Kristen Brand

Uncanny Spirits, the second urban fantasy book in Bea and Maggie’s Paranormal Case Files, hits shelves on September 25th. Get a taste of the spookiness, supernatural action, and banter with this preview of Chapter One—zombies included.

Chapter 1

You never forget your first zombie. Mine was in late September at a funeral home in northern Florida.

Bea and I don’t end up in a lot of funeral homes. Graveyards? We’ve been to plenty. Crumbling old Victorian houses? I’ve lost count. Haunted amusement parks? We’ve exorcised three, which was honestly two too many. But funeral homes don’t get a lot of activity. Restless spirits tend to haunt their places of death, gravesites, or dwellings from life. Funeral homes are just a way station.

Seaside Peace Funeral Home & Crematory, however, had experienced enough disturbing supernatural activity that the director had finally broken down and contacted Bea. I’m not sure how he found her. Probably through her website. (Her ugly, cluttered website with poor navigation and horrendous choice of fonts, which she finally let me revamp two months later after constant badgering.) She dealt with plenty of ghost fanatics and jittery callers spooked by a tree branch brushing against a window at night, but most of her clients contacted her as a last resort when all rational explanations failed.

Perry Bernhard, the funeral director, was one of those people. He sat behind a wooden, L-shaped desk in a cozy office. The carpet was floral patterned, and an old-fashioned desk lamp emanated soft golden light. Perry himself was in his mid-fifties, with a soft face and expressive eyes that probably excelled at conveying sympathy to his clients.

Right then, they only conveyed fear.

“Before anything else, I want to make it clear that I’ve had this job for thirty years.” He pulled out a cloth handkerchief from his suit jacket and mopped his sweaty forehead. “I’m not squeamish or jumpy anymore. Handling the remains we’re entrusted with is just part of the job.”

“I wouldn’t be here if I thought you were imagining things,” Bea replied from where she and I sat in front of his desk.

He nodded shakily.

“Why don’t you tell us what happened?” she prompted.

He wiped his face with the handkerchief one more time as he gathered himself. “The first incident was… about two weeks ago now. I was finishing up Mrs. Marcia Hagen’s makeup. Seventy-four years old when she passed away. Heart disease. Used to work as a hairdresser. Very nice family.” He wrung the handkerchief. “It was all very normal until— I was applying blush when she— She sat up, Ms. Romo. She sat up and grabbed me. I nearly had a heart attack myself.”

“And then?” Bea asked in a neutral tone.

Perry swallowed. “Then she made an awful rasping sound and collapsed back onto the table. I ran out of the room and locked myself in my office. Didn’t come out until the family started arriving for the ceremony the next morning. I couldn’t send my staff in to move her, not when they didn’t know the danger. I arranged her in the casket and…” He laid the handkerchief on his desk and began meticulously folding it. “Maybe I should have called off everything. It was irresponsible, but what could I have said? I nearly fainted from nerves during the ceremony, but everything went normally. Mrs. Hagen was buried that night, and I didn’t see her move again.”

He tucked the handkerchief back into his pocket and seemed unsure what to do with his hands. After a moment, he folded them in his lap.

I glanced at Bea, wondering what she thought.

Beatriz Romo Reyes, freelance exorcist and paranormal consultant, leaned back in her chair with one foot propped up casually on her other knee. She was a tall woman with brown skin and untidy, shoulder-length dark hair. Contrary to Perry’s suit, she wore a pair of faded jeans tucked into black cowboy boots, a gray shirt and black jacket hiding the sleeve tattoos covering both her muscular arms.

“Do you usually do the makeup work yourself?” she asked.

“No, but one of my employees quit recently, and I haven’t been able to replace her yet.” He scratched his neck. “It was rather sudden, actually. Surprised me because she’d been with us for seven years. In hindsight, I suspect she experienced something similar.”

“And when was your next encounter?”

“Three days later,” he answered promptly. “Though I didn’t witness it myself. I came into work that morning and found Mr. Santana’s body lying on the floor like he’d collapsed. He should have been in storage. There’s no way he could have gotten there unless someone moved him or…”

Or he moved himself. The words hung unsaid in the air.

Perry cleared his throat. “For the next week, I heard noises. Bangs on the walls. Whispers in an empty room. Muffled scratching. I started researching exorcists online. The constant dread… I can barely eat most days, and my chest feels like I’ve been punched. But then…” He closed his eyes and put a hand to his face, looking like a man about to break. “Mr. Neil Barber. Thirty-eight years old. Passed away in a car crash. The damage was extensive. It made an open casket impossible. But he… He was walking down the hall on Wednesday. Jodi—that’s my assistant—saw him too. We barricaded ourselves in the janitor’s closet, and he pounded on the door. Jodi called the police—she had her phone in her pocket—but the banging stopped before they made it here. Mr. Barber’s body was lying on the floor in the hallway when they arrived. They called it a prank—someone in a costume trying to scare us—but I know what I saw. Jodi hasn’t come back to work, and that’s… That’s when I called you.”

He slouched in his chair as if speaking about the ordeal had drained all his energy. The room was terribly quiet for a few seconds, and then Bea stood.

“I’m going to take a look around,” she said. “I saw a security camera over the front entrance. Any others around?”

“Er, one at the back door and two that cover the grounds.” He blinked up at her. “They wouldn’t have caught the corpses moving.”

“That’s fine. Cameras sometimes capture spirits the naked eye can’t see. It might help us pinpoint the source of the activity.” She glanced out the window, but nothing was visible in the darkness. “Or it might show something else.”

“Like what?” Perry asked.

Bea shrugged. “Well, if we see a bunch of dudes sacrificing a goat in the middle of the cemetery, we’ll know what’s to blame.”

“I—” Perry choked. “Is that likely?”

“Eh, too soon to say.” Bea turned to me. “Maggie, could you look at the videos?”

I got to my feet. “Sure.”

We split up, Bea leaving to search the area while Perry led me to a small office. He obviously didn’t receive clients there. Gone were the tasteful decorations and fine wooden furniture. Battered filing cabinets lined the walls, manila folders stuffed with papers lying in messy piles on top of them. The cheap desk saw more practical use than the previous one Perry had sat behind; pens, sticky notes, and a half-empty water bottle lay scattered around a computer monitor.

“Sorry about the mess.” Perry stepped over a cord snaking across the floor and got behind the desk. He squinted at the computer screen and clicked the mouse a few times before stepping back and gesturing for me to take the chair.

I sat down and studied the monitor.

I guess this is as good a point as any to introduce myself. My name is Maggie Greenfield, and I was twenty-five when this happened. Picture a short woman with curly blond hair wearing a long skirt and charm bracelets, and you’ll have a decent mental image of me. I helped Bea with some of her cases because they gave me a chance to practice witchcraft. And I’m writing about them now because people need to know about all the good things she did. She helped so many people and deserves to be known as a hero.

It won’t change what happened to her, and most people reading this probably won’t believe it’s true. But maybe some of you will, and I guess that’ll have to be enough.

Anyway, back to the case.

My rings gleamed as my fingers darted across the keyboard. I’d never used that particular security system software before, but luckily, it was user-friendly. I split the screen into quarters that displayed feeds from all four cameras, and then it was easy enough to play them backwards. After that, I increased the speed so we wouldn’t spend two weeks watching everything in real time.

The camera showing the front door was definitely the busiest feed. People zipped in and out of the building’s entrance in reverse, none of them looking suspicious. Grieving couples or single clients came to plan their relatives’ last rites, and groups in formal wear arrived and departed from funerals.

“Who’s that?” I asked, seeing a man emerge from the back door.

“Arturo,” Perry said. “Another of my employees. And that’s Jodi.”

I watched a woman in a polka-dot blouse speed backwards through the same door a moment before Perry himself appeared. That feed went still for a while, and I glanced at the one covering the cemetery. Other than a couple of squirrels, it didn’t show any action. The final camera covered a different section of the cemetery, a large white mausoleum dominating most of the area. A dispersed crowd back-stepped into a gathering in front of the building, and we watched a funeral take place in reverse, the casket seemingly getting pulled out of the ground and carried away.

As morning turned back into night, I leaned forward for a closer look. Most ghosts appeared at night. I searched the screen for any sign of spectral activity: a blur in the air, hazy light, objects moving without being touched. But night brightened back into day without me spotting anything. The only movement had been a group of moths fluttering around the lights over the entrance.

The next—make that previous—day passed in the same way. Clients came in and out of the front door, employees through the back, and another two burials took place in the cemetery. Day and night cycled by with nothing unusual happening. Should I slow it down and ask Perry to check the faces of every guest who stepped inside? Would he be able to remember them all?

“That’s Samantha,” Perry said, pointing to a young woman who burst out of the back door. “She’s the one who quit. I wonder if I should contact her about what happened.”

“Maybe wait until after we’ve sorted this out,” I advised.

He nodded in agreement, and we returned our attention to the videos. After a while, my eyes ached from staring at the screen for so long. I hoped Bea was having better luck with her search, because it didn’t look like the security footage would turn up anything.

On the top left screen, a subdued couple stood at a gravesite, lingering after the funeral had ended. Something in me stirred as I watched them. How much grief and sorrow did a cemetery host every day? Did the emotions build over time? Is that what had caused the dead to rise?

Night came again, and I glanced away from the screen for a few seconds to give my eyeballs a chance to relax. When I looked back, my breath caught in my throat.

Perry stepped closer to the monitor. “Who’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

A dark figure zoomed across the graveyard, crouched, and seemed to dig up something from the dirt before striding backward off-screen. It happened too fast for me to make out any details. I hastily paused the video and restarted it—forward—at normal speed.

For several minutes, everything was placid and still. Night meant that the footage displayed everything in varying shades of gray. Gravestones loomed over the grass, and trees swayed hypnotically in the wind. There were no lamps in the cemetery; I assumed the light source was coming from the street. It wasn’t much to work with, and when the figure walked on-screen, I could barely make him out.

He wore a dark hoodie—black, brown, purple; it was impossible to tell—and jeans. And he had the hood pulled up, concealing his face in shadow.

He stopped a few feet away from an angel statue and crouched to the ground, digging into the earth with his hands.

“He’s not… trying to dig up a grave, is he?” Perry asked.

“I don’t think so,” I answered.

The man wasn’t in front of a headstone, and he hadn’t brought a shovel or anything. That raised the question, though: what exactly was he doing?

As we watched, he pulled something from the pocket of his hoodie and placed it into the hole.

“What was that?” Perry asked.

I had no answer. The thing was too small and the video too dark to make it out. The figure pushed the dirt he’d dug up back over the object and then stood. As he turned to leave, I hit pause, freezing the moment when his face turned toward the camera. I zoomed in, and while the image grew more pixelated and blurrier, it showed us the basics: angular features, pale skin, and patchy stubble.

“I’ve never seen him before,” Perry said. “Have you?”

“I…”

I couldn’t answer. My jaw locked, and my fingers felt numb on the computer mouse. Even though the face on the screen was just a recording, I almost swore that he could see me. His shadowed, deep-set eyes seemed to stare right at me.

And I’d seen that face before.

I shot to my feet. “Let’s get Bea. We need to find whatever that guy buried and dig it up.”

Perry followed me as I rushed out of the office, and I shivered as I set foot into the hallway. Despite the warm lighting and homey textiles, the funeral home seemed eerie and abandoned that evening. Perry’s story about the dead rising must have freaked me out more than I’d thought. No wonder one employee had quit, and another refused to return to the building. I wouldn’t want to come back either.

Another shiver went through me, so strong that Perry glanced over in concern at my shaking. Then I realized it wasn’t just the story giving me the heebie-jeebies. I felt something:

Magic.

The realization came too late, because a second later, someone lurched around the corner of the hallway. Gray-haired and upper middle-aged, he wore a suit that made me think he was Perry’s employee at first.

Then I took in his glazed eyes, ashen skin, and the way he moved like a puppet on strings.

He was dead, and he was heading straight for us.