“Here’s the thing. I need that favor cashed in tonight,” I said.

Corb growled. “You won’t find them. And you won’t be able to stop them. Why couldn’t you have just stayed out of this, Bree? This isn’t your job. It isn’t your life.”

“Already found them, thank you very much,” I quipped as I took my blade out of his shoulder. He gave a low grunt, as I wiped my blade on his shirt. Staring down at him, I didn’t like the hurt rumbling through me that he’d ended up being so like Himself. I just hadn’t wanted to see it. Or maybe I really did have a thing for assholes. “Corb, you can just shut your mouth. Also, I have to say, who needs enemies when I have family like you?”

I turned to face Tom and Louis as they raised their eyebrows at me, ignoring Corb. “Look, some very bad people took Eric, and they’re going to kill him tonight in order to open a gateway so they can bring in a big, bad demon. We have to save him.”

Tom didn’t close off his expression quickly enough, and I saw the horror there before he could keep it from me. “That’s bad.”

“How bad?” Eammon asked. “Opening a gateway is never good.”

“Tonight, the stars align with Venus and Mercury. It’s the first . . . well, it’s the start of a lot of things. If a sacrifice is done tonight, especially of something like a bigfoot, it will set us up for any number of potential problems. Zombies. A new plague of yellow fever. Power shifting from one person to another. That gateway could mean a great deal of darkness.” Tom’s eyes closed as he spoke.

All of that sounded bad, but I felt in my gut he was holding something back. Not that it mattered, did it? If we saved Eric, then we were good to go. No zombies. No gateways. “Then we need to go now.”

“I will stay with the boy,” Louis said. “He will need someone here when he wakes.”

That made sense. Luke had always been nervous around Sarge—how was he going to handle being just like him? Sarge. Shoot, was he still waiting for us up top? I turned toward the stairs and made my feet move.

“Where are they doing the ceremony, do you know?” Tom said.

“Bonaventure.” I led the way up the stairs, adrenaline fading until I reached the top and saw the human form of a very naked, unmoving Sarge, flat on his face.

Eammon pushed me from behind. “Why did you stop? Lass . . . oh. Did you do this?” He made his way around me to Sarge’s body. “He’s still alive, but barely. You need to pull your weapon out. It’s draining him.”

I forced my feet over to Sarge and pulled my knife. It came out with a sucking pop that made my stomach roll. I wiped the blade on the grass and tucked it away in my other thigh sheath. The blades had saved me more than once now.

Darv came up the stairs, Corb fighting to walk ahead of him, with his still-bound hands and feet. It made for a rather awkward bunny hop move that he had to do up eighteen steps. I couldn’t have bunny hopped up two of them. Darv made a motion at Sarge’s body, as if he were massaging the air, and a coil of what could only be magic, blue and red lines, whipped out from his fingers and then spooled out and around the werewolf’s body, lifting him just above the grass, still face down. “I’ll take them both. They’ll be at the fort. You won’t have to worry about them any longer.”

Corb struggled, his eyes suddenly wide with what could only be fear. “No! Not the fort! Darv, not the fort!”

Darv dragged the two men toward a large black van I hadn’t noticed. He shoved them in the back while Corb continued to freak out (I could hear him yelling even after the doors were shut), then reversed over several graves and drove away.

Tom and Eammon stood on either side of me. “Sarge put the others out with a spell that wasn’t one of Tom’s, so he’d bought it from someone else,” Eammon said. “Smelled heavily like fish, so I assumed again it was Crash and his pet. Sarge no doubt did it so the trainees wouldn’t tell us it was him and Corb that knocked them out.”

“Not Crash then after all?” I asked. I wanted to quip about what you get when you make assumptions, but I managed to keep it to myself. I’d save that one for later.

“Oh, he’d come by too, earlier,” Eammon grumbled. “But he did nothing but just throw a fit, and then he left. I thought it was him when the fighting started. Assumed.”

“Why would they set me up like that? To make you angry with me?” That made little sense, at least to me. “And then there’s Joe.”

“He’s missing too,” Tom said, and I shook my head.

“Joe was working with Corb,” Eammon said. “He’d be here if he weren’t dead.”

I glanced at Eammon, thinking it through. “Joe was out watching Eric when I got there, and then he shot at Eric as I was trying to get him away from the demon who’d appeared. The demon took exception and I think it ate Joe.” That was my gut instinct anyway. My guess.

Eammon’s mouth dropped open and he spluttered. “You survived a demon?”

“Why is that so hard to believe?” I said, irritation flowing through me and out my mouth along with the words.

Eammon held up both hands in mock surrender. “Not because of what you’re thinking. One of us, fully trained and comfortable in the shadows, would struggle with a demon. Joe getting eaten is less surprising than you surviving.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell them it was the second demon I’d dealt with. Nope, I was going to hold that close and let them underestimate me.

“Joe was trained by Corb,” Tom said. “Easy to believe he’d been working with them. Helping them keep track of Eric. Damn it, I can’t believe we didn’t see it coming!”

Eammon rubbed a hand over his face. “All of this—the fight at the Hollows, tying us up after, chasing you off, it was done to keep us busy, and not looking at what was happening,” Eammon growled. I looked down at him.

I shook my head. “I don’t understand why Sarge and Corb would want me out of the way, or at the worst, try to make it look like it was my fault that the others got hurt by Crash?”

“Corb liked you,” Tom said. “He was worried you’d be hurt. If you were kicked out . . . then you would be safe, wouldn’t you? Maybe this was how he figured he’d make you leave and keep the rest of us busy all in one fell swoop.”

I didn’t like the way my guts twisted with that statement. It meant I couldn’t just call Corb the bad guy and let it go at that. He’d been trying to protect me in his own twisted way. Was that possible?

“What about Crash then?” I said. “He made the knife they are going to need to kill Eric with. Which they can’t do because,” I fished the knife out of my bag and held it up carefully by the unfinished tang.

Eammon let out a low whistle. “Good that you have it, but they could use another knife. It just won’t be as effective. If Crash got caught up in something even he isn’t strong enough to deal with, then they’ll be too strong for us to deal with on our own.” He looked at me. “You’re sure it’s Bonaventure and not somewhere else? There are a lot of places that can work for grave magic. That seems almost . . . brassy to head out there.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” I said.

Only I didn’t know for sure because I hadn’t checked the place out. I was going on what Jinx had told me. A trickster who’d given me the information in exchange for a signed book that she’d promptly eaten. Shoot, I hoped I was right.

I hoped that Jinx wasn’t playing with me, because it could cost Eric his life.

23

Tom drove the three of us to Bonaventure in his low-slung sedan that had a skeleton etched into the side. “Not real subtle,” I said as I ran a hand over the stitched leather interior. The stitches themselves were all bones and swirls that my brain tried to tell me were magical symbols.

“Around here, it’s no big deal,” Tom said. “Tourists just think I’m one of the guides.”

“He does it to impress the ladies,” Eammon shot at him and they laughed like there was nothing wrong, but I could feel the energy pouring off the two of them.

I looked from one to the other. “You two are nervous, huh?”

Tom let out a slow breath. “Louis didn’t just stay behind to watch over Luke. This is a night for the dead. That is Louis’s magic. The problem is there is a bit of madness there too. Old vampire blood runs through the necromancers and if the gateway being opened needs a lot of blood, it could literally set him off.”

I nodded as if yes, of course, that made total logical sense. I mean, it did in a very weird way, but there was still part of me that was like whoa, nelly, this was not what I was expecting.

Bonaventure sprawled out in front of us, the large wrought iron gate soundly locked, the tall trees weeping with Spanish moss blowing in the night air.

“Keys, anyone?” I asked my companions.

“We can climb over,” Tom said with more than a little hesitation.

I shook my head. “I’ll pick it.” I grabbed my purse and rummaged around until I found the picks. I settled them into the lock, feeling the tumblers quickly. “They keep it well-greased, makes it easy.”

A satisfying click, and I slid through the now-open gate. “It’s a big cemetery,” I said. “You want to split up?”

I turned to see Eammon smiling. “See, Tom? I told you she was a natural.”

“I wasn’t sure she’d remember her gran’s training,” Tom said. “Her gran’s spell that she put on Breena was something else. Celia told me what she’d done up there in Seattle all those years ago, and I wasn’t sure anything could break that spell.”

Ignoring them both, I started off to the left of the gate, working my way around that edge of the cemetery. Night had fallen, but it wasn’t fully dark, so I didn’t bother with the flashlight. It would also be a terrible idea to alert the demons or whoever of our presence.