“She’s got the Irish in her blood, lad,” Eammon said, brushing Corb off with a wave of his hand. “I saw it in her the second I met her. And it’s about time we diversified. Experience and craftiness often outwit youth and vigor. We need more brains than brawn right now, and you know it. There is too much afoot to keep on doing as we have been and expecting different results.”

Corb’s jaw seemed to lock shut after that, and he didn’t utter another word. Maybe Eammon outranked him in this company? That seemed plausible given not only their age difference—Corb was easily thirty years Eammon’s junior—but the way that Eammon led the group along.

They took me to the east side of the graveyard where there were conspicuously fewer graves. The big trees hung heavy with Spanish moss that blew in the breeze, floating back and forth, adding to the overall creepy feeling of hanging out in a graveyard after dark.

We stopped in front of a fence surrounding a single oversized grave, and for a minute I thought maybe we were there to admire the elaborate gravestone. “Stunning” was the word that came to mind.

The tomb was made of marble, if the gray and white veining were legit, and it was easily over six feet tall and wide, a perfect square with a human-sized weeping angel perched on the very top. One wing of the angel spread wide, showing every beautifully carved feather, and the other wing looked like it had been broken off. I squinted up at the statue. No, that wasn’t right, it had been made to look that way. The broken wing hung limply behind the angel, dragging past the back of the tomb.

In one hand, the angel held a spray of flowers, and in the other, a tiny flame curled up from the palm. I don’t mean a carved flame either. I mean a literal flame burned in the angel’s palm, flickering in the night, casting shadows across the angel.

The weather had dragged darkness down the lines of the eyes, streaking the face as though the angel were crying, and had been for a long time.

I found my feet taking me forward to read the name of the person buried here.

Lily. Carved lilies wrapped around her name and the scrolling words that said she’d died in 1879, at the age of eighteen, beloved daughter, may she find peace in death that she could not find in life.

I’d read the message softly to myself without realizing it.

The dark-skinned man held out his hand to me, palm up, pulling me out of my staring match with the stunning grave marker. “My name is Tomas; friends call me Tom.”

I put my hand in his and gave it a shake. “Breena.”