Chapter 1

On All Souls' Day I came back to my hometown to tend the family graves, and found the plot had grown a whole size bigger.

The ground all around it had been repaired and rebuilt too, the offering table piled high, and underneath it all hung a faint stench.

I almost thought I'd come to the wrong place. When I asked my mother what was going on, all I got was a scolding.

"Look at how well your cousin Blake Emerson's done for himself. Two years out in the world and he strikes it rich, and the first thing he does when he comes home is honor the family."

My heart sank. Something was very wrong. I told my mother to call the police, fast.

"Mom, hurry, call the police!"

"The police? What in the world would I call the police for?"

"I think Blake hid a body in the family grave!"

"..."

"Don't you dare say things like that!"

My mother flinched at my words and clapped a hand over my mouth.

She glanced around, terrified someone might have overheard, mortified at the thought of anything smearing Blake's good name.

"You, you, how can you talk such nonsense? Your cousin gets rich and that's a bad thing? You just have to drag his name through the mud?"

"I'm not dragging his name through anything, it's true, we have to call the police! The smell is wrong, can't you smell it?"

My mother sniffed hard, then shook her head and insisted she didn't smell anything.

But I could.

There was the stench of a corpse coming from the family grave.

It felt like the smell was still releasing slowly, not yet very strong, which meant the body was very "fresh."

But this grave had been here for years. There was no way it should smell like that.

And if it were an animal carcass, it wouldn't smell like that either.

Besides, my mother didn't know that two years ago, when I filled out my college applications, I'd secretly changed them to a mortuary science major.

By now I'd studied funeral services for two years, and I'd dealt with bodies plenty of times.

So there was no way I was smelling it wrong.

"Mom, trust me, hurry and call the police."

"Oh, would you stop this fuss, child. It's All Souls' Day, we're tending the graves. What would I be calling the police for?"

My mother looked at me with worry, like I'd seen a ghost, stroking my back over and over and trying to pluck a few strands of my hair so she could call my soul back home later.

She thought I'd been frightened, the way I used to be as a child, and she bowed toward the grave again, begging the ancestors to protect me.

She was driving me half out of my mind. I went to pull out my phone and call the police myself, but she snatched it away.

"Enough! Sydney Emerson, quit acting up!"

My mother raised her voice at me, trying to scare off whatever "unclean thing" had latched onto me.

I saw there was no arguing with her, so I decided to ask when Blake had gotten back. Before the question was even out, a chilly voice came from behind me.

"Sis, you're back!"

A cold dread ran up my spine. I turned and there was Blake, come out of nowhere.

He'd lost a lot of weight, and his skin had gone dark. The scratches on his face stood out, and there were more on his neck and his arms.

"Blake? You're back too?"

I forced out a stiff smile, uneasy inside. Had he heard what I'd said just now?

But what I cared about more were the scratches on him.

"Blake, how'd you get hurt?"

He tugged awkwardly at his clothes. In heat like this he still wore long sleeves and long pants, and he'd made a point of putting on a hat and a sun scarf, as if he were deliberately covering those scratches.

"Oh, it's nothing. You know I got a cat? It went wild a few days ago and clawed me up, the cuts still haven't healed. Don't worry, I already got the shots."

A cat?

It sure didn't look like it.

Since when were a cat's claws that wide?

If anything, they looked like scratches from a person. But I didn't dare say so.

I acted like nothing was wrong and, half on purpose, steered the talk toward Blake and marriage.

Because Blake had had a hard life. His parents divorced when he was little, his mother walked out and left him behind, and he'd grown up on the wrong end of a lot of cold looks.

His father didn't take much care of him either. The two of them scraped by, and even when he liked a girl he never dared to get close.

But not long ago I'd heard Blake had fallen in love, and the two of them were already talking marriage.

So why had he come back alone this time?