by Dannika Dark
Instead, he was going to spend an eternity entombed alive. And in an almost comical way, all this was his fault. When they’d been on assignment at the bar and Raven was luring the Mage away, Christian had set her up. He’d wanted to test her quick thinking by stalling his appearance. After all, real life always came with a monkey wrench or two. What would she do without all the structure and safety nets, forced to make her own decisions?
And just as he’d sought to prove, his plans didn’t go accordingly. When he’d tuned in to their conversation in the car and realized that the Mage was about to speed away, Christian launched to his feet to go after them. He might have made it in time had something not caused him to turn in the other direction.
Someone, to be exact.
Prior to joining Keystone, Christian had severed ties with old acquaintances. Nothing personal, but he’d needed to move on with his life, and that meant creating distance. He moved to an older section of the city and avoided his usual stomping grounds, but occasionally he’d glimpse a familiar face and dodge out of view. It wasn’t difficult to keep a low profile in a big city like Cognito, but when he saw the familiar Chitah taking a seat near the hall, he slipped out the front door instead of the back.
Those few seconds had cost him precious time. When he reached the back of the building, Raven was gone. He turned in a circle, sharpening his Vampire hearing until he picked up her shouting. That was when he hopped on his bike and weaved through traffic, barely able to hold on to their dialogue long enough to sense which direction they were moving. It required concentration to block out the sound of his motor and all the cars around them, but once he reached a long stretch of road with few turnoffs, it was just a matter of catching up with them.
Christian had never believed in karma, but lying in the casket with old Martha Cleavy was giving him second thoughts about divine justice.
Chapter 18
When I hung up with Wyatt after telling him the news about Christian, I figured Viktor would reprimand him for speaking to me. It wasn’t much information to go on. After all, there were dozens of cemeteries in Cognito, and it would be like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Wyatt was going to relay the news to Viktor and leave it up to him.
I didn’t think anything would come of it, so I started my own search. After all, I was partly the reason he was in the cemetery to begin with. I left the address with Wyatt in case one of them wanted to help out, but they probably had bigger concerns on their plate.
I could have just dumped Salvator in a junkyard and stayed out of it, and that might have been the smarter thing to do since Viktor now knew my location and would probably send a Vampire to scrub my memories, but I couldn’t get Christian’s last words about knowing myself out of my head. Keystone deserved to lay their man to rest in a dignified way, and turning my back was the wrong thing to do.
Two hours after driving Salvator’s car to the cemetery, I’d only come across eight fresh graves. I pressed my ear to the earth, wondering if he might be down there. But I didn’t have a shovel, it was daylight, and the local news would eat up a story like that. I stumbled upon a few structures that looked like community mailboxes, but instead of parcels, there were ashes behind each of the plaques. Since many families watched the caskets being lowered, I suspected that anyone hiding a body might have dug their own makeshift grave with no headstone, so I kept my eyes alert.
A vehicle rolled in my direction through the thinning fog. Keystone operated a black cargo van, used for transporting the entire group at one time. When it stopped, the rear doors popped open and a few familiar people poured out. I was surprised to see that everyone had come.
“Dead end,” Wyatt said, approaching me. “Literally.”
Gem elbowed him, and we closed the distance between us.
“There are three fresh graves that way,” I said, pointing over my shoulder.
She sighed and spoke solemnly. “We searched there already. Wyatt can’t locate dead bodies unless there’s a ghost or other special circumstances. If Christian died angry, Wyatt thinks he might be lingering around. But chances are he’s not, so we’re looking for something else—like a fresh grave with no stone or something out of the ordinary. Claude can’t pick up a Vampire’s scent, and we can’t detect his energy,” she said, referring to herself and Niko. “It’s a crapshoot.”
Viktor remained behind the wheel, watching me with somber eyes but not getting out. Shepherd fell back a bit from the group, standing out among our foggy surroundings in a black leather jacket. Between the tall Chitah, Gem in her platform sneakers, Niko in all black, and Wyatt’s slacker attitude, they looked like a group of misfit action heroes.
“What do you plan on doing?” I asked.
Shepherd folded his arms, his gaze fixed on something in the distance. “We don’t leave a man behind.”
We searched two more graveyards in the area before Wyatt suggested we try an old one on the outskirts of town. Breed had their own cemeteries, but chances were that they planted Christian in a human one. Less risk of a nosy immortal wondering what they were up to. Humans—even in the face of a crime unfolding before them—have a tendency to mind their own business.
We reached the cemetery by evening, and I turned on the high beams, unable to make out the unpaved road. The headstones were old—some of them near the entrance looked more like rocks than grave markers. We parked our cars halfway up the road, deciding to spread out.
“I didn’t know places like this existed,” I said, shivering when an owl hooted.
Wyatt held his flashlight against his temple and shone it on me. “It’s a private cemetery—they don’t bury people here anymore. Maybe we weren’t looking in the right graveyards. If you wanted to hide a body, would you do it in a place with a lot of foot traffic and security guards?”
“Good point. What are all those buildings?”
“Mausoleums. People buried whole families in them, sealed up in the walls. They’re different from place to place. Some are crypts that go partially underground, others are open to the public and look more like a post office.” He approached one of the stone coffins and slapped his hand against it. “They don’t bury people this way anymore—except for places that flood—because stone cracks. Not to mention all the vandalism. Plus I don’t think humans like visual reminders that they’re going to die. Most human cemeteries don’t even like raised headstones anymore. They look more like a golf course. It offends the dead.”
Everyone branched off, and I took a slow stroll with Wyatt between two rows of grandiose headstones.
“It doesn’t bother you to be here?” I asked. “I thought all the spooks liked to chase you down.”
“Just the freshies. Old specters do their own thing.” He shone a light on a marble headstone. “See the date? Eighteen hundreds. Most of these folks have moved on to greener pastures. It’s the newer cemeteries I don’t like. There were a few at that first place who were eyeballing me.”
I snorted. “Can they tell what you are?”
“Not unless I look at them.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I try not to look at them.”
“How close do you have to be to a Vampire to sense them?”
He shrugged. “It depends. The more obstacles between us, the harder it can be. When they’re dead like Christian, I definitely can’t sense them.”
I turned around when I heard a thud—the last thing you want to hear in a quiet cemetery. Niko had tripped over a broken headstone. Blue stepped over a rotting branch and locked her arm in his, guiding the way, her flashlight creating a solid beam through the thin veil of fog. Dead branches littered the grounds, along with leaves, rocks, and holes.
Which got me to thinking. “Did you notice something at the front entrance?”
Wyatt’s eyes rounded, and he turned in a circle.
“I’m not talking about ghosts. I didn’t think twice about it until you just mentioned that people don’t visit here. There were fresh tire marks on the roa
d. It looked like they ran over one of the grave markers near the front gate.”
Wyatt swung his light onto the road, and we hurried toward it.
I knelt down and touched the grooves in the soft dirt, which was still damp from the last rain. “These tire marks are recent. The rain and wind would have erased them if they were older than today.”
“Holy Toledo. You’re like the Breed version of Nancy Drew.” He stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
Everyone hustled back over, Viktor with his brows drawn together.
The excitement wore away from Wyatt’s face, and he aimed his flashlight at the road. “Fresh tracks. We think it might be something.”
We followed the tracks up a gradual incline that led to the back of the cemetery. A part of me dreaded finding Christian and seeing everyone’s reaction. Would they cry for him, or was this just a professional relationship? Gem might have warned me about him, but she couldn’t mask the obvious remorse she carried in her expression.
The tracks stopped, and it looked as if the car had moved several times to turn around. The right side of the road had nothing but old markers and rocks, and throughout the center of the cemetery were stone coffins and statues that littered the landscape. Straight ahead were rows of the stone houses that Wyatt called mausoleums.
Claude’s nostrils flared—he appeared to be searching for a scent. “I can’t tell. It’s been too long.”
Shepherd had his hands outstretched.
“What’s he doing?” I whispered to Wyatt.
“Searching for emotional imprints.”
I was staring at the ground, pacing in a circle, when I noticed impressions that might have been… bare feet? They led me to a modest structure made of stone with the word CLEAVY in bold letters above the door. Dead vines twisted around the building as if they had attempted in vain to strangle the life out of it. I tried pushing and pulling on the door.
“Find something?” Blue asked, coming up behind me.
I pointed at a shiny new lock. “You wouldn’t happen to have any bolt cutters, would you?”
Blue reached in her pockets and fished out a couple of pins.
Wyatt sidled up beside me. “She’s pretty nifty with picking locks.”
After a long minute, Blue tossed the lock to the ground and tried to push open the door, but it was too heavy. Claude leaned his body against it and shouldered it open.
The room smelled musty, and I wrinkled my nose as we aimed our lights inside.
“What’s all that?” I asked, noticing a pile of junk in the corner.
Wyatt entered and knelt down, wiping away some of the cobwebs. “Looks like someone wanted to take their silver to the afterlife.”
A stone coffin claimed the center of the room, and what I noticed immediately were the fresh clumps of dirt on the floor.
Everyone backed up against the walls when Viktor came in. He stepped up to the coffin and bowed his head respectfully. Butterflies circled in my stomach.
Viktor touched the coffin with his fingertips. “Christian did not deserve such a vulgar disposal. Death is inevitable for us all, even the immortals. But it should mean something. Let us give him a proper burial.”
Wyatt’s boots scraped against the dirty floor as he walked to the edge of the coffin, his head cocked to the side. “Hurry and open it up.”
Shepherd and Claude gripped opposite ends, pushing with all their might to spin the lid open. Gem averted her eyes, and Wyatt leaned in like a little kid about to watch a firecracker explode.
“Someone was pissed,” Shepherd muttered, looking at his palms.
Wyatt shone his light inside. “So we meet again. Déjà vu.”
It seemed like a strange thing to say, but then again, Wyatt wasn’t exactly the most normal guy I’d ever met. He untied the cloth wrapped around the corpse’s head. When he snapped it away, glassy eyes stared up at us. Christian’s face didn’t look pallid and peaceful like most dead people, but eerily startled.
I expected a flood of tears, but instead, everyone behaved strangely.
“Move away,” Shepherd ordered, reaching into the coffin. “This’ll hurt like a bitch.”
“What are you doing?” I asked in horror.
When Shepherd yanked his arm back, he was holding an impalement stake in his hand. Not the small ones I’d seen people use, but more like an arrow.
Christian flew up to a sitting position like a scene in a horror movie, his lip curled in a snarl. “Remind me never to do that again.”
I blinked in surprise. The impalement wood must have missed his heart.
Viktor shouldered Wyatt aside and placed his hands on Christian’s shoulders, his lip trembling. He waited a beat before finally speaking. “You need a shower.”
Gem and Blue laughed, relief swimming in their eyes. The tension in the room lifted, and the air circulated as everyone began to breathe easy.
Shepherd peered into the coffin. “Who’s your girlfriend?”
A skull rolled to the side, and Christian shuddered. Without answering, he gripped the edge of the coffin and climbed out, stumbling when his feet touched the ground.
Gem reached out to help. “We’re so glad you’re not dead.”
“You and me both,” he murmured, dusting off his pants.
She worried her lip. “I’d hug you, but you have dead stuff all over you. Rain check.” She skipped out the door, Claude shadowing behind her.
Christian lowered his voice and nodded at Wyatt. “I owe you one.”
Wyatt shook his head. “Not this time. You can thank your ex-partner over there. After we kicked her out, she squeezed information from one of Darius’s men. Then she spotted tire tracks on the road before anyone else. She’s a keeper if you ask me,” he said, giving Viktor a cursory glance as he walked out of the room with a brisk step, hands in his pockets.
Christian lowered his eyes, addressing those around him. “Can I have a moment?”
I turned to leave when he snapped my collar back.
“Not so fast.”
When everyone had moved out of sight, I turned around to face Christian, my Vampire eyes adjusting to the darkness. His unblinking gaze unnerved me, so I stepped aside and put my back to the wall.
“Ex-partner, Wyatt says. Does that mean Viktor tossed you out?”
“Yep. Your dreams have come true.”
Christian flattened his palm on the wall above my head, glaring down at me with obsidian eyes. His tousled hair was full of dust, and some of the particles floated around him. “So you did all this to get back in his good graces. Admirable.”
“I don’t want back in.”
He tilted his head to the side, brows drawing together. “Are you langered? If he didn’t trust you before, he certainly does now—regardless of your motives. Why would you turn him down?”
The way Christian looked at me gave me butterflies, and I couldn’t tell if it was fear or something else. Maybe that was why I had reservations about joining up with Keystone. The second I saw Christian’s body lying next to a skeleton, my heart squeezed.
Just a little bit.
I barely knew him, but I felt so responsible for what had happened.
He lifted the ends of my hair. “You cut it.”
“Claude did. It’s a long story.”
Christian leaned in so close that I felt his breath on my cheek. He looked at me differently than he had before—touched me differently. Not as if he were playing with his food or amusing himself, but as if he were gazing upon something intriguing. His fingers grazed the side of my jaw, and my knees wobbled.
Just a little bit.
I scarcely breathed. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m curious about your motives.”
“Even after I led your team here?”
He tilted his head. “Aye. Your decisions aren’t pure. You might be fooling them, but you don’t fool me.”
“Saving your life isn’t enough?” I’d met some imperious Vampi
res in my time, but this one took the cake.
“You did what you needed to do to get this job, no matter what you’re telling yourself. Maybe I need a little reassurance that our partnership would supersede anything else, and that your actions tonight weren’t just a stepping-stone to get on Viktor’s good side. If killing me would have made Viktor happy, would you have shown up a few hours earlier with a can of gasoline and a match?”
Despite the animosity dripping from his tongue, the sensual caress of his fingers never stopped. Even without my looking into his dark Vampire eyes, he had me in his thrall. Maybe the truth kept my feet cemented in place. I wanted to make things right with Viktor, but it wasn’t to get back into Keystone.
Or was it?
“I don’t care if you trust me,” I finally said.
“A man can’t trust anyone, not even himself. But seeing as you’ve saved me from spending eternity with Martha, maybe I owe you a favor.”
“Who’s Martha?”
“I don’t know what’s transpired since yesterday, but I’m in your debt once over. If Viktor brings you back into the fold, don’t ask me to trust you. My debt won’t be paid in the form of loyalty; that’s not something I’ll do.”
Debts in the Breed world were the most valuable asset a man could have. “You can’t pick and choose what I ask.”
He gave a mirthless smile, and his fangs descended. “Tread carefully. I’ll pay my debt when you ask, and then we’ll be square.”
“You’re nothing but an arrogant, poorly dressed, egotistical, sadistic Vamp who can’t play nice in the sandbox. Did I step on your pride tonight? It’s not my fault that you let your guard down and someone put you in that coffin. Maybe if you’d had a partner on the job with you, that wouldn’t have happened. You can’t even do your own laundry.”
Christian’s fangs retracted, and a slow chuckle settled in the back of his throat. He tilted my chin up until our eyes met. “Has anyone ever told you how fetching you are?”