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

"Did you see anything weird?"

"Is this your first time here?" Hannah said. "Everything about this place is weird."

The Anchorite did seem oddly lost in time and space. It had stood on the same spot for two hundred years while the town and the college exploded around it. On one side, a parking garage cast a murky orange light, as if the night outside had oxidized. Glaring red letters spelled out EMERGENCY in the black sky southward. The west wall opened into an alley behind the Calhoun Center for Behavioral Psychiatry, and the north wall followed a narrow road that eventually crossed paths with the modest nightlife flitting up and down Azalea Street. The light of the streetlamps encroached only so far, held at bay by a wall of ivy that had filled in the gaps between the bars of the fence. Within its crooked boundaries, angels wept elegantly over headstones while swinish gargoyles grinned and leered from their perches on either side of the church doors. Weeds grew without restraint. An oak tree even older than the church squatted in one corner, dropping acorns and orange leaves every October until the branches were bare and jack-o'-lantern mushrooms took up residence among the roots. Some had sprouted already, glowing eerily in the dark.

"I mean did you see anything man-made weird," Edie said. The hole clearly wasn't the work of an animal—the lines and angles too regular for paws and claws. "Tuck?"

He shook his head. "Nothing weirder than usual," he said. "No … hole."

Nobody wanted to call it what it obviously was, including Edie. She tugged her own pack of smokes from her pocket and struggled to get one lit. A cold breeze nipped at the tip of her nose and blew the flame out every time she spun the spark wheel.

"Here." Tuck opened his coat to offer temporary shelter from the elements.

"Thanks." She inhaled, exhaled, watched the smoke unfurl. "So, what do we do?"

"Do?" Tuck looked from her to Hannah. "Who says we have to do anything?"

"Do anything about what?"

They turned together toward the Drewalt obelisk, less startled than they might have been because they knew the voice.

"Tamar," Edie said, and breathed a little easier. Tamar was the oldest of the Anchorites, a sobering presence to counterbalance Tuck's twitchy agitation, Hannah's extravagant indifference.

"Hey," she said, emerging slowly from under the oak, cheeks dewy from her walk across campus from the Health Sciences Library. "How's ev— What's with the hole?"

"The very conundrum we were just contemplating," Hannah said, with a wry little smile.

Tamar looked her way, but Hannah only inhaled, exhaled, in Holmesian condescension. "Maybe there's a funeral this weekend," Tamar said, with a sigh, resigned to playing Watson for the moment. "Don't they dig beforehand if the ground is hard?"

Tuck shook his head. "Nobody's been buried here in a hundred years."

"And wouldn't you need a backhoe for that?" Edie asked. "I don't think they dig the old-fashioned way anymore."

"Maybe they do if they're trying to keep it real quiet," Hannah said, with ghoulish gravitas.

"Or," said Tamar, cooler head prevailing, "maybe somebody's just been disinterred."

"What for?" Tuck asked.

She shrugged. "Historical interest, maybe. It's an old church."

"Or dissection," Hannah suggested. "Don't they work on cadavers at the med school?"

"Yeah," Edie said. It was one of the few schools in the county to let premed students work on human bodies—a point of some controversy in her first year muckraking for the Times. Certain parents seemed to think it grotesque. "But I think they prefer them to be, uh, fresh."

Hannah flicked her first butt into the hole. They all leaned toward the center of the circle, watched it disappear. "Maybe," she said, "it's for somebody who's not dead yet."

"THE DARK LORD DEMANDS BLOOD SACRIFICE!"

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.