Page 44 of Midlife Shifter Unexpected

“I think I know what’s making your holes,” I said, looking down into one of them. A skull was smiling up at me, stretching up from its neck. Its skeleton arms reached to the ground; hands still stuck in the dirt that had been taking it at one point. “The skeletons are coming to life.”

“There’s no such thing as a skeleton coming to life,” Trina said. “Any animated corpse is a zombie, even skeletons, and zombies have the power to create more of them.”

“But why are they being reanimated?” I kicked the skull back into the hole.

“Perhaps it is whoever is making blood sacrifices and trying to wake the creature inside the crypt. Perhaps they are trying to raise a zombie army too.” Drake said. “That’s what I would do if I were an asshole and trying to cause a problem. Imagine if you could get all those skeletons to bite all the people in Cougar Creek and have a whole town full of zombies.”

“There’s no cure for being a zombie, is there?” I asked.

“No,” Hilda said. “Even severing the head doesn’t always work. The most useful thing to do is to crush the skull into a pulp. That tends to cause a level of damage that can’t be fixed.”

“Sounds charming.” Jane said.

“So, if we can’t get near the door, how are we going to open it?” Drake asked.

“Just a minute,” I said. “There’s somebody on the outside of the cemetery trying to create spells to awaken and release whatever is inside that crypt?”

“Yes.” Mae agreed.

“We want to find the killer, but we don’t want to release what’s in the crypt.”

“No, we want to contain the creature and see if it has any clues as to who is trying to release it.” Mae clarified.

“But by the very act of releasing it, we are playing into the killer’s hands,” I said. “It’s a trap.”

“How could it be a trap? We can't even get close to the door,” Anita said.

“Oh, we can get through the door.” Hilda gave Anita a wise look. “We weren’t born just yesterday. We’ve got some power.”

“We've looked through everything. I just found reference to it in one of the old almanacs. It just said there was a blood sucking beast that was dead and deservedly buried in the cemetery even though it breathed. So even if we are playing into their hands, we just have to be a little bit cleverer. We aren’t opening the crypt to let the beast or whatever it is free, we’re opening the crypt…“

“To kill the creature,” Branson said.

“You can’t just randomly decide you’re going to kill something when you don’t even know what it is,” I said. “What if it’s a unicorn? You going to kill a unicorn? We shouldn’t be disturbing this creature that was locked up for some reason. We need to find the killer.”

Everyone turned to Mae.

“It’s your call,” Hilda said. “You are the high priestess.”

Mae looked at Branson with a frown on her face as she chewed on her lower lip.

“I hear what you’re saying, Bianca,” she said. “But the truth is, we’ve exhausted every other option. You've spoken to the harpies, we've searched through all of the libraries, we've done everything we know how to do and right now, it’s time we figured out the mystery of what’s entombed behind there. We need to know why it is so important for somebody to get in, because I’ll tell you right now, that’s not the main purpose of the cemetery.”

“What is the main purpose?” I asked.

“Confidential,” Mae said.

God I really didn’t like that, but okay. I was the new kid on the block. I needed to not make a stink of it.

“Open it,” Mae said.

“You got it, boss,” Hilda said. She waved her hands and a bunch of vines started growing toward the tomb. “You were blasted by a spell that responds to blood. It's a blood spell, so when it felt your blood, it pushed you away as it’s only allowing the blood of the person bound to those victims to come anywhere near it.”

“Wow, you guys do all the fun stuff don’t you,” I said, shaking my head. It was bad enough I turned into a wolf. The last thing I wanted to do was start playing with blood.

The vines weaseled their way into the cracks between the stone door and its archway and wound their way up into the crypt.

Even as the vines exerted effort, I could see Hilda was straining.

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