Graveminder

Knowing the dead were here— suffering —and she couldn’t help them yet made her feel physically ill. The threads that she should be feeling toward them were blocked by the salt, but seeing them and not being able to feel them hurt her in a way she couldn’t express. She needed to get away, to step outside, where she couldn’t see them, to put some distance between herself and them so she wouldn’t ignore the logic in Byron’s words.

She looked at Byron and asked, “Can you stay with Daisha? I’ll be back inside, but I need a minute first.”

“Do you want—”

“Stay with her, please.” Rebekkah begged, and then she fled out the back door before she rushed forward and pushed away the salt that kept her from feeling her connection to the dead.

Chapter 52

DAISHA HEARD THE VEHICLE IN THE DISTANCE. WITH HIS LIVING HUMAN hearing, the Undertaker had no idea that Cissy was approaching. Daisha, on the other hand, heard the engine stop, knew that the woman was getting closer. She was walking toward the house, presumably because she had seen their truck.

“Are you listening?” Byron asked.

“I am. Rebekkah needs a minute, so I stay with you,” Daisha said. She considered and rejected the idea of telling him that she heard Cissy walking toward the house. Give her a minute. Rebekkah hadn’t gone out to confront Cissy, but she had the right to do so. Like the dead inside the garage, like Daisha, like Troy, and like Maylene, Rebekkah had the right to confront the monster who had stolen so much from so many. She is the Graveminder. Daisha would give Rebekkah her chance to talk to the woman, and then she’d go outside and do what she’d come here to do.

Daisha tried to keep her features placid, not to reveal what she could hear outside, to let Cissy approach. Buy the Graveminder some time. The Undertaker wasn’t a bad sort, not really. She couldn’t blame him for his reaction to her. His job was to care for the grieving living and the truly dead. Unlike Rebekkah. The Graveminder cared for the truly dead and the Hungry Dead.

Byron narrowed his eyes and stared at her. “What gives?”

“Nothing. I wish Rebekkah hadn’t seen that.” Daisha motioned toward the garage. “The woman is cruel, and I wish Rebekkah hadn’t been hurt.”

Byron gave her a puzzled glance. “Why?”

“She cares for the dead. Like the last one. She would protect us from the woman. From you. From everything.”

“I don’t trust you,” he said. “When this is over, you need to go to the land—”

“That, Undertaker, is not yours to decide.”

Chapter 53

“BECKY.” CISSY STILL HAD HER HAND INSIDE HER HANDBAG, BUT SHE lifted her gaze to Rebekkah. “What a lovely surprise. Did you come to tell me that you’ve decided to give me my inheritance? Leave the house and everything else to the rightful heirs?”

“No.” Rebekkah stepped closer. “How could you do this? Your own daughter, your mother ... You killed them.”

Cissy pulled a black semiautomatic pistol out of her handbag. “Do you think you’ll come back different? I’ve wondered what would happen if a Graveminder became one of the Hungry Dead.”

For a moment, Rebekkah paused. She’d hoped that there was some explanation, some truth, to lessen the ugliness of the things that Cissy had done. “Why?”

“The Graveminder is supposed to be a Barrow woman . You are not.” Cissy leveled the gun at her. “You’re not a part of my family, yet here you are, the next Graveminder.”

“You’re going to kill me because I’m not Jimmy’s biological daughter?” Rebekkah gaped at her. “Would you have killed Ella?”

“Ella took care of that herself.” Cissy’s arm didn’t waver. “It should’ve been me. She decided I wasn’t good enough, that I couldn’t handle the dead. Look at them.”

“You didn’t handle them. You used them.”

Cissy snorted. “They aren’t people now. What difference does it make?”

Rebekkah knew she wasn’t fast enough to outrun a bullet. She didn’t know how to pick the next Graveminder. All she knew for certain was that Cissy shouldn’t be it.

Is thinking it enough?

Rebekkah could imagine only one person she’d pick: Amity Blue. She whispered the name in case it had to be spoken. “Amity Blue. Amity Blue is the next Graveminder should I die here.”

“What are you muttering?” Cissy took a step forward.

Amity Blue. I want Amity Blue to take this task.

“Becky? I asked you a question.” Cissy aimed her gun at Rebekkah’s leg.

“You won’t ever be the Graveminder,” Rebekkah vowed.

Cissy pulled the trigger.

There was no telltale sound as it happened, and it wasn’t that Rebekkah saw the shot, even processed that it had happened. She simply crumpled. Her leg felt like it had been skewered by a hot poker. She put her hand on her thigh in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding. Blood slipped out around her fingers.

“I tried to talk to Mama, but”—Cissy crouched down beside Rebekkah—“all she could see was you. Rebekkah. Precious Rebekkah . After you and your mother ran away, I thought Mama would pick me or one of my girls ... but do you know what she said?”

Rebekkah put her other hand on her leg, too, pinching the skin together. The pain of doing so made her vision blur. She swallowed twice before she could speak. “What?”

“That even if you died, she wouldn’t lay the burden on my girls.” Cissy stood up. She extended the hand with her gun in it again. The barrel brushed over Rebekkah’s cheek. “I guess it was okay to burden you. Maybe she didn’t love you after all, Becky.”

Rebekkah reached up to grab the gun, but Cissy yanked it away.

“I’m not a murderer, Becky,” she said. “I killed once, but now I just have them kill each other. I don’t intend to go before my maker with those sorts of sins on my soul.”

“Still on your soul,” Rebekkah muttered, vaguely aware that Cissy was watching her. She struggled to get her shirt off. Every movement hurt, far worse than the shot that had grazed her in the land of the dead. Shot twice in two days. As she swallowed against the bitter taste in her mouth, she realized that she’d bitten her lip enough that the bitterness she was tasting was her own blood. None to spare. Blinking against the pain, she tied her shirt around her leg. It was a crude solution, but maybe it would stanch the blood.

“No. ‘The sins of the dead rest on the Graveminder, for if she had done her duty, the dead would not be free to do harm.’ I read the journals a long time ago, but when she died, I took them. Since you don’t have Mama’s journals, I wanted to let you know that part. These deaths? Every injury since Mama died, they are yours to carry. How fitting that you will go to your end with those stains.”

Rebekkah looked up. Even in the haze of her pain, the tug in her chest told her that someone, that the Hungry Dead, stood nearby.

At the doorway, Daisha stood. She looked at the two women, but Rebekkah couldn’t read her expression. She didn’t want to call out, to alert Cissy. She glanced again at Daisha’s expressionless face. Is she attracted to blood? Will she kill me as she killed Maylene?