Page 20 of Midlife Shifter Unexpected

“Can you fly?” I kept my eyes on the road barely believing I was asking a question like that in all seriousness.

“No,” she said, “but I asked the same question. Just park by the gate and we’ll walk inside.”

“What exactly am I sniffing for?” I threw the car into park.

“Anything out of the ordinary.”

“What’s ordinary in a graveyard?” I asked. “The stench of dead bodies?”

“Maybe,” Mae said.

“You guys can’t smell anything?” I asked.

“Trina thought she smelled something the other day, but it turns out it was like a dead skunk. None of us have that as our superpower.”

I glanced at her as I grabbed the handle of the car to get out. “You said this is just one of the disturbances in the cemetery. What other types of disturbances have there been?”

She shook her head, opening the car and getting out. “You don’t want to know,” she said as she shut the door.

I gulped. If I was going to be a part of dealing with this problem, that was exactly what I was going to want to know.

Chapter 15

The cemetery was overgrown all around the gate. Whatever they were doing for the cemetery, they weren’t maintaining the graves.

“Was somebody buried here recently?” I asked as we walked through the gate. I noticed to the right of the pathway there was some fresh dirt.

Mae stared briefly at the upturned earth. “No,” she said tersely. “That’s part of the problem. We started seeing it a few days ago. Disturbed graves.”

“It’s right down this pathway,” she said, leading me down a path. It was covered in trees and had moss covered graves in all nooks and crannies of the glen that we walked through. The air was fresh and clear, with the scent of the moist evening. I was finally in the cemetery, the place I had thought about since I was a little kid. My blood was racing as if this was one of the places I was always meant to be in my life. I felt excitement bubbling in my bones.

“It’s so beautiful here,” I said with delight to Mae.

She nodded.

“Why didn’t Trina and Hilda come with us?” I asked.

“No, Hilda has been pulling a lot of double shifts lately trying to find out what’s making the earth move here. She needs to rest up.”

“Does it just happen at night, or does it happen in the day also?” I asked.

“It only happens at night, but that’s not unusual. it’s being caused by magic. Magic is always fed by the moon and is much more common at night then in the day.”

We stepped into a glen that had green groundcover everywhere. It looked like a verdant delicate carpet under our feet. Halfway in the vale, the ground was terribly disturbed, with big piles of fresh mud slung up from holes down in the bottom. I walked up to it and looked down into the hole.

“It’s a grave,” I said, shaking my head. I looked at the claw marks on the side of the grave. “That wasn’t someone digging up a grave, that was…” My voice trailed off into the grim reality of what I was seeing in front of me.

“It came from inside the grave,” Mae finished the sentence for me.

The cold chill traveled over my back causing the hairs of my neck to stand up. A little growl emitted from the back of my throat.

“Zombies.” Dread trilled in my bones. “Of all the supernatural species and awesomeness in the world that I could be subject to, that I could experience, like unicorns maybe or Ewoks or anything, I get zombies.”

“You’re confusing science-fiction with supernatural,” Mae pointed out.

“You know what I mean, like not real.”

“Yeah, but this is real,” Mae said.

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