They were at a distance and an odd angle, which made it difficult to see exactly what was happening at the grave.
The Kincaid brothers pulled something out of the ground. Whatever it was landed at their feet with a thud. In the next instant, cries of horror sounded from the hardened criminals. They ran. Two men feared by all of London ran screaming from the grave, leaving behind every tool of their trade and whatever had come out of the coffin.
“Sandbags wouldn’t scare ’em,” Gemma said. “They’d be angry, raging, but not scared. And they wouldn’t run.”
“Much as I would love to follow their lead and run off,” Barnabus said, “I think we need to know what sent them heading for the hills. It’s somehow connected to us and the price on our heads now that they’ll know we’re not dead.”
“Oi.” She didn’t sound any happier about it than he was.
With the churchyard empty and quiet again, he inched toward the disturbed grave, Gemma keeping pace with him and holding fast to his hand. She could probably hear his heart racing. His medical schooling had included morgues and corpses. He’d treated gruesome injuries. It wasn’t the possibility of discovering something grisly that worried him.
The Kincaids weren’t afraid of anything. So what could possibly have terrified them? A feeling of foreboding washed over him with increasing force as they drew nearer the grave.
They reached the other side of the mound of disturbed dirt and saw what had emerged from that hole.
It was a body.
A body covered in dried blood, pulled from what was supposed to be an empty coffin.
“Blazes,” Baz whispered.
“Is that who I think it is?” Gemma asked.
He nodded. “That’s the Mastiff.”
Chapter 32
The Mastiff.
The corpse at their feet was the man the DPS had been chasing for months. He was the one the Kincaids were working for. The criminal who’d hired them to undertake this resurrection had just been pulled from what should have been a corpseless coffin.
“I don’t understand,” Gemma said in a frantic whisper. “Why was he in that casket? How did he get in there? Who killed him?”
“And why?” Barnabus added.
From the shadow of a nearby tree, a woman’s voice answered the question. “Because he was no longer useful.” A silhouette in a dress stepped forward, but not far enough to be seen in any detail.
“Who are you?” He didn’t bother whispering. He took Gemma’s hand and pulled her the tiniest bit behind him, unsure of the threat they were facing.
“I am the maestro,” the woman said.
“I ain’t heard of no one that goes by that name.” Gemma stepped up next to Barnabus.
“It is not my name,” the woman answered. “It is my destiny.”
The maestro. It was her role. “The Mastiff answered to you.” Barnabus felt a chill pass through him.
“Everyoneanswers to me,” she replied, calm and unperturbed but also fierce and intense. “Mine is power without limit, vengeance without end, an inescapable nightmare. All who oppose me fall.”
She sounded familiar.
“Is that why the Mastiff was in this casket?” Gemma asked her. “He weren’t supportive enough?”
“He craved power, which I offered him. And he adored me, which was exceptionally useful. But I no longer need him.”
“And so you killed him?” Barnabus demanded.
“People die all the time,” the woman said, unemotional, unconcerned. “You’re a doctor, Barnabus. You know that.”