I was lying to myself.
I was getting pretty damn good at making excuses for why I did stupid shit around him. I wondered if they would notice the car's absence since it was unlikely they would notice mine at all. Ryder was partial to his cars and it showed in the way he drove them. The way his hands caressed the leather….oh hell!
I switched on the radio and flinched as Nine Inch Nails roared to life from the speakers mounted in the doors. I clicked it back off and rolled my eyes at how pathetic I was acting. Synthia McKenna, Fae killer extraordinaire—is giddy over the Dark Prince…I could imagine it on the headlines of the Guild's paper already.
I pulled up to the Oak Ridge Cemetery gates and nodded at the gatekeeper before slowly making my way to the unmarked grave in the back close to the tree lines. It was one of the oldest cemeteries in the state. It was also the only one with no names on any of the graves—just numbers.
It was a way to keep track of the dead without giving out their family names or place others on the human's radar. Even though we’re technically human, we didn’t fit in with them or the Otherworlder's. We just continued to protect them even though they didn't accept us anymore than they did the Otherworlder's who couldn’t pay them enough to be accepted. Money made the human world spin. Always had and would continue to do so until someone decided they weren't worth keeping around any longer.
I parked in the back and exited the car, grabbing for my purse before heading to where Adrian was buried. I'd bought his plot since he hadn't had family to do so. It was the least I could do since it had been my ego that had gotten him put it in the ground to begin with. There had been nothing to bury but a few pints of blood and hair.
No soul lay inside this cold ground to be reborn. I had to live knowing it. Knowing that I'd failed to save him. They said the dying had it easy, that being reborn was easy and peaceful. What about the living who had to remember it? Had to carry the burden of knowing they'd failed, living with the memories of the dead? I think we have it worse off since we don’t forget.
I cleared off the grave from the pine needles the wind had shed on his resting place. I pulled out the iPod from my purse and stuck in the ear buds feeling the call of the dead tingling on my skin. None of my dead was buried here, they hadn't been that lucky.
I would release Chandra. Give her eternal peace until she was reborn. I didn’t have my coven to help as her witnesses, but I had a graveyard full of dead souls who had yet to pass on the Ever-after, stuck here for some reason or another and unwilling to pass on.
Good thing I was one of the few who could raise souls, I'd raised this entire cemetery by accident soon after Adrian had been buried here. It had been just another botched attempt to release the souls of my parents. I wasn’t even sure I could release them, I'd messed up at taking them in, but I'd only been five.
Most Witches couldn’t master taking a soul until their late sixties and it was risky do to at any age. I sat with my back to his grave marker, "I miss you."
I waited, as if he would answer me back.
I exhaled trying to find something else to say, anything.
"I'm the world's biggest slut now, almost gave in to a Fae. Go ahead, roll over in there A. Lord knows my parents would be right now." I smirked finding irony in the fact that I was confiding in a concrete slab with numbers on it, "I miss you. Larissa and Adam are totally bumping uglies by the way. Cue more eye-rolling, I know you would be if you were here. I told you he liked her," I smiled imagining the wide grin he used to give me when he found out I had been right on something. "Okay, let's do this."
I stood feeling the eyes watching me. I scanned the area finding nothing out of place in the thick greenery on the edges of the cemetery. I pulled the small blade from my purse before pulling out the ear buds to listen for a second longer.
The wind howled, but other than the Witch posted at the gates I felt no one close enough to be considered a threat. I whispered the words for the candles to be lit, feeling the surge that came before the flames leapt to life in the candelabras that had been scattered throughout the graveyard.
The feeling of power running through my veins was heady after being useless for two days in a row. Throwing a shield didn’t give off the same kind of thrill casting did and nothing gave the feel of raising the dead, even if was only souls that I was actually raising here.
I took the headphones off and placed the iPod on dead shuffle, which I'd made for doing this since the dead loved to dance. Most would consider it odd but not me. Since they couldn’t talk it was about all they could do and not look like zombies. Okay, well some still looked like zombies.