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My elegant fiancé muttered a curse word in his people’s language that my tongue still struggled to pronounce.
“She would know,” he added as we walked past darkened graves.
Ally—Alice Chaddock to most people—was a widow who had hired us to check on her suddenly deceased husband. The late Alvin Chaddock was easily twice her age, but the young widow had been genuinely in love. Sometime between injecting me withdraugrvenom and murdering the “mastermind” behind all the deaths, Ally had become my friend and employee.
I didn’t pay her well enough to justify calling her my employee, to be honest, especially considering what she did for me, but she was one of the wealthiest women in the city so she didn’t ask for much of a salary. My meager checks weren’t even a drop in her ocean of money.
But Eli wasn’t willing to letanyoneforget that Ally had been a member of SAFARI, the Society Against Fae and Reanimated Individuals. They were a hate group opposed to increasingly tolerant attitudes towardsdraugrand, for reasons not-quite-clear, they lumped the fae in with the biters.
“Not all of the dead SAFARI members have been raised,” I pointed out, but I still drew my single-handed sword.
“Hebert had enough of Alice’s little stars to make note of her.” Eli moved far enough away that he wouldn’t obstruct me if we were startled. My sword wasn’t the sort of metal the fae could handle easily, so I was more cautious around him anyhow.
“Not all children are like their parents,” I snapped. I was feeling sensitive about that detail of late. My baggage from my own Daddy Issues—and no, notthatkind. I simply hated the man.
“Enough SAFARI members woke that you know there is a link between them and the injections.” Eli paused at a sound.
“True.” I scanned for movement. Technically, the cemetery was closed, but this was New Orleans, and the Carnival season was underway. It was more likely that there was someone in the area than not. The question was just whether they were dead or alive.
“Is Madam Hebert still alive?” he asked.
“Very. She owns an estate at the border of the ghost zone, but she’s living outside the city, somewhere over in Houston.” I tried and failed to keep the disdain out of my voice.
I had no issue with Houston. It was a fine city, in fact, but people who abandoned New Orleans and still meddled in our affairs were high on my shit list. To abandon the cityandfunnel money back here for a racist organization was a level of asinine I couldn’t understand.
“Good riddance,” Eli said, drawing a small silver dagger.
The Society Against Fae and Reanimated Individuals was tangled up in an attempt on my life in the fall, among other heinous things. Racists, not surprisingly, weren’t too keen on the continued life of those of us who were different, and while I wasn’t officially on their hate list, some of the SAFARI folks lumped bisexual, Jewish, necromancing witches in withdraugrand fae. That hostility had made murdering me seem like a lovely idea.
“Was Christophe a member or just his mother?” Eli asked, as we made our way deeper into the rows of mausoleums. They were often beautiful, but they did make hunting a bit challenging.
“Just her.” I stared at the shadows, feeling the comforting whispers of the dead resting in the earth. Since my brush with my own mortality, my tie to the dead had grown stronger than I liked. It used to be that I had to bleed to hear them.
Now, the collective whispers of the grave rose up like breezes through dry corn husks. I had to actively refuse to answer, and we hadn’t yet seen what would happen if I bled more than a droplet or two on grave dirt. Before my near-death event, my magic was already off. Now, I was apprehensive of testing that change. So far, mydraugrspeed had come in handy on that front at least.
“Is it worse?” Eli asked. “The voices.”
I didn’t think it was worse or better to hear the dead more easily, simply different. I wasn’t sure I wanted to explain that to a faery, though. His people’s understanding of death was so different from human death. The fae ancestry, memories of the family, were accessible to those who were in their lineage. Their bodies, however, dissolved in such a way that their dead were not able to be resurrected the way humans were. No fae-draugrmixes. No fae bodies to call from the grave. The dead were simply absorbed into nature, and their memories were carried forward in their descendants.
Humans, however, could be brought back as draugr or via necromancy. And all the dead were my domain. Not that I controlled them, but thanks to the magic of my mother and thedraugrDNA by the deadbeat who fathered me, I could feel the presence of anything dead. It was useful for killing some and resurrecting others. Yeah, I killed the kind of creatures that had fathered me. Daddy issues weren’t just for debutantes.
“Bonbon?” Eli prompted.
“Stronger,” I clarified. “My magic is stronger.”
By the time we reached Christophe Hebert’s grave, we had ascertained that no one else was sliding out of their graves nearby. We’d learned the awkward way that checking for surprise biters first was essential.
The dirt over Christophe’s resting spot was not disrupted tonight, but it had been recently. Someone had patted it back into place, and even added a few stolen flowers in the mound of mud.
“That’s not suspicious at all.” I scanned the area before crouching down.
Eli moved so he could watch a larger swath of the darkened rows of graves. We were looking in opposite directions. He took our partnership even more seriously than our romance, andthatwas saying something.
“Anything?” I asked.
“No. All clear.” He held his dagger out.
I pricked my wrist on the sharpened tip. A simple droplet worked better than a slice, plus I hated hand injuries. A cut in my palm made my hilt bloody, and that could hamper my grip in a fight.
