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had chewed through, their contents beginning to ferment in the morning heat. The dealer and hooker clientele at the little corner convenience store had given way to two elderly men sipping coffee and a handful of children counting their pocket change. Even the cemetery was transformed by sunlight. The grave stones and markers were still in neat rows, but the grass showed signs of a careless mowing and the gates I’d climbed the night before were rusted. And unlocked. I pushed one and it gave way with a squawk.
    Had they even been locked last night? I’d not bothered to check, assuming they were. I was just glad I didn’t have to repeat my climbing again today, especially in my work clothes.
    Five graves stood out among the rest, the sod tossed about in huge clumps, the dirt looking as if someone had taken a giant mixer to it. Two men stood beside one of the disturbed plots—one with a ring of iron-gray wooly hair around a bald pate, the other younger and shaved bald. The younger shook his head in disgust as he smoothed the dirt back over the grave.
    “Family of yours?” the elder man asked, watching me approach. “I’m so sorry this happened. We’ll have it back to rights in just a few.”
    I glanced at the headstones. Robertson. Five graves right next to each other, same last name, same date of death forty years ago. I did some quick calculations one the ages. Forty and thirty-eight on the adults. Children aged sixteen, ten, and eight.
    Oh my. A whole family lost in one day. Fire? Car accident? Plane crash? Whatever had happened, this certainly was incentive for someone to disturb spirits at rest. An aunt or a cousin, perhaps. Or even a child. By the dates on his grave, Lincoln Junior was certainly old enough to have fathered a son or daughter. I winced at the thought of being a parent at sixteen, but had seen enough of the world to know it wasn’t an unusual occurrence.
    “Friend of the family,” I told the older man. I had no idea how well he’d known the Robertsons and didn’t want to find myself caught in a lie.
    He scowled down at the bare dirt. “Some people have no respect for the dead. Luckily there wasn’t too much damage. Just even these up, put some sod and seed on them, and they’ll be looking back to normal in a few months. I’m pretty sure I can even sand that mark off the stone, too.”
    Mark? I bent down and swept the dirt from the headstone, tracing the edging and words with a finger. There. It was tiny, barely noticeable. If the old man hadn’t been so thorough about searching for damage, he would have missed it. It was likely any visitors would have missed the faint scratching at the corner of the stone, too. I wetted a finger and cleaned the rest of the dirt off to see it better.
    And for the second time in twenty-four hours my heart raced. The graffiti that had been scraped lightly on the stone wasn’t a tag or rude word, it was a symbol. It was the same symbol as was on the piece of paper I carried in my pocket, the symbol Leonora had paid me to research.
    What in the world could the Robertson family, deceased forty years ago, have to do with the vampires? And what was this mark? Obviously it had something to do with the raising of the specters last night. Like the elder man had said, just a few swipes with some fine grit sandpaper would erase them. If they’d been done weeks ago, had nothing to do with the spirits I saw last night, then the symbols would have been dulled by rain by now. Just in case, I checked the other stones and saw the same mark.
    “Do any of the other markers or headstones have this graffiti?”
    The man shook his head. “I didn’t check them all, but none of the other ones in this section do. Terrible, that someone would target this one family for such disrespect.”
    I didn’t necessarily see raising the dead as disrespect, being a non-judgmental Templar and all, but necromancy wasn’t something we got within a hundred miles of. Artifacts and grimoires