“Are you sure?”
He paused and looked at me over his shoulder in a way that said, Seriously? I decided it was better to not question his judgment again and instead followed his nose like Toucan Sam on the prowl for Froot Loops. We crossed the freeway, and I couldn’t help but steal a glance at the New York skyline lit up against the mottled black of the sky. Clouds were moving in, but the fat moon was still visible like a bright white eye watching us and lighting the way.
In front of a fire station Holden came to an abrupt halt.
He didn’t sniff the air like a werewolf, but he closed his eyes and tilted his head to the side. His countenance was tight with focus, his brows knit together, and a frown deepened the lines beside his mouth.
I bit my tongue to repress the urge to ask what he smelled.
“In there. ” He pointed across the street to where a concrete-slab wall rose into a high iron fence.
I inhaled sharply. Nolan hadn’t been kidding when he said the fae would pick somewhere dark. A sense of foreboding cloaked me in a nervous chill. Behind the fence sat an old red-brick Victorian house with a turret and brown-shingled roof. It wasn’t the house that made me nervous, although old Victorians did give me the willies after I almost died in one, even if it was only a set on an amusement park lot.
It was what the house guarded that made me tense up.
Beyond the gates and the house, the heads of stone angels and the points of carved obelisks rose up in dark relief towards the purple glow of the sky. Where the moonlight caught the aged cherubs, their faces were stained with tears from decades of rain, and their features were smoothed down until they no longer looked innocent or protective. The angels all looked on to the expansive graveyard below with blank expressions. Their eyes could not see but could still cry.
He crossed the street, and I hesitated but followed after a beat.
The main gate was locked, barring those who might attempt a little late-night hooliganism. It couldn’t bar Holden and me from entering, however. He pulled himself up as though he were weightless, then balanced with his feet between the spikes and offered a hand down to me, helping me up to stand next to him.
For a moment we stood next to each other on the thin iron band stretching across the fence, steadied like tightrope walkers. His hand lingered on mine longer than need be to keep me from falling. I held my sword and didn’t try to disengage him.
“Let’s go,” I whispered, then jumped off the fence and landed in the brittle brown grass below. A second later the leaves beside me crunched softly to announce his arrival.
We rose together, and I got a good look at the graveyard for the first time. Without the fence to obscure our line of sight, the tombstones spanned for what seemed like miles. Across the darkness I saw a sign planted in front of the old red-brick house that read Calvary Cemetery. Well beyond the fields of grave markers, the expressway buzzed with traffic and the sky glowed yellow from the light reflected off the clouds.
I exhaled a hazy breath, but Holden made no such sign on the night. In spite of the distant noises and the muffled sound of Christmas celebrations from houses nearby, the graveyard was dead calm. The tombstones in front of us were as worn down as the angel faces overhead, and most bore decidedly Irish surnames.
A chill crept under my skin and knocked at my bones, trying to find purchase in the core parts of my being. Something was wrong here and I didn’t know if it was just the fae. I put my hand on Holden’s shoulder and he jerked. So I wasn’t the only one who felt uneasy here, good to know.
“Can you still smell it?”
He nodded tersely. “Even more now. ”
Judging by the flare of his nostrils and the tight, pained expression he wore, something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I didn’t ask because I wasn’t ready to know the response, and Grandmere always told me not to ask questions if I didn’t want the answer. It was the same logic that made me never ponder out loud whether or not my ass looked big in jeans.
Holden pointed down one of the footpaths that led into the heart of the cemetery. We traversed the uneven ground at a good pace, and I did my best to avoid any broken stone outcroppings or bits of crumbled angel wings that might trip me up. The sheer number of angels meant to watch over the dead gave me the willies. They all looked sad and more than a little foreboding with their wide arched wings and tear-stained cheeks. In spite of the mission at hand I kept looking up and shuddering at their hooded eyes and forlorn mouths.
Our pace picked up until Holden was moving at a jog, and when I looked back over my shoulder I couldn’t see the entrance gate or the house anymore. The New York skyline, however, was visible between the tombstones and stained-glass mausoleums.
God this place was creepy.
When Holden skidded to a stop outside one of the crypts, I almost slammed into him. I steadied myself by pressing one hand against his back, then sliding my fingers upwards so I could squeeze his shoulder. I think I meant to comfort him with the gesture, but it was more for me than for him. I needed to feel connected to something alive, or I would risk being sucked into the darkness. Holden might not be alive, but he was my best available option right then. Better a vampire than whatever lurked in the shadows behind us.
“It’s here. ”
I didn’t need him to tell me, not anymore. Mingled with the smell of old blood he’d been chasing was a heady dose of the fresh stuff, and I had no problem smelling fresh blood from this close. The building we stood in front of was about ten feet tall and made of aged limestone. It had been designed to look Roman, with two columns leading to a classic peaked roof, with carvings of angry lions and gladiators in the edifice. There were two small windows made from yellow-and-green-stained glass, but what they were meant to depict—if anything—was impossible to tell.
What set these windows apart from similar ones we’d passed was that they were lit from within. The luminescence was so slight it could have been overlooked if we weren’t standing right outside, but from our position I could discern a faint, flickering firelight making the green glass look like sun-dappled tree leaves.
Then something inside made a hard scraping sound and I heard a meek whimper.
Not waiting for Holden to act, I pushed him aside and kicked in the door. The entrance hadn’t been designed to protect against forced entry, and the lock gave way with no protest. There was a small lantern on the floor, which was the source of the light. With Holden and I in the cramped chamber, the light cast a series of jittery shadows against the walls and threw our silhouettes into the dim graveyard, where they danced and shivered in the spaces between tombs.
We were otherwise alone.
I sniffed the air again, and the smell of blood was unmistakable. We were in the right place, but there was no fae in sight and no sign of the teens. My nerves felt so jangled and raw I worried I might shake apart then and there. How could we be so close and still not find them? I could smell Penny here, the unmistakable mixture of Lo