The Dirt on Ninth Grave

by Darynda Jones

  Michael grabbed his forearm close to the elbow before Reyes could change his mind. Reyes followed suit, and their mutilated wrists touched in what amounted to a blood oath.

  With an archangel.

  What were the odds?

  I felt the need to ask one burning question. “So there’s more than one god?”

  They didn’t answer. As soon as the deed was done, Michael took on an expression way too smug for the direness at hand. “The bargain has been struck, Rey’aziel. The blood exchanged. You cannot, for any reason, back out.”

  Reyes stepped closer to me. “I don’t plan to.”

  “I am well aware of this … uncommon sense of honor you’ve gained while here in His realm.” He sheathed his sword. “Just don’t forget where you came from.”

  Reyes didn’t take the bait. He watched and waited for the angelic asshat to leave.

  Michael turned to go, then stopped and said, “I just thought you should know, I couldn’t have killed her either way.”

  I felt Reyes still.

  “She dematerialized her human form. She fused it together with her celestial energies. Now, even her physical body is immortal. Only another god can end her life. Father was on his way to do just that, but now that we have an agreement…”

  Oddly enough, Reyes seemed more confused than upset. “You did it on purpose. Why? We would have agreed. It is to our advantage to cast out the gods. You didn’t have to threaten her.” He took a bold step, closing the distance between them. “Why?”

  “Some bargains are just too good to pass up.”

  An unsatisfied growl rumbled out of Reyes’s chest. Giving up for now, he said, “You need to fix this.”

  Michael admired the surroundings once again. “Clean up your own mess.”

  “For old time’s sake,” Reyes said.

  In an instant the world was back where it belonged. The windows stood fully intact. The coffee cups rested on their respective tables. People sat talking and laughing as though their cook hadn’t just sealed a blood pact with an archangel to cast gods out of their world.

  I glanced around for Reyes, then looked through the pass-out window. He was behind the grill, cooking, as if nothing had happened. My mouth formed a perfect O. Had I just hallucinated everything?

  When Reyes glanced at me from underneath his lashes before reaching up to the spice rack, I knew that it had all been real. A huge gash ran the length of his arm. I hadn’t imagined anything. I inched backwards to the front doors as what I’d done came rushing back.

  I’d gotten angry and risked the lives of my best friends? I was some sort of time bomb that would eventually collapse the universe? God—the God—wanted me dead? What kind of monster was I? Reyes stopped what he was doing. Gauged my emotions. Saw the fear in my eyes. Just as he started after me, I burst out the door and took off.

  * * *

  I thought of nothing but running. Nothing but getting away from people before I hurt someone. The otherworld raged around me as I ran. Its wind blistered my skin and scorched my lungs. I shook out of it and fought to stay in the tangible world, where it had just started to snow.

  I kept running, my legs pushing forward as though they had an unlimited source of energy. The last time I tried to run, I got half a block and almost keeled over.

  This was not me. This was the being Michael wanted dead. The one God wanted off His planet.

  Slowing to a stop, I fell to my knees and panted. My breaths made puffs of white fog in the air, and my jeans were wet from the snow.

  Then the wind scorched me again. I looked down at my arms. At my hands. Blisters started to bubble on my skin. The wind began to peel it off my muscle. I let out a quick scream and scrambled back. I forced myself to snap out of it, to find the snow again, the snow and the freezing wind that I’d complained about for weeks. But something dive-bombed me, and I couldn’t tell from which world it came. It happened again, and I huddled on the ground. Was it a bird? A spiritual being?

  I squinted and focused on the sparrow trying to protect its nest. I seemed to be teetering on the razor’s edge between two worlds, unable to get a foothold in either.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and flinched.

  “Janey,” a male voice said. “What’s going on? Did you take something?”

  Ian. It was Ian.

  “I need to go home,” I said, near panic.

  He stood and looked around. “How did you get up here?”

  “Where?” When I took in my surroundings, I realized we were on top of a mountain peak, looking down at the city. “I need to get back to town. I need to get home.” When he didn’t say anything, I asked, “Can you take me?”

  He helped me to his patrol car. “Are you working?” I asked him. He was in uniform.

  “Just got off. Hold on.”

  He went to his trunk, rummaged around, and came back with a bottle of water.

  “You’re dehydrated.”

  We started down the steep and curving roads, over the Hudson and toward Sleepy Hollow.

  “What were you doing up there?” he asked me for the tenth time.

  I was getting a better grip on the worlds around me, more able to keep one on one side and the other on the other. I just needed sleep. The edges of my vision blurred, and by the time we hit the highway, I was out.

  * * *

  I awoke to cabinet doors banging and a cup breaking in my kitchen, but I was in my empty bathtub with all my clothes on and no memory of how I got there.

  “You don’t have a drop of alcohol,” Ian said as he stormed into the minuscule room. “What the hell?”

  “Ian, what are you doing?” I put my hands on either side of my head to try to stop the room from spinning. Or at least I tried to. They flopped past my face and fell to my lap. I had zero muscle control.

  I tried to look at Ian but couldn’t lift my head.

  “What were you doing up there?”

  “I went for a run. Ended up at the top of that mountain. Why? Do you own it?”

  My words were slurred, but he seemed to understand me okay.

  “I have … friends up there.”

  “You don’t have any friends.” I giggled, an embellishment he did not appreciate.

  “You’re just like all the other fucking bitches.”

  I might not have known a lot about my previous life, but I was pretty sure I didn’t like being called a bitch.

  “You’re all just teases and whores until you get what you want, then you’re on to the next sucker that you can stand to fuck long enough to get what you want.”

  “We never had sex,” I reminded him. He didn’t appreciate that either.

  He knelt beside me. “If I could knock the shit out of you, I would, and trust me when I say I’d enjoy it.”

  “I’m having trust issues today.”

  “This is where I made my mistake with Tamala. Nobody gets it right the first time, you know. They hesitate.” He made tiny marks on my skin, some shallow and a couple much deeper. “They chicken out. Then…” He sank the knife into my wrist.

  The pain cut through to my marrow. Blood dripped down the side of the tub and onto my pants. My head lolled back, and I hit the spigot.

  He grabbed a handful of my hair. “Be careful,” he said with a hiss. “Any other mark will cast doubt on a suicide ruling.”

  “Sorry,” I said. Whatever he’d given me made this entire situation seem a little funny. This would make the third time today someone, or something, had tried to kill me.

  I snorted as he worked on my other wrist. He made fewer marks on that one because he said once they make the first cut, their adrenaline is going and they’re better with the second one. So that was good to know for future reference.

  “My first one is up there,” he told me. “On the mountain. I go up there to talk to her sometimes.”

  “That’s so nice.”

  He finished slicing into my wrists and sank on the floor beside me. “Her name was Janet. I didn’t try to
make hers look like suicide or anything, so I had to bury her. The constant weight of that, of someone finding her body and some stupid little mistake I made leading the investigators back to me … It puts a lot of stress on me.”

  When my head lolled back again, he pulled it forward. “Careful, damn it. I told you, any other mark will cast suspicion.”

  “Any mark?”

  “Any mark.”

  “Like this?” I asked and lifted my arm.

  The look of utter disbelief on his face when I showed him what I’d scratched into my skin made me burst out laughing. His mouth did a fish thing when he read, Ian was here, and I doubled over.

  Seriously, this day just got better and better.

  He grabbed a handful of my hair, twisted his fingers into it, then—in an act I felt was a bit much—slammed my face against the rim of the tub. My head bounced back, and a blindingly sharp pain shot through me. He did the face-slam thing a few more times. Eventually it stopped hurting, so there was that.

  “Not laughing anymore, are you, bitch?” he said into my ear. He wrenched my head back, and the irony of it all—that there would be a soulless man in a trench coat and fedora standing behind my captor and attempted murderer—struck me as hilarious.

  My shoulders shook, and I thought Ian was going to come unglued.

  He wrenched me closer until we were nose to blood-red nose and asked, “What?”

  I looked past him and tried to raise an index finger to show him, but before Ian could turn around, the man placed his hands on both sides of Ian’s head and twisted. Ian’s neck snapped with a loud crack. Then he went completely limp and fell to the side.

  The man grabbed a towel off my counter, tore it into strips, and wrapped them around my hemorrhaging wrists. “Can’t lose all of this,” he said with a flirty wink. “We’re going to need at least a couple of drops.” He frowned down at Ian. “I have to say, he was the easiest human to manipulate I’ve every encountered.”

  “He was a douche,” I said, trying not to giggle.

  “I agree.”

  He lifted me out of the tub and carried me to the place where he would kill me.

  No, really this time.

  22

  Every girl wants to be swept off her feet.

  It’s when you put her in the trunk that she starts to freak out.

  —INTERNET MEME

  “Thankfully, it takes a lot to kill you now,” he said to me as his driver took us through the streets of Sleepy Hollow in a black Rolls-Royce. “That Jeffries kid could have beaten you for days. Would not have made the slightest difference.”

  I was worried about getting blood on his seats, since it was gushing out of my nose and from a gash over my left eye, but he didn’t seem to mind at all.

  “You’re the nicest man who’s tried to kill me all day,” I told him.

  “Thank you.” He turned toward me. “I appreciate that. So many people, mostly humans, don’t understand what goes into preparing something like a political assassination or a mass suicide or a ritual sacrifice. It’s exhausting.”

  “I hear that.”

  “And then take somebody like you,” he said, waving a dismissive hand, “a god, no less. Talk about prep work. One word: years. That’s all I’m saying.”

  I gave him a horrified expression. That was dedication.

  “Oh, and I won’t even go into how horrible the record keeping was back in the 1400s.”

  “Dude, they didn’t even have computers.” I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know how they got anything done.”

  “Amen.”

  I was busy trying to spit hair out of my mouth when he started humming the Blue Öyster Cult song “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” I socked him in the arm. “Oh my God,” I said, floored. “You’re James.”

  He tipped an invisible hat, as he’d taken off the aforementioned fedora. “If you want to get technical, this human’s name was Earl James Walker. He was your husband’s … well, I don’t know what. He raised him, if you want to call what he did raising. That guy was a crude piece of work. Anyway, just thought it would be a nice twist.”

  “I’m married?”

  “Oh, sweetheart, you really don’t remember, do you?”

  I shook my head, causing another rush of blood to ribbon over my eye.

  “Well, you won’t have to worry about that much longer.”

  That made me feel better. I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep. But I’d barely managed a few nonproductive Z’s when my eyes fluttered open again. I was tied to a rather comfy chair in the middle of a gigantic warehouse with a fire blazing behind me in a stove.

  My face had stopped bleeding, and James was wiping it with a warm towel.

  “I just want you to know this isn’t personal.”

  “Thanks, James.”

  There were several men working on this or that, all dressed casually in an array of light jackets and jeans, and a handful of departed stood sprinkled about, probably acting as lookouts.

  One of the departed was a man who’d come into the café quite often. He never spoke to anyone and never sat in my section. I took that as a sign that he wasn’t into small talk. The lanky man towered over most of the others and looked like he ate a lot of roughage when he was alive.

  James finished up, the towel that was once white now dark red, then went to supervise the unloading of a massive trunk.

  The departed man disappeared from his spot and reappeared next to me. He knelt beside me and used my body as a shield from James’s line of sight. “Charley,” he said in a soft whisper, “you have to snap out of it. This is the real deal, hon.”

  I was busy doing the head-bob thing, fighting the urge to drift off to sleep again. “Is that my name?” But he’d disappeared.

  James glanced over his shoulder, so I acted natural. Lolled my head back to check out the ceiling. Lolled it forward to examine my blood-encrusted nails.

  When he turned back to the box, Dead Guy appeared beside me again.

  I tried to focus on him. Did I really have an ally? “Can you … Can you get Reyes?” I asked. “Reyes has a sword.”

  “No,” he whispered sadly.

  “What? Why? You’re like the worst ally.”

  “He can’t see this. No one can see this. Not yet. Not until you’re ready.”

  “No, I’m ready. Really. I was born ready.” I’d started to panic and raised my voice enough to get James’s attention. Dead Guy had disappeared again and reappeared at what I’d suspected was his post in a far corner by a huge garage door.

  James walked back over and turned my chair around. “You have got to check this out. Remember the 1400s quip? Well, this is why.”

  I looked at the trunk they’d brought in. It was a massive wooden box with cogs and gears all around it. “Nice wood.”

  “Finding that box, which was hidden in the 1400s, was one thing,” he said. “Finding the key to it was another story altogether.”

  Okay, I was intrigued.

  One of his minions inserted a huge iron key that looked like it had been on the bottom of the sea for centuries. He twisted it, and the cogs and gears started rotating.

  “If this works, and I like to think it will, that box will open, and inside will be an object that is literally the only one of its kind. As in, there isn’t another like it in any dimension in any universe anywhere. This’ll blow your mind. And it will trap you in a hell dimension for all eternity. But still…”

  While I could laugh death in the face, being trapped in a hell dimension for all eternity was a tad more disconcerting. Either that or the drugs were wearing off and shit was getting real.

  I glanced over my shoulder at my ally. He completely ignored me. Unlike Cookie, that guy could act.

  The box continued to groan and shift. Panels slid over others and then disappeared. Cogs rotated, then sank into the center. Each movement revealed layer after layer of mechanical devices, which then slid over to reveal more mechanical devices and intricately carved wood.
It was like a giant mechanical Russian nesting doll, each layer revealing a new box inside.

  James stood admiring it, a fascinated smile on his face. “According to talk around the universe, Lucifer stole the portal from its maker and used it for his own nefarious purposes, because, let’s face it, it’s Lucifer. And when he was finished, he gave it to a priest who used it to be the judge, jury, and executioner of his parishioners and, eventually, the entire countryside. If any of them went against his wishes or did something he felt was wrong, he would use this device to banish their souls to a hell dimension.”

  The more the box worked, the smaller the final product, until all that was left was a tiny wooden trinket box. No way was I fitting in that.

  “But only their souls would be banished. The people he stole souls from became catatonic, as the host cannot live without the soul.”

  He walked over and picked up the box.

  “He did this for almost two decades, until a group of very brave monks figured out what he was doing and set a trap.”

  He carried the box over, displayed on his palm, very Vanna-esque, so I could get a better look. Adorned with carvings and iron fastenings, it looked both delicate and hardy.

  “One man volunteered to send the priest through the portal, knowing what would happen to him when he did.”

  He pocketed the box in his trench coat, then took the massive iron key and threw it into a fire they’d been stoking.

  “Legend has it that once a soul or being is sent through the portal, the only way that entity can be brought back is if the person who originally sent him opens the portal and says his name.”

  He took a poker and nudged the key slowly turning red in the fire, flipped it as though browning it on both sides for a more even, enjoyable dining experience. While James and his minions stood transfixed by the orange and yellow glow, I nodded to the departed guy, basically telling him to go fetch.

  He appeared beside me again, pretending to want a better look in case James were to turn around. “I can’t get Rey’aziel,” he whispered. “He can’t see this. Not until you want him to know the truth, Charley. There’s a lot you don’t know.”