Blue reached in her pockets and fished out a couple of pins.
Wyatt sidled up beside me. “She’s pretty nifty with picking locks.”
After a long minute, Blue tossed the lock to the ground and tried to push open the door, but it was too heavy. Claude leaned his body against it and shouldered it open.
The room smelled musty, and I wrinkled my nose as we aimed our lights inside.
“What’s all that?” I asked, noticing a pile of junk in the corner.
Wyatt entered and knelt down, wiping away some of the cobwebs. “Looks like someone wanted to take their silver to the afterlife.”
A stone coffin claimed the center of the room, and what I noticed immediately were the fresh clumps of dirt on the floor.
Everyone backed up against the walls when Viktor came in. He stepped up to the coffin and bowed his head respectfully. Butterflies circled in my stomach.
Viktor touched the coffin with his fingertips. “Christian did not deserve such a vulgar disposal. Death is inevitable for us all, even the immortals. But it should mean something. Let us give him a proper burial.”
Wyatt’s boots scraped against the dirty floor as he walked to the edge of the coffin, his head cocked to the side. “Hurry and open it up.”
Shepherd and Claude gripped opposite ends, pushing with all their might to spin the lid open. Gem averted her eyes, and Wyatt leaned in like a little kid about to watch a firecracker explode.
“Someone was pissed,” Shepherd muttered, looking at his palms.
Wyatt shone his light inside. “So we meet again. Déjà vu.”
It seemed like a strange thing to say, but then again, Wyatt wasn’t exactly the most normal guy I’d ever met. He untied the cloth wrapped around the corpse’s head. When he snapped it away, glassy eyes stared up at us. Christian’s face didn’t look pallid and peaceful like most dead people, but eerily startled.
I expected a flood of tears, but instead, everyone behaved strangely.
“Move away,” Shepherd ordered, reaching into the coffin. “This’ll hurt like a bitch.”
“What are you doing?” I asked in horror.
When Shepherd yanked his arm back, he was holding an impalement stake in his hand. Not the small ones I’d seen people use, but more like an arrow.
Christian flew up to a sitting position like a scene in a horror movie, his lip curled in a snarl. “Remind me never to do that again.”
I blinked in surprise. The impalement wood must have missed his heart.
Viktor shouldered Wyatt aside and placed his hands on Christian’s shoulders, his lip trembling. He waited a beat before finally speaking. “You need a shower.”
Gem and Blue laughed, relief swimming in their eyes. The tension in the room lifted, and the air circulated as everyone began to breathe easy.
Shepherd peered into the coffin. “Who’s your girlfriend?”
A skull rolled to the side, and Christian shuddered. Without answering, he gripped the edge of the coffin and climbed out, stumbling when his feet touched the ground.
Gem reached out to help. “We’re so glad you’re not dead.”
“You and me both,” he murmured, dusting off his pants.
She worried her lip. “I’d hug you, but you have dead stuff all over you. Rain check.” She skipped out the door, Claude shadowing behind her.
Christian lowered his voice and nodded at Wyatt. “I owe you one.”
Wyatt shook his head. “Not this time. You can thank your ex-partner over there. After we kicked her out, she squeezed information from one of Darius’s men. Then she spotted tire tracks on the road before anyone else. She’s a keeper if you ask me,” he said, giving Viktor a cursory glance as he walked out of the room with a brisk step, hands in his pockets.
Christian lowered his eyes, addressing those around him. “Can I have a moment?”
I turned to leave when he snapped my collar back.
“Not so fast.”
When everyone had moved out of sight, I turned around to face Christian, my Vampire eyes adjusting to the darkness. His unblinking gaze unnerved me, so I stepped aside and put my back to the wall.
“Ex-partner, Wyatt says. Does that mean Viktor tossed you out?”
“Yep. Your dreams have come true.”
Christian flattened his palm on the wall above my head, glaring down at me with obsidian eyes. His tousled hair was full of dust, and some of the particles floated around him. “So you did all this to get back in his good graces. Admirable.”
“I don’t want back in.”
He tilted his head to the side, brows drawing together. “Are you langered? If he didn’t trust you before, he certainly does now—regardless of your motives. Why would you turn him down?”
The way Christian looked at me gave me butterflies, and I couldn’t tell if it was fear or something else. Maybe that was why I had reservations about joining up with Keystone. The second I saw Christian’s body lying next to a skeleton, my heart squeezed.
Just a little bit.
I barely knew him, but I felt so responsible for what had happened.
He lifted the ends of my hair. “You cut it.”