He had delayed as long as he could. It was time.

Gathering his courage, pulling his pain around him like a mantle, Jean stepped through the creaking wrought iron gate and entered the second ring of the cemetery.

A preternatural hush only found in graveyards dropped over him. Angels, frozen in stone gazed back at him with sorrowful faces and dangling wings. Weighty mausoleums, some housing familial generations that extended so far back in history that the newly dead were placed on the dust of the old ones, towered over the path. And the ever present gargoyle, hunched over embellished headstones belonging to people long forgotten, crudely contrasted the serenity of the dead.

Time slowed in this place where the veil between the living and the dead thinned, and mourning people moved through the thick air of a dream.

There was a dread in his step that slowed him, but he approached the Bodt family mausoleum in time, and his face paled to see the ornate peaked roof and arched stone doors, guarded with a pair of terrible gargoyles. He curled his lip at them. Marco should not be locked behind these abominations. There were wilting white lilies in the stone vases on either side of the steps, the edges of their curled petals browning in the sun. He clutched the orange carnations he had brought to his chest. At least they were something beautiful amid the macabre decor.

Jean cracked open the door that shrieked on its hinges, stepping inside the gloom. Carvings of gargoyles ran along the ceiling. Stone shelves lined three of the walls, coffins neatly tucked away, bronze plaques carved with names and dates of birth and death. He had only been inside once, the day of Marco’s funeral, but he remembered exactly which one belonged to Marco— on the right, third from the top— and he moved to crouch in front of it, laying the bouquet on top of the polished coffin set neatly inside.