Phantom Kiss (Chicagoland Vampires 12.5)

“Hey, it’s Annabelle.” Annabelle Shaw was a necromancer, a woman whose magic allowed her to commune with the dead, help them reach those they’d left behind and make the peaceful transition to the afterlife. We’d met her randomly one evening, and she’d later clued us into one of Sorcha’s alchemical hot spots.

“Hey, Annabelle. What’s up?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I have a situation. I left a message with the Ombudsman’s office, but I thought I’d better call you, too, just in case.”

“We were just leaving a family event, so my grandfather is probably on his way home. He might not have checked his phone yet. What’s up?”

“I’m at Almshouse Cemetery. I was doing a sweep when I found it.”

The concern in her voice had me sitting up straighter. As a necromancer, Annabelle was hard to shake, even where cemeteries were concerned. “When you found what?”

“Someone has disturbed a body.”

My lip curled instinctively. “That’s awful.”

“Unfortunately, that’s just the first part of it,” Annabelle said. “I’m pretty sure they also summoned a ghost.”

• • •

Although we were transitioning from a party in our honor to the investigation of something grim, I was still relieved to be out of my parents’ house. Magic and mayhem felt more like home now, uncertainty a new kind of normal.

“What do we know about the cemetery?” Ethan asked after he’d alerted Malik to our schedule change and redirected the car.

I did a quick search. “According to the Internet, Almshouse Cemetery was established by Cook County in 1861. It’s where the county buried people without other options—who weren’t claimed by their family, who died in epidemics, who couldn’t be identified after the Great Fire, what have you.”

“Is it still in use?”

I paused to read further. “Only in a limited capacity. There are a few family plots, and family members are still interred there. Once those spaces are full, it will be closed to new burials.”

Edging toward creeped out, I put the phone away again. “Is grave desecration something you’ve run into before?”

“Not personally, although it has existed as long as humans have,” Ethan said, one hand on the wheel, his gaze intent on the dark streets. “Graves are robbed in times of peace, in times of war. In the interest of greed and science. But in the middle of Chicago?” He shook his head. “Not to my recollection.”

His brow was furrowed with concern, and I knew he was thinking of Sorcha.

Although we’d stopped her magic, she’d escaped the hold of the Chicago Police Department. Two months had passed, and there’d been no word from her, no trigger of the magical alarms set around the city to warn us if she tried anything. But it was hard to shake the feeling that we were just biding our time.

I put a hand over his. “There’s no point in worrying about what we might find. It won’t change anything. We’ll see what we see”—I linked our fingers together—“and we’ll deal with it.”

We always did.

• • •

The neighborhood was dark. It was residential but rural, at least by Chicago standards, and there were no streetlights. Clouds obscured what little moonlight might have penetrated the darkness, creating an odd pool of shadow not far from one of the biggest cities in the world. That didn’t make me any happier about our current task; cemeteries were not my thing.

Annabelle’s car was parked at the curb outside the cemetery. She leaned against it, and looked up from her phone at the sound of Ethan’s car. The movement rustled the shimmery dark tunic she’d paired with loose silver pants and sandals. Her skin was dark, her hair in braids she’d piled into a complicated knot.

“Merit, Ethan,” she said. “I sorry I interrupted your evening.”

“Think nothing of it,” Ethan said with a smile and a touch on her arm. “We were already in the car, and we’re happy to see you, if under unfortunate circumstances.”

“How are Marley and Maddy?” I asked her.

Marley was Annabelle’s four-year-old daughter. Maddy, the newest addition to her family, was almost two months old.

“They’re good,” she said, grinning. “Hard to leave Maddy at her age, but duty calls.”

She led us to the gate in the rusted and wavy chain-link fence that surrounded the graveyard. We’d visited cemeteries with Annabelle before—lush gardens of roses and marble, where the living could pretend death was something secret and majestic. But there was no wrought-iron here, no overflowing urns of flowers. No fuss, no ornamentation, no apparent concern about easing the transition between life and death.