When I scooted closer, he tightened the ball he’d formed with his limbs and whispered, “No breaking rules.”
I left him there, a shell of the Rocket I’d known before. We might all die soon, but I was going to do this one thing for Rocket. And Thaniel.
I asked Reyes to help Garrett with the translations and set out to Thaniel’s house. The sun hung low on the horizon, oranges and pinks and purples like streamers streaking across the sky.
When I got to Thaniel’s house, his Raptor was loaded. He was heading out of town, probably a good idea. I knocked on the door and peeked inside. He walked out of a side room, a towel around his neck, his blond hair hanging in wet curls around his head.
He walked to open the door, towel drying the mass atop his head.
“Going somewhere?” I asked him.
Because he wore a short-sleeved shirt, I could see the names he’d carved on his body. Unlike his grandfather, he only carved the first names. Since he had a very limited amount of real estate, that was probably a good idea.
His gray eyes sparkled with genuine humor, but he averted his gaze quickly. My light did that. “You told me to get out of town.”
I handed him a pair of shades I’d picked up at a convenience store when I stopped for gas and a mocha latte. Even the powdered mixes were heavenly when faced with an eternity without one. As I was for the second time in two weeks.
“Right.” I stepped inside when he held open the door. “And you should, but I’d like to introduce you to someone first.”
“I’ve actually filled my quota for new acquaintances for the year, but I can pencil you in for January.”
Ignoring him, I plowed forward as I was wont to do. “I didn’t realize it until I had my assistant do a background check on you, but I know your grandfather.”
He’d been stuffing shirts into a duffel bag. He stopped but didn’t turn around.
“Would you like to meet him?”
“My mother told me her biological father died.”
“I wish I could’ve met her.”
His expression turned dubious, but that was okay. He didn’t know me.
“Where’s the other guy?” he asked.
“Research. We’re trying to figure out how to close the dimension.”
“The one you opened.”
“Yes. Thank you for reminding me. But before all this goes down, I thought you might like to meet your grandfather. He’s very special to me.”
“I used to care about shit like that. I got over it.” He pulled off his shirt to change into a warmer one. The names that covered his torso weren’t as visible as I thought they would be. They were paper-thin scars, hardly marring the hard surface of a very well-maintained body.
He pulled the shirt over his head, but I’d walked up behind him before he could pull it down over his torso. He paused, turning his head just enough to watch me from his periphery when I raised a hand and placed my fingertips on his back, tracing the lines of a dark, freshly touched-up tat.
“What is this?” I asked, my voice hoarse with emotion.
He took off the shirt again to let me see all of it.
“According to my mother, it’s a message.”
My breath hitched in my chest as I stared. “For who?”
“No idea. She just used to say it to me over and over. Had me memorize it when I was a kid, before she got sick.”
“How did she die?” I was sure Cookie would have put his mother’s cause of death in the file, but I’d been too focused on Rocket’s revelation to get that far.
“Pneumonia.”
Just like Rocket’s sister, Blue.
I put a hand over my mouth and backed away.
He turned. “Is it for you? The message?”
I pressed my hand against my mouth harder to stop my chin from quivering.
In small script across his upper back were the words, The heart is both the strongest part of the body and the weakest. Then a larger font underneath read, Always go for the heart. Right in the middle of the second line was a black heart incorporated into the word for with blood dripping down the letters around it.
Emotion jolted through me like lightning, overwhelming me so quickly, it left me reeling. I stood in what should have been Thaniel’s living room as a quake shook through to my core. Despite my best efforts, tears slid past my lashes and down my cheeks.
Thaniel slipped on the shirt and eased closer. “Mrs. Davidson?”
I looked around and knew what I had to do. But first, I had to convince Thaniel. “Why do you keep the names of those who’ve passed on your body?”
“How do you know they’ve passed?”
“Because you inherited it from your grandfather. Why do you keep the names?”
“They’re, I don’t know, important.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
I stepped closer. Put my hand on his scruffy cheek. “Why?”
“Because it’s her army. The girl’s. I can see it.”
I let my lids drift shut.
“There’s fire everywhere. So much fire. It’ll consume the world if she doesn’t do anything. If she doesn’t stop it. That’s when she calls them. Hundreds of thousands stand at her back. Ready to fight. Ready to kill. For her.”
I bit down, the image causing heart palpitations. “Do you know who she is?”
He grinned. “Your daughter, I’m guessing. She has to stop it. She’s the only one who can.”
“I need you here for her.”
He went back to packing his bag. “Yeah, I’m not really a trial-by-fire kind of guy.”
“If I can stop this thing from happening, if I can stop the hell dimension from taking over the world, I need to know you’ll be here for Beep.”
He frowned. “You named your daughter Beep?”
“No. Well, yes, but that’s not her real name. Cookie said that everyone who comes into my orbit is here for a reason, including you.”
“Cookie? Did you name her, too?”
“That one’s not on me.”
He filled his lungs and leaned against a workbench. “What do I need to do?”
“Leave town.”
“You just said—”
“But first…” I looked past him at his knife collection, then took out the powder from my jacket pocket. “First I need you to do something for me.”
I tossed the zip-top bag onto the bench, found a piece of paper, and drew exactly what I needed.
I handed it to him. “I need this. Tonight.”
He took the paper and studied it. Then he plucked the bag off the bench. “That’s not a lot to work with.”
“It’ll be enough.”
He shrugged. “It’s not going to be pretty.”
“I don’t need pretty. I need effective.”
21
You know that little thing inside your head
that keeps you from saying things you shouldn’t?
Yeah, I don’t have one of those.
—MEME
When I left Thaniel’s house, the demon horde was watching. I started to think they were a lot smarter than Reyes and I were giving them credit for. Maybe they were trying to discover if we had a plan to rip their asses from this realm. Or maybe they were hoping I’d lead them to someone or something. I hoped I hadn’t just done that.
I got back to HQ just in time for dinner. A house specialty. Pretty much anything Reyes cooked was a house specialty.
We sat down to eat, some at the table, some on the sofa. Belinda and her mother were getting to know each other all over again, but Geri had already fallen in love with her grandchildren. And how could she not?
Somehow Meiko remembered us from the deepest depths of his mind. He took an instant liking to Quentin and Amber and rarely left their sides. Zoe, Garrett’s ex and Pari’s current, had joined us for dinner as well. So that wasn’t awkward.
Actually, it wasn’t. Garrett was one of the most well-adjusted guys I knew. Not that I would te
ll him that.
Donovan and the boys were making bets on tomorrow’s outcome.
I sat next to the ball and chain with Cookie on my other side and Uncle Bob, not that he was ever really my uncle, next to her. He kept quiet. I didn’t encourage otherwise.
“When does the plane leave?” I asked Reyes.
Commercial flights had been interrupted, but private flights were still a go. We were flying the rest of the gang out that night, including Eric’s abuela. Getting them all as far away from Albuquerque as we could until this was all over.
“Three hours.” My tummy flip-flopped. It was all getting closer and closer.
“Any progress on the box?” I asked Garrett.
“Some, but I don’t know what it means.”
“Try me.”
“From what we can tell, the outside says something about staying true to the heart repeated in several different languages.”
I looked toward heaven and graced my mother with a knowing smile. One way or another, she was going to get that message to me.
“How about ‘always go for the heart’?”
He pressed his mouth in thought. “The word true in a couple of the languages could be interpreted as always.”
Reyes downed half of his water, then added, “And stay could mean go for, as in stay the course.”
“I know what I have to do,” I said to our group when everyone was seated.
Cookie seemed the most shocked, but she usually did.
“We have to find the life force, the heart, and weaken it so Reyes and I can collapse it.”
“And where is this heart?” Garrett asked.
“It has to be where we opened the dimension: in our apartment.”
“How are you planning on weakening it?” Cookie asked.
“I have a weapon on the way.”
Reyes lifted a brow. “Is it a rocket launcher?”
I grinned. “Close.”
Osh shifted in his chair. “It won’t be easy. They’ll be expecting something like this. They aren’t just going to open the doors and let us in.”
“I know. They’ve been following Reyes and me. I think they’re trying to figure out our next move.”
“Unless they already have,” Reyes said.
“Unless they already have.”
He scrubbed his fingers over his face. “I suppose you have a plan.”
“Don’t I always?”
Cookie groaned. “No. Your plans—”
“—never work,” I said, finishing for her. “I know, but this one is really good.”
“They’re all good!” she shrieked before draping her body across the table in typical drama-Cookie style.
She did have a point. I did have some killer plans. They rarely worked, but was that the most important takeaway?
“Okay, enough shoptalk.” I raised my mocha latte. Everyone followed suit. “To victory.”
“To victory,” they said in unison, only Amber had signed victory wrong and a confused Quentin toasted to being single, but that was okay, too.
We didn’t talk about the hell dimension—or any other dimension, for that matter—any longer that night. Instead, we reminisced about all that we had been through. Donovan and the boys told stories about being in a motorcycle club that I probably didn’t need to hear, especially since they were destined to guard my daughter. Amber and Quentin talked about how their business venture, Q&A Investigations, was going. Pari told stories of clients who’d fainted on her in the middle of getting inked. And so on and so on.
It was around that time that I broke the news to Cookie.
“You’re going,” I said to her in the middle of a rip-roaring tale outlining the dangers of using a hot waxing kit.
The van had already made one trip to the airport, taking Meiko and his family to the private jet Reyes had arranged.
It was back, waiting to take the last passengers to the plane. Those included Amber and Quentin as well as Donovan, Michael, Eric the Prince and his abuela. Now I had to convince the other passengers we’d secretly scheduled that they needed to be on that last flight as well. It wouldn’t be easy.
Cookie blinked at me. “I beg your pardon.”
“You’re going,” I said even softer than before. I knew how she’d take this. After everything we’d been through, for me to force her to leave me in our darkest hour was, well, not very BFF of me.
“I most certainly am not.”
“Cook, I love you so much, but I can’t be worried about you and fight a demon army to get to the core of a hell dimension to try to weaken it so we can somehow miraculously collapse it and save the world.”
“No,” she said, in pure obstinate mode. “Absolutely not.”
“Yes,” Uncle Bob said, his voice soft but firm, “you are.”
She gaped at him. “And what about you?”
“I’m staying.”
Cookie and I had the same thought as we said simultaneously, “Oh, hell no.”
She set her jaw and turned a glower on her husband. “I am not about to leave you here to be beaten to death by my best friend.”
“You don’t hear that every day,” someone from the cheap seats said. I was pretty sure it was Eric.
“You’re human now. What can you possibly do to help?”
Pain ripped through my chest, as he said sheepishly, “I can see them. And I don’t have a mental illness that I know of, unless a disturbing fascination with Wonder Woman counts.”
“So, what then?” Cookie asked, growing defensive. “Because you can see them, you have to risk your life?”
“Sweetheart, it’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like?” She tried to stand. To run.
He stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “I have … experience with this sort of thing.”
“You had experience. In another life.”
“She’s right, Uncle Bob.” It would be suicide. We all knew it. “You know she’s right. You’ll just be—”
“In the way?” When I didn’t answer, he prodded. “Am I so useless?”
I dropped my gaze.
He wasn’t about to let me off that easily. “Charley, if I can do something and I don’t and the hell dimension wins, what does that make me?”
“Mine,” Cookie said, her voice cracking. She caressed his face with a quivering hand. “For a little while longer.”
“Besides,” Amber said, kneeling next to him, her voice shaky at best, “I just got you. I’ve never had a real dad and then you came along and made me believe I was worthy of one.”
If the stunned expression on Uncle Bob’s face was any indication, she struck a chord deep inside him. Several, in fact.
“Smidgeon, how could you ever believe yourself unworthy of love?”
Her lower lip trembled and my heart cracked when he pulled her into a fierce hug, drawing Cookie and Quentin into it as well.
“Your name is already on the manifest,” I said before he could argue any further. “You’re going.”
I turned my attention to Garrett. “You’re going, too.”
“What?”
I’d offended his delicate sense of masculinity.
“Fuck that.”
“Can you see into the supernatural realm?” Garrett could be as stubborn as Cookie and Uncle Bob combined. “Did you suddenly develop a way to fight demons that I don’t know about?”
“Charles, this is my family now. I’m not leaving you to fight for them alone.”
“Oh, trust me, hon, we won’t be alone. But if something happens, I need you here for Beep.”
His hand curled into fists. “You’re pulling the Beep card?”
“I’m pulling it hard. As well as the Zaire card. You have a son, Garrett.”
“You’re the worst friend ever.”
Relief washed over me. “I’m getting that impression.”
* * *
We got everyone aboard the love train. Or the shuttle bus. Either way. The warehouse seemed so empty-
without them, especially since I now had only Reyes and Osh to keep me company.
Reyes and I stood at the huge plate glass windows that constituted one wall of our bedroom. The view was extraordinary. The city lights sparkled beneath us.
“I think I have empty-nest syndrome.”
He laughed softly.
“Speaking of which, how did you score a warehouse on such short notice?”
“I didn’t. I bought it over a week ago for Rocket, but I don’t think he’s happy here.”
The fact that my husband would spend God knows how much on a warehouse for a departed friend spoke volumes. Of course, it also spoke volumes that he was the one who’d demolished Rocket’s former residence, but that was a darker time. Like, two weeks ago.
Still, for me, a century had passed.
My phone beeped. I dug it out of my pocket and my heart skip-roped with joy. Metaphorically. “The weapon’s here.”
I took Reyes’s hand and led him downstairs.
“Is it a pipe bomb?”
“No.”
“A tank?”
I giggled. “No.”
“The nuclear launch codes?”
That time I snorted. “Nope.”
I opened the door. Thaniel stood on the other side, holding a leather sheath. I beamed at him. “That was faster than I thought humanly possible.”
“My last girlfriend said the same thing. Nice place.”
“Thanks. It’s home.”
After showing him in, I took the knife from him.
He offered Reyes a nod hello. “Like I said, there wasn’t much. I had to improvise.”
I pulled it from the leather case. It was beautiful. “Improvise how?”
“I mixed the shavings with real gold.”
He’d taken a blade he’d made earlier, one with ornate carvings in the metal, and filled the carvings in with the melted shavings and gold. He’d also dipped the tip in the gold for what would hopefully lessen any resistance we might have.
“It didn’t dilute the strength.” It hummed in my fingers, its power penetrating my skin and pulsing through me.
“I didn’t figure it would.”
Reyes studied it, but a part of him was demon. He couldn’t hold it. He couldn’t even touch it. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes. I found powder in the box with gold flakes, but I’m not sure where it came from.”
Summoned to Thirteenth Grave Page 23