with a wide variety of headstone styles. There were lampposts inside the grounds, so the four of us would have to try to avoid the pools of light around them.
I nodded at Simon, and the two of us crouched down and began to climb.
It was easy to stay in the shadows, given the number of wide trees and huge headstones, but it was a lot harder to watch your footing when you couldn’t see your feet. The rain had graduated from a light mist to a heavy mist, and I lost sight of Lily and Tobias pretty quickly.
A few minutes in, I let Simon move ahead of me and lead, if for no other reason than so he’d stop whispering, “Are you okay?” from just over my shoulder. We tried to stay as low as possible, which sometimes meant dropping into a crouch and sometimes crawling on our bellies. I often had to decide between using my painful left wrist or maneuvering on all threes instead of all fours. Neither choice worked out well.
All of us were dressed in jeans or thick canvas, but it took only about three minutes until Simon and I were covered in mud. It took even less time for my body to start aching. I still felt weak and tired, but for the moment I had enough energy to keep going, and that was all I cared about.
The city cemetery wasn’t that big, but moving through it seemed to take forever. As the rain continued the water ran downhill, and climbing got harder. The white squares I’d seen on the satellite images were low concrete fences, but in person I could see that they probably had as much to do with controlling the hill erosion as with keeping graves together. Whatever their purpose, they were easy to trip over. We often had to move laterally around an obstacle or steep slope before we could continue up. Simon, I noticed, took pains to avoid going directly over someone’s grave, if possible. I didn’t have any qualms about it—I knew better than anyone that the soul didn’t linger in the body—but I couldn’t begrudge him the superstition.
On the aerial map, the only visible demarcation between the city cemetery and the Confederate Cemetery had been a patchy line of trees, but now it was pretty easy to guess that the exact border was where the fog seemed to thicken in a curved line, as though contained under a bell jar. It didn’t quite meet the tree line, so we’d need to cross a small open area to enter the fog. I tapped Simon’s ankle as we took cover behind the last tree before the clearing. He turned, waiting for me to come along beside him. I whispered, “How are they keeping the fog like that?”
“It’s being held inside the circle,” he murmured, in that Simon way where there was a little appreciation in his tone.
“I don’t hear anything.” I meant that literally—there was no sound coming from up ahead.
“Damn,” Simon said admiringly. “They’re containing the sound in the inclusive circle too. That’s a hell of a complex ward.”
“As I understand it, this is basically all Tallulah Finch does,” I said, breathing hard. “Apparently her daughter has been paying attention.”
I stared at the last stretch of open ground separating us from the line of fog. Someone standing just inside the fog might be able to see out, and if they had firearms, we wouldn’t be able to defend ourselves. The words “dead angle” popped into my head, but I pushed them away.
“You ready for this?” Simon asked me. I knew he was trying to give me one more chance to beg off, to say I felt like shit. I did, but it didn’t matter. We had a plan, and I was part of it.
“Let’s go.”
Simon and I belly-crawled as quickly as possible across the open area, side by side, with a little space between us to make us smaller targets. As we got close, I saw the brick gutter Milburn had told us about—basically two horizontal rows of bricks, dipping down in the middle to form a trough for water. There was no actual water flowing—the misting rain hadn’t provided enough precipitation yet—but there was something at the bottom of the gutter: a line of very thin, dark paracord with a reddish tint, just as Lily and Simon had thought. Anger bubbled up in me. I hated that Odessa had used my blood, not to mention my mother’s bloodstone,