Unmarked Graves

by Christine Pope

  No, as he’d said, whatever happened, they were in this together.

  They approached the restaurant that was their apparent destination, an attractive space with awnings covering the windows. Across the street was a tall, official-looking building with an honest-to-god clock tower in it, an architectural feature Rosemary had only seen in the movies before that moment. However, she didn’t have the opportunity to pause and try to figure out what the building was, because Will had gone ahead and opened the front door to their destination.

  It smelled good in there, warm and with a scent of chocolate and spice drifting on the air. The restaurant was the sort of place that made you want to relax at once, although she knew that wasn’t a very good idea. Everything here in Greencastle might appear idyllic and friendly, but this town was home to several generations of demon offspring. She needed to keep up her guard, no matter what.

  A pleasant-faced woman approached and asked if they wanted breakfast or lunch. Will and Rosemary both replied, “Breakfast,” and the woman guided them to a table off to one side, handed them a couple of menus, and told them their waitress would be with them in a moment.

  Rosemary murmured a thank-you and sat down, and Will did the same. A quick glance around told her they were the only diners here except for a large group seated in a separate dining area to the back of the space. Sunlight slanted in through high windows bordered in stained glass, and soft, unobtrusive music played in the background.

  “This feels a little too much like a vacation,” she murmured as she glanced down at the menu. Meat-heavy, as she’d feared, but she figured she could get the sampler platter and then see if she could exchange the bacon for some fresh fruit.

  Will glanced up at her, and gave a small nod. “I know. And I wish it were. But….”

  The words trailed off because their waitress, a woman around Rosemary’s age with her fair hair pulled back into a French braid, had approached their table. “What can I get you?” she asked, tone brisk but pleasant.

  Rosemary and Will placed their orders — almost the same thing, although he didn’t bother to replace the bacon with something healthier — and the waitress withdrew. He sent a quick glance in her direction, but she’d already disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Fred sent me a list of the local demons last night,” he said quietly. “It reads like a who’s who of Greencastle’s prominent citizens, so we’re going to have tread lightly.”

  “What about Caleb’s father?”

  “Daniel Lockwood? He’s president of the First Indiana Bank and Trust here in town.”

  “Figures,” Rosemary replied, her lips twisting in an ironic grin. So much for Caleb’s stories about his modest upbringing and even more modest bank account. No, it probably wasn’t quite the same thing as having the CEO of Wells Fargo as your father, but she still had a feeling the family did very well. “Any brothers or sisters?”

  “No.” Will had his phone out, but he held it down against his leg, nearly under the table, so she couldn’t see exactly what he was reading. The notes Fred Peñasco had sent, she assumed. “Actually, the interesting thing is — well, as long as this list is accurate — that it doesn’t look as though any of the cambions had more than one offspring each. All sons, too.”

  Interesting. Did that mean demons only carried XY chromosomes? It sure seemed that way, although Rosemary had to admit that her high school biology class was long behind her, and she might have been forgetting some of the finer points of sexual reproduction. The more important thing, though, was that the half-demon children of the original Underhill demons only had one child apiece, so her visions of having to confront an army of part-demon adversaries appeared to have been exaggerated. Still, even with Caleb out of the picture, that meant she and Will might be up against as many as thirteen of the part-demon creatures, which wasn’t very good odds if they all possessed the same kind of supernatural talents Caleb had.

  “So, we’re not quite as outnumbered as we thought,” she murmured, then pasted on a smile as the waitress came back with their coffee before departing again.

  “It doesn’t look that way,” Will said. He picked up his coffee and took a sip, then gave an approving nod.

  Good. She needed a decent cup of coffee, still felt far too draggy even though they’d gotten nearly eight hours of sleep the night before. And the coffee was good — hot and rich and fragrant, not bitter at all. Maybe after she’d drunk the whole cup, she’d start to feel a little more human. And if she was feeling this way….

  She sent Will a probing look. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” he replied, and drank some more coffee. “Really. No headache at all this morning. I was a little worried about what spending hours in a pressurized cabin might do to my head, but I’m not noticing any ill effects at all.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” Rosemary said, allowing herself to enjoy some measure of relief. All during the flight, she’d worried what she would do if Will had some kind of a relapse at ten thousand feet, but it seemed her fears had been exaggerated. “Still, we can take it easy at first. Maybe wander around, get the lay of the land…figure out the most likely places that hard drive would have gone.”

  Will’s mouth twisted in a grimace, although his next words told her it wasn’t because of the coffee. “With Daniel Lockwood as the president of the bank here, I wouldn’t be surprised if it went straight into one of his bank’s safety deposit boxes.”

  Oh, that would definitely make their task a lot harder. Rosemary had seen enough caper movies to know that neither she nor Will possessed the necessary skill set to infiltrate a bank vault.

  “Well, let’s hope that isn’t what happened,” she said lightly. “After all, I have a feeling these…people…are the types who like to keep their valuables where they can see them.”

  Will tilted his head to one side, as if considering that possibility. However, he refrained from replying because their waitress returned then with their plates of food, and asked if there was anything else they needed.

  Since Rosemary’s breakfast looked as though it contained enough food to feed her for an entire day, she said that no, she was fine, and Will murmured something along the same lines. Once they were alone again, he spoke.

  “We’ll just have to see. Anyway, I have the addresses of the cambions and their offspring, so after breakfast, we can drive around and see what we can find.”

  Because of course they’d had to rent a car at the airport the night before, so they were already mobile. Their rental vehicle was a silver Toyota RAV4, something unobtrusive enough. With any luck, no one would even notice them driving around without any clear destination.

  Will picked up a triangular slice of wheat-berry toast, then took a bite. It was almost as if he’d guessed at what she’d been thinking, because he said, “It’s lucky that this is a college town. They’re probably more used to strangers coming and going than a lot of other small towns in this part of the country.”

  True enough. Rosemary had done some research on Greencastle while the shuttle took them to the airport, and she supposed she should have recalled that DePauw, a small liberal arts college, was located in the town. That probably explained the excellence of the food here at the restaurant, not to mention the various bars and gastropubs they’d passed on the way to get breakfast.

  “Well, but we should still be kind of careful,” she said. “It’s a lot easier to be anonymous in a car.”

  “Exactly,” Will responded. “It’s much better for us to do a casual drive-by than walk through a neighborhood where everyone knows each other, and try to act as though we belong there.”

  She nodded, and they dug into their meals in earnest after that, as if motivated to eat quickly because they had a goal in mind. Even with substituting fresh fruit for her bacon, Rosemary couldn’t eat all of her breakfast, but that was no problem, since Will offered to finish it for her.

  Men and their appetites. She wondered where he put all of it, since he w
as trim and had absolutely zero sign of a beer belly, but clearly, burning off large amounts of food wasn’t a problem for him.

  After they were done, they walked the couple of blocks back to their hotel and retrieved their RAV4 from the parking lot. No one was around — although the lot was about half full, mostly cars with out-of-state plates — and she couldn’t help being relieved that there wasn’t anyone around to see the two of them climb into their rental vehicle. The less chance of being connected to it, the better.

  She remained silent as Will guided the Toyota away from Greencastle’s quaint downtown, toward the south and west and the residential neighborhoods located there. Even at this time of year, the landscape looked brilliantly green to her California-bred eyes, although the trees were turning. However, frost hadn’t completely yellowed the grass, and it all looked verdant and lovely, and completely unlike the sort of place where a bunch of demons might be holed up.

  Well, to be fair, the true demons weren’t here anymore. They’d allowed their mortal bodies to die and had gone back to Hell, but, as Caleb had proved, their descendants were just about as tricky to deal with.

  Will and Rosemary turned down a street where the lots were large and most of the houses set far back from the road. “I thought we’d go past Daniel Lockwood’s place first,” Will said, his tone quiet, as though he feared they might somehow be overheard even from inside their rented car. “I figure he would probably be the likeliest person to have the footage, since it wasn’t at Caleb’s place in Eagle Rock.”

  Rosemary thought that theory sounded logical enough, especially since Caleb had actually mentioned his father to her during their confrontation at the house Colin Turner and Madeline Nash had once owned. For all she and Will knew, Daniel was the one who’d been pulling the strings all along. It would have been odd for him to approach her directly, so he’d sent his handsome son to do his dirty work, figuring she’d be putty in Caleb’s hands.

  And she had been…until she’d gotten cold feet about sleeping with him. Before that, however, she’d gone along with pretty much all his suggestions. Some kind of demonic mind control?

  If that’s what it had been, then those mind-control powers weren’t infallible, because even while Caleb was trying to charm her into leading him to the missing footage, she’d found herself falling for Will Gordon instead. Maybe even demons couldn’t find a way to defeat the human heart, not when it was intent on the person who was clearly your soul mate.

  Although maybe she shouldn’t go quite that far when it came to describing Will Gordon. She knew she loved him, had never experienced this sort of pure emotion for any other man, but “soul mate” might be a bit of a stretch. How could she think of him that way when there was still so much she didn’t know about him?

  She did her best to push those doubts aside. If nothing else, she knew she wanted to be with Will, no matter what. That had to mean a whole hell of a lot.

  He said, breaking into her reverie, “That’s it.”

  All he’d done was incline his head, as if he’d thought that even pointing would give too much away, but Rosemary knew immediately which house he meant. It was large and square, composed of red brick like so many of the other buildings in Greencastle, with white trim and several chimneys and prim rosebushes marching their way up the herringbone path that led to the front door. In fact, the place looked almost exactly the way she imagined a house that belonged to a bank president in a small Midwest town should look, and her mouth curved in amusement.

  “Right out of Central Casting,” she remarked. “Or at least, whatever location agents use in place of Central Casting.”

  “True,” Will said. He’d been looking slightly grim a moment earlier, but right then, his lips quirked in an echo of her own smile. “What I’m more worried about is how open it is — there are a few trees on the lot, but they’re not close enough to the house to provide any cover.”

  She sent him a quizzical glance. “Even if there were, what exactly were you planning to do? I’m sure a place like this has an alarm system. Unless you’re hiding your history as an international jewel thief from me or something.”

  Her remark made him laugh outright. “No, I don’t have anything that interesting on my resume, unfortunately. I suppose I had a vague idea of being able to get close enough to look in a window or something.”

  “Assuming the demons don’t have the equivalent of Michael’s wards put in place to keep us humans out.”

  His expression sobered. “Yes, assuming that. It’s hard to know exactly what their powers encompass, since they’re so ‘other.’ And even when they have a lot of human blood mixed in the way Caleb does, they’re still forces to be reckoned with.”

  That was for sure. Rosemary recalled how Caleb had summoned fire to surround his hands, had used those flames as a weapon against her and Will. How he’d disappeared into thin air right before her eyes. Her own powers had grown by leaps and bounds over the past few days, but she was pretty sure she would never be able to pull off a trick like that.

  She held back a sigh, since she knew allowing herself to feel hopeless definitely wasn’t going to help their current situation. “I suppose we should drive around the block and see if we can get any information about the back of the property. These lots are big enough that they might not have any rear neighbors.”

  “Good idea.”

  They’d been driving slowly, a little bit under the posted speed limit of thirty miles an hour, but Will sped up slightly as they made their way down to the next intersection. He turned right and right again. As Rosemary had thought, the street here didn’t have any houses on one side, because the large lots of the homes on the next street over backed up here. It seemed land wasn’t at a premium in Greencastle the way it was in Southern California.

  Interestingly, the back gate to Daniel Lockwood’s property stood open. Not that it was probably a good idea to drive in, because even as she and Will watched, a white van with the logo of a local catering company painted on the side entered through the gate and began to make its way along the narrow lane that hugged the wall and appeared to dead end at a large, multi-bay detached garage.

  “Is he having a party or something?” Rosemary murmured. “That’s kind of odd behavior for a man whose only son has just been murdered, don’t you think?”

  Will nodded, his dark brows drawn together in a frown. “Maybe he hasn’t found out yet.”

  “But they’re part-demon. Wouldn’t he just…know?”

  “Maybe…or maybe not.” His fingers were tight on the steering wheel, and she could tell he wanted nothing more than to pull over, park their rented RAV4 at the curb, and hurry through the gate before it closed again. However, he continued to drive along without speeding up or slowing down, gaze now on the road ahead of him again, as if what was going on at the Lockwood house was of no interest to him. “We really don’t know how connected the demons are, whether they can communicate by thought or instinct or some other means we can’t begin to guess at. But I can see how Daniel Lockwood might want to keep such a thing quiet for a while, just because people always have questions whenever there’s an unexpected death. After all, we really have no idea whether anyone here in Greencastle even knew Caleb was in California at all.”

  True. Coming here to Indiana made Rosemary think they were basically flying blind during a sandstorm. Sometimes you had to take a leap of faith, though. She wanted to believe that her own psychic abilities would have piped up and told her that no, going to Greencastle to retrieve the Project Demon Hunters footage was a spectacularly bad idea, but she’d experienced no such inner warnings. Besides, Michael had certainly been on board with the plan.

  Then again, as much as she liked Michael, she had to admit that sometimes he wasn’t the best indicator as to whether something was a good idea or not….

  “Well,” she said, trying to sound positive, “at the very least, that’s one piece of intel we didn’t have ten minutes ago. It could be something we can
work with. I mean, if Daniel Lockwood is hosting a catered party, then it’s probably not some kind of quiet family dinner. Maybe we can try to find out what’s going on.”

  “Good idea,” Will replied. “Still, since we’re out and about, we might as well get an idea of where the other demons are hanging out.”

  She figured doing a little more recon couldn’t hurt, if for no other reason than to know where the rest of the crew was lurking. “Sure.”

  He touched his phone screen, and the map program he was using switched over to the next address. It wasn’t very far, just two streets down and a block over, another large home on a substantial lot, although not quite as big as Daniel Lockwood’s. Was he first among equals, or had the cambions decided amongst themselves that for appearance’s sake, he should have the biggest and most expensive house?

  Since none of the other homes they drove past came anywhere close to his, she had to think something like that must be going on here. Oh, all of them were nice houses, much bigger than hers, even the ones that belonged to the younger generation of demon offspring. But there also didn’t seem to be anything about them that would make them stand out to the casual observer.

  About an hour later, they’d finished making their circuit, and Will headed back to the hotel since they really didn’t know where else to go. Rosemary had snapped a few pictures and made some notes, but she had to admit that the idea of casing thirteen different houses — well, all right, eleven, because it seemed the two youngest quarter-demons still lived at home — and trying to figure out which of them concealed the stolen hard drive made her head hurt.

  Or maybe it was something else. As they pulled into the lot at their hotel and Will parked the car, she began to realize the buzzing in her head wasn’t mere overload. No, she was definitely getting an image. A formal study with a big mahogany desk and mahogany bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes she had a feeling no one had ever read.