Jeaniene Frost - One Grave at a Time

“I won’t listen to any more of your lies, unclean thing,” she hissed. Then she drove about a hundred yards before pulling off and parking in a darker section off the shoulder. My brows lifted. Kramer couldn’t be so dumb as to meet us here, could he?

“Is this the place, or did you forget where we’re supposed to go?”

Sarah took the keys and got out, tapping them on the roof of the car in a nervous staccato rhythm. “Kramer says you will fly me to where he is.”

Uh-oh. I didn’t look around for the ghost I knew Bones had sent here, but that was my first instinct. If I flew, Elisabeth wouldn’t be able to follow me, and that would mess up the rest of our plans.

Had Sarah seen me fly? No, Bones had snatched me off that street and flown both of us to War Eagle Park. Kramer shouldn’t have seen me fly, either, because Bones had flown me when we picked up Francine, too. Maybe he was just sending Sarah on a fishing expedition.

“Not all vampires can fly. I’m too new to have that power yet,” I told her, not moving from my seat.

Those keys banged harder on the roof. “You’re lying again. Kramer told me he saw you fly near a cave in Ohio. You will fly me to him, witch, or he will know you betrayed him, and those other witches will pay your penalty.”

My teeth ground together. That was right; I’d flown with Bones when we evacuated my mother, Tyler, and our pets from the cave in Ohio. We’d thought Kramer had left because the slaughter of Madigan’s soldiers had stopped, but the sneaky little shit must’ve been hanging around watching us. And he obviously suspected me of having ghost allies tailing me tonight to insist that I fly to him instead of letting Sarah drive me. Maybe I was wrong, and he didn’t think I was blinded by a vain desire to defeat him all by myself. That, or he was too careful to risk it.

Once I arrived, it would take several hours for Elisabeth and Fabian to locate me by concentrating on my fading power. Kramer had to know how long it took him to reach me that way, so he’d know he had a good chunk of time to work within. Goddamn ghost was covering all his bases.

I thought about how much my borrowed abilities had faded. Then I thought about all the valid dangers I’d listed if we didn’t manage to defeat Kramer sooner rather than later. There had to be a way to take Kramer on without turning my back on Bones and the others.

Sarah banged again on the roof. “I’m not waiting any longer. If you don’t do as he says, I’m leaving.”

Oh, I wanted to take her high in the sky, all right. And then drop her so I could enjoy listening to her screams before she splatted on the ground. But if I kept Kramer waiting much longer, I was sure he’d put his new flesh to repulsive use. Frustration made me clench my fists. If only I had more of that borrowed power left in me, but no, I was stuck at the final “sparks but no fire” stage of my abilities.

Although . . . maybe my faded powers from Marie would still work if I gave them the proper accelerant.

“You’re out of time,” Sarah said coldly, leaning down to stare at me through the driver’s side window.

I got out of the car and shrugged. “All right, I can fly.” Then I flashed a toothy grin at her. “But I can’t land that well, and that’s the God’s honest truth. So you’d better brace yourself on the way down, because it’ll probably hurt.”

Iflew over the vast fields interspersed with houses and mostly empty roads, looking for the PumpkinTown farm Sarah told me about. Of course, I might have passed it several times already. The whole area was an agricultural mecca, with soybean, hay, and cornfields surrounding farmhouses, barns, and various storage facilities. At this height, the swaying golden cornfields reminded me of the night Bones took me flying, and regret squeezed a lump into my throat. Bones would be so worried when Elisabeth gave him the news that I’d flown to my meeting with Kramer, but if he used that infallible logic of his, he’d realize I still had the ability to cast a trail of bread crumbs leading to me. While this wasn’t the plan he and I had discussed earlier, it should still turn out the same. It would just be cutting it closer than either of us preferred.

I pushed my guilt and all the softer emotions aside. I didn’t need them now. I’d need them later when I was with Kramer.

More lights than normal clustered about a mile ahead. I flew toward them, noting derisively that Sarah had her eyes squeezed shut. No help there. Then I dropped lower to better see if one of those cornfields had a large maze carved into it. That would be easier to spot than looking for a sign that would be facing the street, not the sky. Sure enough, outside of the circle of trees that surrounded a picturesque house, barn, pumpkin patch, and stable was a cornfield with a distinct abstract pattern carved into the stalks. Unlike most of the other houses I’d flown over, this place was jumping with activity, too. Dozens of cars were parked along a cleared edge of the field. Music, spooky sound effects, and voices floated up to me. A closer look revealed that the maze had costumed people threading through it.

It was a Halloween celebration with families and children, for crying out loud. This better not be the place Kramer had picked out for his gruesome little event.

“Open your eyes,” I said, giving Sarah a rough shake. “Is this it?”

She only needed to slit her eyes before she nodded. “Yes. Take us to the second field west of the maze.”

“West? Tell me right, left, top, or bottom,” I snapped. It had been hard enough finding the place considering I was too high up to see street signs. What was probably only a forty-minute car ride from Grandview Park had taken me over an hour because I wasn’t used to navigating by the equivalent of satellite imagery. I’d looked at enough maps of the areas surrounding Sioux City to know that Orange City was up and to the right of it, but all my repeated flyovers hadn’t been stalling. It had been me being lost.

“You don’t know where west is?” Sarah asked with disbelief.

I wasn’t going to drop her to the ground. I was going to throw her. “Do I look like I have a compass on me?”

Sarah waved a hand at the sky. “Can’t you use the stars to navigate?”

“I’m twenty-nine years old, not two hundred and twenty-nine. I navigate by GPS, MapQuest, or TomTom. Not the fucking stars, ’k?”

She sighed in exasperation. “Try the second field on the right of the maze. If that’s not it, we’ll walk until he finds us.”

Her thoughts were still too scattered for me to detect whether or not she was lying. If Kramer really was here, I didn’t need her anymore; but in case this was some sort of test, I’d keep her alive. Stupid woman didn’t realize that my killing her would be doing her a favor.

I aimed for the second unmarred cornfield to the right of the maze and descended. Even with the people less than half a mile away, the lack of lights over this section combined with our dark clothes against the night sky should make us invisible. I slowed as best I could and rolled as soon as I hit the ground, letting go of Sarah. That rolling meant I took out ten yards of dry vegetation in my landing, but it also meant I lessened the impact. Sarah didn’t roll, and a sharp cry of pain escaped her when she thudded down amidst the cornstalks.

“Baby get a boo-boo?” I asked, fighting the urge to kick her while she was writhing on the ground clutching her ankle.

“You bitch, you broke my ankle!” she thundered at me.

With the nearby music, sound effects, laughter, and screams of delight from the good-natured scares set up around that section of the farm, none of the Halloween revelers would hear her. So I had no hesitation about walking over, calmly taking her injured foot in my hand, and then snapping it to the side hard enough for me to feel the bone crack.