Love is Murder Story 01 - Grave Danger

was helpful. She felt stronger, remembering his strength and determination, coupled with an even temper that always seemed to allow him to go forward.
    What would Greg say now? she wondered.
    She smiled to herself. Well, in all honesty, Greg would tell her to get out and get away, and call a cop. But then, he might also smile and remind her that her imagination was truly fantasmic, andthat sometimes she had to live in the real world. Lord, there had been that one time when she had been working on the gauntlets for Knights and Aliens when he had stood behind her, fingers in her hair, knuckles brushing down over her cheeks while his whisper teased her ear, reminding her that the knights weren’t real, but he was, and he only had a few hours left before heading out for his shift.
    They’d made love for hours then, and she had laughed and suggested they should actually make a movie: Homicide Cop and Prop Girl. Naturally, he’d be Supercop, and she’d have extra powers, and of course, he told her, she did have extra powers—what her lips did to his flesh was superhuman….
    That was then. This was now.
    Yes, it was just that it was dark, and she was alone. What was benign by day seemed frightening by night.
    So, the werewolf had the appearance of being about to pounce at any given second. And the damned zombie seemed to be watching her, too, as if it was about to salivate any minute. She’d had a part in creating them; they were damned good effects!
    She heard the shuffling sound coming from the rear of the storage room again.
    She was an idiot. She needed to get downstairs and get the hell out.
    She couldn’t just run out; she had to finish work tonight—if she still wanted to have a job tomorrow. She could imagine trying to explain herself to Dustin Avery, her boss. “The zombie and the werewolf were freaking me out, Dustin, and I kept hearing this shuffling sound…so, let’s just put that umpteen-million-dollar shoot off a day. It’s Victor’s fault. He didn’t come back with dinner.”
    For a moment, she was almost overwhelmed by the impulse to call Greg. No. She stood still, trying to turn every muscle in herbody into steel with her mind; she couldn’t call Greg. Not now. Not ever.
    He’d been the love of her life at one time. But she’d left him the night he’d left her—because his crazy ex had been hospitalized and arrested on another drug charge. She’d tried so hard to tell him that he couldn’t keep bailing Cassandra out; he’d assured her that it didn’t mean anything. He felt responsible. Cassandra had a little boy— not his —but he still had to hope that she could get straight and care for the child. Once Ali had left him, she couldn’t talk to him again. And she couldn’t just call him casually now. “Hey, sorry, how are you? Yes, I know I’ve ignored your calls. But I’m alone at the studios, and I think a coworker is trying to scare me into getting fired.”
    No, she couldn’t do it. She had to be rational.
    She heard the shuffling sound again, but when she felt the chills race along her spine again, she straightened, gritting her teeth.
    Victor was a jerk and a prankster. When he’d left, the place had supposedly been locked. He’d had a key to get back in, and she’d been so busy sewing the last zombie shirt, she probably hadn’t heard him return. And now…Victor was trying to freak her out.
    She wasn’t going to run. She was going to turn the tables on him.
    She gave the werewolf a pat on the chest. “Work with me, okay?” she whispered. She smiled grimly, and, using the creatures and mechanics to hide her, she began to tiptoe back toward the rear of the storage room.

    Not at all far away, Greg Austin was on a case.
    “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Tony Martini whispered.
    Something similar almost escaped Greg Austin; he managed to remain silent as he surveyed the scene.
    Gravestones. Opalescent in the moonlight, some full of lichen and appearing so worn by time that those buried beneath themmust have been long forgotten, some bearing funerary art that drew the eye with its sheer beauty. Angels with folded wings wept over freestanding crypts, and cherubs holding crosses looked up to the skies. The ground seemed overgrown, as if the cemetery had long been neglected, completely lost in time.
    And then, of course, there was the dead man. The newly dead man.
    At first, he must have been hard to see, even for film director Howard Engel.
    Because there were corpses