Chapter One
The living world carried a hell of a wallop for a guy who had been dead as long as I had been. The noise, the heat, the constant roar of people—moving, shouting, pushing, touching, talking—
“—I like graveyards,” Lula Gauge, my wife, my love, was cheerfully carrying on the conversation I’d dropped. “You know I do, Brogan. All these years sleeping in them?” She drove the truck to the end of the thrift shop’s empty gravel lot, parking under the fragrant shade of a mimosa tree.
I tightened my fingers in our dog, Lorde’s, black fur, trying to borrow her calm as she napped between us. Her breathing was even, softened by sleep, content in this world.
Dogs, I had always believed, had life figured out.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to get a handle on it. It had been one month since the god, Cupid, had snapped his fingers and made me mostly alive again. He wanted us to track down people he was looking for and a book we’d run across. A book that had almost gotten us killed.
Well, more killed.
He wanted other things too. It didn’t sit right with me, us being under the thumb of a god.
“Hey, handsome.”
I must have been quiet too long. Again.
Lu reached across Lorde and rested her fingers on my hand. If she noticed my wince at the contact, she didn’t do anything to show it.
She was sunlight, my Lu. Red hair caught in a wild tangle around her pale, pale shoulders that used to freckle good and hard before we’d both been attacked by monsters we still hadn’t found.
Monsters that had made Lu athrawan—that step between being human and a vampire. Monsters who had made me an earthbound spirit, and who had ripped off pieces of our souls, leaving us neither quite alive nor fully dead.
“I know—” I startled at the volume of my voice. I swallowed, and for the hundredth time, the thousandth time, reminded myself that I was solid now, that I had a voice now. “I know you don’t mind graveyards. But all these years sneaking into them just to speak to you, just to touch you…”
She opened her fingers so I could thread our hands together. She waited, silent, because she was made that way. Quiet as the fire sleeping in the heart of coal.
“Brogan,” she began, soft and low, a hunter soothing the trapped animal. “I think we should…”
“Hotel,” I interrupted too loudly. Loud enough even Lorde woofed in her sleep.
Lu’s eyebrows rose above her sunglasses.
“Hotel?”
“With a shower and fresh, soft sheets. A window with nice dark curtains.”
Quiet, I thought. It would be a place for Lu to rest, a soft place. She’d spent too many years in the back of one truck or another, driving the old Route 66, or on the hard grounds of graveyards, roughing it just to be near me for scant seconds.
I hadn’t said any of that out loud, but her other hand lifted, fingers finding and tracing the magic pocket watch that hung from a heavy chain beneath the edge of her yellow tank top.
“You don’t like hotels.” Lu’s hand fell away from the watch and her fingers hooked the bottom of the steering wheel. “Too many dead and other such linger there.”
“Sure,” I said amiably. “But there’s hot showers, soft sheets, and doors that lock. I like all those things more than I dislike a ghost or two.”
“But you hate ghosts. You’ve never met a single one you’ve liked.”
“I’ve also never met one I couldn’t ignore.”
She bit her bottom lip thinking. I watched her, because, how could I not? The line between her brows, the clench of her hand on the old truck’s wheel told me she was worried. Worried more than she should be.
“Hey, love,” I squeezed her fingers gently. “I’m still new to this breathing thing. Maybe a soft bed wouldn’t be such a bad idea for a day or two?”
She wasn’t convinced, but I knew how to wrangle her interest.
“Let’s make a bet on it. Whoever finds the most valuable item in this thrift shop gets to choose where we sleep. I win, it’s a hotel. You win, it’s a graveyard.”
