The Dirt on Ninth Grave

by Darynda Jones

  So when the US ignored Russia’s application for extradition, they set up a sting operation involving an illegal street-fighting organization that had been going on for a few months. The metal that the Vandenbergs’ captors were going to plasma-cut through was a panic room, but one set up to keep someone in instead of vice versa, if they should ever catch him. He had a lot of muscle around him. They needed to keep him both hidden and unattainable.

  “Is called extraordinary rendition,” Klava said. “Is to kidnap and force transfer of a criminal to another country for prosecution.”

  “Ve are like Dog,” Ilya said.

  “Dogs?” I didn’t get it. “Like bulldogs?”

  “No, Dog the Bounty Hunter. Only I have better hair, yes?” He smoothed a hand over his bald head and laughed again. It was growing on me.

  “Is Dog even a thing anymore?”

  He pounded his chest. “He is big thing inside me.”

  I could have gone so many places with that.

  “Ilya is good fighter,” Klava said. “He vin much of money.”

  I didn’t doubt it. “You’ve been after this guy for two years? Is he in the area?”

  “Da. Ve grab him last veek, but have to keep him in box until papervork is coming through.”

  Considering the guy’s illicit hobbies, I shouldn’t have been alarmed, but I was. “You’ve been keeping him in a metal room for a week? He’ll freeze to death.”

  “Ve are Russian. Ve can handle ten of your vinters. Also, is heated and cooled and have little toilet.”

  This was the craziest story. One that I wouldn’t have pictured if it had been a paint-by-numbers.

  “But how do these guys fit in?” I nodded toward the cabin, or, more pointedly, toward the body bags on the ground by said cabin, and shuddered.

  “They vere his best customers. Al Qaeda. They vant him back. Mostly, they vant his money and veapons cache.”

  “Sucks to be him.”

  “Yes!” Ilya slapped me on the back. “Totally.”

  I resisted the urge to call him a Valley Girl. Mostly because I used that word way too often myself. And I was afraid of what he’d do to me if I called him a girl.

  “Janey?”

  I turned to see Mr. V standing there and straightened my shoulders. “Mr. Vandenberg, I thought you were with your family.” They had been taken to the hospital immediately. I’d wanted to see them so bad, but the children were suffering from dehydration and a massive need for therapy for the rest of their natural-born lives.

  “I’m on my way,” he said, his voice cracking. “I just—” He stopped and shook his head. “They told me … I don’t know how to thank you.”

  I walked up to him and put a hand on his arm. “You could thank me by not pressing charges.” I still had a crapload of antiques to pay for, but if he’d just hold off on the breaking-and-entering snafu …

  His brows slid together. “I don’t—”

  “It doesn’t matter right now. I’m just glad your family is okay.”

  He wrapped long, thin arms around me. I motioned Angel over. I wanted him to be a part of this. Without him, I could never have done what I did. I took Angel’s hand, pulled it to my mouth, and kissed it. He lowered his head, suddenly bashful.

  “My daughter was right,” Mr. V whispered into my ear. “You’re an angel.” He set me at arm’s length. “She saw you outside the window. Said you were an angel and you had come to save us. And she was right.”

  I shook my head. “She must have me confused with someone else.”

  He shook his, too. “Seriously, where do you keep your wings?”

  * * *

  Bobert and Cookie followed me all the way back to Sleepy Hollow. Like right-on-my-tail followed. Like they expected me to do something crazy. Like they didn’t trust me. So weird. I drove straight to the café, and they followed me there, too. It was becoming an issue.

  They’d told me Cookie ran out of the café, screaming like a banshee, with no explanation and no forwarding address when Bobert called her. She needed to explain to Dixie what happened. I needed to explain why I missed lunch with Reyes. And to see if he wanted to have sex with me again later. I could pencil him in.

  We stormed into the place as if we worked there, and even though it was well past Cookie’s scheduled shift, Dixie put her to work. She was apparently short-handed.

  Reyes gave me odd glances, and I wondered if he knew about the Vandenbergs. Or was upset I’d missed lunch with him. I would have called if I hadn’t crushed my phone.

  Drawing in a lungful of air, I started toward the back. Shayla stepped in front of me before I got too far.

  “Hey, sweetie,” I said before I really looked at her. When I did, I kept the smile on my face because I didn’t know where else to put it.

  She gazed at me wide-eyed. Her cute, freckled nose and huge, almost colorless irises made her look utterly fairylike, but now she had a grace she didn’t have before. A gentleness that enraptured me.

  Still, in the grand scheme of things, I’d rather have had her as she was. Sweet, caring, and full of life.

  I stumbled back a step.

  She held out a hand. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I promise.”

  She blurred as my vision became flooded with wetness. This wasn’t possible. I’d just seen her the day before, and she was the picture of health. She was happy and vibrant. She fairly glowed. How could that change so fast? How could she become one of the transparent gray departed?

  I turned from her and leaned against the checkout counter. Fought to breathe. Struggled for an explanation. After Erin’s baby. After the Vandenberg children. This? Now? Was life really so meaningless? So fragile? So easily lost?

  She touched my arm. “Janey, I just stayed for him. For Lewis. Can you get a message to him?”

  A tear pushed past my lashes when I looked at her again. Did death really target the innocent? Did it zero in on the purest, most radiant souls?

  “Can you please tell him I’ve had the best two days of my life?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said at last.

  A few of the customers had turned toward me. Dixie stepped out from behind the prep station, wiping her hands on a towel, her expression curious. Cookie stopped what she was doing and stilled.

  “I had asthma and severe allergies. It was no one’s fault. I ate a corn dog from Whips. I’ve eaten a hundred. They must’ve switched to peanut oil.”

  A soft cry wrenched from my throat, and I sank onto my elbows. If not for the desk, I would’ve crumpled like the three men earlier today. This was not happening.

  “I just want Lewis to know how wonderful a person he is. He really has no idea. He needs to know, Janey. And he needs to know how much I loved him.” She stepped closer.

  I couldn’t look at her. In spite of all the bravado today, I was a coward after all.

  “Promise me,” she said, her tone harder than before, probably to get me to focus.

  It was one thing to see the departed as being other. As almost not being real. It was another thing to know on a visceral level that they were once alive and dynamic and worthy of all that life had to offer.

  I nodded, agreeing at last, and she smiled. “Thank you.” Without another word, she slipped to the other side.

  I clutched the counter, digging in my nails as her life flashed before my eyes. I saw the first time Lewis noticed her. Or kind of noticed her. She’d dropped her books in high school, and as a group of kids beside her laughed, he hurried over, picked them up, handed them to her, then kept jogging as he tried to catch up to his friends. It was the everydayness that captured her. He didn’t do it for accolades. He just did it. It was simply in his nature. She was invisible until that day. That day, that very minute, she decided to be seen.

  I saw her watch him at a talent contest in middle school where his band played a Fall Out Boy song. He was lead guitar, and the entire event won him a trophy and a lot of female admirers. Yet there wasn’t a jealous bone in Shayl
a’s body, because she loved him even then. She was happy for him. Wanted only the best.

  I saw her during an asthma attack at her fifth birthday party. It was so bad, she had to be rushed to the hospital. She wasn’t mad that she missed the party or the cake or the time with her friends from the hospital. She was mad because she spilled red Kool-Aid on the dress her mother stayed up all night making for her. It broke her heart, and she cried for hours, so her mother stayed up all night again and made her a shorts set out of what was left.

  I saw her the day she was adopted. After she was tossed around a series of foster homes as an infant, her parents finally found her when she was three. She was thin and sickly and had an oxygen tube looped under her nose and around her ears, but they’d recognized her anyway. Said they’d been looking everywhere for her. Even though she was pale with blue eyes and freckles, and they were dark and tall and beautifully exotic, she recognized them, too.

  I saw her in the neonatal ICU, shaking with the effects of the drugs, so weak she couldn’t breathe on her own, her heart couldn’t function on its own, so they connected her to a machine that lulled her to sleep with whirring sounds for ten days. The nurses told her to fight with everything she had, so she did.

  I saw her come into the world on the filthy floor of a crack den. Her mother had OD’d and was already dead. No one noticed her at first. No one called the police. But it wasn’t their fault. She’d been born invisible. It was a miracle one of the dealers saw her. Not wanting anything to do with the cops, he wrapped her in a shirt stiff with dried blood on it and left her in front of an all-night liquor store.

  She turned back to me, a Cheshire smile on her face. Only then did I notice the tattoo she had on the inside of her wrist. INVISIBLE GIRL, NOW SHOWING.

  I stood in the present, still clutching the counter, shaking so hard with anger and indignation and outrage that it vibrated. Small clear drops landed on the Formica under my face. Tears had dripped off my chin. The fury inside me took on a life of its own.

  “Charley.” Cookie walked slowly toward me, her hands up, her voice soft.

  Reyes watched me from the kitchen entrance, his head bowed, his expression one of warning.

  Too late.

  I released the furious thing inside.

  21

  I see dead people.

  No, wait. I take that back.

  I see people I want dead.

  —ECARD

  It was like in those movies when the misunderstood girl gets so mad she suddenly develops superpowers and blows out the windows of her high school, showering all the kids who were awful to her with shattered glass without meaning to.

  It was like that, only I’d meant it.

  The world exploded. Everything from the plate-glass windows to the coffee cups that lined the tables splintered into a million sharp, lethal torpedoes. People flew back, their faces frozen in a variety of horrified stages when time slowed to a full stop. Cookie stood before me, reaching out, her face sad. Knowing.

  Then I saw Reyes. The anger simmering beneath his steely surface went way beyond what I’d expected. He stood deathly still. His fire blazed around him, the flames reaching all the way to the ceiling and fanning out.

  We both turned toward the front door. With fists clenched at my sides, I watched as the angelic being I’d seen before walked toward me. The slivers of glass that hung in the air parted slowly, moving out of his way, tinkling as they bounced off each other. It sounded like ice crackling on a winter’s day.

  His wings spanned the entire width of the café before he folded them at his back.

  Though Reyes was across the café, the angel addressed him first. “Rey’aziel.”

  “Michael.”

  The angel faced me, his movements stiff. Formal. “Elle-Ryn-Ahleethia—”

  I frowned and stepped back. “Is that my name?”

  “—I am sent by the Father Jehovah, the one true God of this dimension, to end your mortal life so that you may ascend to your rightful place of omniscience and duty.”

  My anger dissipated, and shock took its place. “I don’t understand.”

  “You are Val-Eeth. You are too powerful for this world in this condition.”

  I glanced at Reyes. His flames had died down a bit, and he studied Michael with a new curiosity.

  “I don’t understand even more.”

  Michael eyed me, assessing me with one quick sweep. “Can you imagine what would happen if the detonator for an armed nuclear device fell into the hands of a child?”

  “I’m guessing that’s bad.”

  “Now imagine that same child holding the detonator for a hundred trillion of them.”

  “Since I’m assuming I’m the child in this scenario and I have a detonator of some kind?”

  “You are the detonator, Elle-Ryn, and the nuclear devices, all one hundred trillion of them, are inside you.”

  I looked down at myself. “I have a bomb inside me,” I said, trying desperately to understand.

  “Your inability to comprehend the situation is a rather large part of the problem.”

  “How is something like that even possible?”

  “And you prove me right again.”

  “Quit being a smartass,” I said, taking a step closer. The glass trembled and closed in around him. “I get it. I’m an idiot. Now answer my question. How is something like that even possible?”

  “It shouldn’t have been,” he acquiesced. “You should not have come into your powers before your corporeal form expired. You learned your name too soon, and as such, absorbed your powers too soon. As you can see, it was too much for you to regulate. Now you can’t remember your name. Any of them. And you can’t control your anger. You just tried to kill every person in here with a single thought.”

  “No.” I stepped back until I hit the counter. “That wasn’t what I was doing.” I glanced around the café. At Dixie and Mr. P and Cookie. “I would never hurt them.”

  “What is this, then?” he asked me, indicating the glass that hung like sparkling crystal around us. “And this was just the barest hint of a thought. One infinitesimal inkling that didn’t amount to a single grain of sand in your Sahara. Can you imagine what you’d do with more forethought?”

  Reyes was only a few feet away now, slowly advancing, gaining ground.

  “So you’ve come to kill her?” he asked Michael.

  The air pushed out of my lungs as if I’d been punched.

  “It cannot be helped.”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “Get off this plane now, and I’ll let you live.”

  But we weren’t on a plane. I glanced around just to make sure. Nope. No plane.

  “I have been sent, Rey’aziel.”

  “Then you have been sent to your death.”

  “I would’ve thought after the nick I gave you last time—”

  “Funny. Most of the blood on my shirt was yours.”

  Michael rolled his eyes. Did angels really do that? “We could be at this all day.”

  “What does He want, exactly?”

  “The Val-Eeth to do her job. It is why He allowed her onto this plane in the first place. To stop the fallen one.”

  Reyes tilted his head. “And here I thought He allowed it so she could be the portal. His portal.”

  He lifted a shoulder. “That, too. But, as it were, there is a loophole in the original agreement with your father.”

  “Ah. So killing two birds with one stone.”

  He didn’t disagree. “But, alas, it would seem two gods is one god too many.” He gave him a chastising scowl. “Five is an invasion.”

  Reyes took another step closer to me. “We know about the three gods of Uzan. You’re strong, Michael, but you’re not that strong. I’ve seen how they fight. And, you know, there is the matter of them being gods. You’re going to need our help. We can get all three of them off this plane for good.”

  He stilled, his lids narrowing. “You can get them off? All three gods of
Uzan?”

  “Yes.”

  He thought a moment, let his piercing vision rake over Reyes. “And you’re going to cast them out?” He sounded thoroughly unconvinced.

  “You of all angelic asshats should know what I’m capable of.”

  Michael lifted his sword, slowly, nonthreateningly, and placed the tip at my throat. He raised my chin with the cool blade. Studied me. Judged me. “Will that be before or after she collapses the universe with her temper?”

  The dark smoke that cascaded over Reyes’s shoulders and pooled at his feet materialized into a black robe. He pulled a sword from underneath it and did the same thing, lifted his sword until his blade rested across the angel’s throat. “It will be sometime before she collapses the universe with her temper and after I collapse your lungs with my blade.”

  Unmoved, the angel shot him a sideways glance. “He’ll come after you if you fail. Personally.”

  “I doubt that.”

  The angel lowered his sword, but Reyes held his steady. He clearly had trust issues. “I have your word?” the angel asked. “You will cast out all three gods from this plane?”

  “You have my word.”

  “No matter the cost?”

  “No matter the cost.”

  I suddenly got the feeling Reyes was being played. The barest hint of a smirk lifted one corner of Michael’s mouth. He was pleased with the bargain he’d just struck. A little too pleased, in fact, and I couldn’t help but wonder what Reyes had gotten himself into.

  Before Reyes could react, Michael raised his right fist and slid his wrist along the razor-sharp edge of Reyes’s blade. Then, as though self-mutilation were a sport, Reyes did the same. He dropped the hilt into the palm of his left hand and sliced his right wrist open on his sword.

  My hand shot up to cover my mouth. Blood gushed out of the deep opening and ran in rivulets over his forearm. They stepped toward each other and started to shake on it, but Michael paused, holding back for one last assurance.

  “Your word. All three gods of Uzan will be banished from this plane and will never, ever return.”

  Reyes knew something was going on. Had known from the first. I could feel the turmoil bubbling inside him. He lowered his head and watched Michael from underneath his dark lashes, his eyes glittering, his brows knitting in thought. After a moment of contemplation, he gave one quick nod.