The Graveyard Book Novels & Stories

The voices still whisper words I don’t understand. “Up here,” Crimson gestures to the empty space I created, but his finger points upwards to the very top shelf. I look around for a ladder before calling for Mathias. He steps down the long row followed closely by Tawny and Althea who watch on with curious eyes. Mathias lifts me up and my fingers brush the book that sends a jolt of sparks down my hand and up my arm. Removing the book, I find a box hidden behind it. “Here,” I say as I pass books down to Crimson while my giant still holds me up.

With a final, grateful twitter, the bird spirit's light went out, and its form crumbled like glowing, white sand in my hands and vanished into the snowdrift. I could hear its song in the wind, and my stomach lurched as the horror settled on my mind. Every granule, every whisper of wind, every bit of light had once been a shifter's animal spirit. I had known before that this was a graveyard, but this... This was something different. A dumping ground, a mass grave where no single spirit maintained any sense of what it had once been.

“When you knocked on the door, I expected you to be Kyra. I expected a gun to be pointed at my chest. I did not expect you and Corina’s head.” “You are really trying to tell me that everyone is dead?” “Come with me.” He rises from his seat and heads to the door. “Let me show you something.” I follow him from his office out through another door that led to a garden. “You can’t smell it because they are buried.” He points to hundreds of plots of heaped dirt. A single rock on top of each pile. His own little graveyard. “Why did you let this happen?” I stare at him in shock.

At a party hosted at our house, my husband sang a soul-stirring rendition of “Missing You Tonight". He poured his heart into it, his eyes misty and his voice raspy with emotion. I secretly recorded a video and posted it online. To my surprise, the video blew up. Hundreds of thousands of likes poured in, with the comment section overflowing with sympathy. Laughing, I handed my phone to my husband. “Jacob, you went viral.” The top-voted comment read: [Girl, I’m not one to stir up drama, but your husband looks like he’s nursing a broken heart.] I thought he’d just laugh it off with a half-hearted smile. Instead, he took the phone and looked me straight in the eye with dead seriousness. “Yo

Still nothing. Every book I devoured in the last forty-eight hours had either skimmed over the ancient bloodlines or talked in circles around myths and legends that couldn’t possibly explain what I’d done at the graveyard. Not one mention of wolves with glowing eyes or energy bursts that could level a battlefield. And definitely no information about my parents’ deaths. Just more dead ends. I stood, stretching until my joints popped, and rubbed my temples. Maybe the answers weren’t in books. Maybe they were buried with them, just like the truth.

I'm sure the money we're going to get from your life insurance policy is going to be more than enough to buy formula for our baby! Darkness surged before my eyes. It felt as if the whole world collapsed in that instant. Just as the very last inch of my heart froze, Zachary's doting voice slipped in again, "I get you're happy, but be careful, alright? Don't upset the baby." The last thread holding me upright snapped. I had no strength left to move forward. My body collapsed limply into the snow. Just as my consciousness slipped into the darkness, an anxious voice burst out, "Zachary! Why hasn't Sophie come back yet?!"

looking helpless as he lost the only thing that made him a god: his land. "You look like you're staring at a funeral," Silas rumbled, standing by the window. His silhouette appeared massive against the grey sky. "I am," I whispered. My voice was a dry rasp, like a dead leaf when crushed. "I'm watching the burial of the Crescent Alpha. I just didn't expect the scene to look so... boring, and ordinary…" My cough broke the silence, a deep, racking tremor that made my ribs feel like they were being snapped back one by one. I pressed a tissue to my mouth that quickly soaked in a dark, thick crimson. I didn't panic; that was for people who still had a future.

“ Go on, pay your respects to your mother.” He did not have any intention of following after her in the graveyard since it was really small and open, one could see the tombstones sticking out of the land with ease. Levy stepped out of the car and then walked over to the graveyard with her hands clutching onto a small bouquet that had lilies tied in it. He stared at the small graveyard that was rather different from the one in their territory, the graveyard was so small that he was surprised that the witches in this community were not burying their loved ones in standing graves because it was so cramped that there were multiple mass graves.

The sun hangs low and heavy in the sky. It is October 31st. It should be a day to celebrate my twenty-fourth birthday, but instead, the air smells like cloying lilies and damp, freshly dug earth. Today is the day we bury the monster. The cemetery looks like a movie set for the elite. Everything is prim, cold, and perfect. Long, black cars with glass-like polish line the stone paths. The grass is a deep, unnatural green, and the tall gravestones stand like silent, frozen soldiers watching us.

Neither man hesitated. The cemetery sat atop a low hill east of Reed Manor. The entire place had been sealed off. Sentinels surrounded the grounds. Several looked pale. One was actively vomiting behind a tree. Savannah understood why the moment she saw the grave. The earth had been dug up. Carefully. Professionally. The wooden coffin sat broken beside the open pit. Empty. Completely empty. Savannah stopped walking. For several seconds she simply stared. Then she climbed into the grave.