Wakeworld (14 page)

T
he cemetery gate was locked and chained, and Weston pulled the pickup off the road onto the grassy verge, deep into shadow and partly concealed behind a tree. They’d passed the time before sunset with preparations: buying tools, grabbing something to eat at a drive-through. Although Vivian was uneasy about leaving Poe to his own devices, the idea of him running loose in the graveyard at night had been considerably more alarming, so she’d stopped by the bookstore and run him a bath, where she’d left him looking reasonably content. As for the raven, the minute the truck door opened, it hopped out and vanished into the night.

Vivian was grateful that it was not only dark, but a deep black night. No moon to give them away, only the cold stars, which did nothing to pick up a glint of light on a shovel or a pick. They dared not even use the flashlight Weston had dug from behind the seat of his pickup, not out here by the road. People in Krebston were as likely to come in guns a-blazing as to call the police, and neither option was acceptable.

Weston climbed over the gate first, packing his shotgun, and she passed the shovels to him, one by one, and then the pick, reserving the flashlight for herself. Her depth perception was off in the pitch-blackness and she miscalculated the ground on the other side of the gate, falling the last few feet with an oomph of expelled breath. Weston loomed over her, little more than a shadow; she could hear his breathing, smell wood smoke and singed hair.

She expected a hand up, but instead he pushed her down and pinned her shoulders to the ground.

“I’ve been thinking. I need some answers before I go through with this.”

“Weston, I explained—”

“I’m not a stupid man, if I am a little slow on the uptake. Last I remember Old George was still in business. If you’re the last, as you say, what happened to him? Dragon? Pestilence?”

“Sorceress.” She said it flippantly, not wanting to get into the whole saga.

It was a mistake. The cold barrel of a shotgun dug into her chest. “Maybe you’re the sorceress. And if you try that voice trick on me again, I might just have enough gumption to pull this trigger.”

“Oh for God’s sake. I told you—I can do the voice thing, that’s it. Think—why would I kill him and set myself up for this nightmare?”

“So some sorceress—not you—killed him. She after you next then? Going to show up here?”

“She’s dead.”

“A sorceress is mighty hard to kill.”

“Trust me, this one’s dead. She turned into dust and blew away.”

She’d hoped this would relax him, but the pressure of the barrel intensified into a deep round ache between her ribs. “How did you manage that? Seeing as you can’t do sorcery and all.”

“If you think I can’t be killed, why are you threatening to shoot me?”

“You might not die, but it would slow you down. Inflict a mighty big heap of pain. Now tell me how you managed to turn some sorceress into dust.”

“Who said it was me?”

“Give me credit for half a brain. Who else could have killed her?”

“Well, I didn’t kill her, precisely. She did some spell to twine her life with a dragon. We killed the dragon—”

“We.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“And I don’t want any association with a sorceress.”

“Look, I told you I am not a sorceress. And she’s dead.”

He used her own trick of silence against her, waiting. Vivian clenched her teeth against the words she must not say aloud.
All right, maybe I have the blood in me. Who knows what I might be capable of?
The thought made her shiver. “Please, can I get up now? It’s cold and damp down here.”

“You’re not a sorceress, but you killed this Jehenna.”

“Well—in a roundabout way, yes.”

“And after you kill this sorceress, somebody steals your pendant and you get locked out of Dreamworld. Doesn’t sound like a coincidence to me.”

“I never said it was coincidence. We were ambushed in a Dreamworld.”

He was quiet for a long time. The pressure of the gun barrel eased. “Who set you up?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out! Can we get on with it then?”

“Not quite. What about the dragon thing?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I think I have it under control.”

“You think.”

“Look, Weston, you want honesty? Here it is. I’m a pitiful excuse for a Dreamshifter. I know next to nothing about it and I’ve had no time to practice. I have a tendency I’m not happy about to turn into a dragon, and I may have sorceress DNA. But I’m
it
. The last Dreamshifter. Unless you want the job. No? Fine. Then help me.”

She counted to ten before he released her. As if he hadn’t been holding her at gunpoint he asked casually, “Where do you reckon she’s buried?”

Vivian copied his tone. “Old part—over to the right and back.”

“You sure she’s here?”

“That’s what the website said. They’ve actually cataloged the names on the headstones. There was even a map.”

Dead quiet followed. A faint murmur of a breeze in treetops, a stirring of the grass, her footsteps and Weston’s, the sound of her own breath.

“Trees will screen us now. Give us a light.”

Vivian switched on the flashlight, which had far from the desired effect. The beam of light just made the dark look darker. It reflected off headstones with an illusion of ghostly movement. If Dreamshifters and sorcerers were real, there might well be ghosts. She’d seen plenty of strange things in the emergency room, enough to make her accept the possibility of lingering spirits. A fair number of dying people embraced the moment of death with a sudden joy, the name of a long-departed loved one on their lips.

Just because she accepted the idea didn’t mean she had to like it. Grace had better not be a ghost.

Weston didn’t look the least bit uneasy, even though they were on the way to dig up his sister’s grave. He strode along like he was hunting, keen eyes prying into the dark, the shotgun over one shoulder, the tools over the other.

“Tell me what you know about sorcerers,” Vivian said. Anything to shut out the silence and the gathering creepiness. The deeper they penetrated into the old graveyard, the thicker the air felt, as though something were trying to hold them back.

“Don’t know much. They move and act mostly in the Between. Don’t have access to the Dreamworlds unless they get hold of dreamspheres, or somebody else takes them in.”

Lovely. There was a whole pocketful of dreamspheres lost out there somewhere. Her head hurt. “How many are there, do you think? Sorcerers, or whatever?”

“My father spoke in terms of nests. I have no idea what that means.”

“Nothing good.” She thought of ants, scurrying, and of
Star Trek
and the Borg. Her hand tightened around the flashlight. She felt numb, lost in a haze of unreality, and didn’t trust that when she put her feet down they would rest on solid ground. She wished once again that she still had her stiletto. A gun. Any kind of a knife.

Weston walked on a few paces before realizing she had stopped. He turned back, moving into the circle of her flashlight beam.

“Any idea what this Key does?” She tried to make her voice casual, knew she was failing.

“Something to do with ultimate power and everlasting life. The old man went off on tangents about a war between the dragons, interference by the sorcerers, and the balance of the Dreamworlds. My childhood bedtime stories were an elaborate fairy tale. I always thought the Key was a myth—never gave it credence.” He stopped. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I don’t think it’s a myth at all.”

“Oh, come now. There were giants in these stories—giants who built gates that dragons couldn’t open. Nobody believes in Jack and the Beanstalk.”

“Jehenna believed in the Key. Mythical or not, she would have killed for it.”

“You actually found this Key?”

“Yes,” she said, guilt flowing through her. “And Jehenna stole it before she—died. I don’t know where it is.”

“Well, hell,” he said. And then he shrugged. “All the more reason to get to the bottom of this. Reckon we’re about there?”

“Over here, I think.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own, and she was surprised when her feet obeyed her commands and carried her between a line of old headstones. The light played over them as she walked, picking out bits of names and inscriptions.

A glint of the light on reflected eyes made her gasp, but the full beam revealed it was only the raven, sitting on a worn old stone that read:

GRACE JENNINGS
BORN 1912
DIED 1977
REST IN PEACE.

Vivian paused. Amen to resting in peace.

“This isn’t right,” Weston said, at the same time as Vivian shone the flashlight onto a rectangle of newly spaded black earth. There should have been grass growing here, thick and wild. Grace had been dead for years. Instead, this grave couldn’t be more than a couple of days old.

“Weird,” she said, her scalp prickling.

Weston shrugged. “It’s been dug already. Best see what’s still down there.” His face had set into grim lines that emphasized the bones beneath his skin, and his voice sounded brittle when he spoke. “Set the flashlight on that stone across the way—it will free your hands and give us light to work by. Watch for anything else out of line.”

He took the lead, thrusting his spade through the grass and into the soil beneath. He flung a shovelful of earth aside with a soft thud. Vivian joined in and the two of them fell into a rhythm. Strike into the soil, lift, turn, spill the dirt into the growing pile. Strike again. The reality of physical exertion became everything, past, present, and future. A blister burned and stung on her right palm. Her shoulders ached, her wrists stiffened. Breath sobbed in and out of her lungs, but she wasn’t going to stop for a rest, not so long as the old man kept digging.

They were standing in the hole now, flinging the dirt up into the unseen dark. Between the two of them they’d marked out a rectangle they estimated as a foot longer and wider on each side than a coffin would be. Weston’s unwelcome raven startled them at odd intervals, invisible wings flapping overhead, alighting on the side of the hole and sending little runnels of dirt skittering down at Vivian’s feet.

As they’d gotten deeper she’d moved the flashlight to the edge of the pit. Weston moved in and out of the light as he shoveled, his face streaked with sweat and dirt. A strand of hair stuck to his cheek.

She tried not to think about Poe or Zee, but with every shovelful of earth that she dug they ran through her mind like a litany. Poe would be fine, she told herself, even as she imagined someone breaking into the empty store and carrying him away, or worse. Flashbacks of her last glimpse of Zee were even worse. Over and over she saw him wounded and fighting, falling beneath the onslaught of foes.

Thoughts of revenge kept her going.

Thunk. Her shovel hit something solid. She heard Weston’s make a dull thud. Reality of what they were engaged in settled on her shoulders as she stopped to catch her breath. She, the doctor, the healer, the upstanding citizen without so much as a misdemeanor to her name, was about to rob a grave. And for Weston, this was personal. His little sister was in this coffin.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I’ll do.”

He wiped his face with his sleeve and turned away, back to what needed to be done. For the next few minutes they focused on digging a trench that would allow them to stand beside the coffin. They scraped the earth away until the wood was visible and then stopped once more, hesitating.

Weston’s head was bowed, lips moving. Vivian waited, partly out of respect, but also out of dread. Whatever lay within the coffin would not be pretty. But they had to look.

After only a moment, Weston looked up and nodded. “Let’s do it.”

Vivian tugged at the lid. It was stuck tight. “You’re going to have to help. Might have to pry it.”

A new voice demanded, “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

Her heart convulsed and she looked up in alarm. The speaker stood above the grave, behind the flashlight, his face obscured by the dark.

“Put down the shovels.” The voice was familiar, and Vivian’s heart resumed beating.

“Deputy Flynne? What are you doing here?”

A heavy sigh. “What am I doing here? Put down the shovel and explain yourselves.”

“We’re kind of busy. You want to help?”

“You want me to help with a felony—”

“It’s important. Related to things like giant penguins and dragons.”

He paused, then said. “Doesn’t matter. I can’t allow this. For so many reasons that you ought to know, Dr. Maylor.”

She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, knowing she was leaving a muddy streak and not caring. “I don’t have time for this. I’m sorry, Brett.”

“I could arrest you—”

“Or you could make yourself useful.”

“I am not helping you dig up a body.”

“You don’t have to help. Just go away. Pretend you didn’t see anything.”

“I can’t. Do you have any idea how much trouble I’ve been in since the dragon thing? All those gaps in my report, combined with the fact that they already think I’m insane. FBI is involved, Vivian, do you understand? And Homeland Security. They’re trying to hush it up, like it never happened.”