He opened the door of the toolshed, careful to make no noise. She slipped out beside him. He closed it again. They were alone. The small slice of moon hanging in the cloudy sky provided just enough light to carefully navigate by but not enough to illuminate them. They followed the edge of the wall, which would take them behind the chapel but also spill them out onto the street eventually. They were one dim walk away from freedom.
They hadn’t gone more than a few steps, placing them behind the chapel, when the sound of tools stopped Barnabus short.
“Sounds like a shovel,” he murmured.
“The church’s gravedigger ain’t going to be working at this time of night,” Gemma whispered.
“Would a resurrectionist ply his trade this early in the evening?” It was dark, yes, but it was hardly the middle of the night.
“Not unless they ain’t got any other choice.”
The sounds of digging continued. Barnabus didn’t want to think overly much about what that meant. Whether he put a name to the danger or not, he couldn’t deny it was past time to get out of the churchyard.
They inched their way along the wall. As they emerged from the back end of the chapel, keeping to the darkest shadows, Barnabus searched the churchyard, dimly lit by moonlight. He didn’t need to look long.
Two men stood over a grave, a pile of dirt beside them. They had made a lot of progress. The dirt appeared loose, not clumps like it would have been if the grave weren’t a very new one.
“That’s ours,” Barnabus said in a tense whisper.
“The wall, Baz.” Gemma’s strained whisper was filled with worry. “On the corner of the chapel.”
At about waist level, smudged in black was a single, long vertical line followed by aK, then a shorter vertical line and anotherK. Barnabus had never seen the Kincaid mark look that way, had never heard Gemma describe it like this.
“What does that mean?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
“They’re both here. They’re digging me up.”
He’d thought the biggest obstacles were behind them. They’d managed to escape closed coffins and a hearse that was being watched. All of that would be for nothing if Silas and Arlo were nearby.
“They are going to discover there is nothing in those caskets but sandbags.”
Running now would get them away from the imminent threat, but the Kincaids would know they were alive. The hunt would never stop.
“We cain’t just run,” Gemma said. “There’s a bit of the wall up ahead that ain’t in shadow. We’d risk being seen.”
“We’ll wait here,” Barnabus said. “They’ll find an empty coffin and go searching the streets. We can leave after they do.”
“And go where?” Gemma asked. “They’ll start hurting people again. All this, and it won’t change nothing.”
He had no words of reassurance. They had to stay where they were, waiting and watching while all the effort they’d made was undone.
The shoveling stopped.
“They’ve reached a coffin,” she whispered. “I don’t know if it’s yours or mine.”
Wood splintered. Resurrecting a corpse without fully digging up the coffin meant breaking the lid. This wasn’t an endeavor they were attempting to hide, then. Since the Mastiff did this sort of thing to send a message, it made sense the Kincads wouldn’t have been careful about their work.
The taller of the men watched as the other tossed aside his pry bar.
“They have it open.” Gemma’s voice quivered. “They’re seeing an empty coffin. They know.”
The taller brother fetched what looked like a length of rope from a bag. The two of them lowered it into the hole they’d created.
“That don’t make sense,” she said. “The rope’s for hooking around the arms of the body and pulling it out. But there ain’t a stiff inside. Are they trying to pull out a sandbag?”
“Unlikely,” Barnabus said.
“But that’s our plot,” Gemma said. “And that soil’s fresh. It cain’t be any coffin but one of ours, and we’re not in ’em.”