by Chloe Garner
“You need to stay back, now. I need this.”
He glanced back at Samantha as Sam squatted in front of the first stone.
“I’ve got her,” Samantha said, drawing Lahn. Patty staggered back at the high-pitched whir of air, tripping over her heels and nearly falling.
“Where did you get that?” she asked. Jason nodded at her and joined Sam, pointing the light at one grave after another.
“Lahn is special,” Samantha said.
“Billy searched you,” Patty said, staying out of reach.
“And Lahn decided to remain hidden,” Samantha said. “It’s what she does.”
Patty looked over at the brothers, her face sheet-white in the moonlight. Samantha watched her for a moment, then picked up scanning the field and the tree line for signs of the ghost.
“I need you to stay close,” Samantha said. “Behind me is better than in front of me. If I say ‘down’, I need your shoulders to drop below where your hips had been, but keep your feet under you. Do you understand?”
There was silence for a moment, and Samantha glanced at Patty.
“Do you understand?”
She nodded.
“Okay.”
Samantha nodded back at her, taking the woods in small chunks. A slow sweep, she’d only see what was moving. If she jerked her eyes to look at it, something might jump out as odd, and she gave her mind a moment to identify it or discard the section of woods before moving on.
“Which one is it?” Sam asked. “Henry or Jacob?”
“It isn’t William,” Jason said.
“Got that. What do you think?”
“We’ll do ‘em both,” Jason said. “Feed me nails?”
“Got it.”
Sam took the flashlight from Jason and Jason searched the wood line for a moment, returning with a round stone. He held up a hand and Sam tossed him a nail, holding the flashlight steady on where Jason was working.
There was a scream, like the sound of a storm in trees, and both Sam and Jason looked up on alert.
“Would be a good time to be armed, don’t you think?” Jason said.
“I’ve got him. Keep working,” Samantha said, flipping Lahn.
A tall man in a long military coat stepped out of the woods. He hadn’t been behind anything. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next moment he was, trailing tendrils of fog to one side in a non-existent breeze. He opened his mouth, but instead of the normal shape a human mouth took to speak, his lips peeled away, exposing a cavernous mouth lined with teeth like gravestones. He screamed again, an angry, primal noise without any hint of humanity, and stepped, then trotted, then ran towards Sam and Jason.
“Nail,” Jason said. Sam tossed one to him, and Jason hammered it into the ground with the stone. Sam tossed him another, and the stone made another solid thump against the ground. They didn’t even look at each other as they worked. Samantha checked where Patty was, motioning for her to follow. Patty shook her head, falling to her knees on the ground and Samantha cursed in hellspeak under her breath, then ran to intercept the ghost.
“Here,” she yelled. The ghost’s mouth was rolled too far open for her to see its eyes, but its head turned. She spun, slicing the air with Lahn’s front blade, ducking under the sword that the ghost carried. It cut the air like a real blade, and she didn’t for a moment imagine it wouldn’t go through her flesh in the same way. He cut back across his body, and she put Lahn up to block. The impact was jarring as steel hit steel, but she sighed in relief. If she could hit it, she could fight it.
She spun Lahn again, stepping to keep herself between the ghost and the brothers, counting as the stone thumped into the ground again and again with mechanical rhythm. The ghost screamed again, driving cold chills through her back and arms, but she kept Lahn up and her right arm out, on balance. He might be a centuries-old ghost and veteran of a terrible war, but she was angel-trained. He wasn’t going to scare her off or make her blink.
He closed his mouth and looked at her with cold calculation, then the fight began in earnest. He was weightless, and more than once, Lahn slashed through his ephemeral body, digging ruts of mist through his torso and kicking up clouds of fog at the exit of the wound, but it didn’t slow him down. He glitched once, again, appearing behind her with sword already in motion, and she rolled across the rocky, uneven ground, feeling nothing as she heard the sword whir past inches away from her. He made no noise, save for the sound of the blade in air.
She glanced at Patty, who was sitting on her heels, hands over her face. She might have been trying to scream, but no noise escaped her. The ghost saw Samantha’s interest and opened its mouth again, crying out with the violence of the elements, then glitching. Samantha was already moving. She knew where he was going.
He appeared next to Patty, sword raised, and Patty toppled to one side, arms tossed across her face as her body wilted into unconsciousness.
“Dishonor,” Samantha yelled. “Fight me.”
He brought the sword down and Samantha leaped, bringing Lahn down in a hard arc aimed at the ghost’s wrists. She couldn’t block the blade; all she could hope to do was disconnect the ghost from it, if only temporarily, and give herself a chance to get in between it and the unconscious woman. Lahn buried herself into the soft, wet soil, and still the ghost’s blade descended, describing a long slash across Patty’s waist and upper arm. Samantha got her feet under her and pulled Lahn out of the ground, preparing for the counter attack to save Patty’s life, but the ghost exploded into a formless white vapor as his sword reached Patty’s side.
The vapor rolled away on still air and Samantha sheathed Lahn, probing with her fingers to see how much of a slash Patty had suffered. She found wet, slit cloth.
“Light,” she yelled.
“That got him?” Jason asked.
“Light,” she said again, looking over at him. Jason tossed the flashlight underhanded to her and she bent time to snag it out of the air, not willing to wait in the event she fumbled it. She heard Sam and Jason walking toward her as she pointed the light at Patty’s side.
Her side was wet with blood, but as Samantha used the dry parts of Patty’s shirt to clean the skin around the wound, she sighed. Her eyes made sense of the shapes she was seeing and she nodded. Patty murmured something, and Samantha pulled the woman’s arms away from her face.
“Patty? Patty, can you hear me?”
“How bad is it?” Jason asked, peering over Samantha’s shoulder.
“Less than a quarter inch. I don’t think he even hit muscle. She’s going to be fine,” Samantha said. Patty whimpered again.
“Patty,” Samantha said. Patty screamed.
Samantha jerked back in surprise, falling over her heels and sitting hard. Jason laughed.
“It’s over,” he said. Patty thrashed, hitting Samantha and Jason with flailing arms, and Sam reached down and caught her wrists.
“You’re safe,” he said, pulling her upright. Patty’s hand flew to her side and she clawed at the fabric there frantically, trying to see the source of the blood.
“Just a scratch,” Samantha said.
“Don’t you lie to me,” Patty said. Samantha nodded.
“Just a scratch. Might need stitches. You’re okay.”
“What was that?” Patty asked.
“You know the answer to that,” Samantha said. Patty shook her head.
“No. No, that was… something. It was something. Tell me what it was.”
“It was a graveyard guardian,” Sam said. “He just got carried away.”
Patty jumped to her feet.
“Where did he go?”
“We locked him in,” Jason said. “A fence of iron. It won’t last forever, but you’ve got a few years before you have to do anything else.”
Patty put her hands over her mouth.
“Patty?” Samantha said. The woman toppled to one side. Sam caught her and swept her knees out from under her, jerking his head at Jason.
“I’ll nee
d the light this time,” he said.
“You got it.”
They picked their way back across the field and Samantha borrowed Patty’s keys out of her pocket so that Jason could drive them back to the police station.
<><><>
“What do you expect me to put in my report?” Billy thundered. Sam, Samantha, and Jason sat on the floor outside of his office. The wall was too thin for any real privacy, but at least they were out of sight.
“I don’t care what you put in your report. Say it was coyotes. Say it was suicide. We’ll tell the parents the truth, and those are the only people who deserve it, as far as I’m concerned,” Patty said.
“They’re conning you, Patty,” Billy said.
“I saw what I saw,” she answered.
“Which one of them hurt you?”
“Did you find a blade on any of them?” Patty asked. Billy had searched them himself. Sam felt Samantha smile.
“No, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t find something.”
“I told you. It was a ghost. The kids made him angry, and those three out in the hallway put him back in his box.”
“I’m not letting them go,” Billy said. “Not with that car load of stuff they’ve got.”
“If they don’t give our stuff back,” Jason growled.
“Shhh,” Sam answered.
“They saved my life, and they probably saved Jimmy’s life. We’re not holding them up after that.”
“Patty, what do you think they do with an arsenal like that?”
“Maybe if I’d let them use it, he wouldn’t have gotten as close to hurting me as he did,” Patty said.
“Damn straight,” Jason muttered. Sam conceded that it probably wasn’t true; the ghost got the jump on Samantha and there wasn’t a lot they would have been able to do about it, no matter what weapons they had. Jason looked at him.
“Shotgun,” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” Sam said. Samantha laughed.
“No,” Billy said. “Not on my watch.”
“Billy, this is my town as much as it is yours. I say they go, and that’s the end of the argument.”
Billy started to say something, but the door opened.
“Let’s go get your car packed back up,” Patty said. They scrambled to their feet and followed her down the hallway to the station’s garage. She turned.
“You said that what you did tonight would only work for a few years,” she said. “What do we do after that?”
“Now,” Jason said. “You fence the graves.”
“Wrought iron,” Sam said.
“Forget to put in a gate.”
“You can let them mow, but make sure it’s during the day and that they’re careful.”
“They’re Civil War veterans,” Patty said. “They deserve respect.”
Jason nodded.
“By the time those nails rust out, he’ll have probably cooled down a lot, as long as nothing else happens. If you want to, you can move his bones, but I wouldn’t do it for a while. He took Debra in daylight. He’s plenty pissed off to hurt anyone who goes inside the ring of nails we put in.”
Patty nodded.
“I don’t want to see you boys again,” she said. “You or your murder truck.”
“Truck’s name is Gwen,” Jason said. “And she takes being called a murder truck personally.”
Patty snorted.
“Pack it up and get out of here.”
She pointed them to the boxes where someone had packaged and labeled their stuff and Sam and Jason started loading them into the Cruiser. Samantha checked Lahn. Piles of evidence. Such an easy place for Lahn to get herself lost.
“Thank you,” Patty said quietly to Samantha.
“Of course,” Samantha answered. Patty nodded.
“I’m going to go supervise my brother writing his report. None of this had better be in it.”
“Thanks,” Samantha said. Patty dipped her head.
“Of course.”
<><><>
Samantha sat in the back of the Cruiser amidst a sea of plastic bags.
“I can’t believe they did this,” she said, looking at the drawer of loose vials in front of her. “It’s going to take me forever to get everything put back where it goes.”
Jason snickered. Sam looked over his shoulder.
“Sorry.”
She had her backpack sitting next to her, empty to the very bottom, and was slowly reorganizing all of the pieces that were supposed to go on it. Racks of vials needed to be re-identified and replaced, and only then could she start putting bags, jars, vials, and cuttings of everything else back into the cabinet.
“Everything was where it went. Did they…” she threw a plastic bag across the back of the Cruiser, “freaking have to bag everything,” she threw another, “separately?”
Jason laughed again.
“Just you wait till you see what they did to your stuff,” she said.
“I’m not vested, remember?” he said. “It’s all just stuff.”
“And I don’t think they bagged my clothes,” Sam said, grinning. “Did my baseball bat get bagged?”
“Shut up,” she muttered. Jason’s cell phone rang. He shifted, the Cruiser drifting in its lane and jerking back straight as he got the phone out of his pocket and his hand back on the wheel. Samantha glared at him from where she sat on a box in the middle of the far back.
“Hello?”
He paused, then threw his arm out behind him.
“It’s for you.”
She climbed over the seat back to grab the phone and settled back on her box with a grunt, taking another vial out of another resealable bag. She threw it at the back window in disgust.
“Hello?”
“Sam?”
“Alexander? What’s going on?”
“You sound angry,” he said.
“Oh, some jerk messed with my equipment and I have to go through all of it and get it sorted back out,” she said. “What’s up?”
He laughed.
“I never really thought of you as anal like that.”
She frowned.
“I guess I’m not, when I’m…” with you. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “What’s going on?”
“Did I call too early?” he asked.
“No, we’re up.”
“You’re in Birmingham?”
“Headed back that way now,” she said. The sun had come up by the time they had left the police station and she had spent thirty minutes of the drive already taking things out of bags. She threw another one on the floor.
“I’ve got a friend in Birmingham. Go dancing with him sometimes. I thought about not introducing you to him because he’s such a stud, but I figure what the hell. He works this afternoon, but he asked if we wanted to get breakfast. You want to come?”
She shook her head, looking at the blizzard of plastic bags around her and the drawer full of unidentified ingredients.
“That sounds great, yeah.”
“Can I pick you up at your hotel or something?” he asked. She dropped her hand and let the phone rest against the box she was sitting on.
“You mind dropping me off?” she asked. “Get breakfast with Alexander?”
“We’re not invited?” Jason asked. “I’m hurt.”
“I’m meeting his friend,” she said.
“That’s fine. Get an address.”
She nodded.
“Where can I meet you?” she asked the phone.
“His place? I can drive,” Alexander said.
“Sure. Give me the address.”
<><><>
Jason pulled up outside of the apartment building that Alexander had directed her to, and Samantha looked out the window. Alexander was leaning against the building, arms folded across his chest, smiling at the car. He waved. She grinned.
“Give me a call when you guys get done,” Jason said. “Then pretend I gave you directions, and just find Sam. We’re gonna be asleep.”
Sh
e laughed.
“Sleep well,” she said.
“Have a good time,” Jason told her.
“Be careful,” Sam said. She put her hand on his head and mussed his hair.
“I’ll see you later.”
She got out of the Cruiser and Alexander pushed himself off of the brick wall, walking over to hug her. He waved as Jason and Sam pulled away.
“How was work?” he asked, teasing.
“Work was fine,” she said. “Few hangups, but that’s normal.”
“My buddy is getting his stuff together for work. I said we’d meet him upstairs,” Alexander said. He grabbed her hand, twisting his fingers through hers, and she grinned, leaning her head against his shoulder as he led the way upstairs. They got on the elevator and watched each other in the reflective doors.
“Is it bad that I missed you?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“I did.”
“I’m glad,” she said. He grinned. The doors beeped open and they got off. He pulled her to one side in the hallway, stopping.
“Hey,” he said. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he pushed her hair off her neck. Her skin prickled as he put his fingers through her hair at the nape of her neck, just looking at her.
“Look. I know this isn’t going anywhere. We have a lot of fun, and I really like you, but someday we’ll go different directions and just never meet up again.”
She frowned and started to argue, but he grinned.
“It’s true. Neither one of us is looking for more than this, and some day it’s going to be over. It’s going to be awesome, looking back. I’m having fun. I love you.”
She started, then slowly nodded.
“Yeah. I love you, too.”
He pulled her toward him, his lips finding hers, gently, then with more pressure and urgency. His hand left the back of her head to wrap around her waist, pulling her tight as he kissed her harder. His smell, his taste, his hands between her shoulders and low on her back. She smiled, eyes closed, and sighed, shifting closer against him and wrapping her arms around his neck.
<><><>
Sam sat up in bed. Listened. Felt. Listened harder.
“Get your keys,” he said.
“What?” Jason asked from the bathroom where he was brushing his teeth.
“Get your keys now,” Sam said, pulling on the pair of jeans he had just tossed on the floor. Jason spat into the sink and came out of the bathroom.