A sound drew my attention. A thin hooded figure, masked like they were off to an early carnival party, stared back at me. They didn’t move like they were dead. Too slow. Too human. And draugar weren’t big on masks.
“Hey!” My voice seemed too loud. “You. What are you . . .”
The figure ran, and several other voices suddenly rang out. Young voices. Teens inside the cemetery.
“Shit cookies!” I ran after the masked person. Who in the name of all reason would be in among the graves at night? I ran through the rows of graves, looking for evidence of waking as I went.
“Bitch!”
The masked figure was climbing over the wall with a ladder, the chain sort you use in home fire-emergencies. Two teens tried to grab the person. One kid was kneeling, hand gripping his shoulder in obvious pain.
And there, several feet away, was Marie and Edward Chevalier’s grave. The soil was disturbed, as if a pack of excited dogs had been digging. The person in the mask was not the dead one in the nearby grave. There was a recently dead draugr.
And kids.
I glanced back at the teens.
A masked stranger, a dead security guard, a draugr, and kids. This was a terrible combination.
The masked person dropped something and pulled a gun. The kids backed away quickly, and the masked person glanced at me before scrambling the rest of the way over the wall—all while awkwardly holding a gun.
“Are you okay?” I asked the kids, even as my gaze was scanning for the draugr.
“She stabbed Gerry,” the girl said, pointing at the kid on the ground.
The tallest of the teens grabbed the thing the intruder dropped and held it up. A syringe.
“She?” I asked.
“Lady chest,” the tall one explained. “When I ran into her, I felt her—”
“Got it.” I nodded, glad the intruder with the needle was gone, but a quick glance at the stone by the disturbed grave told me that a fresh body had been planted there two days ago. That was the likely cause of the security guard’s missing face. I read the dates on the stone: Edward was not yet dead. Marie was.
I was seeking Marie Chevalier.
“Marie?” I whispered loudly as the kids talked among themselves. The last thing I needed right now was a draugr arriving to gnaw on the three dumb kids. “Oh, Miss Marie? Where are you?”
Marie wouldn’t answer, even if she had been a polite Southern lady. Draugr were like big infants for the first decade and change: they ate, yelled, and stumbled around.
“There’s a real one?” the girl asked.
I glanced at the kids. I was calling out a thing that would eat them if they had been alone with it, and they seemed excited. Best case was a drooling open-mouthed lurch in my direction. Worst case was they all died.
“Go home,” I said.
Instead they trailed behind me as I walked around, looking for Marie. I passed by the front gate—which was now standing wide open.
“Did you do that?” The lock had been removed. The pieces were on the ground. Cut through. Marie was not in the cemetery.
Shaking heads. “No, man. The ladder the bitch used was ours."
Intruder. With a needle. Possibly also the person who left the gate open? Had someone wanted Marie Chevalier released? Or was that a coincidence? Either way, a face-gnawer was loose somewhere in the city, one of the who-knows-how-many draugar that hid here or in the nearby suburbs or small towns.
I pushed the gates closed and called it in to the police. “Broken gate at Cypress Grove. Cut in pieces.”
“Miss Crowe,” the woman on dispatch replied. “Are you injured?”
“No. The lock was cut. Bunch of kids here.” I shot them a look. “Said it wasn’t them.”
“I will send a car,” she said. A longer than normal pause. “Why are you there, Miss Crowe?”
I smothered a sigh. It complicated my life that so many of the cops recognized me, that dispatch did, that the ER folks at the hospital did. It wasn’t like New Orleans was that small.
“Do you log my number?” I asked. “Or is it my voice?”
Another sigh. Another pause. She ignored my questions. “Details?”
“I was checking on a grave here. It’s intact, but the cemetery gate’s busted,” I explained.
“I noted that,” she said mildly. “Are the kids alive?”
“Yeah. A person in a mask tried to inject one of them, and a guard inside is missing a lot of his face. No draugr here now, but the grave of Marie and Edward Chevalier is broken out. I’m guessing it was her that killed the guard.”
The calm tone was gone. “There’s a car about two blocks away. You and the children—”
“I’m good.” I interrupted. “Marie’s long gone, I guess. I’ll be sure the kids are secure, but—"
“Miss Crowe! You don’t know if she’s still there or nearby. You need to be relocated to safety, too.”
“Honest to Pete, you all need to worry a lot less about me,” I said.
She made a noise that reminded me of my mother. Mama Lauren could fit a whole lecture in one of those “uh-huh” noises of hers. The woman on dispatch tonight came near to matching my mother.
“Someone cut the lock,” I told dispatch. “What we need to know is why. And who. And if there are other opened cemeteries.” I paused. “And who tried to inject the kid.”
I looked at them. They were in a small huddle. One of them dropped and stomped the needle. I winced. That was going to make investigating a lot harder.
Not my problem, I reminded myself. I was a hired killer, not a cop, not a detective, not a nanny.
“Kid probably ought to get a tox screen and tetanus shot,” I muttered.
Dispatch made an agreeing noise, and said, “Please try not to ‘find’ more trouble tonight, Miss Crowe.”
I made no promises.
When I disconnected, I looked at the kids. “Gerry, right?”
The kid in the middle nodded. White boy. Looking almost as pale as me currently. I was guessing he was terrified.
“Let me see your arm.”
He pulled his shirt off. It looked like the skin was torn.
“Do not scream,” I said. My eyes shifted into larger versions of a snake’s eyes. I knew what it looked like, and maybe a part of me was okay with letting them see because nobody would believe them if they did tell. They were kids, and while a lot had changed in the world, people still doubted kids when they talked.
More practically, though, as my eyes changed I could see in a way humans couldn’t.
Green. Glowing like a cheap neon light. The syringe had venom. Draugr venom. It wasn’t inside the skin. The syringe was either jammed or the kid jerked away.
“Water?”
One of the kids pulled a bottle from his bag, and I washed the wound. “Don’t touch the fucking syringe.” I pointed at it. “Who stomped on it? Hold your boot up.”
I rinsed that, too. Venom wasn’t the sort of thing anyone wanted on their skin unless they wanted acid-burn.
“Venom,” I said. “That was venom in the needle. You could’ve died. And”—I pointed behind me—“there was a draugr here. Guy got his face chewed off.”
They were listening, seeming to at least. I wasn’t their family, though. I was a blue-haired woman with some weapons and weird eyes. The best I could do was hand them over to the police and hope they weren’t stupid enough to end up in danger again tomorrow.