One Grave at a Time (Night Huntress 6)

I flew 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 f**king 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.

"Now I broke your ankle," I told her.

Sarah wailed in earnest, but though I wasn't worried about us being discovered, it was hurting my ears. I slapped a hand over her mouth.

"Quit crying before I really give you something to cry about."

That old parental threat worked. She stuffed back her loud sobs and tried to claw her way up my arm to stand. I debated shoving her away but decided that it would take longer to get to Kramer if she was hopping and stumbling on one foot, so I let her brace herself against me. She didn't speak, but her thoughts were a hateful mix of crazy static and delight when contemplating how I was going to burn, first on earth, then in hell.

Charming.

"Either you keep up or I leave you behind, I don't care which," I said, and started to walk. I wasn't sure if I was going in the right direction, but if Kramer was out here, he might have seen our crash landing. The ghost would know to be studying the sky, unlike the families in the maze and the surrounding farmhouse area. I hadn't seen any other lights in the field outside of where the revelries were being held, so if he was here, he was keeping a low profile.

Sarah limped beside me, her fingers digging into my arm and little yelps escaping her with every hobbled step. Between that, the crackling paper noise that the thousands of drying cornstalks made as they swayed against each other, and the merrymaking from the other section of the farm, I couldn't hear whether anyone else was out here with us.

Goddamn Kramer. I'd wondered why he would choose a place like this for his meet up. Now I knew. I couldn't focus on any telltale movements to spot him because everything around me moved. The corn was taller than I was, and it all looked the same, making me unable to tell if I even walked in circles or not. Noises were swallowed up by natural and artificial sounds, and all the people across the fields kept me from flying in low swoops above the area to see if I could locate him, Francine, or Lisa that way. My landing might not have been spotted, but a woman winging her way like a bat slow and low enough to detect anything in this huge moveable canvas eventually would be.

That was why I had no warning before white-hot pain blasted through my back. Once, twice, three times in rapid succession, turning my chest into what felt like a molten lake of agony. I staggered, knocking Sarah over, who screamed as I stepped on her ankle trying to keep myself upright. Her thrashing made me lose my balance, even my innate vampire reflexes unable to keep me from falling. I flipped over at the last moment, still hitting the ground but doing it without being facedown.