Having passed the church, Charlie rocked to a stop, stared into the shadows under the trees, and sighed. “It’s not a park, it’s a cemetery.”

“What?”

“I need to concentrate now, Katie.”

“Straight home, Charlie. No detours. She refuses to talk about it until you’re here.”

“Talk about what?”

“I don’t know, do I? You decided to go bar hopping.”

“One bar,” Charlie began, but Katie’d hung up.

One bar was not bar hopping. Charlie shoved her phone into her pocket. It was hop, at best.

The cemetery was old. Historic even. Shadowed by the church and the office building across from it, the graveyard was distinctly darker than the sidewalk she’d left. Sycamore trees whispered overhead. The storm seemed more imminent here.

Modern cemeteries weren’t so much cities of the dead as parks filled with inconvenient stone slabs and they usually attracted nothing more dangerous than joggers and dog walkers. The possibility of witnesses—mourners, caretakers, the recently dead—tended to keep thrill seekers and the terminally stupid away. Historic cemeteries, however, with their gnarled trees and high iron fences, time-darkened crypts and worn tombstones, attracted the sort of person who thought burning a few candles and scribbling chalk notations found in musty books bought at library yard sales would have no unforeseen consequences.

It was possible that this particular historic cemetery, enclosed, private, and urban, had, over the long years of its existence, escaped being visited by those sorts of people. Anything was possible; Charlie knew that better than most people. It was possible that the shadows wrapped around the worn stones were the result of a solid object blocking both starlight and streetlights. It was possible. But it wasn’t very likely.

She actually didn’t need to go into the cemetery to get home. If she didn’t want to return to the planter—and she didn’t—Baltimore had plenty of other ways into the Wood. Not so long ago, she’d have sketched a charm on the gate to keep people out and figured she’d done her bit to keep the accumulated malevolence from screwing up too many lives. Those who avoided the gates, clambering up and over the wrought iron, would have been looking for trouble so, hey, not her problem if they found it. Making them even less her problem, they wouldn’t have been family. Or a threat to her family.

Not so long ago, that would’ve been enough. But not-so-long-ago was back before a troll had helped her discover that being a Wild Power in the Gale family meant more than charming strangers and collecting metaphysical frequent flyer miles by taking shortcuts through the Wood. Where helped meant holy fucking shit that hurts.