Page 2 of Trick Me
Erik’s ghost hovers there, looking like a kicked puppy. If puppies were transparent and had bullet holes.
“She never appreciated what I did for her,” he moans.
“You mean like dying on the day you wererenewing your vows with her?” I ask, finally free to speak my mind.
“I was murdered! Otherwise, I was careful.”
“You were a sixty-year-old man having an affair with a woman younger than your daughter. That’s not careful. That’s a midlife crisis with a death wish.” I stand, my legs shaking from the cold. “Now get out. I have other dead people to deal with, and at least some of them have the decency to be interesting.”
Erik’s ghost vanishes with a pop of displaced air. The temperature in the room immediately rises ten degrees, though I’m still shivering. I breathe easier.
I make my way out of the consultation room and into the main floor of what we call the Nordic Institute of Posthumous Communications. We mostly just call it the Institute, or as I prefer, the Office Where Dreams Go to Die and Then Complain About It.
Some of the interns started calling it NIPS, which, unfortunately, stuck, much like the ghosts in the elevator shaft.
The building didn’t exist before the portals opened, and society restructured itself around magic instead of money a long time ago. Well, magicandgold. Some things never change. The main floor soars three stories high, with art deco fixtures that someone decided toimprovewith floating light orbs that shift color based on the spiritual energy in the room. Right now they’re a sickly yellow, which means someone ishaving a bad day with their particular brand of death magic.
There are lines of meeting pods for our less dramatic consultations. We have a vault, reinforced with enough protective spells to stop a magical attack, that holds cursed objects we’re either studying or waiting to destroy. And my desk, along with thirty others, sits in an open office.
Most things in the office run on magic, giving us the use of some technologies many around the world don’t have.
My desk is a standing model that adjusts to height. We have a varied staff, from a pixie in Accounting who tops out at three feet to a half giant in Security who has to duck through doorways. The surface is black glass that displays my calendar, active cases, and approximately seventeen different warning systems for spiritual intrusions.
I collapse into my chair, pulling my sweaters tighter. August in Helsinki is usually warm enough that normal people are in sundresses and shorts. I’m dressed like I’m about to climb Everest, and I’m still cold. The Institute keeps my area at a balmy twenty-eight degrees Celsius, but when you’re channeling the dead, your body temperature drops to match theirs.
“Rough session?”
Dmitri looks up from his desk, where he’s examining what appears to be a jewelry box wrapped inchains. As a curse breaker, he deals with objects that want to kill, maim, or occasionally turn people inside out. The hazard pay is excellent. The mortality rate is… not.
He’s unfairly attractive in that carved-from-marble way that has you wanting to either paint him or lick him. Sharp cheekbones, white-blond hair that he keeps tied back while working, and eyes like winter ice. He’s also wearing thick leather gloves that go up to his elbows and a protective apron covered in runes, which somewhat ruins the aesthetic. On the table in front of him sits a transparent half orb of magic, barely visible except for the occasional glint of light. His hands are buried inside it, working around the sealed box like it might bite.
“Lindqvist case again,” I say, not bothering to elaborate. Everyone knows about them. The Institute loves these high-profile cases because they pay well. I hate them because the dead are usually assholes, and the living are worse.
Next appointment in twenty minutes. “And before you ask, no, it’s still not resolved, and she’s returning next week.”
“The dead don’t exactly feel compelled to kiss and tell.” That’s not entirely true. Sometimes they won’t shut up about their conquests. But Erik seems more concerned with making it up to his wife.
Dmitri goes back to his work, and across from me,Marcus is chatting with a manager about what sounds like a haunted house situation, before the boss man leaves. The other desks are empty right now.
We all live in the House of Gold and Garnet, which rules our corner of the world, demanding excellence in all things. We’re the cleanup crew for the aftermath of magic, the ones who deal with what happens when spells go wrong, when the dead won’t stay dead, when curses take root and spread.
When the portals in our world first opened to a world ruled by humans and magic flooded in like a tsunami, the majority of humanity died in the first wave. The survivors either adapted, evolved, or got very good at hiding. Then the world slowly divided into Houses, taking control over various countries and seas.
These Houses now rule what’s left of the world, each seeming to attract a certain type of magic and supernaturals. And in the House of Gold and Garnet, we got death, wealth, and violence. We’re the dangerous side of the world, the flashy, profitable, and hiding-bodies-in-the-basement kind. Our territory stretches across several countries, all under the rule of King Kaspian, who governs from his modern palace in Reykjavík. They say he bathes in blood and eats diamonds for breakfast. They say a lot of things. All I know is our pay each month clears.
The Institute is one of the crown jewels of ourHouse’s death services. We handle everything from simple hauntings to mass possessions, from curse breaking to spiritual negotiations. And then there’s me, the only natural medium in the Institute who doesn’t need rituals, blood sacrifice, or machinery to talk to the dead.
Lucky me.
The Institute found me three years ago during what the newspapers called “The Helsinki Library Disaster.” I was studying, minding my own business in the library, when the construction crew breaking ground on the new wing hit something they shouldn’t have.
Turns out there was a mass grave under the library. Viking raiders from a long time ago, buried without proper rites, their spirits bound to the earth by violence and rage. When the construction crew’s drill hit the first skull, all forty-three Vikings woke up at once.
And they were pissed.
Twenty-three students started speaking in Old Norse, warning about blood and vengeance. The temperature dropped so fast that the windows shattered. Books flew off shelves, forming words in languages that had been dead for centuries. And me? I was the only one who could see them, all forty-three Viking warriors in full battle gear, axes raised, ready to possess every living soul in a three-block radius.
I don’t remember much of what happened next. The security footage showed me rising four feet off the ground, my eyes going solid white, speaking fluent Old Norse despite never studying it. I bound all forty-three spirits and sent them to their rest, but not before every camera in the area caught me looking like something out of a horror movie.
