Giving the tether two tugs as he hit the end of Main Street, Felipe suppressed a smile at the single one he got in return. A tumult of emotions roiled on Oliver’s end of the tether, but Felipe couldn’t drive and parse them at the same time. None felt dangerous or particularly sharp at least; he would check on Oliver later. Passing the tavern, the bank, a tailor, and a general store, Mr. Allen pointed to a foreboding brick building on the corner that had been Sheriff Ridder’s office but now sat shuttered and dark. Felipe took the next corner and parked thesteamer further down the road, out of sight from Main Street. As he opened the steamer door, the sensation of walking into a spider web fell over him, but when he touched his face, nothing was there. Shutting the door, he found Mr. Allen grimacing with concentration as he motioned for him to stay close. A woman crossing the street glanced their way, but her gaze slid over them as Mr. Allen unlocked the sheriff's office and urged him inside.
The smell of mildew, rotting garbage, and stale booze mixed with sweat hit Felipe first. The building had only been shut up for two weeks, but the smells had fermented in the absence of people. As his eyes grew accustomed to the sudden darkness, Felipe surveyed the room. The large, chipped desk in the corner was littered with papers and the refuse of daily use. A used toothpick had been left beside the blotter, and the chair was half out. Trash rotted in the wastebasket, and all but one of the darts still hung from the dart board on the far side of the room. Its occupant was gone, yet the office stood waiting for a man who would never return.
“I’ll keep watch for any sign of Mayor Stills.” Mr. Allen perched on the thick rail near the door with his cane at the ready between his knees. “Do you want me to light the lamps for you?”
“No, I can manage without them.”
Felipe didn’t think it was dark enough to make his eyes gleam, but he kept his back to the innkeeper just in case. Moving between the pieces of furniture without touching them, Felipe searched for any signs of a struggle as Mr. Allen kept watch near the front window. Nothing seemed amiss in the front room or in the closet that doubled as gun storage. Every rack was filled and the cabinet locked, so Felipe shut the door behind him and followed the stench of sweat and piss down the hall to the empty jail cells. After being shut up for weeks, the rooms stunk. At least no one had been left in them too long after the sheriff disappeared. He fleetingly wondered what they were doing with the town drunks or those who got into fights, but if that was the worst crime they had in Aldorhaven, perhaps the sheriff really hadn’t been missed.
Returning to the front room, Felipe eyed the wastebasket he would need to pick through before turning his attention to the desk. He yanked open one drawer after another to find them crammed with all manner of junk. The papers were coated in dusty grime that might have been cigarette ash or flakes of chewing tobacco, but Felipe wasn’t willing to put them to his nose to find out. When he lifted the first pile out of its drawer, a spent bullet along with a petrified cockroach carcass slipped from the pile and tinked against the straw-scattered wood floor.
It was going to be a long afternoon.
***
As Oliver and Gwen walked out of the heart of town and made their way up Cemetery Hill, neither said a word. The plan they discussed that morning had been to check the graves of those who had risen from the dead to see if their plots had been dug up or if they had all been in mausoleums. Even after months, there might have been some evidence left behind by whomever awakened them, but it hadn’t taken long for Oliver’s mind to return to his mother. He had meant to find her in the graveyard records before they left that morning, but Gwen had beaten him to it. When Oliver arrived downstairs for breakfast, she had already finished with the book, made a map, and had Mr. Allen return it to the storeroom. Oliver could have asked for it. Heshouldhave asked to see it, but he couldn’t come up with an excuse to do so before the conversation turned elsewhere and it was too late.
Now, as they lingered outside the locked cemetery gates, their unspoken thoughts from the pharmacy thickened the air between them. Standing beside her, Oliver could see Gwen feeling her way through the tumblers as she picked the lock with her powers. Every once in a while, she hazarded a glance in his direction and didn’t say what was on her mind. Oliver hated it. He hated that they were both dancing around what he didn’t want to hear, though he hated himselfmore for grasping onto the only thing he could think of to get Gwen to drop it for now.
“Can we look for my mother’s grave while we’re here?” Oliver blurted.
The lock jerked and the chain fell to the ground with a clang as Gwen did a doubletake. For a long moment, she merely stared at him as if his question didn’t match what she had anticipated him asking. Finally, she sighed and nodded.
“Yeah, we can do that.”
The knot in Oliver’s chest loosened as she gave him one of those familiar half-sorrowful, half-affectionate looks and ushered him inside. He would happily take her exasperated sympathy if it closed the distance between them. Pulling the map from his pocket, Oliver plotted their course toward Mr. Ekland and Mrs. Lindstrom’s burial sites. As they wove through the crooked lines of meandering graves, Oliver’s gaze slid over the weather-worn headstones for any variation of Joanna. When the sky darkened and the wind howled between the trees, Gwen pulled her coat closer and shivered. The trees shook in warning, sending a volley of droplets onto the graves below. They would have to move quickly if they wanted to avoid getting drenched when the storm arrived in earnest.
“Are you disappointed that we haven’t found any actual vampires?” Oliver asked softly, stopping to check a grave with the right name but the wrong description. His mother hadn’t been born a Harrison.
“Yes and no. I think I got my hopes up a little too soon when I heard about the case, but I knew finding a real vampire was highly improbable. Revenants or whatever you want to call the dead here are pretty close to vampires, so I can probably still use this case for something. Perhaps, I’ll write an appendix or companion volume that discusses vampire-like creatures and how to tell them apart from true vampires.”
“That could be useful. I wouldn’t mind helping you with it. If you need my help that is.”
“Your explanations of decomposition, or lack of, have been very useful. Since I was able to see and smell it, my descriptions will lend a touch of firsthand experience that these kinds of scholarly books usually lack. Play your cards right, and I might add you as a contributor to my companion volume on the assorted undead.”
“I would be flattered, though if you need more firsthand experience with the dead, you could have just spent more time in the lab with me.”
“I spend plenty of time in the lab with you, Oliver Barlow. You just haven’t had any corpses that were of use to me. My research requires only the crème de la crème of dead people,” Gwen retorted in a haughty voice, pointedly turning up her nose and sniffing.
A smile broke across Oliver’s lips as he gasped in mock dismay. “How dare you insult my patients. I’ll have you know they’re all very fine corpses.”
“Your corpses pale in comparison to Aldorhaven’s.”
“Ah, yes, mine are sorely lacking in insects.”
Gwen laughed with a gag. “Touché. So according to Mr. Allen’s book, Ekland should be buried up by the tree line.”
“And so is Lindstrom.”
Glancing up the hill, Oliver could make out a mausoleum with Ekland inscribed upon the pediment and a cluster of graves about ten feet away that must have belonged to the woman’s family. The further up the hill they got, the stronger the smell of rain became. Thunder rumbled in the distance, drawing a grimace from Gwen.
“Let’s split up. You take Ekland, and I’ll take Lindstrom. If either of us sees anything, we call the other.”
Nodding, Gwen ambled up the hill toward the stately granite mausoleum. Oliver trailed his eyes over the headstones leading up to the dead woman’s grave for any sign of his mother’s name but found nothing. A low iron fence surrounded the plot of graves. The ones at the center were the oldest, dating back to the early 1700s with newer graves flanking them on all sides. Some had already been overtaken by the woods. Moss crawled over the stones likea green carpet, and lichen chewed at their names until they were scarcely recognizable while the trees looming over the graves hissed as Oliver grew closer. From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something move behind him, but when he looked, he saw only Gwen prodding at the mausoleum with her powers. He took two steps and stopped when a twig snapped behind him. Whipping around, Oliver found the graveyard empty, apart from a blackbird pecking at the base of a tree. Oliver shook his head. All the talk of murderers and the reanimated dead was getting to him.
Picking around the nearest graves, Oliver’s eyes flitted across the names of Sarah Lindstrom’s ancestors and family until he found her now empty grave only half a yard from the tree line. He eyed the dense woods suspiciously, but when the lowest branches didn’t jump out to grab him, he inched closer to Sarah Lindstrom’s headstone. The dirt around it looked undisturbed. Kneeling, Oliver tugged at the grass to see if someone had peeled away the sod, but it didn’t budge. Up close, he could see a seam in the dirt where it had been moved, just not in the way someone digging a grave would have done it. It was almost like the dirt and grass had been parted down the center and knitted back together. An earthmancer or a plantmancer could have done it, but that would require several people with powers working together to raise the dead. A conspiracy to terrorize the town would be far harder to deal with than a rogue necromancer. If that was the case and there were multiple people involved, they would need to call in more investigators.
As Oliver stood and dusted his hands on his trousers, a branch slammed hard into his back. The breath whooshed out of his lungs as he tumbled between the trees and a wave of magic so strong it seemed to penetrate his bones washed over him. Landing hard on his hands and knees, Oliver retched and coughed away the strange magic. He shut his eyes against the nausea, but when he opened them and sat back on his heels, panic lanced through him. Gone were Gwen and the cemetery, and in their place stood the endless forest of the Dysterwood.
