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1
Marguerite dreamed of graves.
So many graves.
None of them were hers.
Most people might find it a relief to stare at the stone guardians in their weathered posts over the moldering remains of the living and to know that the gaping maws cut into the cold, dark earth weren’t meant for them. But it wasn’t a comfort to her.
In her dreams, she walked among the broken angels and chipped crosses with their faded names. She moved from row to row, and all she felt was…lonely. Cemeteries could be desolate places, especially the older ones, as nature worked to erase what was oftentimes the last record of the long-forgotten dead.
Maybe lonely wasn’t the right word for what she felt.
Maybe deserted was a better choice.
Not that the living had abandoned the dead—although, sure, that was true. Many of the family plots were overgrown with weeds and thickets, and the cast iron fences and chains were long rusted and in disrepair. She even saw a tree that had consumed an old footstone, grown around it like slow-moving lava.
No.
It wasn’t the sadness of the living forgetting the dead that made her heart hurt.
It was the fact that she had been abandoned by the dead.
It was as though she were standing on the wood plank of a pier, watching ships sail off to some unknown horizon, knowing she couldn’t ever follow. And even if she could jump off the edge of the structure into the waves, either a cold hand would rip her back…or she’d drown in the waters.
She would never, ever find her way to foreign shores.
She knew that now. Death might come for her someday. But it would be the death that a rock suffers after being worn to sand underneath wind and rain. There would be no afterlife for her. There would be no resurrection. There would only be the void.
All because of him.
He had done this to her. He had tethered her to the shore. Anchored her to the pier and made sure that she would never, ever leave. She didn’t know why. It was a riddle she hadn’t yet solved. It was a riddle she didn’t know if she should solve. Or even if she wanted to try.
Her long, black dress whispered against the grass and dirt as she walked through the rows of stones. Sun filtered through the trees, casting gently moving patterns of shadows on the path in the summer morning. It was a beautiful day. Warm, but not oppressive. The birds were chirping merrily in the branches, hunting worms and grubs in the grass.
It made her smile, even amidst the isolation she felt. The dead here might have been forgotten by their families, or had no families left to remember them, but the cycle of life continued. The dead became food for life. The worms eaten by the birds had fed upon the wood and the flesh beneath.
At least she’d be that much. Even if her soul would become nothing, her body would serve a purpose.
It was deep inside the cemetery that she finally reached her destination. It was a mausoleum. An old, decrepit thing. The gate was chained shut, the metal and the lock securing it far newer than the rest of the stone structure.
Pulling out the key from her bag, she undid the lock and set the chain aside. The groundskeeper had fussed at her request, but, like everything in the world, money had solved the problem quickly enough.
The family name etched into the facia of the tomb had long since worn away. It didn’t belong to her. It honestly didn’t matter. Because one of the graves inside did. She’d never find rest within the wood coffins that lined the stone shelves along the walls, but it was as close as she figured she would ever get.
The inside of the chamber was enormous. A circular stained-glass window in the back wall cast a beautiful and ornate cross onto the center of the floor. Dry leaves, blown in through the gate, crunched underfoot as she moved along the wall.
Stone benches in the center and vases on the wall where fresh flowers were put told her that this place had once been frequented by the living, come to pay respect to the dead and to mourn their loss. But no one had been here in a long, long time.
It was perfect for her.
There was the open hole, the slab of unetched marble set aside. It had never been occupied—she had been very clear to the groundskeeper that she wasn’t in the business of graverobbing. She just needed something valuable kept very, very hidden. If she were lucky, it would stay there for the rest of time.
Reaching into her bag, she pulled out two wooden boxes. One was as small and nondescript as possible. She had personally painted it black. The second was an ornate jewelry box, inlaid with gold lines and expensive woodwork.
She threw the small black box as far into the slot in the wall as she could. It clattered to the back. Gathering up some leaves from the ground and a stick that had landed near the door, she covered it as best she could.
Placing the ornate jewelry box around the middle of the chamber, she haphazardly covered it with leaves and smiled slightly. It was filled with expensive trinkets. Each one had been a gift from him. She was glad to be rid of them. They had always struck her as trite and useless. Baubles meant to buy her favor.
