Excerpt from Graveyard Shift by M L. Rio, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

12:00 AM Edie

Most of the names on most of the gravestones had been scrubbed out by time or teenage vandals; the church itself had been boarded up and was so overgrown with vines and moss and mold that the DANGER, KEEP OUT sign nailed across the doors was decidedly redundant. Since its designation as a local historic landmark, it was protected from the bulldozers and wrecking balls that had razed everything else south of Azalea Street to make way for more patients, more parking, more gift shops and dining halls. While the medical school constructed, Saint Anthony the Anchorite deconstructed—one brick, one beam at a time. Nobody in their right mind would loiter in its long shadow in the middle of the night, but nobody in their right mind still smoked these days anyway.

So Edie Wu told herself as she trudged across campus from the offices of the Belltower Times. She was always the last to clock out—her grim duty as editor-in-chief to lash herself to the masthead, go down with the ship—but lately she didn't clock out so much as take five. Take a break. Take a walk. Tell herself one cigarette a night was not a habit, just a way to take the edge off when she was, well, on edge. And when was she not? Yes, it was a student paper, but a six-time Pacemaker Award–winning student paper circulating to ten thousand readers. Her predecessor had graduated and gone on to the Nation but still cast a long shadow across Edie's desk. Some nights she wished for catastrophe to strike just so she'd have a big story to break, which only made her feel worse in the morning, because she still had no story, but she did have a fresh black bruise on her conscience.

The bigger problem was The Lump. Since its first appearance two weeks ago, everything had felt hugely, horribly urgent. She pulled her coat a little closer and hurried toward the ramshackle shadow of the Anchorite, a rockbound black mass rudely eclipsing the sickly sickle moon.

She was huffing and puffing by the time she crested the hill and slipped through the gate, which refused to stay latched anymore. Like the KEEP OUT sign, the gate was redundant. Nobody wanted to huddle in a moldering churchyard after midnight because there was nowhere else to smoke. But huddle they did. Misery loved company and made strange bedfellows.

Two of the others had beaten her there. She knew them by their shadows: Tuck, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, was always first. Beside him stood Hannah, who put her hood up at the first rustle of autumn and didn't take it down again until May. Oddly, though, they weren't talking. They stared down at the ground in stony imitation of the graveyard angels, without the blank unblinking eyes or patchy beards of lichen. When they heard Edie's footsteps round the Drewalt obelisk, they looked up and she looked down and realized that what they were actually staring at was a hole in the ground.

Edie stared, too. "The fuck is that?"

Hannah took a long drag. "The fuck do you think?" The hood cast her narrow face in shadow, blacked out both her eyes. Of the other Anchorites, Edie liked her least. She turned to Tuck instead, already fumbling to light his second smoke.

"Don't look at me," he said. "I don't know anything."

"It wasn't here last night," Edie said.

"Duh." Hannah let her mouth hang open, smoke spilling out. She lifted one foot and knocked the peak off the little mountain of dirt at the edge of the hole. Edie peered down into the darkness. Hairy, gnarled roots poked out of damp earth cobwebbed with white threads of mycelia.

"Who was the last to leave?"

"Ask the rector." Hannah steepled her hands in a mockery of prayer and bowed toward Tuck. He pinched the cigarette against his lips.

"Me," he said. Not actually a rector in any official capacity, but he might as well have been. Always the first to arrive, always the last to leave. Edie sometimes wondered what he was avoiding. She had trouble checking the impulse to pry into everything. The Lump throbbed reproachfully. It did that now, when her journalistic ambitions got the better of her. She knew she was probably imagining it, but that—like the many statistics arguing in favor of its being entirely benign—did not comfort her much.

Excerpted from Graveyard Shift by M L. Rio. Copyright © 2024 by M L. Rio. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.