As much as I liked Fred’s Aston Martin, I still wasn’t going to replace my hearse. It was totally me. Death on wheels. What’s hotter than that? Okay, an Aston Martin is. But you get my point.
The Morrigan said run. We ran. But a part of me didn’t like it. I wasn’t used to running. The last time I ran was when I ran with Nico to New Orleans to escape the Order of the Morning Dawn. Now I was running back for the first time since to the very place where it happened. Sure, no one who was alive back then was still around. The place had changed. But as a witch, I believe that there are spirits of a place, spirits that linger in the elements, the trees, the skies, the ground itself, and they don’t forget the past as easily as humans or vampires do.
I also didn’t like the idea that there might still be demons running free in New Orleans. Of course, demons could go anywhere. But New Orleans was the vampire capital of the United States. It was obviously where the demons who wanted to use vampires as hosts were focusing their efforts. And it was where Legion might eventually find another host and begin multiplying again.
“What if all of this is what Moll wants?” I asked, turning to Hailey and Julie over my shoulder.
“What do you mean?” Hailey asked.
“For us to run away. So Legion can come back and start multiplying before we can get there to stop him.”
Hailey and Julie exchanged concerned glances. “I thought the same thing,” Julie said. “But what can we do?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I really don’t. But if we get caught by the hunt, that’s worse.”
We were between a rock and a hard place with no foreseeable way out. Our only hope, it seemed, was to evade the hunt, hopefully manipulating the strong contingent of the Order in Rhode Island to get in the way, and to pray—yes, pray—that Legion not find a new host over the next nine weeks. The one thing working for us was the fact that pretty much every vampire in New Orleans now knew what the demons were up to. They weren’t creating new vampires. And they weren’t feeding as frequently as they had in the past. But this could only last so long. At most, the youngest vampires in New Orleans could make it a month or so between feedings. But not nine weeks. The chances that some of them might bite infected humans were better than not.
I couldn’t believe how much Exeter had changed. It shouldn’t have surprised me, I suppose. It was still a small town. But very few buildings that were there in the 1890s still stood. Most had been replaced. Most of the old homes had long been replaced. But there was one place I knew would still be the same. At least, the immediate space would be. The cemetery. The grave where I was buried and came back as a vampire. Where I was buried again and came back heartless.
I asked Fred to stop the car. It was the early part of the night, so we had plenty of time. But something inside me begged to visit my old grave.
It’s a strange thing to visit one’s own grave. My first name was on the top of the stone. It referred to me as the “daughter of George and Mary Brown.” And it reported my death on January 17, 1892. I was aged nineteen years.
It didn’t feel like my grave. I wasn’t buried there. Nothing of my body lay there. In fact, Nico and I had buried someone else there, someone already decomposing, and dressed her in the clothes I’d been wearing when they buried me. It was a precaution we took just in case they decided to exhume my body again, to see if I was still there. I didn’t know if they had. The Order knew I’d risen again and probably didn’t need to bother desecrating my grave to confirm it.
But there were flowers on my grave. Who the hell had put flowers on my grave? Not every grave in the cemetery had flowers.
Edwin’s grave was next to mine. His body was actually there. His didn’t have flowers. I shed a tear when I saw his stone. To me, he hadn’t died in 1892. To me, his actual death, the death of his soul, was much more recent. But in truth, he hadn’t been himself since the date inscribed on his stone.
My father’s grave was there, too. I didn’t get so choked up about that one. I flipped off his gravestone. It made me feel better. No flowers at his grave, either.
I took a deep breath and went back to Fred’s Aston Martin. I sat back in the front seat.
“You okay, Mercy?” Hailey asked.
“Kind of surreal visiting your own grave,” I said. “But you know what’s stranger?”
“What could be stranger than that?” Julie asked.
“Someone put flowers on my stone.”
“Did you have any family left in the area?” Fred asked.
I shook my head. “Every last member of our family died in 1892. It’s the strangest thing.”
“Give me two seconds,” Fred said.
“Okay.”
He stepped out and walked toward my grave. What the hell was he doing? Fred bent over and picked up the flowers. He was examining them closely. He pulled a ribbon from the base of the flowers. He smiled and nodded. Then he returned to the car, still holding my flowers. He got in and handed me the ribbon. “Check this out,” Fred said.
I looked at the ribbon. “Flowers by Bert?”
Fred nodded. “Maybe Bert can tell us who bought the flowers?”
“Holy shit. You’re a genius!” I exclaimed. I leaned over and kissed Fred on the cheek. I don’t know why I did it. I was as shocked about it as he was. If he wasn’t a vampire, he might have blushed. But I appreciated the gesture—there was a mystery here, and Bert was going to help us solve it.
Chapter Eight
It took Hailey a whole fifteen seconds to locate Bert’s flower shop on her phone. We drove straight there, aided by GPS, which Hailey set up in only five seconds. I didn’t have any clue how she did it. I was convinced that she knew a whole brand of witchcraft I’d never heard about.
The florist was closed. That wasn’t going to stop me—I’m a vampire. I’ve killed. Breaking and entering isn’t beyond me. And by the looks of the place, I doubted they had a security system. At least, I hoped they didn’t.
I thrust against the door with my shoulder. No alarm. I sighed in relief. Not that it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle, but face it: we’d only bought ourselves so much time evading the hunt as it was. And I knew the Order was strong in the area. The last thing I wanted was for them to somehow discover I’d returned and focus on me rather than the hunt.
“There has to be a record of orders somewhere,” I said as I broke into a small office area and started going through the drawers.
Hailey was shaking her head. “They have a computer, Mercy.”
“What?”
“They have a computer. Their orders are probably recorded on a computer. I doubt they have a paper record.”
“Can you get into the computer?”
“Depends if it’s password-protected,” Hailey said. “But even if it is, I might be able to get around it.”
“You can hack through someone’s password?”
Hailey shrugged. “Not always. But let me see what I can find.”
Hailey powered up the computer. Once it loaded, her fingers started dancing across the keyboard like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on the silver screen. Not that Hailey would have a clue who Astaire and Rogers were… or that Astaire or Rogers would have any idea what a keyboard was… Well, maybe they would. Astaire died in the late eighties, Rogers in the mid-nineties. They probably knew what a keyboard was. But I doubted they used one nearly so well as Hailey did. Damn, I felt old.