At about waist level, smudged in black was a single, long vertical line followed by a K, then a shorter vertical line and another K. Barnabus had never seen the Kincaid mark look that way, had never heard Gemma describe it like this.

“What does that mean?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

“They’re both here. They’re digging me up.”

He’d thought the biggest obstacles were behind them. They’d managed to escape closed coffins and a hearse that was being watched. All of that would be for nothing if Silas and Arlo were nearby.

“They are going to discover there is nothing in those caskets but sandbags.”

Running now would get them away from the imminent threat, but the Kincaids would know they were alive. The hunt would never stop.

“We cain’t just run,” Gemma said. “There’s a bit of the wall up ahead that ain’t in shadow. We’d risk being seen.”

“We’ll wait here,” Barnabus said. “They’ll find an empty coffin and go searching the streets. We can leave after they do.”

“And go where?” Gemma asked. “They’ll start hurting people again. All this, and it won’t change nothing.”

He had no words of reassurance. They had to stay where they were, waiting and watching while all the effort they’d made was undone.

The shoveling stopped.

“They’ve reached a coffin,” she whispered. “I don’t know if it’s yours or mine.”

Wood splintered. Resurrecting a corpse without fully digging up the coffin meant breaking the lid. This wasn’t an endeavor they were attempting to hide, then. Since the Mastiff did this sort of thing to send a message, it made sense the Kincads wouldn’t have been careful about their work.

The taller of the men watched as the other tossed aside his pry bar.

“They have it open.” Gemma’s voice quivered. “They’re seeing an empty coffin. They know.”

The taller brother fetched what looked like a length of rope from a bag. The two of them lowered it into the hole they’d created.

“That don’t make sense,” she said. “The rope’s for hooking around the arms of the body and pulling it out. But there ain’t a stiff inside. Are they trying to pull out a sandbag?”

“Unlikely,” Barnabus said.

“But that’s our plot,” Gemma said. “And that soil’s fresh. It cain’t be any coffin but one of ours, and we’re not in ’em.”

They were at a distance and an odd angle, which made it difficult to see exactly what was happening at the grave.