Page 29 of The Witching Hours

The Lady of the Light Cemetery had definitely seen better days. The above-ground tombs were mostly intact although pieces of broken mortar were scattered here and there.

“Yes. We don’t have a light because you threw my phone God knows where.”

“Good thing, too. Hope it stalls them long enough for us to find a place to hide.”

She breathed out slowly, hoping to calm her jitters. “Let’s go,” she said.

Tristan waved off the eerie feeling that the atmosphere changed when they passed under the arch. The air seemed cooler and electrically charged, but he dismissed it as imagination, of course.

“Be careful,” he told her. “There’s all kinds of loose stuff on the ground.”

The cemetery was originally designed for tombs to be built on a grid with precise rows, but time and damage had made things messy. Between overturned statuary, upturned rocks that had once been walkways, overgrown weeds, and pieces of actual crypts, getting around would be treacherous even in daylight.

“Tristan.”

“Yeah?”

“They can’t find us.”

Hearing the quiver in her voice made his heart catch.

“There’s only one place we can be sure they won’t find us.”

“Where?”

“Inside one of the, uh, crypts.” Even in the dark, he knew she was looking at him like he was crazy. “I know. It’s gross.”

“Gross? No, Tristan. It’s not just gross. It’s sacrilege to disturb remains.”

“Well, it’s them or us. Let’s pick somebody who was a nice person and would want to hide us.”

She could feel it in her solar plexus. She was relenting even though she didn’t want to. “We’re not strong enough to move one of those concrete lid things.”

“We don’t have to. We just have to break the lock on one of the family tombs that has a gate.”

The rumble had gotten louder, but seemed to be staying the same.

“They weren’t fooled by the phone. They’ve found the car. We don’t have much time.”

She took a deep breath. “We need to get off the main aisle.”

Tristan agreed. They needed to pick someplace less obvious.

They turned away from the center aisle, went past two rows, and hurried as fast as they could toward the back. Tristan’s foot caught a limb that, in the dark, was the same gray color as the grass. He fell forward and let out a soft grunt, but wasn’t hurt. Jeanette stumbled over a brick that, likewise, was too dark to be noticed, but righted herself and didn’t fall.

“That’s it!” she said pointing to a miniature of a Greco-Roman building. Tristan couldn’t see why that one was different, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. “These people were well off,” she said between panted breaths. “The sculpture of the angel crying is a real work of art.”

“Uh-huh.” He hurried toward the entrance prepared to go to battle with a padlock, but found both the gate and inner copper door unlocked. “Finally caught a break.”

A thin ray of moonlight streaming in from a hole in the roof lent just enough light to separate dark shadows from darker shadows in the interior. The mostly white colors helped, but nothing could alleviate the combination of smells; mustiness, rot, and decay made worse by rain leaking in. The inner vault appeared to be lined with coffins stacked three deep on each of three walls with one elevated in the center of the room. There was room to walk around, which meant there was also room to sit on the floor.

Tris pulled Jeanette inside closing both gate and door behind them, then fumbled his way to the rear keeping hold ofher hand. By the time they crouched behind the center tomb, the rumble of motorcycle engines was loud. In fact, it sounded like they were ridinginsidethe cemetery.

Tristan and Jeanette hadn’t had lights to find their way, but the bikers would. Either phones or real flashlights. There might’ve been some signs left to follow. Footprints maybe. They had no way of knowing, but they did hear deep voices nearby. Some laughter. Some shouts.

“Tris,” Jeanette whispered, “I have a funny feeling.”

“Are you sick?”

---