Page 2 of Til Death Duke Us Part
“Wait!”
The wind picked up, whistling through the trees spindly tree limbs as if to chase the stranger away. The stranger picked up his pace, too.
Oh no. Bad sign, that. It wasn’t the wind’s howling that chased him from the cemetery. She didn’t believe that for a moment. This man trotted because he didn’t want to be caught.
That meant she needed to catch him. Damn it. A lone man skulking about the cemetery at night meant one thing usually—a grave robber either after jewels to sell in pawn shops or body parts to sell to medical students.
He couldn’t have them! Not on her watch.
“Stop!” she cried, then rolled her eyes. Oh yes, Sephy, he’s sure to bide by your wishes. Stop indeed.
He did not stop, naturally. In fact, he picked up his pace, a dark shadow slipping through the darker night like water through fingers.
She ran after him.
And a wall sprouted out of the ground in front of her.
She yelped, slowing but not soon enough. She slammed into the brick.
No. She didn’t. She slipped right through it then rocked back several steps to study it. The wall seemed real—red brick rising several feet above her head and stretching out on either side as far as she could see. But there’d never been a brick wall here before. And she’d never known one to grow out of the ground like a damn tree.
And…
She stuck her hand through it.
It was an illusion, a glamour.
“Bloody hell. He’s a toff.” What was one of the transcendent ton doing in a graveyard at night? He should be in a huge fancy house in West London, lying in a huge fancy bed, surrounded by at least three courtesans. More if he possessed a title higher than an earl. But he wasn’t. He was in an alchemist graveyard on the east side of London and?—
A scream in the distance, followed by a thud.
Likely in another grave, too.
She ran through the fake wall and toward the sound of his scream. She stopped at the short end of a grave she’d dug earlier in the evening and removed the orb from her pocket, set it loose into the air above the hole.
She’d found him, alright, face down and groaning. Again. And when he rolled over, he spit dirt into the air and swiped it from his eyes. Levering himself upright, he bent a knee and draped an arm across it, shaking his head. He glared at her beneath the fairy light, a knife-sharp thing that likely quelled most everyone.
Persephone smirked. “Need help?”
“Go away.”
“Afraid I cannot. If you’re here to disturb the rest of these souls, I’m not going to let you.” After her husband’s death, she’d taken over his job, digging graves a form of penance. She’d fail herself, fail Percy, if she let a thief destroy the dead’s eternal peace.
He snorted and stood, stretching his back.
“Are you hurt?” It would be easier to catch him and bring him to the night watchman if he was.
“Good God, woman. Go dig a hole somewhere else and leave me alone.”
“Can’t. You’re a suspicious character.”
“And you’re… what? Cerberus guarding the gates of Hell?”
“Something like that.”
He gave one loud sniff, and it was all she needed to imagine him in a ballroom, sneering down his nose through a quizzing glass at everyone around him. “You’re hardly a terrifyingly famed figure of mythology. You dig holes, madame.”
“Said as if I’m supposed to be ashamed of it.”
