Once there, I jumped off to grab one of the flashlights I'd left on the grass and let Zed get to work. With the help of the backhoe, it was only another half an hour until the bucket scraped something hard.
I waved my arms at Zed, and he lifted the scoop back out of the hole before shutting the engine off.
"Jesus," he muttered, standing beside me as I peered down at the dirt-covered coffin six feet below us. "I'll do the rest by hand." He climbed into the hole. "Hand me the shovel?"
I did as he asked, then crouched on the edge, watching as he cleared dirt away from the top half of the casket, just enough that we might be able to open it, seeing as it was conveniently a split lid.
"You ready?" he asked, peering up at me with his hand on the edge of the lid.
I nodded, wordless. I needed to know.
Zed heaved, but the lid didn't budge.
"What the shit?" he muttered, annoyed. "Pass me a light? There must be a catch or something."
I snorted a dark laugh. "To keep the corpse inside if it came back to life? Creepy as hell. Here." I handed a flashlight down to him, and he inspected the side of the coffin.
He fumbled around and muttered curses for a moment, then all of a sudden, the lid came free in his grip. It was so sudden that Zed lost his balance and fell backward onto his ass, giving me a clear and unobstructed view of the interior.
My vision swam and my whole damn body went weak with terror. Our plan to collect a DNA sample was pointless. There was no skeleton or decaying corpse inside at all. There was... nothing.
"Oh shit," Zed breathed, and I couldn't have agreed more.
33
The trip home was somber to say the least. We didn't bother filling the grave in again because what was the fucking point? Even if we had, it would have been pretty damn obvious the five year old grave had recently been dug up. But more to the point, Chase wasn't in there. He wasn't in there... which meant he was, what? Still alive? Or just that he was buried elsewhere?
My head hurt from more than just the mild concussion.
Pulling my phone out, I brought up my contacts list and found the number for someone who had firsthand experience surviving a supposedly fatal gunshot.
"Hades," he answered after a couple of moments. "This is a surprise. What can I do for you?"
I drew a long breath before replying, meeting Zed's worried gaze as he glanced at me. He was driving, and I had the phone on speaker.
"Steele. You got shot in the chest last year and lived to tell the tale," I said, chewing my thumbnail as I considered my words. "What do you think the odds are of someone surviving a bullet to the head?"
Max Steele—one of the few people I considered more friend than acquaintance—made a sound like he was thinking. "Like a graze?" he eventually asked. "I know for sure that's possible."
"No," I replied with a grimace. "I mean a .44 bullet right in the middle of his fucking face, point-blank."
He huffed a laugh. "Pretty fucking bad, I'd say. His brain would likely resemble scrambled eggs. I got shot in the chest, but it just missed the good shit enough that I could get patched up in surgery. There's not much chance of missing important shit with a bullet to the brain, you know?"
I let out a long sigh. "Yeah, that's what I thought too." I didn't even know if that's what I wanted to hear or not.
"What's this about, anyway?" Steele asked. "Or do I not want to know?"
I exchanged a look with Zed. Should he know? He had been involved in the Timberwolf massacre, after all.
"You don't want to know," Zed answered for me, sounding grim. "But you might wanna dust off your weapons, just in case."
Steele scoffed. "As if I let them get dusty." Then he paused, and there was the sound of tapping on a keyboard in the background. "Look, I don't know if this helps, but there has been a recorded case of a woman being shot with a .44 in a drive-by shooting. Somehow, the bullet shattered against her skull, and she barely even needed stitches. So... yeah, I guess it's possible. Likely? Hell no. Impossible? Also no. Nothing is impossible; you guys know that."
I groaned, rubbing a dirt-covered hand across my forehead. That definitely wasn't what I wanted to hear.
"Amazing," I muttered, dread rolling through me in waves. "Now would probably be a great time to take a vacation." It was the same advice I'd given Demi, and while I didn't care that much about Steele and his family, I also didn't want to see them dead. They were too useful.
He just laughed, though. "That's funny. I never knew you were funny, Hades."
Zed smirked. "It's a new thing apparently."
"Screw you, Zayden," I snapped, scowling at him. I was quietly pleased at Steele's response, though, given how much assistance I'd provided when his girl was in trouble last year.
"I've been looking for an excuse to buy new guns," Steele commented, like he was already online, shopping. "Just say the word, and we've got your back."
I let out a small, silent sigh of relief. We'd teamed up once before to slaughter my whole family and Chase's, and we were one hell of a team.
"Appreciate it," Zed replied. "Stay alert around SGPD right now too. They're no longer ours."
"Damn," Steele muttered, "that was convenient while it lasted."
"Tell me about it," I said with a sigh. I ended the call and gave Zed a long look. "What are the actual odds that Chase was a one in ten million who could survive a bullet to the face, then manage to crawl out of the Lockhart mansion before it went up in a ball of flame? Then also, somehow, fake his death?"
Zed grimaced. "Like Steele said, nothing is impossible, right? Someone has to be that point zero one percent case; why not him?"
I groaned and ran my hands over my face. "Fuck it all to hell and back. I'm so screwed."
Zed dug his fingers into my knee. "Nope, you're not. We are. What is it that Seph says? Ride or die?"
I snorted an inappropriate laugh at his attempt to use slang. He wasn't fucking wrong, though; he was my ride or die. Except I had the horrible feeling our ride was just about finished.
"I'll feel a hell of a lot better when I've got my own eyes on Seph," I admitted, chewing my thumbnail again as I stared out the window. We weren't far from Shadow Grove now, but my anxiety kept building. "This whole thing started when Chase put her in danger."
Zed gave me a worried look from the corner of his eye, then shook his head. "It started a long time before that, Dare, and you know it. But yeah, I'm worried he'll go for Seph too. Maybe text Cass and check in, but we'll be back in twenty minutes anyway."
Not wanting to acknowledge his comment, I did as he suggested and shot Cass a message to make sure all was still okay at my apartment building.
He replied almost immediately with a thumbs up. Yep, man of few words, right there.
Zed and I drove the rest of the way back in silence, both lost in our own thoughts and haunted by the memories of our past that had been so uncomfortably reawakened.
I couldn't spot Cass's bike as we pulled into the street outside my building, but that was no great shock. He often stayed out of sight so Seph wouldn't know she was being watched. It saved him the drama of her throwing a temper tantrum that no one trusted her.