Page 54 of Forever Dark
That did not matter.He had felt it.
He stepped back to the body and reached into the dead woman’s coat pocket.Her cell phone came free in his gloved hand.The screen lit, blue-white against the dark, turning the leather of his gloves slick and pale.
He dialed.
The dispatcher answered on the second ring.
“There’s a dead body at Hawthorne Graveyard,” he said, putting panic into his voice.“Please.Please send someone.”
Questions came at once.Location?Name?Are you still there?
He ended the call before answering any of them.
The phone went down beside the stone in the flattened grass.
“There’ll be more joining you soon,” he whispered to the corpse.
From his coat pocket he drew the small paintbrush.
Its handle rested neatly in his fingers.The bristles darkened as he dipped them into the blood pooled near her side.Symbols mattered.Sequence mattered.Those who came after would look for meaning because meaning had been placed there for them.Whether they understood it was irrelevant.
He turned and faced the old grave from 1896.
One vertical line.
Then a second.
Then a third.
Blood gleamed on the weathered stone, fresh and bright against the worn gray face of the marker.The three marks stood clean and deliberate, not hurried, not trembling, each one placed with care.
He studied them for a moment, satisfied.
The brush left his hand and vanished into the undergrowth beside the dead oak.
Far off now, at the edge of hearing, came the first faint cry of a siren.
He stepped between the graves and moved with easy familiarity through the rows.His boots sunk into some soft ground, but he grinned, knowing they’d never match them to anyone.Stone after stone received him, then hid him.Leaning angels.Broken lambs.Family names worn soft by a century of weather.By the time blue light began to pulse against the clouds beyond the hill, the graveyard had taken him back into itself.
Only the dead woman remained.
And the marks that promised more.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Groggy blackness greeted Selena as her eyes strained to open.
Not the kind broken by city glow or a streetlamp through thin curtains.Motel blackness.Dense.Close.The sort that flattened the room into nothing and left Selena half convinced she was still falling through sleep.
The phone was ringing.
Selena stirred with a groan, one arm dragging over the sheet until her fingers found the bedside table.The lamp, the motel notepad, the cold shape of the phone.She fumbled it into her hand and squinted at the screen.
Five a.m.An hour before she was due to get up.
She answered without sitting up.“Raven.”
A beat of static.Then Connor’s voice came through it.
