Victor glanced back and offered her the edge of a smile. Sydney made a noise, a small groan of discomfort that had nothing to do with the biting cold.

It was fresh, the earth turned over and a temporary marker driven into the soil until a stone one could be cut. He’d come to a stop, and was staring down at a grave. She ran to catch up, nearly tripping several times over the frozen ground before she reached him. She wanted to know what they said, but the rock had already tumbled into the weeds, and Victor was still moving briskly between the graves. She could see that there were letters, parts of words, etched into one side. Sydney kicked a loose rock that had broken off from one of the older graves. “Just us and the dead.” They made their way into the heart of the cemetery, the shovels tapping softly on Victor’s shoulder as they went. Victor blinked, and the frown was gone, replaced by the even calm he always wore. A buzz that told him when someone was near. He might have stopped humming, but the sensation never did, keeping on with a faint electrical buzz that only he could hear and feel and read. Not with his eyes so much as with his skin, or rather with the thing that crept beneath it, tangled in his pulse. He stopped humming, rested his shoe lightly on a tombstone, and scanned the dark. In fact, Sydney was the only reason Victor was beginning to believe in fate at all.

They were neither, but the resemblance certainly came in handy since Victor couldn’t very well tell people he’d picked up the girl on the side of a rain-soaked road a few days before. The two looked like ghosts as they wove through the graveyard, both blond and fair enough to pass for siblings, or perhaps father and daughter. It made Sydney shiver in her too big coat and her rainbow leggings and her winter boots as she trudged along behind him. The sound carried like wind through the dark. His trench billowed faintly, brushing the tops of tombstones as he made his way through Merit Cemetery, humming as he went. Victor readjusted the shovels on his shoulder and stepped gingerly over an old, half-sunken grave.

Bridge of souls victoria schwab