Seven Kinds of Hell by Dana Cameron Read Free Book Online

heard you mention her.”
    “She’s been dead a long time now, before I met you. I think Ma left me something at my grandmother’s grave. Something even more important than the bag you kept for us.”
    “Wouldn’t she have been buried next to your grandmother?” Sean asked. “You know, where we were earlier?”
    “Um, no. Father’s mother,” I improvised. “Long, complicated story—you know that.”
    I motioned impatiently, eager to be off the subject. Sean nodded and gave me ten fingers, which got me to the top of the fence. It was a long jump down. I would have thought with his larger size, Sean would have had a harder time clearing the fence, but long years of mischief and fieldwork had made him an expert. He landed heavily next to me, and I led the way.
    “The last time Ma came here, she didn’t take me, but she did bring a taped-up package, a brand-new garden trowel, and a potted plant. Ma wasn’t a gardener; she came from the supermarket carnations school. I’m pretty sure she buried something.”
    It had started to rain hard now. The only light came from my flashlight and the city-night glow of Cambridge.
    Water plastered Sean’s hair to his head. His clothes were soaked through. “Zoe, what the hell are you doing? This is…it’s seriously messed up.”
    That hurt more than I imagined. I knew I had problems, but I didn’t like Sean thinking I was anything but normal.
    I shrugged. “Ma told me she left me something with Grandma, something that would tell me about my father’s family. All those years we were on the move, she somehow kept us two steps ahead. But she only told me about this when she couldn’t protect me anymore. I need to know, now.”
    We’d arrived at a modest headstone, just where I remembered it, at the intersection of two lanes, near the tree missing a branch that had come down in a blizzard.
    He stared at me, wondering how crazy I’d gotten in the past two years, the rain running down his face. He rubbed his hand over his eyes, wiped his nose.
    “OK. Give me the trowel. You don’t have a shovel, a trenching tool or something? This is going to take all night.”
    “What?”
    “You can’t afford to get busted for grave robbing, not with those goons after you. Give me the trowel. I’ll get us started.”
    I couldn’t help it; I started to laugh. Call it giddiness, fatigue, nerves, or burnout, I lost it. Sean thought I was going to dig up my grandmother and was now offering to help.
    I pulled my trowel from my belt loop. One look at the tiny thing, worn down from years of work, and Sean was ready to explode.
    “No, Sean, I’m not going to open the coffin. Just dig under the roses.”
    It took him a minute to parse that information; it would have taken anyone a moment. Finally he said, “OK, you can start.”
    He settled down two headstones over and tried to look relaxed. Hard, with the rain plastering his hair down, dripping off his nose.
    It was hard work, made no less easy by the weather, the dark, and the dead little roses. I didn’t want to just dig them up, leaving my work for everyone to see, but it would have been easier to work without the thorns grabbing at my sodden sleeve and bare wrist.
    “Just like old times, huh, Sean? Working on your grad school projects?”
    “What?”
    “Me working, you watching, pretending to take notes.”
    That brought a smile, but any retort he might have made was cut short by a small noise, something barely audible above the rain but to which we were both well attuned.
    Metal on metal.
    I scraped the trowel through the wet earth and heard it again. Something was there.
    We both worked now, me defining the edges, Sean shoving the overburden aside. Different noises now; it wasn’t just metal.
    Once I felt it move, I stuck my trowel in the ground and felt. I moved my fingers across the surface, obscured by mud and pebbles. Round, with something wrapped around the edges.
    I pulled, and it came away, grating against damp, sandy