Bridge of Souls (Cassidy Blake #3)(22)

This place isn’t haunted.

It’s just really freaking creepy.

I back out of the chapel to give the film crew room, because the space is small, and because I really don’t want to be surrounded by body parts, even if they’re not real.

Jacob and I wander up the path, surveying graves with names like Bartholomew Jones, and Richard Churnell III, and Eliza Harrington Clark. Names that sound like something out of history, a play.

My parents’ voices rise and fall from the chapel, following us like a breeze. Jacob scales a crypt and steps from roof to roof, as if he’s playing hopscotch.

Thunder rolls through, the low clouds dark with the promise of more rain, and I can barely feel the Veil beyond the humid air.

And for a moment, I feel myself loosen, unwind.

And then I look around, and realize that unlike St. Louis No. 1 or Lafayette, there are no swells of tourists here right now, no groups clustered around the tombs.

The graveyard is empty around us.

And I remember Lara’s warning.

Stay with your parents … Don’t wander off.

“Jacob,” I say softly.

But when I look up and scan the crypt rooftops, he’s not there. My pulse picks up, my hand going to the pendant at my throat.

“Jacob!” I call, louder now.

Something moves at the edge of my vision, and I spin, already lifting the mirror when I see his superhero shirt, his messy blond hair.

“What?” he asks, cringing back from my pendant. “Can you put that away?”

I sag in relief. “Yeah,” I say, a little shaky. “Sure.”

We start back toward the morbid chapel and its offerings of hands, and eyes, and teeth. And halfway there, the air changes.

At first I think it’s just the storm. Maybe the sudden cold, the way all the wind drops out of the world, the eerie quiet, is just normal.

But I know it’s not.

I’ve felt this way before.

On the platform in Paris.

In the séance room in the hotel.

And the only word I have for it is wrong.

Something is very, very wrong.

I look around, but I don’t see anything strange.

I lift the camera to my eye and scan the cemetery again, peering through the viewfinder.

All I see are graves.

And then something steps between them.

In the viewfinder, it’s … nothing. A void. A solid dark. A patch as black as unexposed film, just like I saw at the Place d’Armes.

When I lower the camera, the darkness has a shape.

Arms and legs in a black suit, a broad-brimmed hat low on its face, which isn’t a face at all but a bone-white mask, black pools where there should be eyes. That mouth, set into a rictus grin.

The Emissary of Death holds out its hand, gloved fingers uncurling toward me.

“Cassidy Blake,” it says in a voice like a rattle, a whisper, a wheeze.

“We have found you.”





Cassidy, run!” shouts Jacob.

But I can’t.

When I try, it’s like dragging my arms and legs through icy water. And when I try to breathe, I taste the river in my throat.

My feet are stuck to the ground, my eyes locked on the Emissary, and I don’t know if it’s fear or some kind of spell, but I can’t speak, can’t move. It’s all I can do to grip the camera in my hands. The camera. My fingers scramble numbly, and I finally bring the camera up, turning it toward the advancing figure.

I hit the flash.

If the Emissary were a ghost, it would stop, stunned by the sudden burst of light. But the Emissary doesn’t stop. It doesn’t even flinch. It just keeps moving toward me, those long thin legs covering too much ground with every stride.

Jacob is still shouting, but I can barely hear him. The world has gone cotton quiet. The only sounds that get through are my pulse and the too-heavy steps of the Emissary walking toward me.

“Once, you stole from us,” it says, and the words wrap around me like water.

I feel like I’m in the river again, the cold leaching all the strength from my limbs.

“Once, you fled.”

It reaches up for its mask, and I feel myself tipping forward, into the dark. The Emissary hooks one gloved finger under the bone mask, begins to lift its face away, when Jacob appears, all flailing limbs.

“Get away from my friend!” Jacob shouts, flinging himself at the Emissary. But Jacob goes straight through, and hits the ground on the other side. He collapses, shivering as if doused in cold water. His hair hangs wet around his face, and he spits a mouthful of river water onto the grass.

Jacob, I mouth his name.

The Emissary doesn’t even seem to notice.

Its bottomless black eyes stay on me.

I manage a single backward stumble, clawing at my necklace. I hold up the mirror pendant like a too-small shield between me and the skeletal thing striding toward me. I force air into my lungs, and speak.

“Look and listen,” I say, voice shaking. “See and know. This is what you are!”

But we’re not in the Veil.

And the Emissary, whatever it is, is not a ghost.

It looks straight past the mirror at me, then closes its gloved hand around the pendant and tugs it free. The cord snaps, and the Emissary flings the mirror away. It hits a gravestone, and I hear the splinter of glass before the world is blotted out again by the Emissary’s voice.