Jeaniene Frost - One Grave at a Time

For several moments afterward, I couldn’t move. I could only cling to him, savoring every last tremor of his climax and the continual, tingling ripples from mine. Finally, my lids fluttered open. At some point, I must have closed my eyes again. We were no longer over the golden, swaying cornfields, but a patchwork of roads, thankfully too high for the streetlights to present any collision issue—or embarrassing illumination.

“Do you know where we are?” I murmured, reaching up to run my hand through his hair.

He turned his head, nuzzling me through the material of my sleeve.

“Not a clue.”

My laughter was breathy from afterglow. “Poor navigator you might be, but you are one hell of a pilot.”

His chuckle mingled with mine. The angry blare from a horn drifted up to us, a reminder of the real world waiting to intrude, but I closed my eyes and rested my head back against him.

The real world could wait a few minutes longer.

On October 26, not four hours after Bones and I put the finishing touches on the new limestone/quartz/moissanite trap, my cell phone beeped from a text. I was in the shower, rinsing suds from my hair and trying to ignore how the water seemed to get icier every day. No electricity meant no hot water. If the carbon monoxide exhaust wouldn’t kill Tyler, I’d set up a generator in the house just to be able to take a hot shower again.

I continued rinsing my hair, not rushing to read the text because it was about the time Denise would send her daily updates, letting me know everything was okay on their end. If it were urgent, she wouldn’t text. To conserve the battery in my phone, we didn’t chat verbally, and to be honest, it was easier to text back “no news” than admit out loud that we still hadn’t found the last woman. All of us watched the days count down on the calendar with increasing dread.

Kramer hadn’t been coming around as much in the past week. The knowledge that he was probably splitting his time between readying his accomplice for the woman’s kidnapping and escalating his torment of her was enough to make me feel like I had a permanent case of nausea. Unless we found her, that woman had just over a hundred hours to live.

It was just me and Bones at the house right now. Ian, Tyler, and my mom were at the Southern Hills Mall. Ian prowled about seeking his own version of food, and my mother kept watch over Tyler just in case Kramer happened to stumble upon them. Hopefully soon, my mother would follow Ian’s lead and vary her diet. I half wondered if that was why he insisted on going out so frequently and taking them, although maybe it was just a case of boredom combined with cabin fever.

After I got out of the shower and dried off with a few brisk, efficient swipes, I grabbed my cell from the countertop and read the text. My first thought was that it was gibberish. Letters, symbols, and numbers were run together without spaces, some repeating, some not. Maybe Denise’s phone got jiggled around in her purse or pants pocket and my number was redialed by mistake; I’d butt-dialed people by accident before. But this wasn’t coming from Denise’s cell. It was from Elisabeth’s number. I looked more closely at the message.

6THST5360#(SC5360WEST^THSC5360WEST6THSTSC

It took me another two rereads before I figured out the pattern. “Fifty-three sixty West Sixth Street, Sioux City,” I sounded out. Then louder, excitement running through my veins like a bolt of lightning. “Fifty-three sixty West Sixth Street, Sioux City. Holy shit, she did it! Elisabeth found her!”

But why was her message such a mess? When Elisabeth texted Francine’s address weeks ago, it had been neat and distinct. This looked like she’d been trying to text while juggling at the same time. What would cause her to send a message so garbled that she’d risk the chance of my not understanding it?

By the time Bones came into the bedroom, I’d figured it out, and I met his gaze with a mixture of hope and grimness.

“Elisabeth found her,” I repeated. “And it looks like she texted the woman’s address while trying to fight Kramer off, so Kramer knows she found her, which means he also knows that we’ll be on our way.”

Even with the direct air route we’d take, it would still be a good twenty minutes until we got to Prospect Hill, the neighborhood in Sioux City where that address derived from. Bones could fly faster, but I couldn’t, and if he burned through his power getting both us there quicker, that would mean he’d be running on less reserves when it was time to make our speedy exit. We already had to expend energy making sure we were high enough to avoid being spotted by commuters in the after-work, rush-hour traffic. It wouldn’t be fully dark for another hour, but even though the early evening was still light enough to raise our profile, waiting wasn’t an option.

It seemed like forever before we spotted the white monument that marked the Prospect Hill area. Seeing the MapQuest overview before gave us an idea of which area to land in, but obviously people didn’t have house numbers conveniently displayed on their roofs. Bones took us above where we thought her street was and zoomed downward in a straight line, landing us in the middle of some tall hedges. The ground shuddered, and our feet went ankle deep into the earth from an impact far harder than usual. I immediately crouched into a kneeling position, helping to distribute some of the force. It still hurt like hell, but with the area bordering downtown and lots of people window-shopping, seeking dinner, or otherwise strolling around, we couldn’t afford to glide to an easy landing and be spotted. With almost every cell phone having recording capabilities, we’d be on the news and Internet before you could say compromised supernatural security. Then not only would we be in deep shit with the vampire Law Guardians, but Madigan, with his facial recognition software programmed to flag my image, would also know exactly where we were.

“All right, luv?” Bones asked, shaking off any injuries from the equivalent of being dropped like a bowling ball from five thousand feet faster than I could.

“Fine,” I gritted out, wincing at the pain that shot through my back when I stood up. I might’ve saved my legs by kneeling, but my angle must’ve been wrong, because I heard several things pop in my spine upon standing. A few sharp tingles later, and the pain was gone. Nothing beat being a vampire when it came to healing abilities.

Bones took some sage out of his pockets and lit it. I did the same, careful not to let any of the burnt edges fall to the ground. There were dry, crinkled leaves everywhere, and starting a fire would be a great way to draw a lot of unwanted attention to us.

We came out of the hedges and started walking toward the nearest intersection as though we were a normal couple out for a stroll. From the mutters I picked up on, the people closest to the spot where we’d landed were wondering about the noise and the momentary vibration they’d felt, but thankfully hadn’t connected those things with two people dropping out of the sky. With how fast we’d descended, we would have been nothing more than a brief streak even to someone who’d been looking right at that spot.

“That’s Cook Street,” Bones said low, nodding at the street sign in front of us. “Sixth should be coming up . . .”

His voice trailed off, tension ringing from his aura like invisible fire alarms. I followed the direction of his stare, dread creeping up my spine.

A tunic-clad man floated in the middle of the street, white hair unmoving in the breeze. Cars drove right through him, the drivers unaware that they’d just come in contact with one of history’s most prolific serial killers. And even though he was too far away for me to see his eyes, I knew the Inquisitor was staring right at us.