Page 87 of Fallen Court

I supposed they’d be right. I glanced at Roark walking beside me, but if he was thinking the same thing, it only made him grin.

The moon hung low in the sky, almost obscured by the high wall, and threw long, oblique shadows both onto and from everything. A macabre chessboard of ornate, moss-eaten burial vaults, coping tombs, and their larger society cousins spilled before us in a mostly ordered grid. A breeze whispered through the graveyard, rustling the dried remains of floral arrangements left by strangers on the graves of those long dead.

I could see through the dark, yet I knew Cate could not. But if she was unnerved—like when Roark mentioned that it was a human who’d been killed—she didn’t show it. She did, however, finally spin toward us when it was clear she had no further instinct about where we were heading.

Her pale skin and slightly unkempt beauty tugged at my soul and took my breath away for a moment. The myrtle-draped bough of a cypress tree swayed in front of the light of the moon over her shoulder, filling my nostrils with a sweet, floral scent that completely defied the cemetery’s normal stink of rich earth and slow decay.

For a moment, anyway.

It was a familiar feeling. Like me, the cemetery was caught between two worlds, both of us bonded by death.

Too bad it wasn’t always clear which was which.

My hand flew to the back of my neck, and it took me a second to realize it wasn’t an itch that had brought it there but the memento mori. How the fuck could it know I was in a cemetery? It burned slightly, a feeling both foreign and familiar, and I began to wonder if it wanted rid of me as much as I wanted rid of it.

Cate cleared her throat pointedly.

“It’s this way,” I said, shaking my dismal thoughts and trying to hide my own fear of what a grisly murder scene might do to my mate.

Cate wasted no time, just pivoted on her heel and strode confidently into the darkness of the far corner of St. Rochs.

This time, I reacted quickly. If there was someone lying in wait, it would be best if I was first in line. If Cate objected, she didn’t show it, and I reached down to hold her hand, trying to walk a half step ahead of her. I pulled out my phone, using its flashlight to guide us safely. It really wouldn’t be long until a statue poked her eye out if I didn’t.

She squeezed my hand slightly—just enough to tell me she was glad I was there.

A moment later, we heard voices up ahead, and I pulled up short with Cate. I didn’t have to tell Roark what to do, even without our link. He slid silently sideways into the utter darkness offered by the eaves of a particularly close-knit group of burial vaults and dashed forward to scout.

It was only a few seconds before I heard his voice cut through the gloom. “You sure you want to be here?” And then, a moment later, “Cate and Lach are right behind me.”

I knew it was safe. Roark was actually warning me, in a way. I pulled Cate forward through the near-total darkness, almost dreading whatever complication had already arrived. And then I saw them.

“You didn’t tell me they found the body,” I muttered to Roark.

He held up his hands in surrender. “Didn’t know. I just got a call to get down here.”

Shaw.

Fucking Shaw.

Dante was with him, and a couple more of our guards, one of whom had turned on his phone’s flashlight and laid it on the top of a headstone, making the five appear, even to me, as a collection of floating heads.

“Get rid of them,” I muttered, nodding at the guards.

“Done.” Roark strode forward, directing the other men toward a nearby mausoleum. One of them spared a glance back at his precious cell phone but thought better of bringing it up.

My grip tightened on Cate’s hand as we came to a stop in front of my brother. Shaw stuffed his hands into his pockets, failing to look casual as he glanced nervously at Dante.

“Don’t lose your shit,” she whispered to me.

But my shit was already lost.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

“We found the body,” Shaw began, but I didn’t let him get far.

“That doesn’t explain what you’re doing in a fucking cemetery at three in the morning.” I took a single step in his direction, but Cate held me back.

“I think he’s asking you how you found the body,” she cut in diplomatically.