A glance at my slowly dying phone made me wish we’d just untied Feish and Crash and hurried away. The numbers blinked dully up at me. Eleven thirty. Thirty minutes before midnight. Thirty minutes, and Eric’s life would be taken from him, and whatever magic was needed from him would be woven into a spell that was no doubt dark. Who would know where Eric was?

“Corb!” I shot forward in my seat. “Is there any way we can get smarmy Darv to let us talk to him?”

Eammon handed me his phone. “You can try. I may be a leprechaun, but luck doesn’t seem to be on my side lately.”

I opened his phone and found Darv’s number, then dialed it into mine.

It rang twice before he picked up. “Eammon, do you have news?”

“Not Eammon, Bree,” I said. “I need you to put Corb on the line. Now.”

“You aren’t the boss of me,” he snapped. Like a freaking child!

I gripped the phone. “If we don’t find the bigfoot, and this spell happens, any number of terrible things could come of it. Do you want to explain to your other council members that you got pissy and that’s why zombies are now roaming the streets of Savannah? Or that there’s some monstrous gate that is allowing demons to wander through on vacation? That’s going to take tourism to a whole new level.”

He was quiet for just a moment. “Zombies. Can’t your necromancer handle that?”

“I’m using it as an example,” I bit the words out, trying not to sound snarky because I needed him to help. Even though I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle him.

“No, I won’t help you,” he said finally, and the little turd hung up on me!

“What?” I yelled at the phone and then snapped it shut. I put my hand on my purse, resting it there, thinking that I needed someone who knew the graveyards, someone who could . . .

“Oh my God! Pull over!” I had someone who’d help. I just had to get him out of my purse.

24

Tom yanked the car to the side of the road, and I scrambled out and onto the grassy side median. I dug through my purse until I found the single bone that was Robert. I put it on the grass. I didn’t really know if there was a magic word, or some other less obvious way to make him appear, so I went with simple. “Robert, I need your help.”

His body grew from that single bone until he was just there, swaying next to me, his long hair covering a face I still hadn’t fully seen. “Friend,” he whispered.

“You are my friend, and I think you can help me. Can you find . . .” Hell, I didn’t know if he would understand what a bigfoot was. And I doubted he could smell, so there would be no tracking that way. But he knew graveyards, and I was hoping he had some sort of connection to the burial places of the other dead.

“Ask him if he can find a powerful ceremony happening in a cemetery.” I looked past him to see Crash and Feish walking toward us on the side of the road. How in the world had they caught up to us? Crash’s hair was disheveled, and he looked irritated as a bear woken from hibernation, but his words made sense. I still glared at him as I spoke to Robert.

“Robert, can you find a ceremony happening in a cemetery? A powerful one.” Please, please, please.

Robert slowly turned and faced back toward Bonaventure, then started moving at a far quicker pace than I had thought possible for him with his swaying walk.

I followed, because not only was it the only lead I had, I trusted him. Yeah, I trusted a freaking skeleton.

My life was about as weird as you could get lately.

A hand on my shoulder stopped me, and Eammon turned me around. “Corb lives near Centennial Park. There are a lot of ceremonies out here.” He let me go and pointed toward Bonaventure. “Most of them in Bonaventure are benign. The ones in Centennial, not so much. He was supposed to be watching the park for anything that shouldn’t be happening. It makes more sense that it would be there, that he was distracting us all by acting like nothing was wrong.”

Eammon was probably right, but Robert was in point mode, like a dead golden retriever. I felt it again, the sense that I could trust him, and I was going to stick with my gut, just like my gran had said.

This was not a time for indecision. “You and Tom go to Centennial. I’ll stay here with Robert.”

Eammon and Tom both leaned to one side. Tom shook his head. “Who is Robert?”

I looked at them, and then looked at Crash. “You can see him, right?”

Crash nodded. “But not everyone can.” He didn’t explain why that was, and I didn’t have time to ask. Eric didn’t have time.

I pushed Eammon in the direction of the car. “Go, we don’t have a lot of time, and this is the best we can do for Eric.”

Just like that, I split up from them again, only this time Crash stood in my way. Well, not quite in my way.

More like to one side, watching me. “I’ll come with you. Seeing as I owe you. For releasing me from bonds that Eammon would have left me in.”

I shrugged and hurried after Robert, who hadn’t slowed his swaying walk down the road. He slid through the iron slats of the gate and kept on walking. We’d left the gates open, and I slipped back through.

Feish stopped at the gate. “I wait here.”

There was no time to argue. “Robert, can we go faster?”

Ten minutes gone. Twenty left.

Robert’s swaying sped up and I jogged to keep up as he wove his way through the massive graveyard, beelining it for the edge that led along the water. The unnamed graveyard that was the Hollows hideout was directly across from us—across the water, that is.

As quickly as he’d started this trek through Bonaventure, he slowed and came to a stop. Crash put a hand on my hip and tugged me to one side. I grabbed at him to keep from falling, which was my excuse for finding myself pressed up against him, hands on his chest. Just a flash of touch, but it was enough to remind me that while he might be a bad guy, a damn criminal, my stupid hormones didn’t care.

All they wanted was to have me mount up and ride that pony off into the sunset.

I tried to push away from him. One of his hands tightened on my hip, the other lifted to his lips.

Only when I stopped struggling did I hear the low chanting. How the hell had we not noticed before?

“Did you know they were here?” I whispered.

He shook his head. “They’re cloaked.”

Like freaking Star Wars. Or maybe that’s Star Trek? I got them mixed up.

I held still and listened to the words roll over me. Not Latin, they were . . . tribal was the only word I could come up with.

“Hoodoo,” Crash whispered. “Grave magic.”

I turned so my back was against him and I could look across the graveyard sprawled out in front of me. There was a tiny speck of light, so small that I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been looking for it.

Then again, I might have, seeing as Robert was now going straight for it.

“Robert,” I whispered as loud as I dared, and he paused in his forward movement. Crash tried to hold me still, but I elbowed him and dropped down to my hands and knees, crawling across the graveyard, using the tombs as cover. A slapping sound made me look over my shoulder.

Crash was on his hands and knees, following suit. Most undignified, and it stupidly made me like him more.

Undignified, he looked more real.

Idiot hormones.

I looked toward the light, to where Robert waited, silhouetted. Three figures stood with their hands above their heads, raised to the sky. In a simultaneous sweeping motion, they brought their fingers down and brushed them across the ground. The air crackled all around us and it was the strangest sensation.

Like the power they were calling called to me too. I wanted to stand and go to them, to lie down in the middle of their circle and let that magic wash over my naked skin, let it burn through me in a cleansing I wanted like nothing else. I ached for it.

A hand clamped on my ankle, and I shook Crash off, dragging myself forward as the chanting grew louder. And with the chanting came waves of that power that made me catch my breath as though I were being dunked in a not-unpleasant bath of hot and cold water. My skin prickled and danced with the strength of it.

I was right at the edge of their circle, tucked in behind the single gravestone big enough to hide me. Robert stood beside me, and I was fairly certain they lacked the ghost-seeing ability. That or they were so focused, they just hadn’t noticed him. I closed my eyes for a quick second and then leaned out around the stone to get a good look at things.

Eric was trussed up in the middle, and the bigfoot was staring in my direction. Which meant he saw me. His eyes immediately flushed with tears.

The three around him were not what I’d expected.

The first was a man with the palest of skins, so white that his hair and eyes were white too. An albino.

The second was also a man, but his skin was as dark as the night around him.

It was the third figure who shocked the crap out of me. Seriously, I had to clamp my legs together, so I didn’t let out a stomach-clenching toot.

Hattie—Gran’s best friend, sweet old lady, wonderful person my whole life—led the chanting in a long, flowing dress, her hands covered in rings and bracelets, the gray poof of her hair bobbing with her moves. Her body moved stiffly, but there was no hesitation as she chanted through the litany that would bring the spell to fruition.

My gran’s best friend was at the center of this? She wanted to kill Eric? Suddenly the smell of dead fish at Crash’s made sense. It wasn’t from Feish being hurt; it was from the stink of Hattie’s canning.

Someone brushed past me and in my shock, I didn’t move.

More accurately, Crash brushed past me.

The chanting slowed and I froze in place as he stepped out into the circle. What the hell was he doing? No, scratch that, I knew exactly what he was doing.

“Hattie,” Crash said with a soft venom that did nothing to make him less scary. “You had your men attack me.”

“Oh, lovely boy,” she crooned. “I need that knife you were making. I thought you were hiding it from me.”