Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [79]
Wren turned on every light in the third bedroom, which she used as the library/storeroom. Every wall was covered with bookcases that went to the ceiling, and the floor had boxes filled with things magical and inert from past jobs and research that she didn’t know what else to do with. Half, maybe more of the books, she’d never read past the cover flap, just shelved for a possible need later on. Well, later was now. She rummaged through the bookcases for any title which might possibly touch on the subject of ghosts, while Sergei sat in her office and ran through search engine after search engine, bookmarking any site that looked as though it had potential.
“At this point,” Wren directed him, “we don’t pass anything up, no matter how crazy it looks.” Much to her surprise, death current was a well-researched, if frowned-on topic. Weird that she’d never heard about it before. Or then again, maybe not so weird. You sort of had to have a specific question to go looking for these answers.
The real problem, they quickly discovered, was that even within reputable magical sources ghosts were mostly a theoretical debate. There was no way to prove that an alleged encounter was a spirit, or merely the effect of a subconscious magic-user, or even a deliberate hoax by a trained mage.
“Or,” Wren said glumly, “a wizzart just losing his mind.” She looked at the piles of books and printouts surrounding her, spread out all over the music room’s floor. Sergei had kicked her out of her own office when her running commentary on the idiocy of several writers had become too much for him to concentrate.
The truth was, most written texts on the supernatural were completely useless. Ninety percent of anything people believed grew out of their own fears and superstitions, not reality. Historical figures like John Dee and Agrippa Von Nettesheim, alchemists and scientists and self-proclaimed “magicians” rarely if ever touched on the truth. And those who did know rarely—call it damn near never—felt the urge to share that knowledge with outsiders.
Oh, there was some truth to the “other magics,” as the texts called them. Herbal craft. Faith-based “miracles.” It was as real as current, but with far less reliability. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes they didn’t. Less to do with ability than sheer luck, really. There were speculations, ranging from alternate world power bleeds to Divine intervention, but for the most part it was left to folklore and Nulls trying blindly to create what was beyond them.
But the one thing Wren had gotten from her rather reluctant attendance in college—two years, associate degree, and gone, and only because her mother insisted as part of her going to work with Sergei right out of high school—was the fact that you could sometimes find useful information in unexpected places. Placing aside an old text on necromancy, she instead picked up a modern paperback on spectral visitations, a pop science book written by a popular “ghost hunter,” who claimed to have the reports of over five thousand sightings in his files. Bypassing the section on haunted houses, she went straight to the back of the book, to the chapter on the ghosts of murder victims. Unquiet haunts, they were called.
Most of the chapter seemed to focus on ghosts that were merely reliving—so to speak—their deaths, or haunting the specific area of their demise.
“Not the case here, more’s the pity.” The apparition she had encountered was clearly aware of itself, and just as clearly no longer bound to the stone. Might it return to the actual site of the murder? But they had no idea where that might have been: a drawback, not knowing the spell used to create the protection. And somehow Wren didn’t think that the Council would give that detail up, even if Sergei hadn’t specifically said they’d purged that file. Would the ghost think to return to the building? And even if it did, what would it do there, haunt the lobby? Wren smirked at the thought of Rafe and his buddies