Page 6 of The Bones in the Yard

“What is it, Hart?” Ward called.

“A shell,” I replied.

“A shell?” he repeated.

“Yeah. Seashell. Big one.” I knelt back in the dirt—my pants were well and truly fucked by this point, anyway—and smoothed back more of the soil around the shell.

Behind me, I heard Ward mutter something about a ‘fucking seashell,’ and smiled. At least we were united in our annoyance at whoever had buried a seashell in the raspberry patch. And at the ghost who had apparently wanted us to fucking find it.

Maybe the ghost was into seashell collecting.

I kept clearing out the dirt, periodically documenting with my phone, until I could lift both halves of the shell out to show them to Ward. “Shell,” I clarified.

“It sure is,” he replied, but seemed distracted, glancing off to his right. Because the ghost probably had something to say about my very exciting archeological find. He frowned.

“You’re going to tell me to keep digging, aren’t you?” I asked.

He looked a little guilty, then nodded.

I set the shell pieces on the ground, then went back to my slowly growing hole.

A few minutes later Madeeha came back outside with the bowl of freshly washed raspberries and a jug of what looked to my extremely thirsty eyes like fresh lemonade with a handful of berries floating in it.

I took a break from digging to have some—it was fresh lemonade with raspberries in it, and it was fucking amazing—and to discuss the lunch plan with Ward and Madeeha, who appeared to have adopted us. Or we had adopted her. I couldn’t quite tell which.

Madeeha took off with our food orders for some sandwich place I didn’t bother to remember the name of, and, with a groan, I went back to my hole, trying to push away the flashbacks to the last time Ward hung out with a ghost while I dug my way down to a body. That one had been a couple hundred years old and in a field in the middle of the fucking night, and Doc had been right there with me. And so had a good couple dozen CSIs and uniforms, digging up the remains of a serial killer ghost’s centuries of murder.

I really hoped this wasn’t going to be more ofthatbullshit.

But it was me and Ward, so I also wouldn’t have been terribly surprised. Disappointed, yes. Annoyed, absolutely. But not surprised.

I found the first edge of bone before Madeeha got back with lunch.

I stopped digging, staring down at the odd off-white that is so very particular to bone. “Well, fuck.”

“You’re going to tell me there’s a dead person in there, aren’t you?” Ward called from his shaded spot over by the museum.

“I’m going to tell you there’s a bone,” I replied. “Couldn’t tell you what the fuck it came from, though.” I took a couple pictures, then hopped out of the hole and came over to sit beside him. “But it’s bone, so I’m going to place a nice phone call to get permission—or not—to keep going.”

“Who are you calling?” Ward wanted to know, a frown on his face.

“Dan Maza.”

“Isn’t he Richmond PD?”

“Yup.”

“And aren’t we… not in Richmond?”

I snorted. “That may be true, but Dan took over my ‘magical’ affiliation. And since we have a cult and a ritual knife, it sure seems magical to me.”

Ward’s expression was deeply skeptical. “You just don’t want to deal with the local PD, do you?”

“Nope. Fuckers down here are almost as bad as in Hanover.”

Ward grimaced, no doubt recalling the fact that it was the Hanover PD who had arrested—or tried to—his husband twice for the heinous crime of being an orc. “Are we going to get in trouble if you get permission from him and then we have to call in the local PD?”

“Probably.”

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