Dylan’s mouth pulled into a tight line as his eyes seemed to trace her features. Was she turning green? Man, she felt like she might be. “Fine. There’s a chair in the office around the corner. Wait there. I’ll try to make this quick.”
Nodding, she hurried to find that chair before her mind and body conspired to faceplant her right there in the hallway. She found one in a small, empty room and dove for it. Her face grew hot as her vision blurred and the room spun around her.
Oh, man. Not good.
Forcing deep breaths in and out of her lungs, she squeezed her eyes shut and lowered her head between her knees. Breathe. Breathe. Okay. Everything’s okay now. She repeated the mantra over and over until the kaleidoscope of color behind her eyelids stopped. She slowly opened her eyes and sat up. This had happened before, most memorably when she’d been visiting a cousin after foot surgery, glanced down at the freshly stitched wound on the swollen limb propped on a pillow, and abruptly lost consciousness.
Given the assortment of strange and unnatural injuries she’d seen among the dead over the years, one might expect her to be blasé about the real ones, too, but nope, she was a first-class wimp when it came to blood and gore. Her mind had always been able to disconnect when a ghost manifested a slit throat or bloody gash, much the way many people did when watching horror films, but put her near a hypodermic needle or flesh wound, and she was horizontal in seconds.
She reached for the lightswitch on the wall above her shoulder and flicked it on. She yelped when she spotted the elderly woman sitting in the chair behind the desk across from her.
“Geez!” She held a hand to cover her racing heart. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you before.”
The woman said nothing.
With cold, void eyes, the grandmotherly type just sat there, staring at Alexandra with absolutely no emotion on her weathered face.
Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.
The sound of blood rushing through Alexandra’s ears intensified.
Oh no. Please, no.
Swallowing hard, Alexandra grabbed the arms of her chair. She’d met a lot of ghosts in her time and could easily distinguish between the living and the dead. Ghosts emitted sparkly auras, but living people had no auras at all that Alexandra could see.
Neither did this old lady. Alexandra’s heart raced and her stomach did continuous somersaults beneath the ominous, intense stare aimed in her direction. Those eyes were…unnatural.
Ghost?
No, she didn’t think so.
“What are you?” she whispered.
The old woman tilted her head and examined Alexandra even more closely. In a deep, gravelly voice, the woman countered with “What are you?”
Alexandra fingered the gold cross at her throat as she slowly rose from the chair, her gaze unwilling to leave the old woman. She said the silent prayer her grandmother had once taught her—By the power of Saint Michael and all the angels and saints, please keep me safe from harm—as she felt for the doorway behind her.
Hurrying out of the room, she glanced down both directions of the hallway, searching for the entrance she and Dylan had come through. Screw this. She’d wait outside by the car.
She spotted the familiar door and hurried toward it, but her feet came to another abrupt halt as figures down the hall turned toward her.
Nervous laughter bubbled through her chest when she saw not one, not two, but three more dead people standing in front of the door marked EXIT. They were all staring back at her.
Crap. Crap. Crap.
This wasn’t right. Dead people shouldn’t be hanging around the hospital-slash-morgue. They should be following their loved ones around or something. Not this.
They all advanced at once, chattering over one another so that Alexandra couldn’t make out the details of what any one was saying.
“Help me! Please help me!” One man began begging as he reached for Alexandra’s arm. His grasp was strong and determined. “My wife? Do you know where she is?”
“Where am I?” A middle-aged woman asked, pushing that man aside to clasp Alexandra’s elbow. “My children. Do you know where they are?”
“Outta the way!” A stern-looking old man in a hospital gown knocked them both aside and pressed Alexandra closer to the wall.
Alexandra mentally exclaimed for everyone to give her some space. At least, she hoped she didn’t yell the words aloud.
The three figures all fell silent and backed away, and that’s when she spotted the fourth figure, standing behind them all.
A gargled, sickening sound was coming from the naked man. His face was mangled and bloody. No features were distinguishable.
He reached out a hand toward Alexandra, and she screamed.
***
“Not that I’m complaining or anything, but you guys almost never come by here when we’re doing this. What gives?” Dr. Jeffrey Watkins removed the bloody gloves he wore and then washed his hands in the sink and flicked water off his fingers.
As one of five professors and medical examiners on the pathology staff at the university, Watkins was the only one Dylan had met, and he sent up a silent prayer of thanks for his one piece of good luck today. It would have sucked if he’d had to explain himself to someone new.
Dylan veered around the medical instruments that always gave him the heebie jeebies and tried not to look at the corpses barely covered on the examining tables a few feet away. The pretty, young autopsy technician Dylan didn’t know gave him a brief smile and left the room.
“My captain wants this case solved, and soon.” He gestured toward the body he was here to investigate. Candice Christopher. Twenty-two, a recent honors college graduate, and too damn young to be lying on that table. “I thought I’d come see if I could get a jump on that report.”
He didn’t mention that he’d hoped to shake the supposed psychic he’d been saddled with too. Guilt tugged at his conscience. Bringing Alexandra here had been a stupid thing to do, but the sooner he got rid of her and put his focus back on solving this crime, the better.
He’d have liked to have gotten to know her a little better, spend some more time in bed maybe, but that plan had been shot to hell and back.
Besides, the idea of someone pretending to be psychic sent his blood pressure up a few millimeters. Psychics made him think too much about his older brother, Zach, who was as dead to him as the bodies in this room.
A clang of metal in the sink snapped his attention back to the medical examiner.
“You’re in luck. Charlie told me this one was a rush job, so we did this one first,” Watkins said, mentioning the coroner both he and the police department dealt with regularly. “I haven’t finalized our report yet.”
“Did you find anything I should know?”
Watkins nodded and moved toward the body, slid the sheet lower and pointed out a small swollen spot on the woman’s arm. “Same as the others. Our guy used a needle to inject about 10 milliliters of chloroform. She was dead of cardiac arrest within minutes. The rest was done to her afterward.”
“So it’s the same suspect?”
Watkins nodded and tugged the sheet back up. “This one was a little different. I found sand under the fingernails on her right hand and salt water in her lungs, but that’s not what killed her.”
“Water?” Dylan blinked in surprise, remembering Alexandra’s words from earlier. “So she wasn’t killed in the cemetery?”
“Hard to say for