Feverborn (Fever #8) - Karen Marie Moning Page 0,55

easiest. He hadn’t yet figured out tracking by person but heard he was capable of it.

We’d had to stop first at BB&B, an easy sift for him, where I rummaged for a map in the wreckage and showed him where I wanted him to take me. As there was no detailed topography of the town—it was far too small for that—we ended up smack in the middle of a cornfield and had to walk twenty minutes to get to the cemetery. By the time we arrived, I was dripping sweat. Just another hot August day in Georgia: sun scorching, humidity thick.

He’d offered to try to sift us closer but we materialized alarmingly near a colossal live oak dripping Spanish moss—as in half an inch from the massive trunk. While he might survive manifesting in the middle of solid wood, I wasn’t so sure about myself, so I’d opted to use my feet from there. I had a good deal of nervous energy to burn off anyway.

“Why are we here again?” he said.

“I want to check on something,” I muttered. I hadn’t bothered to tell him that I planned to dig up a grave. I wasn’t entirely certain he would have complied with my request for transport.

I glanced over my shoulder. He was trailing behind, looking at everything.

“Christ,” he said, sounding disgusted, “everything is so new here.”

I would have laughed if I hadn’t been in such a pissy mood. I’d always thought my town dripped history but ours was a few hundred years old, and in Scotland his was a few thousand. I guess when you grow up with prehistoric standing stones in your backyard, American towns seemed prepubescent.

I was pleased to see that V’lane/Cruce’s protection of Ashford when the walls had fallen had indeed kept it remarkably unchanged. Lights glowed in windows, there were no wrecked cars blocking the streets or signs of random rioting and carnage. No Dark Zones, no Unseelie lurking in the alleys, not one husk of the dead tumbling down desolate streets.

I supposed it was pretty much the way it had been before the walls fell—my town was too provincial and unexciting to draw the Fae.

It was as if the war between our races had given the place as wide a berth as Sherman’s armies when the troops made the devastating march from Atlanta, after burning it to the ground. Although Ashford hadn’t been torched by Sherman’s marauding army determined to “make Georgia howl,” half the town center burned to ash in the late 1890s, and they’d rebuilt it with a plan for revenue, planting a large number of shops and restaurants arranged around an enormous, beautifully landscaped square.

We passed the Brickyard where I used to bartend.

I barely spared it a glance.

My head was jam-packed with images of my dead sister, curled on the floor, screaming. Afraid of me. Crying out for Darroc.

It was too much to deal with. It was one thing to see an illusion of my dead sister, another to see her apparently terrified of me for some reason. That moment when her joy had turned to horror was scorched into my brain, eclipsing all my good mental photographs of her.

What sadistic game was the Book playing?

“See that hardware store?” I said to Christian, pointing. It was open for business, I supposed on the barter system, but I was in no mood to see anyone I knew. “Can you sift in and grab me a shovel?”

He shot me a look that couldn’t have more plainly said, What the bloody hell do you think I am? Your little fetch-it boy?

“Please,” I added. “And make it two.”

One brow arched. “You think I’m going to dig?”

“I was hoping.”

“You do know I can simply make the earth move, Mac. Even as a mere druid, I had that much skill. What do you want moved?”

“Silly me,” I said dryly. I’d not even considered that Christian was the Bewitched I’d teased Barrons about being. Truth was, I’d rather been looking forward to some physical labor. That damn steam I needed to burn off.

“Come on,” I said, sighing. “The cemetery’s this way.”

“Great. A bloody cemetery,” he said, and matched my sigh. “I’m never going to get away from Death.”

—

There were no flowers on my sister’s grave. My town puts plastic bouquets everywhere in the cemetery, which is attractive from a distance but I always thought was kind of gruesome close up. Embalmed blossoms for embalmed people.

I paused at the foot of her grave and closed my eyes. It was over