcoal coat over dark clothes, and she held up an identification card in a black wallet with the economy of someone who had done it many times and found the theater of it faintly tedious.

The badge behind the card was silver, with an embossed design he didn't recognize.

"Mira Vale," she said. "Veil Authority, Supernatural Crimes Division." She put the wallet away. "You're Kael Arden."

"I'm standing in my own doorway," he said. "So probably yes."

Her expression didn't shift. "I need to come in."

"I'd want to know why first."

"Because a deceased individual registered to this address was observed ambulatory on a public road at seven fourteen this morning by two witnesses, one of whom recorded it, and the recording is currently being reviewed by my department." She held his gaze without effort. "That's why."

He stood aside. Not because he wanted to, but because there was no version of refusing that didn't make things worse, and he needed to understand what the Veil Authority was before he decided how much to tell them.

She came in and looked at the reception area the way investigators looked at rooms: not admiring them, cataloguing them. Her eyes moved from the counter to the shelving to the corridor and back to him.

"How long have you been in the building?"

"Since yesterday afternoon."

"Have you had any contact with the deceased individual? Thomas Vail, forty-seven, transferred here from Blackthorn General eleven weeks ago."

Kael kept his face neutral. She already had Vail's name, which meant she had access to the transfer records he'd been planning to chase himself. "He was on the embalming table when I arrived. Preparation had been started and not finished."

"And this morning?"

"I saw someone in a hospital gown on the road. I went out. It was him." He paused. "I got him back inside."

"How?"

"I put my hands on his shoulders and pushed."

She looked at him for a moment. "That's not how ambulatory reanimation is typically resolved."

"I'm new to all of this."

Something crossed her face. Brief and controlled, but he caught it. Not quite amusement. Something more guarded than that, like she was revising an initial assessment and not yet sure what to replace it with.

"Mr. Arden," she said. "I'm going to need to see the body."

"It's in the embalming room."

"I'm also going to need to know whether you've performed any unauthorized necromantic procedures since taking possession of this property."

Kael looked at the grey marks on his fingers, then back at her. "Define unauthorized."

Her expression didn't change, but something behind it did. She reached into her coat and produced a second item alongside her notepad. A slim black device, roughly the size and shape of a pen, which she clicked once. It emitted a faint sound at the upper edge of hearing.

The grey marks on his fingers flared with a warmth so sudden he almost pulled his hand back.

"That answers that question," she said quietly, and wrote something down.