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“Okay, we won’t go in.” I squeezed his hand and looked back at him with a smile. “I’ll just poke my head in if the doors are unlocked.”

The heavy wooden doors of the little church were closed but indeed unlocked when I tried them. The door screeched when I opened it, and I winced and peered in, blinking to try and see through the gloom and dust that had been kicked up.

It looked long deserted, the pews coated in dust and cobwebs, the stained-glass windows above the altar too dark and coated with grime to let in any light. The corners of the nave were shrouded completely in shadows, pitch black and impenetrable. As I wrinkled my nose and scrubbed at it, trying to get rid of the itch the dust had caused, two glowing, menacing red eyes appeared from those shadows and looked straight at me.

“Lucifer—” I jumped out of my skin, clutching my chest, and felt Brian’s big hands settle on my shoulders as his worried voice came from outside.

“Klaus, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, sorry.” I laughed a little, then awkwardly waved at the… Actually, I couldn’t tell what they were. Especially when it looked like several more glowing red eyes blinked open and closed again too fast for me to really be sure I’d even seen them. Whatever they were, they were staring me down from the darkness, so I plastered a friendly smile on my face. “Hi! Sorry to disturb you. Is it okay if we walk around the graveyard? We’ll be quiet.”

After a few more seconds, the red eyes blinked sleepily, drooped, then shut again. A raspy, demonically layered voice came from the darkness. “Yeah, no worries, bro.”

I backed out of the church on tiptoes and eased the door closed as quietly as I could. “We’ll try not to disturb them,” I whispered to Brian.

“What is it?” he asked in a hushed voice. “Vampire?”

“I’m not sure, actually,” I told him cheerfully. “But they seem fine.”

Taking his hand, we walked back toward the graveyard, which was as unkempt as the church itself. It clearly hadn’t been maintained in a long time. Long grass and weeds and creeping vines crowded many of the graves, twisting around the statues of sorrowful fallen angels and spilling from the mouths of the grinning gargoyles watching us from their spots near the church’s decaying roof.

Most of the graves we passed were for vampires, identifiable by the iconography they liked to carve into their headstones. Roses, ravens, lace, thorny vines. The area with bigger, more elaborate headstones, including those with the mournful statues, had several with rubies embedded into the stone—an outdated status symbol of wealthy vampires.

I paused when we reached two graves, side by side, with carved stone hands protruding from the ground in front of each headstone and reaching for one another, fingertips barely touching. One of the hands was narrow and masculine, with pointed claw-like nails, the other was larger and elegant, more feminine, with actual claws curving from the fingertips.

I quickly scanned the inscription on the headstone to the left, the one with the masculine hand. The name and date were faded, but the text at the bottom was just about legible: He could not bear to live without his forbidden love, so he greeted the dawn upon her death.

The headstone next to it, with the larger, more feminine hand, read: Pack leader, sister, daughter. Loyal until the end to her nightwalker. The dates under her name showed she’d lived to the ripe old age of ninety-one.

Brian spoke up before I could make sense of it all. “I think they were a vampire and werewolf couple.” He pointed at the space between the graves, where those two stone hands reached across to touch. “See there? There’s a little stone border separating these two sections of the graveyard. Looks like vampires are buried on one side, werewolves on the other. Makes sense if this was built in the eighteen hundreds. That was when vampires and werewolves were at war with each other and any fraternisation was strictly forbidden.”

I gasped, my hand flying up to cover my heart. “Oh my Lucifer. They were lovers. And he couldn’t live without her when she died, so he…” Heat prickled in my eyes as I shook my head. “That’s so sad.”

Brian glanced down at me, then made a sound in his throat that was half-sympathetic, half-amused as he squeezed my hand and brought it to his mouth to kiss my knuckles. “You’re sweet.”

“Sorry.” I let out a rueful little laugh and wiped delicately at my eyes. “I’m such a crybaby.”

“Getting emotional over something objectively sad doesn’t make you a crybaby.”

I sniffled and laughed again, shaking off the melancholy and instead focusing on the fact that we now knew these two people’s love story—a story that was slowly becoming lost to the ages. At least they’d live on for a bit longer in our memories. “That’s true. Thank you.”

“Do you want to leave?” Brian asked, looking down at me with a concerned pinch to his brows. “If it’s making you upset…”

“Oh, no, I’m fine.” I squeezed his hand and went right up on my tiptoes to kiss his chin. I still couldn’t quite reach his cheek without him hunching down to meet me halfway. “I love this. It’s so peaceful here. This is so much more interesting to me than… I don’t know, looking around a store or going to a movie or something.”

Brian’s handsome face broke into that sweet, wolfish smile. “I think so too. I actually, um… I have an idea for our next date. If you want to go on another one, that is.” His cheeks turned pink. “I’m not assuming—”

“Of course I want to go on another one,” I interrupted him with a wide smile, squeezing his hand again. “And another one after that. And another one…”

He chuckled, scrubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “Okay, great. Me too.”

“What’s your date idea?” I asked eagerly, those lovely little butterflies starting back up in my belly.

He shot me a sheepish look. “Would you hate it if I kept it a surprise? If you don’t like surprises, that’s totally fine—I can tell you, but I thought…”

“No, that sounds fun.” I beamed up at him. “I love surprises. I know you’ll pick something we’ll both enjoy. I can’t wait, Brian.”

“Okay.” He grinned again, even wider this time. A true, authentic, no-holds-barred smile without any hesitancy or nerves or anything. It was breathtakingly beautiful. I couldn’t stop myself from reaching up and cupping the nape of his neck, tugging just enough for him to realise what I wanted.