Pray for Dawn

TWENTY-TWO

That could have gone better,” I said after several minutes of silence in the car. Mira was driving back toward the waterfront, weaving through the quiet elegance of the historical district.

“It could have been a lot worse,” she replied, as she parked the car in an empty spot on Bay Street.

Unfastening my seat belt, I put my hand on the door handle. “I don’t want to imagine how that could have gone worse.”

Mira reached across and placed a restraining hand on my left arm as I started to exit the car. “Oh, please do,” she pressed. “I do love a good horror story.”

“You’re a walking horror story,” I grumbled, pulling out of her grasp as I got out of the car. Her low laughter followed behind me. Looking over the hood of the car at her, I frowned, though her light mood felt like an infection slowly defeating my immune system. “Did we accomplish anything by going there?” I demanded, trying to hold on to my anger and frustration.

“More than you realize,” she said in mysterious tones.

“Anything regarding the murder?”

“A little bit,” she admitted as she shut her door. “I think someone is trying to expose nightwalkers by killing the Bradford girl. And considering the method and gruesome manner of her death, I’m willing to put my money on the naturi. They stand to gain the most from our exposure.”

“Yes, but there haven’t been that many naturi in your domain,” I said as I followed her down a flight of uneven stone steps to Factors Walk. I needed to tell her. I had put it off long enough. There was nothing to be gained from keeping Mira in the dark about the bori in her domain. While I doubted that she would be able to fight it at all, she may know something about the race that would finally give me an edge should I be suddenly faced with Gaizka again.

“Regardless, they are here.” Mira led the way down the shadowy alleyway that slipped between River Street and Bay Street, the heels of her shoes clicking on the stones. “You killed a horde of them at the conservatory. And then there was the bunch that followed us in the car. They’re here.”

Cutting down a short street between Factors Walk and River Street, we headed toward the river and the most crowded section of the riverfront district, with its bars, restaurants, and gift shops. There was a sharp bite of cold to the air, keeping most of the tourists that had stumbled into Savannah during December back in their hotel rooms. It was also starting to get late and the shops were closing up for the night. We were nearly alone on the street.

“If you’re convinced it’s the naturi, what are we doing here?” I asked, shoving my hands deep into the pockets of my leather jacket in an effort to stay warm. “Are you making another pass by the apartment?”

“Nope,” Mira replied with a shake of her head. She threaded her left arm through my right and snuggled close as if she were trying to stay warm. “I’ve got one more resource that I want to check. The nightwalkers don’t know anything. The lycans don’t know anything. But this guy’s got a different connection. He might know something. I’m just hoping that we can catch him.”

“Who is this guy?”

“A very interesting human,” she said, flashing me an evil grin before stopping in front of an opening in a building with an orange-and-green awning that advertised “Old Town Trolley Tours.” A scattering of people were gathered around the opening, buying tickets and making reservations with a young woman behind the counter. When the woman finally looked up, Mira waved at her. “Hi, Emmy!” Mira cried in a genuinely happy, excited voice that I had never actually heard her use before. It was surprising.

“Mira!” Emmy cried back, her expression instantly brightening. “Let me get these people settled and then I’ll get to you.” With a new vigor, I watched as the young woman whipped through the crowd, taking money, checking off names, and handing out tickets for what I could only assume was an evening tour of the city. Though I was confused as to why anyone would want to take a nighttime tour of the city since so much of the amazing architecture would be obscured by the darkness.

When the line had finally dwindled to nothing, Mira stepped over to the booth, pulling me along when I seemed to hesitate. However, the nightwalker released me long enough to lean across the counter and grip the young black woman in a tight hug.

“Danaus,” Mira said the moment she released the woman. “This is a dear friend of mine, Emma Rose. She handles the ticket sales for the Old Town Trolley Tours Company here in Savannah.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Danaus,” Emma Rose said, extending her hand to me.

“Likewise,” I said gruffly, quickly taking her hand for a single shake before releasing it again and taking a step backward from the booth. I felt ill at ease with the situation. Nightwalkers, lycanthropes, warlocks, and even the naturi, I could handle with little problem. Humans, on the other hand, were something that I had lost touch with. I didn’t feel as if I belonged with them any longer, and hadn’t since I was young, so long as I could barely remember.

However, Mira refused to let me remove myself from the little meeting of friends. She quickly threaded her arm through mine, holding me in place, as she plunged into some idle chitchat about health and other random gossip about who was seeing who within the city. As a new line started to form, I loudly cleared my throat in an effort to prod Mira back to the whole reason we had come to this part of the city in the first place.

Mira threw me a dark look and then returned her attention to Emma Rose. “I won’t keep you any longer. I was just looking for Nate. Is he working tonight?”

“Yeah, he should actually be arriving any minute now,” Emma Rose said, glancing briefly down at the sheet of paper in front of her.

“You have any openings on the next tour? I need to talk to him about something important for a few minutes.”

“Oh, sure! We haven’t been full all night. It’s the time of year. Just way too cold,” Emma Rose replied with a casual wave of her hand.

Mira reached into her back pocket and pulled out her little black leather wallet, but Emma Rose quickly waved her off. “Don’t worry about it. I have no doubt you’ll jump off halfway through, like you always do.”

“Thanks, Emmy,” Mira said, pulling her into another tight hug. “I’ll catch you later.”

Mira and I walked over to the side where a group of people were waiting for the next tour bus to arrive. Mira cuddled close and I stared down at the top of her head.

“You don’t like humans very much, do you?” she inquired softly, surprising me with her question. She turned her face up to look at me; her lavender eyes seemed to pierce me to my core.

“Humans…are…are fine.” I stumbled, unsure of how to answer the question. “Why would you ask a question like that?”

“It’s how you act around them. Emmy, James, Daniel. When you’re around all of them, you’re distant and cold. You don’t look them in the eye and you rarely speak. What do you have against humans?”

“I don’t have anything against them,” I said, inwardly cringing at the defensive tone that had crept into my voice against my will.

“Is it because you’re not really one of them? Are you envious?”

“I’m not envious!” I said sharply, then regretted it as several people looked around at us. I leaned closer, dropping my voice back to a whisper. “I don’t have anything against humans. I just don’t spend a lot of time dealing with them.”

“But Themis?”

“I’m rarely there, and when I am I encounter only James and Ryan.” I hesitated a moment, frowning down at her. “It’s just that I don’t feel like I…I understand them any longer. They’re fragile and their lives are so short. I—I haven’t been one of them for so long. I’m not one of them.”

My eyes fell shut as I slowly drew in a deep breath. I wasn’t human. I technically never was a human, though I had believed I was for at least the first couple decades of my existence. But now, I wasn’t like anything else that existed. I wasn’t human, vampire, lycanthrope, or warlock. I wasn’t truly a bori, but some kind of half-breed that was too dangerous to be left alive, and yet Mira protected me at the risk of her life and her people.

Mira laid her cold hand against my cheek, letting her thumb run across my cheekbone in a gentle caress. “You’re not alone,” she whispered. She was close enough that I could feel the breath from each word skim across my lips. “You’re never alone.”

“It’s better than I am,” I murmured, afraid to move or open my eyes because it would shatter this moment.

“You’re not alone. I won’t allow it,” she said before pressing her lips to the tip of my nose in a quick kiss. I opened my eyes and stared into her, locked frozen in a moment that I thought would never happen again. The world had slipped away and there was only Mira’s hand on my cheek and her parted lips inches from mine. She stood before me like a bundle of unspoken promises; promises of compassion, affection, laughter, and unwavering strength and loyalty. I just needed to lean in those few final inches…

Behind us, a car rumbled down the cobblestone street, snapping Mira’s head around and shattering the moment. I stood a little straighter, while her hand slid down my face to rest on my chest over my heart. Reaching up, I covered her hand with mine and gave it a little squeeze, needing to hold on to that moment just another second longer. If anyone knew what it meant to be alone and an outcast, it was Mira. She was my enemy. She was my friend. She was the only one who would understand that chasm of emptiness that threatened to consume me each night when I awoke. Hunting her kind was all that I had to keep me sane through the endless years. But standing there, holding her hand, I knew that those days were slipping from my grasp. The time was coming when I would have to choose between killing her or facing the life that she was offering me.

I could feel the excitement rolling off her in massive waves as she stared down the empty street. She was up to something and I knew that I wasn’t going to like it. I released her hand and shoved mine back into my jacket pocket. Mira rubbed her hand over my chest one last time as she smiled up at me before threading her arm back through mine.

“What have you done?” I asked in a low voice, trying not to attract the attention of anyone else standing near us.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, looking up at me with what I’m sure she meant to be an innocent expression, but she couldn’t even manage that as she quickly broke into a smile.

“We’re going on an evening tour of the city?” I pressed, arching one eyebrow at her, which only sent her into a soft fit of giggles.

“Nate is a tour guide.”

“How are we going to talk to him if he’s giving a tour?”

Mira shook her head at me, her smile slipping a little bit. “Part of the tour goes through this house, but that section of the tour is given by the actual homeowner, so Nate will have a fifteen-to twenty-minute break. We can grab him then.”

“I don’t understand why a nighttime tour of the city is so popular,” I grumbled. “You can hardly make out all the amazing architecture that blankets this city. It makes more sense to do this during the day.”

Mira’s hand tightened on my arm and her smile had completely disappeared when she looked up at me again. “Is the city that much more beautiful during the day?”

For a moment, I had forgotten that Mira had never seen her city bathed in sunlight. She had never seen Forsyth Fountain glistening in the summer sun or the way the light cut through the thick leaves of the live oak trees that filled each of the squares. She had never seen the bustle of tourists through the city market as they prepared to grab one of the carriages that crisscrossed the historic district of Savannah.

“You have a very beautiful city,” I found myself saying, one corner of my mouth quirking in a smile. “Both in sunlight and by the moon.”

“Thank you,” she whispered as she looked back down the street. “Oh, look! Here he comes!”

I turned my attention from the nightwalker that was clinging to my arm as if we were out on a date to the vehicle that was rumbling down the street we had walked down just a few minutes earlier to reach River Street. It was not a tour bus like I was expecting. No, it was a trolley. A black trolley with a black light glowing from its undercarriage. Tattered lace and fake spider-webs hung in the rounded windows. And across the side in white letters was written GHOSTS & GRAVESTONES. That explained the nighttime tour; it was a ghost tour.

Laying my hand over Mira’s, I pulled her a couple steps away from the rest of the crowd and hunched down so that I could growl in her ear. “A ghost tour? Is that what this is?”

“Of course! Why else would you see the city at night?” she asked, looking up at me as if I were the one who had lost his mind. “Savannah has a reputation of being the most haunted city in America. Of course we’ve got ghost tours.”

“Yes, but I didn’t expect you to want to do this! I mean, this is ridiculous. There are no such things as—”

“Finish that thought and I will drain you, Danaus,” she said in a low, dark voice. “You of all people should know better.”

Yes, I knew better. There were such things as ghosts. I couldn’t see them or talk to them, but there had been a few occasions where I had felt them. However, it was nearly impossible for most humans to detect the presence of a ghost. It just didn’t work that way. In most cases, sightings could be explained away as an overactive imagination, while pictures were generally nothing more than dust on a lens.

“I do, but this…” I said, motioning toward the black trolley, which people were now boarding. “They can’t possibly expect to see a ghost.”

Mira lifted her chin at me and gave a little sniff. “You’d be surprised,” she said, then turned back to the trolley. “Besides, we’re not here to see a ghost. We’re here to talk to Nate. And there he is.”

At that moment, a man in baggy brown pants and white shirt stepped off the trolley. In his hands were an old-fashioned lantern and a shovel that clanged when he set the tip on the sidewalk. He was dressed as a gravedigger, which seemed only fitting, since I was sure that I was going to put Mira in her grave if she tried to pull me onto this trolley.

“Nate!” Mira cried, pulling me along as she walked over to him.

“Mira?” The gravedigger spun around at the sound of his name. When he turned, I found a youthful face covered in a white and gray theatrical makeup to give the effect that he had spent more time with the dead than the living. Mira released her hold on me when Nate scooped her up in a bear hug. I jerked out of the way just in time as the spade of the shovel came close to taking off my nose.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, holding her at arm’s length.

“I was hoping to talk to you about a couple things,” she said, then motioned toward the trolley. “Couple work-related items.”

Nate set his lamp down on the sidewalk and scratched his chin. “Yeah, I guess I should have been expecting you. I think a part of me was hoping that I was overreacting.”

“Has it been that bad?”

“No, not like you would think,” he said, then shook his head as he shoved one hand through an unruly crop of brown curls. “Actually, can we talk more later? I’ve got another tour to start in a few minutes.”

“We’re actually on this tour. Already cleared it with Emmy. Can we talk at Sorrel-Weed?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Who’s with you?”

To my surprise, Mira actually blushed, though it was almost impossible to make out in the faint lamplight. She reached over and pulled me back to her side. “Danaus, this is a friend of mine, Nathaniel Mercer. No relation to Johnny Mercer. He’s a grad student over at SCAD, specializing in historical preservation. By night, he’s a gravedigger tour guide for Ghosts and Gravestones.”

“Good to meet you,” Nate said, shaking my hand.

“Likewise. What’s SCAD?” I asked as I released his hand and took a step backward.

“Savannah College of Art and Design. A place Mira has been a big supporter of. We wouldn’t be able to accomplish half the things we have without her assistance,” Nate said.

“You’re helping to preserve and restore a city I love. How could I not?” Mira said with a slight shrug of her shoulders.

Nate just shook his head as he bent down and picked up his lantern again. “Go ahead and get on the trolley. We’ve got to get this tour rolling before we get behind schedule.”

Mira stepped onto the black trolley and I followed behind her, trying to keep from frowning. I was going on a ghost tour through Savannah. Not exactly how I anticipated my evening would go. But then again, nothing had gone how I might have expected since our brief appearance at the Dark Room. Mira was just full of surprises this evening.

At the back of the trolley, Mira paused and allowed me to sit next to the window while she sat as close as possible to me. The trolley soon filled up with somewhat hushed tourists as they took in the pseudo-creepy décor of fake cobwebs, skeletons, and tattered antique lace. After a brief introduction by Nate warning that the trolley was going to be traveling into the dark, grim past of Savannah and that passengers should be forewarned that the dead were eager to reach out and make new friends, we pulled away from the sidewalk and rumbled down the uneven stone street.

As we traveled down River Street, Nate wove tales of despair and woe. Once-prosperous shops from ages ago were filled with tales of suicide and fires, murder and disease. When we turned off River Street, I looked over at Mira to find that she was watching Nate with rapt attention.

How can you buy into this stuff? I asked, touching her mind so that I wouldn’t disturb the other passengers who were listening to Nate with a mixture of mild interest and vague boredom.

It’s not the ghosts, she mentally scoffed. It’s about the history of Savannah. Some of these stories I was actually here to witness firsthand. I remember reading about some in the paper. For me, it’s about reminiscing about events that I lived through. Don’t you ever like to look back at your past? Take another look at what you survived?

In truth, I tried to never look back. I had survived more than a millennium of world events. Wars, famine, natural disasters, the rise and fall of entire civilizations, the discovery of new worlds, the deaths of people I viewed as friends. My memories were colored by a bleak landscape of death, blood, and struggles against an evil that I was now seated cozily against in a black trolley. But most of all, my past was covered in a seemingly vast emptiness that could never be filled up.

No.

To my surprise, Mira wrapped her arm around mine again and laid her head against my shoulder. I could feel her relax against me as if some secret weight had slipped from her shoulders. I tried not to think about her soft body pressed against mine, nor listen to Nate’s monologue of death and despair, but I wasn’t having much luck. Tonight, Mira had gone out of her way to touch me and remain close. When I was surrounded by nightwalkers, I had taken it as a way of signaling to them that I belonged to her and that I was not to be molested. However, seated in the dark trolley, surrounded by human tourists as we wove our way through the old city, there was no reason that I could think of for her to be touching me. And yet, I could not bring myself to disentangle her from my frame. In fact, I sat back against the seat and felt some of the tension ease from my own shoulders. For a moment in time, we weren’t running, hiding, or fighting. We were just two people on a ghost tour of Savannah. I had forgotten what it was like to do something normal and mundane.

It had been more than seven decades since I had last touched a woman like this. I had been hunting vampires in Paris for more than a week, and had finally succeeded in eliminating the strongest of them. The remaining few had left the city, from what I could tell, and I was prepared to do the same. Yet, I lingered one last night in the City of Light, wandering through the winding streets and past the crowded restaurants and cafes. Pausing briefly in the doorway of one bar, I looked up to find a woman smiling at me, a cigarette between her pursed lips. Her name was Cherise and she had green eyes.

We talked of nothing and laughed and kissed over a bottle of cheap wine. We walked down the rain-slicked streets, arm in arm. And then we were attacked by four nightwalkers. I had been distracted by Cherise, wasn’t watching my back. They killed her in an instant, leaving the blood on my hands as they escaped before the sun could rise.

Time had left a gaping void of loneliness within my chest, haunted by a pair of green eyes and an enigmatic smile. There had been no other women since Cherise and too few before her. I couldn’t protect them. Just fragile flowers waiting to be crushed under the heel of the world I lived in. Too many years of fighting had piled up to leave me with nothing more than a memory of green eyes.

Mira shifted in her seat beside me, leaning forward to look around my chest and out the window as we passed by an old hotel. She squeezed my arm as she looked up at me, flashing me another excited smile. The woman that sat beside me now wasn’t fragile or weak. She was strong, a powerful force within our world. And while I was under orders to protect her, Mira had been protecting me along the way as well.

After passing a couple of old hotels and some locally famous houses, we pulled up to a two-story burnt-orange house with palm trees surrounded by a brick wall. It was the infamous Sorrel-Weed House; supposedly one of the most haunted homes in all of Savannah. The occupants of the trolley quickly pushed to their feet and exited the trolley for what Nate said would be a brief tour of some of the rooms of the Sorrel-Weed House. We held back until everyone had gotten off the trolley before we exited.

Nate laid down the shovel he had been holding in the trolley and leaned against a tree, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“So, what do you think of the tour?” Nate asked as I stepped to the sidewalk. “Cheesy, right?”

“It’s interesting,” I said slowly, bringing a smile to his lips.

“It’s one of the most popular in Savannah because we’re the only ones that get you into Sorrel-Weed,” he said proudly.

“It’s fun, too. You know, just to pretend that some of it might be real.”

“You don’t believe in ghosts?” I asked while Mira snorted behind me.

“No, I believe,” Nate said with a wry grin.

“Nate can see them and talk to them,” Mira volunteered. I turned to look at her, confusion undoubtedly filling my face. I had never heard of a human being able to do such a thing.

“Talk to them? Necromancer?”

“Dear God, no!” he cried, pushing off of the tree that he had been leaning against. “Who would want to look at a decaying corpse? Besides, from what I hear, they don’t come back all that intelligent. I just talk to the spirits.”

“Speaking of which…” Mira said, trailing off as she finally got around to the actual topic at hand.

“Yeah,” Nate sighed, leaning up against the tree again. “Things haven’t been too good lately. Well, actually that’s not exactly right.” He hesitated, running one hand through his curls, sending them into disarray. “Things have been oddly quiet. A number of the locals that I’m used to seeing have disappeared and the few that have remained rarely come out. I’ve talked to a number of the hotel owners along the route and they say that activity has dropped to almost nothing. Mira, this isn’t good. We’re a city known for being haunted. If things go quiet, the tourists might stop coming.”

“The tourists aren’t going to stop coming,” Mira said, waving off his genuine concern. “What about Sorrel-Weed?”

Nate made a noise in the back of his throat like a laugh, while one corner of his mouth pulled into a frown as he looked up on the looming structure. “The ghosts in that house are too angry to ever go completely silent. However, Scott, the owner, says things have recently been limited to the carriage house.”

“Should you try talking to them, considering they’re still active?” I suggested.

“Nah,” he replied, turning his gaze back to me. “It’s like I said. Too angry. You go up there, you’re just going to get something thrown at your head.”

“What about over at Colonial Park?” Mira asked. Nate hesitated, looking down at the ground as a frown deepened on his young face. “It’s still on the tour and it would only take a few seconds,” Mira continued. “We just want to see if anyone will tell you what’s got them so upset.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Nate replied in a low voice, his gaze drifting back over toward Sorrel-Weed at the sound of approaching footsteps. “Why are you so interested anyway?”

“A girl was recently murdered and we’re looking into it,” I said, causing Nate’s gaze to snap back to me.

“And you think a ghost did it?” he demanded in hushed tones.

“No, but they may know who did,” Mira said, grabbing my arm and pulling me back onto the trolley. We resumed our seats as the rest of the tourists jumped onto the trolley.

Watch what you say! Mira said in my brain as soon as we were settled. He doesn’t know what I am, doesn’t know my place within Savannah. You may find this hard to believe, but there are some people who still think I’m a normal human being.

You’re right. I snickered. I do find it hard to believe. A human that believes another human can see and talk to ghosts?

Okay, so maybe he thinks I’m a slightly eccentric human, but still human.

I laughed softly as the trolley pulled away from the curb and Nate resumed his dark monologue about the city. Mira settled against me. Her hunger was still evident as it beat against me, but underlying that red haze was a feeling of contentment.

We trundled along for another few blocks before the trolley driver stopped next to the Colonial Park Cemetery. We got off the trolley and followed the rest of the tourist herd down the ornate brick sidewalk to the side of the cemetery so that everyone could stare through the iron bars at the thick blackness that blanketed the graves. Out of habit, I completed a quick scan of the region, sending my powers out from my body to sweep over the tombstones until they reached the opposite wall.

“Anything?” Mira whispered, undoubtedly feeling the wave of energy wash from me.

“Nothing.” And that’s what had me concerned. While it made perfect sense for the naturi to be trying to sabotage the nightwalkers through the murder of Abigail Bradford, it didn’t make any sense for the ghosts of Savannah to be upset by their presence.

We waited until Nate finished with his tale of duels and Civil War soldiers bunking down with the dead in the middle of winter before we approached him. Most of the tourists had begun to head back to the trolley while Nate stood at the fence, one hand gripping a black cast-iron bar.

“Nate?” Mira asked, laying a hand on his shoulder.

“There’s a couple out there. Slowly coming over to me. They’re…scared. Something has been hanging around the cemetery. Ghosts have disappeared.”

“Can they tell you what it is?”

“What’s happening?” Nate asked the darkness. “Who’s with you?”

We all waited in silence for nearly a minute before Nate finally frowned and shook his head as he turned away from the bars. “They don’t know. Something they’ve never seen before. It’s killing them, which doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know how you can kill a ghost, but they’re upset and keeping low.”

“Were they upset like this back in September?” I asked as we followed him back to the trolley.

“Nope,” he said, looking over his shoulder at me. “This only started in the past week or so.”

I turned to find Mira standing a few feet away from me, staring through the bars into the cemetery. Her voice was low, just above a whisper. I stared at her a moment, straining to hear what she was saying, when I realized she was singing. Walking over, I discovered that she was singing what sounded like a lullaby in Greek. Her right hand was continuously moving through the empty air as if she were petting something.

“Mira,” I said, trying to grab her attention.

The nightwalker looked down at the swath of air that her hand was moving through and she smiled before starting the lullaby over again, oblivious to the world around her.

“Mira!” I said a little louder as I grabbed her left arm. She jumped, her head snapping up as she stopped singing. She blinked and looked around as if she was seeing the cemetery for the first time. She then looked down at the open air where her right hand hovered, a look of confusion crossing her face.

“Where did she go?” she asked, looking around her.

“Who?”

“I—” Mira started, and then shook her head. I released her arm and took a step backward, giving her some room as I could once again feel a wave of cold energy washing off of her. She was using her powers as she possibly searched for something or worked some other kind of nightwalker magic. Pressing the fingers of her right hand to her forehead, Mira clenched her eyes shut and drew in a sharp intake of air through her nose. “It’s nothing. It was nothing.”

Mira turned and started to board the trolley, but I grabbed her arm, stopping her. “Do we need to talk to Nate anymore?”

“No,” she replied, arching one brow at me.

“Then let’s walk back to the car. I need to think,” I suggested. Mira simply nodded and took her foot off the first step of the trolley. She gave Nate a brief hug and then turned back toward the cemetery while I shook the ghost talker’s hand. He hadn’t provided us with much information, but it was enough to confirm a dark idea already implanted in my head.

Mira waited until the trolley had rumbled away and we had walked more than a block in silence before she finally spoke up. “You don’t think it’s the naturi, do you?” she ventured.

“If it was the naturi, the ghosts would have been upset back in September when the city was crawling with them. There are fewer naturi in the city now and yet the ghosts are upset. Something else has moved into the region.” I zipped my jacket up a little higher and shoved my hands into my pockets as we walked along the dark street back toward the riverfront.

“Do you also have a theory as to what?” Mira inquired.

I stared down at my companion in silence, knowing she wasn’t going to like what I had to say. I wasn’t particularly pleased with it myself. “Ghosts are nothing more than bodiless spirits. Souls,” I said slowly, but it was more than enough. Mira came to an abrupt halt just as we were about to cross an empty street and jerked her head up to look at me with wide, horror-filled eyes.

“You can’t possibly think…?” she gasped. “It’s impossible. How could a…a…a bori escape?” she said, whispering the last two words as if the mention of the creature would summon it to our side. A bori was the only creature dependent upon soul energy. It was using the ghosts in the city somehow.

“I don’t know. The naturi escaped,” I replied, taking a step to cross the street, which helped to jolt Mira from her own paralysis.

“But some naturi were already out, working to free the others. There are no other bori here. They were all caged centuries ago.”

I frowned at that bit of logic. “You can’t be sure of that,” I grumbled. “My mother found a way to make a deal with one of them after they had already been exiled.”

Mira plopped down on one of the benches near the center of Oglethorpe Square and put her head in her hands as she rested her elbows on her knees. “I can’t keep doing this, Danaus,” she moaned. “First it was you, then Jabari with the coven, and then it was Rowe and the rest of the naturi. Now, a bori? I can’t do this. I came to Savannah to escape the insanity that seemed to follow me throughout Europe. Now it seems to have followed me here.”

I stopped and knelt in front of Mira, wishing I could tell her that I thought I was wrong and that it was something less frightening. The bori were called the guardians of the soul, while the naturi were the guardians of the earth. The two races had been born to create a balance on the Earth, but from what I understood, the two seemed to be locked in a permanent power struggle over who truly ruled the Earth. Centuries ago, long before I was even born, the bori and the naturi were imprisoned in separate, alternate realities. For the most part, the naturi had succeeded in escaping from their cage this past fall and their now-queen Aurora was free. Though at least she had her own problems in the form of a younger sister who was attempting to wrest the crown from her.

A bori running loose in the world was an entirely darker matter that neither Mira nor I truly wanted to face. The bori were the creators of the nightwalker race, from what I understood, and had the same ability to control the nightwalkers the way the naturi could control the lycanthropes. Mira already had had to suffer the indignity of being controlled like a puppet by Jabari and me. She didn’t need to have a bori free in her domain as well.

Putting one hand on her knee, I placed my other hand under her chin and forced her to look up at me. “We’ll get through this,” I said firmly. “We’ve survived the naturi. We can survive a rogue bori.”

“You say rogue bori, but you don’t know,” Mira said grimly. “How do we fight a creature that can control us both?”

I flinched—the bori that had a hold on my soul had managed to take control of me when we were in Peru. Mira and another nightwalker named Stefan had cast a spell that killed a horde of naturi and captured their souls. The bori that held me reacted to the souls and appeared to feed off the energy, controlling me and forcing me to attack Mira.

“We’ll find a way.”

Mira frowned at me. She wrapped the fingers of her left hand around my hand, which was still beneath her chin. “I would never have expected you to be such an optimist.”

I smirked at my companion in this nightmare that never seemed to end. “Do we really have any other choice?”

“Not really,” she admitted.

Mira looked up over my right shoulder, squinting as she tried to focus on something. Then she suddenly lurched to her feet, nearly knocking me over in her haste. She took a couple steps forward as I rose to my feet. Her emotions pushed unbidden through me, filling me with fear and rage.

“Scan the area,” she ordered in a gruff voice. Her hands were held out to her sides, her fingers curled slightly as if she meant to summon up balls of fire at the first sign of trouble.

I sent my powers out from my body so that they flooded the park, and then farther away, covering several blocks. There was nothing out there. A scattering of nightwalkers and a couple of lycanthropes, but not the naturi I knew that she had me searching for. I reached out farther, covering the entire city, and to my surprise, there wasn’t a single naturi in the region.

“There’s nothing here,” I said, drawing my powers back into my body. They swept over Mira, pulling with them an unexpected cold chill, as if a part of her energy had mingled with my own.

“That’s impossible,” she replied, twisting around to pin me with a confused glare. She pointed toward a tree more than a hundred yards away, but I saw nothing there. “I saw one right there!”

“Was it Rowe?” I inquired, taking a couple steps toward her so that I was standing beside her. My eyes covered the entire region surrounding the tree, but nothing moved. The one-eyed naturi was the only one we had encountered that could magically pop in and out of an area. He had nearly captured Mira that way in London.

“No,” she whispered, turning her back on the tree and walking back over to the empty park bench she had been seated on only moments ago. I watched her shake her head as if to clear it while her slim shoulders slumped. Her fear had dissipated with the wind, but now a growing confusion ate away at her thoughts.

“Who was it? A naturi you’ve seen before?” I pressed. We needed to know if there was another naturi like Rowe, that could use magic to appear and disappear at will. This added a new element of danger to the naturi if there were more that could potentially grab the Fire Starter.

“It was nothing,” she muttered. “Just a trick of the shadows and the night.”

An uneasiness grew in the pit of my stomach and a frown pulled at the corners of my mouth. Nightwalkers had the best night vision possible, as far as I knew, and between the lamp and moonlight, the park wasn’t that particularly dark. How could Mira have mistaken a shadow for a naturi? Was this the same shadow she had seen outside the house of the First Communion? Or similar to the crying baby that she had heard at the conservatory? Something had potentially found a way to play with the nightwalker’s mind, making her more dangerous to those around her.

“Mira…” I started, but my voice trailed off. How was I supposed to tell her that I thought something was intentionally driving her crazy?

“It’s nothing, Danaus,” Mira said, turning to face me again. She resumed her walk through the park and I fell into step beside her, unable to tap down my growing concern for the nightwalker. “Our focus needs to be on finding a way to locate our killer,” Mira continued after we had walked a couple of blocks.

Between the Fire Starter and a nightwalker hunter with a bori-owned soul wandering around Savannah, I had little doubt that the bori would eventually come looking for us.