Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [91]
Hell, I’m mostly dead already and I whispered back, “Okay. Can you see all right? I’ve got a flashlight back in the car.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
I took him at his word and followed him along the unmowed rows and stepped sharply past fallen monuments and dismembered cherubs. The cemetery was old, but it wasn’t that old. If you forced me to take a guess, I’d say that the oldest graves were dug right around the turn of the twentieth century, but some of the graves were newer. You could tell, because the monuments were flatter.
I tripped down into a pit created when someone’s casket had collapsed, there under the sod. “Pardon me,” I mumbled.
“What?”
Drat his hearing. I said, “Nothing.”
But yes, I had begged the pardon of a corpse. Believe me when I tell you that I know how stupid this is, but people who’ve been dead a long time freak me out. Fresh corpses? No big thing. I’ve created more than a few of them in my time. But moldering old bodies, left in the ground to mulch themselves into dust? I shudder to consider it. And on those rare occasions that I traipse through graveyards (and believe me, they are rare), my obsessive compulsions become extra-ludicrous. I cannot bear the thought of walking over anybody’s … well … body.
It feels so fucking impolite, you know? And worse than that, mostly these old folks are buried on a grid system of sorts, and once I know there’s a grid I can’t keep the OCD on a leash. Step on a crack and break your mother’s back? Step on a grave and horrifying things might befall you, or maybe not, because, like, who’s going to do the befalling? I know. It doesn’t rhyme. But that’s what it is, and that’s how I roll—awkwardly, and mumbling like a lunatic past the cracked and crooked stones.
“Are you still apologizing to the dead people?”
“No,” I told him.
“Because it sounds like that’s what you’re doing.”
“Shut up. And where’s—” I almost said, “your sister’s fake grave?” but I thought that might annoy him. I tried to think of some nicer way to put it, since I was relying on him to find it, but he beat me to the punch.
“Almost there. See? Under that tree.”
“Awesome,” I grumbled.
“Why?”
I approached the stone and accepted one of the shovels. “Because it means tree roots. Harder to dig through. I assume.” I had to assume it. I’d never tried to dig up a grave before, so this was new turf for me.
I suppose it bears mentioning that I kind of lied just now because I have dug up a real one. But that’s a long story, and the grave was so old I justified my actions by calling it “archaeology.” Which may or may not have been fair. And it was practically out in the desert. No tree roots.
Anyway.
The marker was simple, just the poor girl’s name and the dates she was born and apparently died. Nothing but a little dash in the middle, marking the rest. And not even a body underneath—nothing to be commemorated. The whole thing felt achingly futile.
Adrian stared down at the little patch.
I stood on the other side of it, facing him, mirroring his posture with my shovel. One of us had to be the first to dig, but I decided that it shouldn’t be me. So I waited for him. He didn’t move.
He said, “The last time I saw her, she was like you.”
I knew what he meant, even though he wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at the ground with an expression I couldn’t really read. It might have been as simple as sadness, or as complicated as nostalgia. He was still quiet, so I said, “That’s how you knew, I guess. When we first met. You knew what I was, because you’d seen your sister.”
He didn’t nod, but he didn’t have to. “She came to me for help. Showed up while I was home on leave, visiting with my mom and dad. I’d shut myself up in my bedroom, getting ready to call it a night. The window was open. I closed it. And when I turned around, there she was … looking like … looking wrong. Looking dead.”
I assumed that anything I had to say would be unwelcome, so I kept