Her back was to the stone grave. She was panting. The darkness and her reaction to days in the stifling tomb had caught up. She needed sky. She needed air. Light. She fumbled her iPhone on.

“Light. Please, Ser Dalius—”

The [Knight] heard her voice crack. He slowly bowed in the air.

“I will make a torch. My apologies, Miss Cara. Stay there but—but ten minutes.”

“Thanks. Thank you. Please hurry.”

She whispered. The ghost nodded at her and flew off ahead of her, quickly vanishing from sight. And there—Cara realized she’d miscalculated.

Because the darkness was all but absolute. And without Ser Dalius, it was worse. Her iPhone lit up the stone floor and graves in a small area around her. But Cara still heard it.

Skitter, skitter.

It was just the mice. Tricks her mind played on her. Cara looked about. She didn’t see anything. But her eyes were so poor.

“Calm down, Cara. You’ve seen damn mice. You eat them. For breakfast. It’s just—”

She sat on the lid of the grave, as sacrilegious as that might be. Peeking around. Now that she looked around—the tomb was the perfect place for a game of hide-and-seek. The long, identical graves let something creep up on—

Cara whirled, shining her light around. She thought she saw a shape, moving for a second. It was small, mouse-sized. She slowly exhaled.

“So there is a mouse problem. Hey! You little bastards! Piss off, will you?”

She shouted, grateful for something to take her frustrations out on. She owed Dalius an apology. He was okay. She just needed that torch instead of wasting her battery and then—

Skitter. Skitter.

Cara’s head turned. There was another shape. It moved out of the way, hiding behind a grave.

“I saw that! Get lost, rodents!”

She shouted. Two mice. They could be lunch. Ser Dalius could hunt them down. She felt…a bit queasy.

She hoped the mice weren’t infected or filled with something nasty. But they’d been cooked.

Movement. Cara’s head turned. A third mouse poked its head around the side of a coffin to her right.

She whirled.

“What the—”

The glowing eyes retreated. Cara stared. And suddenly—she felt uneasy.

“Those eyes…”

They had been glowing. Not just gleaming in the light. Before her phone’s light had swept across it, she could have sworn the mouse’s eyes were glowing.

“Just a trick of the light. Calm down, Sid—Cara. You’re a professional. You’ve seen worse. Calm down.”

She took a deep breath, and then another. She was not a child. That was just—

Skiterskitter.

Cara whirled. This time she caught three mice scurrying around the corner of a stone coffin. Three. The hair on the back of her neck rose.

“What the…get lost! Do you hear me?”