Spirit and Dust by Rosemary Clement-Moore

Gerard, any local police officers or security guards—were the nameless, faceless “others” who had kidnapped a young woman and shot her bodyguard in cold blood.
    “I took precautions,” Carson assured me. “But I’m not a hundred percent certain.” He crouched and offered his linked hands like a step. “Come on. I’ll boost you up.”
    I eyed the spikes on top of the fence—dull and mostly for show, but still
spikes
. Then I eyed Carson, judging the estimated levels of sight line (his) and hemline (mine). “You have got to be kidding.”
    “What?” There was a challenge there. “You were never a cheerleader?”
    A ridiculous question, and from his glance at my Hello Kitty skull T-shirt, he knew it.
    “Were
you
?” I doubted it. One, I couldn’t imagine that interning for a crime overlord left much time for the NCAA. Two, he wasn’t pretty enough. He wore clean-cut like a disguise, but there was a no-time-for-nonsense intensity to his gaze and an older-than-he-should-be hardness to his jaw, as if he’d had to toughen up in a hurry.
    Again with the challenging lift of his brow. “You don’t believe I spend my Saturdays cheering the Gophers to victory?”
    My snort fogged in the cold. “You’d have to manage to
be
cheerful first.”
    Then the corner of his mouth quirked up—not as far as
cheer
, but just a hint of shared humor and a slash of handsome guy-dimple.
    Sainted Mary Magdalene. If my lungs weren’t half frozen, my breath would have whooshed right out of me.
    No, he was not pretty. He was worse. Devilish.
    There was a bodiless sigh from the darkness. “I would greatly appreciate it if you two stopped flirting and got on with this unseemly business.”
    Mrs. Hardwicke, our ghostly chaperone, was still along for the ride. She faded out when I didn’t give her my attention, but she always managed to pop back in when she had something to say.
    “Fine,”
I said. At Carson’s bemused look, I explained, “Mrs. Hardwicke is impatient.” No reason to mention the flirting part. At least I couldn’t blush with ice in my veins. I put my toe in his clasped hands and warned, “Do
not
look up my skirt.”
    “Eyes down,” he promised soberly. “Scout’s honor.”
    I only cared on principle. I rebelled in a lot of ways, but indecent underwear wasn’t one of them. I’d talked to one too many shades who’d died embarrassed because of not listening to their mothers on that score.
    I grabbed the bars of the fence for balance. On Carson’s count, I jumped while he lifted me like I weighed nothing. SomehowI managed not to skewer myself on the pointy top, then got a toe up on the horizontal rail, eased over, and dropped to the other side.
    Carson, as far as I could tell, just vaulted across. Maybe he really was a Jedi.
    “Which way?” he asked, blowing into his cupped hands.
    “Give me a sec.” I flexed my own fingers to get the blood going, and with it, the intangible me. I pushed my psyche out like a sixth-sense radar net and got my bearings.
    The graves around us were relatively new. Here and there the soft echoes of souls lingered, damped by the earth. Later, as dust returned to dust, the last remnant traces on this side of the Veil would unravel and vanish.
    “Is this weird for you?” asked Carson. “Being in a graveyard?”
    It was my turn to raise a brow. “Weird compared with what? Talking to Alexis’s dead grandmother in the backseat of a Ford Taurus?”
    He gave me that point. “When you put it that way …”
    I tucked my hands into the coat pockets, wrapping my right hand around the mausoleum key. An electric tingle washed over me, carrying subtle information, like flavors I could taste but had no words to describe.
    “The remnants here”—I gestured around us—“are all sleeping. Proper burials are like that. Most spirits have someplace better to hang out. What’s left are the memories of loved ones visiting. They blend together, and it’s kind of pretty,