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“I removed your physical remains from the property, along with the remains of the two men killed protecting you. Your spirit was already here, and removing the body could not change that. What it did was reduce the risk of your death becoming a prison within the prison, so to speak.”

I frowned. “That sounds depressing as hell.”

“It was not intended to be comforting.”

“So if you hadn’t moved my body, I could’ve been stuck reliving that shit over and over again?”

“There was a possibility, yes.”

Well, shit.

That made moving my body without asking drop several spots on the list of things I wanted to cuss her out about.

I rubbed a hand over my jaw out of habit, still not understanding why being dead hadn’t gotten rid of habits I’d had my whole life.

“Hold up. If helping dead mothafuckas is your job, where the hell you been for the last year?”

Miss Veda’s expression barely changed. “Removing your remains was emergency intervention. Direct contact is different. Newly separated spirits need time to settle into what they have become before someone like me can safely guide them. I was aware of you, Caspian. I simply could not approach you this way yet.”

“So you watched me cuss at walls for a year?”

“Among other things.”

“That’s fucked up.”

“You survived.”

“I’m dead, Veda.”

“Precisely.”

I shook my head. “On to a more important question. Where the fuck is my body?”

“Protected,” she simply answered.

“That ain’t a location.”

“No, it is not.”

“Veda.”

“Caspian.”

I already knew she was about to make me work for every damn answer.

She slipped the nail file away before explaining, “When I removed your remains, I did not carry them to another house, bury them in another city, or hide them somewhere the living simply have not thought to search. They were placed beyond ordinary physical reach, in a protected space between the physical world and the one I operate through. No person can accidentally stumble across them, no police search can uncover them, and no construction crew can dig them up. They will remain there until they can safely return.”

I stared at her for a few seconds. “So you got my body tucked off somewhere between here and the afterlife?”

“That is an oversimplification.”

“Is it wrong?”

Her silence lasted just long enough.

“That’s what I thought.”

Miss Veda gave me a look but didn’t argue.