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“And so, I am here to assist you,” he said. “And, Geneviève, I havedressedfor this outing. I even shopped for new trousers.” He gestured to his black trousers, coat, and boots. He’d skipped a scarf. No elegant jewelry adorned his hands or wrists. “What do you think?”
I rolled my eyes as if looking at him was a chore. “You clean up well enough.”
He flashed me a smile that meant he heard the things I refused to admit. “Only for you.”
Tonight, he was wearing a black knit cap to hide the glimmers that were visible in his hair when my magic was in play. A part of me wanted to ask why my magic disrupted his glamour, but the rest of me remembered that asking about his secrets would mean sharing my own.
We stopped in front of the still-locked gate.
“Do you want a boost, gingerbread? Or shall we pick the lock?”
I shot him a surly look. “I paid for the gate to be unlocked.”
“I see.” Eli pointedly glanced at the very obviously locked gate. “Money well spent.”
“At least it was a write-off as a business expense. Good for taxes.”
“When did you start paying taxes?”
I shrugged and scanned the area. The sun was dropping, vanishing seemingly faster and faster by the heartbeat, as we stood in front of a wrought iron, silver-tipped fence. The groundskeeper was either late or gone. Give a man enough money to let you inside to kill a few dead people, and he had enough money to get out of town instead. I couldn’t say I truly blamed him. New Orleans was a difficult place to live, and the life expectancy at graveyards was lower than in most jobs.
Still. . . the soft tinkle of a grave bell from the middle of the shadowed graveyard was proof that the family was probably right. I was there to check if my client’s late husband, Alvin Chaddock, was awake.
If it wasn’t him, someone else was awake.
Either way I needed to get in, do my job, and get out without detection. It was that or deal with the consequences of Chaddock’s return. The dead man getting away meant no check, a potentially messy hunt, and awkward police station visits. No one wanted that.
The grave bell was jangling faster.
“Over?” Eli asked.
I studied theactualproblem at hand: minor B&E. There weren’t any better options. “Over.”
I could hear my quarry inside the fence, and unfortunately, the delay in entry meant that I would have to deal with the security cameras, too. Lafayette Cemetery had invested in cameras that recorded everything after dark, as if nothing bad could happen during the daylight. The video was likely already recording the sounds of the corpse that verified that he’d made plans for an unhealthy afterlife.
“Ready when you are, butterdrop.” Eli pulled on a pair of thick lined gloves. Iron burned his kind—and touching me had other complications.
“Always ready,” I said, because the reality was that ready or not, the dead would come, and what I was made me uniquely able to stand against the dead, whether I wanted to or not.
Destiny—even one created by your parents—was an inflexible jackass.
Chapter Five
The soft tinkleof the grave bell was quickly becoming obnoxious as the deceased cracked the lock on their vault.
I circled the fence, looking for the best entry point. I wanted to avoid spending too much time walking through the graves, since the last thing I needed was an army of dead bodies animated to do my bidding.
“Here,” I told Eli as I admitted to myself that the only wayinwas over.
After a quick boost from Eli, I hoisted myself up by grabbing the wrought iron just under the sharp points on top of the fence.
Eli, despite the metal being poisonous to him, practically vaulted over the fence. I had a leg over, and he was on the ground grinning. He reached up and grabbed my legs, so I slid into his arms.
Without so much as a smoldering glance, Eli lowered me to the ground and stepped away. “I hear it.”
My sword was in hand before I could think, and Eli had moved away from the toxic metal as I raised it.
He gave me a strange look when I didn’t send a pulse of magic to find the again-walker I sought, but my magic had been like a malformed pipe these days. Sometimes, I tried for a trickle and ended up with a flood. Sometimes, I tried for a stream and received a few droplets. Better to use my regular sight.
