Page 33 of Cold Sacrifice

He didn’t seem surprised at all to see a wolf poking at the underbrush, but watched me silently with dark, gleaming eyes. Finally, I approached him.

I sniffed at the tree he was sitting on, and when my nose came up against his flesh, I yelped and leapt back.

He wasn’t a ghost at all.

I shifted, because of course I had to talk to him. I had to find out what he was and why he was in the woods of Silverwood, sitting there like he was glued to the tree.

“Hello,” I said, pulling my hair over my body, then realized he wasn’t ogling me but the demon blade in its Saul-created magical sheath at my hip.

He grunted, then lifted his stare to mine. He was…ancient, and there was so much in his eyes that it was hard to look at him for very long.

“You’re a ghoul,” I realized. Then I frowned. “Don’t ghouls usually haunt graveyards? Why are you in my woods?”

He said nothing, but one of his eyebrows went up an inch or two, and I got the feeling he was judging my intelligence. Or, in his eyes, my lack thereof.

“Can you speak?” I asked.

“I can enter any graveyard in any world,” he said, lifting his chin. He somehow managed to look down his nose at me, though I was standing and he was crouching on the tree.

“And yet,” I said, gesturing at the woods, “I see no graveyard here.”

His other eyebrow went up.

“Oh,” I said. I took a few steps back and looked at the ground. “They’re here, aren’t they? The necromancers?”

“You will return home to dress and bring tools. I will wait.” He hesitated. “I would like you to bring me something in return for my assistance.”

I was curious. What could a graveyard ghoul possibly want? A weapon? Magic to send him home, wherever that might be? A female ghoul? “What do you want?” I asked.

“A candy bar,” he said.

I laughed. “A candy bar made of flesh and blood?”

He gave me a scornful look. “A candy bar made of chocolate and caramel.”

I squinted at him, unsure. “You’re not joking,” I said finally. “Who are you? Why are you here in my woods?”

“I’m not in your woods. I’m in your graveyard. And I am here because I need to be. I have marked the graveyard for you.” He hesitated. “I hear them, you see. Even in another world, I hear them. When the living one broke free, she created a hole through which their screams could drift to sensitive ears.”

My mouth went dry and my stomach tightened. “I’ll be back,” I whispered, and I turned and left the strange ghoul, my mind only on freeing the trapped and tormented souls the vampires had murdered.

When I returned, Sam and Remy were with me. We were equipped with shovels, and I had my supply bag on my back. I was nearly certain it wouldn’t be easy to free the spirits and send them to their afterlife, no matter how deeply we dug.

It wasn’t really the ground holding them there. More than likely, it was bad vampire magic. I might not be able to break it, but I was going to give it everything I had.

When we got there, the skinny ghoul was gone. I put his bag of candy bars on the tree where he’d been.

“I think you hallucinated that shit,” Remy said. “There’s no such thing as a candy bar-eating ghoul. I don’t think ghouls exist.”

“Maybe it was a ghost,” Sam said. He’d returned a mere hour earlier. His hair was wet from his shower, but I was pretty sure there was still blood under his fingernails.

“I touched him,” I said, but weakly, because I’d begun feeling a lot of ghosts. I’d felt the vampire ghost. I could usually easily tell the difference between a spirit and a living person, but…maybe the realer they became to me, the harder it would be to tell the difference. “I don’t know,” I finished. “I really don’t.”

If we dug into the ground and found nothing, I’d figure I was just going nuts. If we found the bodies, I still couldn’t be sure if the ghoul was alive or a ghost, but at least I’d know I wasn’t losing my mind.

“Let’s start digging,” Remy said. “We’ll know soon enough.”

Nearly one and a half hours later, we found the first bones.