Grave Dance (Alex Craft, #2)(63)

“I’l go check out the tear. You stay here, and stay inside.

We don’t know when more of those constructs could show up.”

Right. I frowned at his back as he took my keys and walked out the door. Of course, he was probably right. I couldn’t afford to add any more associations between me and the tears in reality. The only people who knew for sure that I could merge planes had been with me on the night of the Blood Moon, and that was a short list: Falin, Death, Rianna, and Roy . . . maybe Casey—I had no idea how much she remembered. My father also knew, of course, and at this point Caleb, Hol y, and Tamara suspected that at least I could punch holes to the Aetheric. But everything else was speculation and rumor.

I just have to keep it that way.

I’d have to wait to check out the tear after the commotion died down. If it dies down. I sighed, fed and walked PC, then cal ed Hol y to check on her. They were holding her in the hospital overnight for a sleep study, but if nothing unusual happened, she was scheduled to be released in the morning. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad news. I was about to head downstairs and visit Caleb when Roy appeared in the center of my room.

“Alex, you aren’t going to believe this,” he said, his shimmering form al but vibrating with his excitement. “That guy you sent me to fol ow, Maximil ian Bel ? He just claimed guy you sent me to fol ow, Maximil ian Bel ? He just claimed responsibility for a tear in reality.”





Chapter 18


??Wait, Roy—slow down,” I said both to give myself a second to absorb his words and because the excited ghost looked like he might flit back into the deep realms of the land of the dead at any moment. “Which tear? The one at the Lenore Street Bridge?”

Roy scrunched his face around his thick-framed glasses.

“I’m not sure where. A phone cal came in, and then everything happened in a flurry. At first I thought I’d missed something. That his men had nabbed you despite his instructions to fol ow you discreetly—”

That would have been good to know before now. “—But then Bel and a bunch of his fol owers—that school is a cult, by the way—piled into cars and drove down to the river.”

“That has to be the same tear Lusa found.” I rol ed from my heels to the bal s of my feet. So Bel was on the scene.

And claiming the tear? “Roy, did you actual y see Bel rip the tear into the Aetheric?”

The ghost shook his head, pushing his glasses farther up his nose when they slipped forward. “He got the cal , hurried to the site, and then told the reporter and the officials that the tear was his possession and on his land, so they were trespassing.”

“So Bel might not have had any idea the tear was there until Lusa ran her report.” Which made a lot more sense.

After al , if he could rip a hole in reality on his own, why would he have approached me? Unless he found someone else to do it.

But who?

But who?

“Did you see another ghost at the scene?” I asked, remembering the figure I’d spotted in Lusa’s footage, the one Falin hadn’t been able to see. “Probably a man with dark hair. It looked like he was wearing some sort of trench coat?”

“You mean the reaper?” the ghost asked, and his form shimmered out of focus as he shivered. “Yeah. That’s why I got the hel out of there.”

A soul col ector? The col ectors were a secretive bunch.

I’d “known” Death most of my life, but in truth, I didn’t know anything about him or the other col ectors—I didn’t even know his name. What was a collector doing walking around a hole into the Aetheric?

Lusa was no longer on the screen of my TV, most likely because Bel had kicked her off his property. The studio reporter rerol ed Lusa’s footage of the tear, keeping his own running commentary as he pointed out parts of the tape. He paused to enlarge the shot when the cameraman had zoomed in on the tear, and a symbol scratched into the dirt caught my attention.

“Is that a rune?” I stepped closer, squinting as I al but shoved my nose against the screen trying to make out the smal shapes in an already overzoomed image. The symbols sure looked like runes, but the magnification had degraded the image quality to the point that someone could have drawn a tic-tac-toe board in the dirt and it probably would have looked like a rune.

I leaned back as the camera panned. Then a clump of pixels at the bottom of the screen jumped out at me. “That’s definitely a rune.” It was that same damn rune I’d spent half the morning staring at because it looked familiar but I couldn’t place.

“Got you,” I said, jabbing my finger against the TV screen.

Roy hunkered down beside me and looked from where my finger pressed against the screen to my face. He shoved his glasses farther up his nose again. “Alex, are you shoved his glasses farther up his nose again. “Alex, are you talking to the TV?”

“Not at al .” I jumped to my feet, unable to stay stil any longer. The rune proved that the tear and the constructs were connected. Maybe they weren’t from the same ritual, but they were definitely cast by the same witch or coven of witches—the chance that two unconnected witches would suddenly start casting unheard-of spel s using the same rare runes was too unlikely. “This is the break we need.”

“Would ‘we’ include me?” Roy asked, floating beside me as I paced. “Because if it does, I’m lost.”