First Grave on the Right cd-1

by Darynda Jones

  He lay beside me to catch his breath, rested his head on an arm, and watched. For the first time, I realized his eyes looked like small galaxies with a billion sparkling stars. “You’re not going to try to run away from me again, are you?”

  Too shocked to smile, I asked, “Would it do me any good?”

  He lifted a solid shoulder. “If you knew what you were capable of, it might.”

  That was an interesting thing to say. I rolled onto my side to face him. His eyes sparkled, sated and relaxed. “And just what exactly am I capable of?”

  He grinned, his handsome face — too handsome to be human — softening under my gaze. “If I told you, I would lose my advantage.”

  “Ah,” I said, a piece of the puzzle falling into place. “The consummate general, with more tricks up his sleeve than a seasoned magician.”

  He lowered his chin as if ashamed. “That was a long time ago.”

  His body glistened beside mine, and I couldn’t help but let my eyes stray to the hills and valleys that made up his exquisitely molded form. I suddenly realized he was covered in scars, some tiny and some … not so much. I wondered if they were a product of his life with Earl Walker or his life as a general in hell. “What did you mean earlier when you said that Satan was looking for you?”

  He swirled a lazy finger around my belly button, creating tiny quakes that riveted straight to my core. “I mean that he is no longer looking.”

  “He gave up?” I asked hopefully.

  “No. He found me.”

  My jaw dropped open in alarm. “But, isn’t that bad?”

  “Very.”

  I sat up so I could see his face better. “Then you need to hide again. Wherever you were before, you need to go there again and hide.”

  But I’d lost him. Something beyond my range of perception had stolen his attention. He was on his feet at once, covered in the black hooded robe. I scanned the area but could perceive none of what he was seeing. This disturbed me, especially after what I’d just witnessed. There was so much I couldn’t see, so much going on around me every minute of every day that I had no access to.

  “Reyes,” I whispered, but almost before I’d gotten his name out, he was in front of me, covering my mouth with his hand.

  His robe tingled along my skin, sparked along my nerve endings like static electricity. With eyes blazing, he shifted, liquefied, straddled two planes at once. After a moment, he let his hand drop and replaced it with his mouth in a kiss that had me shivering despite the heat that surrounded me.

  “Remember,” he said before he vanished, “if they find you, they will have access to all that is holy. The portals must be kept hidden at all costs.”

  I swallowed hard, because an urgent sadness had filtered into his voice. “What costs are all costs?” I asked, almost knowing the answer before he said it.

  “If they find you, I will have to terminate your life force, to close the portal.”

  A jolt of shock rocketed through me. “Meaning?”

  He pressed his forehead against mine, closed his eyes as he spoke. “I will have to kill you.”

  He dissipated around me, his essence ribboning over my skin, through my hair until only the frailest elements lingered, falling softly to the Earth. For the first time in my life, I knew what was at stake. I had answers I no longer wanted. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed, though I had no one to blame but myself.

  I knew dating the son of Satan would turn out badly.

  CHAPTER 21

  A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

  — STEVEN WRIGHT

  “You obviously had waaaaay too much fun last night.”

  I tried to pry open my lids and orient myself to the environment at the same time, but I couldn’t quite manage either. “Am I still naked on my living room floor?”

  Cookie whistled. “Wow, you had more fun than I thought.” She sat on the edge of the bed, bounced a little to irk me, then said, “I made coffee.”

  Ah, the three magic words. My lashes fluttered open to the blessed image of a coffee cup hovering in front of my face. I squirmed and shimmied into an upright position, then took the cup from her.

  “And I brought you a breakfast burrito,” she added.

  “Sweet.” After a long, rich draw, I asked, “What time is it?”

  “That’s how I know you had fun last night,” she said with a chuckle. “You rarely sleep this late. Well, that and your pajamas were all over the living room floor. I picked up most of your things, but your bottoms are in Mr. Wong’s corner. No way am I venturing into Mr. Wong’s corner. So, are you going to spill now or later?”

  With a shrug, I said, “Now, I guess, but I’ll have to give you the Reader’s Digest version.”

  “Deal,” she said, sipping her own coffee and gazing over the rim expectantly.

  “Well, I found out it takes a lot more to kill me than it does the average human.”

  An astonished frown commandeered her features.

  “I found out Rosie Herschel never made it out of the country. Her husband killed her before he came after me.”

  Her frown turned to alarm.

  “I found out that Reyes is a god of sex and all things orgasmic.”

  Now confusion.

  “And I found out that he is, in fact, the son of Satan and that if they, meaning the beings from the underworld, find me, he will be forced to kill me.”

  Back to alarm.

  “Yep,” I said, thinking back, “that’s pretty much last night in a nutshell. Do you think I’m psychotic?”

  She blinked, worry lining her face.

  “Because at this point, my sanity is all that I have. Well, that and a breakfast burrito.”

  She blinked some more.

  “Holy smokes, is that the time?” I asked, looking at the clock.

  She just glanced at it, apparently unable to talk. I couldn’t imagine why. She was holding her coffee cup.

  But it was almost nine. I jumped out of bed, heedless of my lack of clothing but heedful of the soreness that seemed to be fusing the vertebrae at my neck together, and rushed into the bathroom to get dressed. At ten o’clock, the state was scheduled to take Reyes off life support. If that injunction didn’t go through …

  I couldn’t think about that now. Uncle Bob had a judge on it. Surely it went through.

  After dressing in a dark sweater and jeans, brushing my hair into a ponytail, and downing four ibuprofen at once, I rushed to the office, where I had all the numbers on the case listed on an array of colorful sticky notes. I snatched them up, then booked out the door.

  Cookie met me on the stairs, and I told her where I was headed. She mumbled something about needing a raise, but I hurried past her and rushed to the parking lot.

  On the way to Santa Fe, I tried Neil Gossett at the prison, but he was out. I tried the Guardian Long-Term Care Facility, but a flustered receptionist said she couldn’t give out patient information over the phone. I tried Uncle Bob, but he didn’t answer. I tried the judge’s clerk, where I’d filed the injunction, but she said the request had gone to the courthouse in Santa Fe.

  Panic was setting in. What if the injunction didn’t go through? What if the judge in Santa Fe denied the request?

  At two minutes to ten, I pulled into the care facility to an array of flashing lights and bustling activity. My heart palpitated with anxiety. Maybe something happened at the facility and the state didn’t get to do their thing. If that were the case, surely they would have to postpone the killing of Reyes Farrow to another day.

  Then I saw Uncle Bob’s SUV with the crunched-in bumper. What in the world was he doing here? The moment I threw Misery into park, my door opened.

  “Your cell is dead again,” Uncle Bob said, holding out a hand for me.

  “Seriously?” I took it with one of mine and dug my cell out of my purse with the other. “I just called you.” Sure enough. Dead as a doornail. I totally needed a new battery. Preferably one
that was nuclear charged and lasted twelve years without giving me a brain tumor.

  “I tried you at the office earlier,” he said as I stumbled out of Misery. He sounded weird, distracted.

  “I tried calling you on my way up here. You didn’t pick up. What’s going on?” A prickly kind of awareness laced up my spine. Ubie was acting strange. Not that strange was out of character for him, but he was acting stranger than his normal, everyday strange.

  He closed my door and led the way through the melee of cops and health-care professionals.

  “Uncle Bob,” I said at his back, fighting to keep up with him, “did something happen to Reyes?”

  “The injunction didn’t go through,” he said over his shoulder.

  I skidded to a halt. A combination of disbelief and downright denial stole my breath as I stood there running a thousand scenarios in my head. If they took him off life support and he died, would he cross? Would he stay? Could we even have a relationship if he was departed? Maybe they would take him off life support and he would just wake up. He would be okay. I angled for a Hollywood ending with each hypothesis, hoping for what was most likely impossible.

  “Charley,” Uncle Bob said as he stopped and turned toward me, a hint of warning in his voice that shot my nerves to attention. “Are you telling me everything you know about Farrow?”

  Something was up. That whole woman’s intuition thing was tingling, among other womanly things. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, well, you told me—” He leaned in and softened his voice. “—that he’s supernatural. But I thought you meant like you. Not like, you know, super-supernatural.”

  All I could think was, Oh, my god! Why was Uncle Bob asking me such a thing? Surely Reyes was okay if Ubie suspected super-supernatural phenomena. “So, um, why do you ask?”

  “Charley,” he said, his voice a warning, and my heart rate skyrocketed. He gripped my arm and began winding us through the crowd again.

  “What happened?” I asked at his back, hope evident in every syllable. Reyes had to be alive. Something miraculous had to have happened. Why else would Ubie ask such a question? Why else would all these people be here?

  “I don’t know, Charley,” he replied, his voice drenched in sarcasm. “Nobody knows, Charley. Perhaps you can explain how a man can just disappear off the face of the Earth.”

  “What?” That brought things to a second standstill. “What are you talking about?”

  Uncle Bob stopped again and turned back to me. “I knew how important this was to you, so I came up here to talk to the judge myself. Not that it helped. She couldn’t justify keeping your friend on life support when he was obviously brain-dead and it was costing the state a fortune to keep him alive.”

  “You drove up yourself? For me?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, pulling at his collar in discomfort. “So, I figured the least I could do was be here when they took him off life support. But when I arrived, the place was in an uproar. He was gone.”

  “Gone?” I squealed. I cleared my throat. “Gone where?”

  He leaned in again, his voice a harsh, desperate whisper. “Not just gone, Charley, disappeared.”

  “I don’t understand. He escaped?”

  “You’ll have to see this for yourself.”

  We hastened through the front doors and into a small security room.

  “Show her,” he told the security officer, who obeyed immediately.

  After he typed a couple of commands into his computer, I asked, “What is this?”

  “Just watch it,” he said.

  The monitor showed footage from a security camera. I recognized the area. “Is this outside Reyes’s room?”

  “Just watch,” he repeated, all mysterious and annoying-like.

  Then I saw movement. I leaned in closer. Reyes’s door was open, and the black-and-white footage centered directly into his room. He moved, raised an arm to his head, then shot up and looked around. The resolution was so low, it was hard to see anything definitive, but it was most assuredly Reyes. And he was awake. As if gaining his bearings, he calmed, took a deep breath, then turned toward the camera and smiled. He smiled! A wicked, lopsided kind of grin that had me melting into my boots.

  A glitch in the footage caused the screen to go static, then black a fraction of a second, and when the picture returned, he was gone. In a heartbeat. He was literally there one moment then gone the next, his bed rumpled and empty.

  “Where’d he go?” I asked the bemused security guard, who shrugged.

  “I was hoping you could tell us,” Uncle Bob said.

  Reyes was certainly otherworldly, but the ability to dematerialize a human body simply didn’t exist. At least not that I knew of. Course, I didn’t figure Satan had a son until a few hours ago either. “Uncle Bob,” I said, hedging away from the truth, “I didn’t really tell you everything.”

  “Ya think?” Uncle Bob motioned for the security guard to leave.

  After he was gone, I said, “It’s just … well … I’ve never really told you everything.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, even more perplexed than before.

  “I mean, I’m different. You know that. But I’ve never told you exactly how different I am.”

  “Okay,” he said, his tone wary, “how different are you?”

  I couldn’t imagine how telling Uncle Bob I was the grim reaper or that Reyes was the son of Satan would benefit the situation. Some things were better left unsaid.

  “Let’s just say that I’m more different than you know and that, yes, a part of Reyes is super-supernatural.”

  “Which part?”

  “Um, the super-supernatural part?”

  “I want more than that, Charley,” he warned, stepping closer. “You have to explain this.”

  I eased down onto the edge of the security guard’s chair, my back stiff, my jaw clenched shut. One word came to mind repeatedly. Crapola. How on Earth could I explain the dematerialization of a human body? If that’s really what happened.

  Just then, Neil Gossett walked in. His gaze landed on me instantly, then darted to Uncle Bob in a gesture of guilt, like we shared a secret. Which, in a way, we did. He just didn’t have all the details.

  “Mr. Gossett,” Uncle Bob said, holding out his hand.

  “Detective,” Neil said as they shook hands. “Anything new?”

  Uncle Bob looked back at me then. “Nothing substantial.”

  Both Ubie and Neil knew just enough to be dangerous. And neither knew the whole story. I wondered how long I could keep their questions at bay. I’d already revealed more about myself in the last week than I had in my entire life. While it was freeing in a way, it was also risky to invite so many people into my world. I’d done it before. And I’d paid the price.

  “Who’s Dutch?” Uncle Bob asked, gesturing toward the monitor, and my breath caught in my throat.

  Though I hadn’t touched it, the screen was now black. In the center sat that one solitary word followed by a blinking cursor, and relief flooded me so completely, I thought I would slide off the chair. Reyes. Reyes Alexander Farrow was alive. I stared a long time at the nickname he’d given me the day I was born, wondering if he could still come to me, if we could still be together. Then I felt him brush across my mouth, and I knew my life would never be the same again.

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