One Grave at a Time

“Ian smacked my mother on the ass?” I cut him off. At Tyler’s nod, I stopped lighting sage and grabbed a silver knife, feeling my fangs pop out of their own accord. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

Bones blocked my path to the door. “I have it sorted, luv. He won’t do anything like that again, promise.”

I stood there for a moment, debating whether to push past Bones so I could slice and dice Ian before stringing him up by the silver rings he had pierced through his parts, when Bones raised his brow.

“Don’t you trust me?”

“I trust you, not him,” I muttered.

He grasped my shoulders. “Then if you trust me, believe that it’s sorted. If he proves me wrong, I vow I’ll hold him down and let you stab him as many times as you please.”

That image brought a smile to my face. Talk about looking on the bright side! Bones chuckled.

“Then it’s settled. Now, I’ll get us unpacked. Why don’t you go back to lighting enough sage to make sure that ghostly sod gets a proper welcome if he pops up on us again?”

I’d like to believe that wouldn’t happen, but there were two ways Kramer could indeed drop by for an unwelcome visit. One was if he’d returned to Spade’s before we left last night and followed us all the way from St. Louis to here. We’d tried to prevent that by leaving very quickly and having Elisabeth and Fabian keep a lookout the first hundred or so miles, but if the ghost was sly, he could’ve managed it.

The second possibility was more likely, and it sucked on many levels.

“You realize we might need more than sage if Kramer overheard us talking last night about how we were planning to trap him,” I stated.

“Aw, hell. I didn’t think of that,” Tyler muttered.

“I did,” Bones said with a grim glance at me. His voice lowered until it would be impossible for anyone eavesdropping to overhear him. “Means we need to center our attention on his intended victims instead of the accomplice. Elisabeth said he never wavered once he picked his targets. That will work to our advantage.”

My eyes widened, but I made sure to speak as quietly as he despite my surprise. “How, unless we use those women as bait?”

“I hate it when you two whisper like that,” Tyler muttered. “Makes me antsy.”

“That’s precisely what we’ll do,” Bones replied, holding up a finger to Tyler in the universal gesture for wait. “If Kramer expects us to concentrate on finding and mesmerizing his accomplice, he’ll either be extremely zealous in concealing that bloke’s identity, and we’ll never discover who he is. Or he’ll lie to the accomplice about where he’s intending to hold the bonfire, sending us on a wild-goose chase while he’s off somewhere else having his spot of gruesome fun. Either way, he avoids our trap.”

“But if we have the women,” I mused, “then Mr. No One Else Will Do would come to us to try and get them. Or he’d send his accomplice for the same purpose.”

Bones nodded. “And then, either way, we’d get our chance to nab Kramer or the accomplice. In any event, the women would be safer with us than on their own.”

Safer, but not safe. I heaved a mental sigh. Nothing I could do about that. Once they’d been targeted by Kramer, they wouldn’t be truly safe until the Inquisitor was rotting in a trap somewhere. We might be able to protect them this Halloween, but the ghost had proven to be more than deadly in his noncorporeal form, too. Even if we returned those women safe and sound to their homes on November 1, with strict instructions to keep sage burning at all times, they had to leave sometime. And when they did, Kramer could poof up and poltergeist them to kingdom come.

If we didn’t find a way to trap Kramer—which would be damn hard even if he did come right to our door—we could be saving these women on Halloween only to have them murdered in a different way later, and the same pattern would repeat the year, and the next, and the next . . .

I heaved an actual sigh this time, fixing Bones with a tired, jaded look. “We might need to see Marie.”

Bones’s face became as hard as granite. “No.”

“Who’s Marie?” Tyler wondered. I’d said that last part loud enough for him to catch it.

I mimed “wait” at him and lowered my voice again, trying to convince Bones that an audience with a woman who’d been both ally and adversary in the past was worth trying.

“Probably no one in the world knows more about ghosts and the afterlife than the ghoul queen of New Orleans. What if there’s a spell that could boot Kramer right off this plane of existence?”

“Then Marie would want too much in return for it, not to mention practicing black magic is against vampire law,” was his immediate reply.

“Since when did you worry about being law-abiding?” I scoffed.

His dark gaze was steady. “Since I fell in love with you and assumed Mastership of a line. If it was proven that we practiced black magic—and I don’t trust Marie not to mention it—the Law Guardians could sentence us to death. That’s a chance I’m not willing to take, Kitten.”

I disagreed that Marie would tattle on us, but I remembered all too well how lethally efficient Law Guardians were when it came to death sentences. I’d briefly been under one of those, and only some quick thinking combined with misdirection had prevented my head from parting company with my shoulders less than five minutes after a Law Guardian pronounced that sentence.

The only other way Marie could help us would be to give me another wineglass full of her blood, but for me to admit that my Remnant-summoning powers had run their course held its own set of unacceptable consequences.

Damn. Back to square one: trying to catch someone who was made of air and for all intents and purposes, immortal. You don’t have a chance in hell, an insidious inner voice whispered.

Fuck you; pessimism never helped anyone, I told it.

“All right,” I said, forcing a smile. “We concentrate on finding the women and let Kramer or his accomplice come to us once we do.”

And if they do, that relentless inner voice continued to taunt, you’re going to need a helluva lot more than burning sage to save the day.

Yeah, I knew that, too. But I’d resolved to believe that things would work out, and that was what I was going to do.

Twenty-two

On October 14, while all of us were in the family room watching a movie to break up the monotony of more fruitless waiting, my new cell phone finally vibrated with a text. I almost leapt up from the couch to read it, praying it wouldn’t be a wrong number, then let out a whoop.

“Elisabeth sent over an address! Let’s move.”

Bones was already on his feet, Spade and Denise following suit, but Ian shot me a piqued look.

“You don’t mean all of us, do you? The movie’s not over.”

“You’ve seen this one before,” I replied in disbelief.

He shrugged. “Watching Snape make fun of Harry is my favorite part.”

“Let him stay,” Bones stated. “He can watch over Tyler while we’re gone. You can rouse yourself to do that if need be, right, mate?”

Ian’s mouth curled at the heavy irony in Bones’s voice. “Probably.”

“I’m not going?” Tyler sounded disappointed, but his thoughts indicated otherwise. Ian, watching over me? Finally, this situation’s looking up!

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, Tyler, you’re staying here with Ian. Try not to let it upset you too much.”

It won’t, he thought, but said, “I’ll manage,” so mildly that Bones let out a snort.

I went to the refrigerator and grabbed multiple packets of sage, handing them out to Spade, Denise, and Bones. It felt weird to be loading up on plants instead of silver before a potentially dangerous situation.

My mother marched over, holding out her hand with a challenging glint in her eye. “You’re not expecting me to stay behind, too, are you?”