“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.