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He flipped the thumb guard on his katana. “Someone is doing magic in this neighborhood. Let us be prepared either way.”
I nodded, kept my hand on my katana’s handle as we walked across the street and down the block, pausing every few yards to check our position in relation to the sound. Silently, I touched Ethan’s hand, nodded toward a small cemetery, the graves surrounded by a chain-link fence. Unlike much of the rest of the neighborhood, the fence and grass beyond it looked well tended.
“Longwood Cemetery,” Ethan whispered as we reached the front gate. It was a double gate and standing open, large enough for cars to drive through.
I stopped at the entrance, gathered up my courage. I didn’t like cemeteries. My brother, Robert, and sister, Charlotte, and I had held our breath when we passed them on car trips as kids. I was the youngest and always held my breath the longest. I had been completely terrified by the thought of all those people underground waiting, Thriller-like, to thrust out their dirty hands and grab my ankles. If I stayed quiet and still, they’d stay happily asleep beneath the earth.
The wind shifted and moved, directing the clear sound of a voice on the wind. We were looking for a sorcerer, and this definitely seemed like a potential hit. That meant I had to suck it up and walk into Longwood like the goddamn Sentinel of Cadogan House, with my head held high, my senses on alert, and my bravery intact.
But even still, and knowing what I knew now, I decided to take exceptionally quiet steps.
The gate led to a crushed-stone path that led straight through the cemetery and branched off to secondary trails.
The cemetery wasn’t very large, but it was well kept. Marble gravestones sat at perfect intervals along shorter rows, and there were neatly pruned peonies and rosebushes every dozen yards or so.
I stayed close enough to Ethan that our arms brushed when we walked. “Freaking Thriller,” I murmured.
“What was that?” Ethan whispered.
“Nothing,” I said, and stopped short when a figure became visible in the darkness. There, I said silently, gesturing toward her.
A woman stood in front of a grave, silhouetted in the moonlight. She was tall, slender, and pretty, with dark skin, high cheekbones, and dark, braided hair pulled into a knot atop her head. She wore a cropped white cardigan, white sneakers, and a long, pale pink dress of sharp, narrow pleats that fell over her swollen abdomen.
Ethan stepped forward, broke a twig in the process. The crack was as loud as a gunshot. She turned around, one hand on her belly, fingers splayed in protection, another in front of her, threatening magic.
I’d seen Catcher and Mallory throw fireballs before, and didn’t want any part of that. I put my hands in the air, and Ethan did the same.
The woman stared at us for a moment. “You don’t look like ghouls,” she said, but didn’t seem entirely sure about it.
“We are not,” Ethan said. “And you don’t look to be an evil sorceress.”
She snorted. “I most definitely am not. Could you move forward, into the moonlight?”
We did, hands still lifted in the air. It seemed safe enough movement; I’d yet to meet an evil, gestating supernatural.
“You’re vampires,” she said after a moment. “I recognize you. You’re Ethan and Merit, right?”
Ethan nodded, but his gaze stayed wary. “We are. How do you know us?”
She smiled guiltily. “Gossip magazines. They’re my guilty pleasure.” She cocked her head at us. “You’re in them a lot.”
We couldn’t argue with that.
She glanced at me. “And Chuck Merit’s your grandfather, right?”
That was a much better reason to be famous. “Yes, he is.”
“I’m sorry, I’m being rude,” she said, putting a hand on her chest. “You startled me. Sorry about that, everyone,” she added, looking around, hands patting the air like the simple movement was the thing that would keep the bodies in the ground.
Fear speared me, and I tried to logic through it. Surely her petite hands weren’t the only thing keeping not-yet-walking dead from rising. Still, just in case, I moved a little closer to Ethan, ever the brave Sentinel.
He was going to give me so much crap about this.
“I’m Annabelle Shaw,” she said. “I’m a necromancer.”
“Mortui vivos docent?” Ethan asked.
“Very good,” she agreed with a smile, and must have caught my look of confusion. “The phrase means, roughly, ‘the dead teach the living.’ In this case, the dead speak, I listen.”
