Aria in Ice Read Free

lashes, “unless I’m around Johnny Gerard who tends to get
me into surreal situations even when he’s not playing Gregory
Noble.”
    Johnny patted my green and chestnut hair as
though I was a toddler, then casually leaned down and proceeded to
plant upon my lips a kiss that curled my toes as well as my hair.
Just as casually, he let go. “Darlin’, I personally love the ghost
theory better, too. Tell you the truth, I’m very curious as to any
specteral wanderers wandering Kouzlo Noc . Care to take a
stroll around the castle cemetery and see what pops up?”
    I winced. “Not sure ‘pops up’ is exactly what
I need to see happening in a graveyard but I do like the idea of
exploring.” I linked my arm through his. “Lead on, burglar
boy.”

Chapter 2
     
     
    Within six seconds I was rethinking this
whole stroll around the graveyard. To begin with, I didn’t see a
single grave worthy of a digital click from even a throw-away
camera—unless I wanted promo for a bad slasher movie. This cemetery
must have been intended for the dregs of society. Every headstone
was chipped or cracked into pieces. Not even foot markers had
remained intact through the centuries. Broken bottles decorated the
headstones and vines strangled the larger pieces of stone,
effectively blocking inscriptions and epitaphs from the few curious
souls seeking a shred of history.
    Graveyards aren’t normally party sites, but
this untended, ignored plot of land was—to put it mildly—sad.
Johnny pushed aside a particularly annoying vine and we both nearly
fell over partially-intact headstones. Since the epitaphs were in
Czech the words were somewhat unintelligible to me, but the carved
numerals were easily deciphered. 1721-1764. 1725-1780. Odd. The
graveyard was such a mess I would have expected to find that the
dates were more in line with much earlier centuries, perhaps even
from the medieval period. Johnny knelt down to inspect a marker,
while I sidestepped the two headstones and walked a few steps
further. More Eighteenth Century dates. I wandered through this
forgotten piece of history, pushing away the dead greenery and the
piles of dirt that clung to the stones. Everything was
Seventeen-such-and-such to Seventeen-so-and-so.
    I slowly surveyed this small cemetery. And it
hit me with such force I sank onto the nearest block of stone that
seemed intact enough to hold my weight.
    “Johnny.”
    “What?”
    “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
    He nodded. “These headstones don’t look like
they’ve been destroyed through the forces of time, nature and
neglect.”
    “I agree. It’s like they’d been deliberately
smashed.”
    I walked on, surmising that this destruction
didn’t appear to have been caused by kids out for a sick vandal
romp through a burial ground, but by a person or persons who had
been hunting for something. The cracks and the crumbles had been
forced in such a way as to allow the perpetrators to literally
search inside the stones. That wasn’t the worst of this scene. It
was obvious, once I took the time to really look, that each plot
had been dug up; that some of the wreckage now lying in a sorrowful
and frozen chaotic tableau on the ground were the remains of
coffins—with parts of the original inhabitants now outside those
original resting places.
    I felt chilled. There is something so unholy,
so sick, so uselessly mean about a grave robber. If one has to
steal from the dead, then plan a heist on a museum where the
personalities have been long forgotten.
    Prague in the spring, yet suddenly cold as
ice. I wanted out of this place. Time to let Johnny Gerard go paint
the mural or whatever he wanted to do with the rest of this day
while I headed up to Kastle Kouzlo Noc , talk to the owners
about renting this castle for Shay’s movie—and get warm. I
shivered, looked around for Johnny, who’d wandered off to
investigate broken angels, then carefully shielded my face from an
open grave about eight feet away from me. No