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I squeezed my nape. If the cemetery’s vampires saw him like this, they’d be on him like a school of piranha, latching onto him and draining his blood.
“Pull yourself together.” I made my tone get-your-ass-in-gear gruff. “Or your brothers will die.”
Zaq’s eyelids flickered. “Fuck you,” he said and pushed himself upright again.
I’d been coming to Lachaise Cemetery for so long that the vampires ignored me. They knew I wasn’t human, and I’d never shown myself as Reaper. Instead, I was a down-on-her-luck dhampir with short dark hair and the nasty attitude of a pit bull with a toothache.
What they didn’t know was that I had a secret way into the cemetery. I didn’t use it often, because if the other inhabitants of the cemetery never saw me coming and going, they might get suspicious.
Now I looked at Zaq’s sagging body and made an executive decision. “We’ll go through the wall.”
“The wall?” He eyed the stones. The top was well above our heads. “What’s wrong with the gate?”
“Too many eyes.” I grabbed his hand and tugged him around the corner and down the sidewalk until I reached a break in the wall that I’d repaired myself without cementing the stones.
A quick glance around assured me we were alone. Fortunately, the vampires congregated near the entrances, waiting for human prey.
I crouched and shoved at a stone about two feet up from the ground, a smallish stone that held the others in place. It fell through to the other side. I pushed and pulled more stones out of the way until I had a space large enough to crawl through, then jerked my chin at Zaq.
“You first.”
He cursed and lowered himself to his hands and knees. He was bigger than me and his shoulders got stuck for a few seconds, but he raised his arms above his head and wriggled through like a snake, swearing the whole time. I dropped down and crawled after him.
Zaq curled up on the ground. He was silent now, no longer cursing.
I put the stones back and helped him to his feet. For once I was grateful I was a dhampir, with a dhampir’s strength. The man might’ve lost weight, but what was left was all hard muscles and solid bones.
I draped his arm over my shoulders. “It’s just up this hill.”
He grunted but shuffled forward with me taking as much of his weight as I could. The walkways started out wide but got narrower with each turn. The asphalt changed first to cobblestones, then to a dirt path barely wide enough to avoid the weathered granite tombs, obelisks and gravestones on either side.
For the last twenty-five yards, we left the path altogether. My bolt-hole was in a section of aboveground tombs that curved side by side up a hill like shrunken six-foot-high rowhomes, their worked-metal doors corroding from the elements.
By then the sky had lightened. The vampires would be seeking their day sleep, but I kept a wary eye out anyway as I half-dragged, half-pulled Zaq up the steep hill to my tomb. Actually, it was the Guilbert family’s tomb, but they’d either died out or moved away. No one had visited in the two years since I’d hollowed out a small underground room beneath it.
Zaq was moving like a sleepwalker, eyes half-closed, and I was cursing myself for choosing this out-of-the-way hideout. But it was far from the cemetery’s walking paths and unclaimed by any of the local vampires.
Two overgrown cypresses shaded the tomb from the rising sun. The metal door opened soundlessly because I oiled the hinges whenever I was in Paris. I pulled Zaq inside and shut the door behind us.
We were in a four-by-eight-foot space. Zaq’s head almost touched the ceiling. At the far side was a bench covered by a stone slab. I propped him against the wall and heaved the slab aside.
“Almost there.” I urged him toward the opening I’d uncovered.
He swayed and tripped over his feet. I swung around and caught him before he fell. We ended up facing each other, my hands gripping his torso.
“Hey.” I shook him. “Stay with me.”
He scrunched his face like a sleepy kid, then focused on me.
“Reaper.” His tone was bedroom-husky. The gold flecks in his eyes seemed to glow.
His hands were on my shoulders to help him keep his balance.
I knew that was the only reason he touched me, but we were so close, gazing into each other’s eyes like we were about to kiss.
His new T-shirt was damp with sweat. He should’ve smelled bad after all those days in the cell, but he didn’t. He smelled good. Not as good as that morning at the airport—and his scent had a metallic undertone from the silver poison—but still good. Dark and spicy, like the cypress.
My spine melted, along with other parts of me lower down. I stiffened my vertebrae and ordered those other, lower parts to settle down. This was not an embrace, even if I was breathing in the man like a drug I couldn’t get enough of.
