The Curse of Tenth Grave

by Darynda Jones

  I should have guessed long ago that he was more than met the eye. Even barely awake he had a powerful stride. Sleek. Graceful. Like that of a big cat. I slipped into the outer edge of the supernatural realm and saw the darkness billowing out of him like a cloak to cascade over his shoulders. To wash down his back. To pool at his bare feet.

  The fire that bathed him in yellows and oranges and blues licked over his smooth skin like a layer of sin. It dipped between the valleys of hard muscle. Shifted with every move he made. As though it were as alive as he.

  Strawberry noticed none of that. Her harried little mind, like her body, spun in circles as though she hadn’t just dropped a bombshell on me. Why would those names be meant for Beep? It made no sense.

  “What do you mean, hon?” I asked her, suppressing a giggle when Reyes spotted the little beast coming in for a landing near his rubber tree plant. It wasn’t like she could actually knock it over.

  Instead of answers, I got, “I love cotton candy. I’d marry it if I could.” She swooped in for a landing, taxied just long enough to catch a second wind, then took off again. “I can smell it sometimes. There was a house on fire once, but I couldn’t smell it. I can’t smell perfume or paste or oranges, but I can smell cotton candy. Only sometimes, though. All pink and fluffy. Do you like cotton candy?”

  I’d been busy watching my husband head for the kitchen, trying not to let the soft grin he tossed me ease the turmoil roiling inside me.

  “Cotton candy daiquiris,” I said, unable to take my eyes off him.

  We had fallen into a continuous series of short conversations and awkward silences. And I had no idea why. No idea what I had done. For a man who could barely keep his hands off me a week ago, this new form of torture was disconcerting.

  Did he know that he was a god? More important, did he know that I knew that he was a god?

  Such knowledge could certainly put him on edge. Then again, why? I was a god. Why shouldn’t he be one as well? Maybe there was more to this than I knew. Or perhaps his recent disinterest had nothing to do with any of that.

  Maybe it was due to the fact that I had done exactly what he had predicted I would. I forgot him. When I learned my celestial name, I forgot him. He’d said I would. No, wait—he’d said I would leave him, and then I would forget him. Two for two. But amnesia was a really good excuse for not remembering someone. And it’s not like I’d done it on purpose.

  The fact that he was so drop-dead sexy did not help anything. The pajama bottoms did absolutely nothing to hide the fact that he had the most perfect ass I had ever seen. Steely. Shapely. Deep divots on either side. Solid, rock-hard muscle. The kind of ass no heterosexual woman could resist. Damn him.

  I craned my neck to watch him walk into the kitchen and pull the carafe out from the coffeemaker.

  “I just made it,” I said, referring to the coffee.

  “What do you think brought me in here?” There was a softness to his voice despite the darkness surrounding him. A humor. It was nice and more reassuring than it should have been.

  “Sometimes I eat it for breakfast,” Strawberry added, then pointed to Reyes from the space between a slate coffee table and a creamy sofa. “Does he ever eat cotton candy for breakfast?”

  He stepped around the counter to face us, lowered his gaze, and took a sip from the black mug in his hands.

  “No,” I said. “He’s very much like the Big Bad Wolf. He eats little girls for breakfast.”

  He spoke from behind the cup, his voice deep and as smooth as butterscotch. “She’s wrong. I eat big girls for breakfast.”

  A tingling sensation fluttered in my stomach.

  Strawberry stopped at last and crinkled her nose in thought, our playful banter going over her head, thankfully.

  “Did you catch the bad guy?” Reyes asked, pinning me with his powerful gaze.

  I turned around in the chair I’d pulled up to the window and sat on my heels to savor the view. “No bad guys this time. Just a man trying to make it through the day.”

  “Aren’t we all?” he asked, and I paused to study him.

  He studied me back, his lashes narrowing as he took me in, and I wondered if he really understood, on even the basest level, what he did to women. A man just trying to make it through the day? Uh-huh. Right.

  Strawberry landed again, plopped onto the coffee table, and let her feet dangle beneath her. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

  Reyes grinned and ducked back into the kitchen, hopefully to make me the breakfast of champions, whatever that might entail. I took the opportunity to once again scan the vastness of what used to be my microscopic apartment. I hadn’t seen it for over nine months, eight of those having been spent at a convent—long story—and the other one spent as an amnesiac waitress at a café in Upstate New York.

  At some point during our recent adventures, Reyes had renovated the apartment building. The entire thing. The exterior remained relatively unchanged. A few fixes here and there, a good cleaning, and it was good to go.

  The interior, however, had been completely overhauled. Each apartment had been updated as students graduated or long-term residents moved into one of the newly renovated ones while theirs received the same treatment. But the third floor, the top one, had received a little extra attention.

  It now had only two apartments, ours and Cookie’s, each consisting of over thirteen thousand square feet of absolute luxury.

  The rooftop storage units had been opened up so the ceilings in half of the apartment were now over twenty-four feet tall. Metal rafters zigzagged across our ceiling. Two adjoining gardens sat on the flat part of the roof outside, complete with lights and a pond and real plants. The whole place look positively magical.

  Reyes kept only one room locked and had refused to open it when he brought me home for the first time in months, but locked doors were never much of a problem for me. The day after we’d arrived home, I took advantage of the fact that he left earlier than I did and broke in. I’d flipped the light switch and stopped short. The room had been decorated in mint green stripes and pastel circus animals and equipped with a bassinet. It was Beep’s room, and the fissure in my heart had cracked a little more.

  “I’m going to see if Blue wants to play hopscotch.”

  She disappeared before I could get out a good-bye. Or good riddance. Either way.

  I looked past where she’d been sitting toward Reyes’s plush cream-colored sofa. He didn’t get it at a garage sale like I’d gotten my previous sofa. Her name had been Sophie, and I often wondered what happened to her. Was she lamenting the days away at a dump site? Sure, she’d only cost me twenty bucks, but she’d been with me a long time. I hated the thought of her being destroyed.

  Then another thought hit me.

  Speaking of discarded items, “Hey,” I said, suddenly concerned, “where did you put Mrs. Allen and PP?”

  PP, a.k.a. Prince Phillip, was an elderly poodle that had once fought a demon for me, doing his darnedest to save my life. He and Mrs. Allen had been living down the hall since I’d moved in, and if anyone had a right to live here, to have one of these sparkly new apartments, it was those two.

  Reyes lowered his head. “Her family had to put her in a nursing home.”

  My spine straightened in alarm. “What? Why?”

  He bit down. “A lot’s happened since we’ve been gone.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “It happened last month. You wouldn’t have known her.”

  I paused to absorb that. He was right. Didn’t make it any easier to swallow. “Where is she?”

  “At a retirement home in the North Valley.”

  I made a mental note to visit her. “What about PP?”

  “PP?”

  “Her poodle. The one that saved my life, I might add.”

  He fought a grin. “He’s with her. The home where she is allows animals.”

  “Oh, thank goodness.” I slumped in the chair and put my chin on the back
. Reyes was right. A lot had changed. Including the state of my cup.

  “I’m going to make another pot if you want more after your shower,” I said, hopping up and heading that way.

  He lifted a wide shoulder, studying his own cup. His bare feet were crossed, his other shoulder propped against the opening to the chef’s kitchen, and I slowed my stride to take it all in.

  “I’m not sure I want to shower today,” he said.

  “What? Why?”

  A panty-melting grin as wicked as sin on Sunday slid across his handsome face. “Your aunt Lillian keeps … checking in on me.”

  I stopped midstride, finally becoming intimately acquainted with true, paralyzing mortification.

  He stifled a chuckle as he set his cup aside and started for the bathroom.

  “Aunt Lillian!” I yelled, summoning her to me instantly. Aunt Lillian had died in the sixties. She’d been elderly at the time, but she didn’t let that stop her from enjoying the flower child generation complete with love beads and a floral muumuu. I’d always figured a hit of acid at her age could not have been good.

  “Pumpkin head!” she said, her tone as hollow and insincere as her dentureless mouth. She wasn’t even looking at me. Her gaze instantly sought out the son of evil. Locked on to him like a laser-guided missile.

  He tossed her a wink as he strode past, and I thought she was going to melt right then and there.

  “Aunt Lillian,” I whispered accusingly. “I thought you didn’t even like my husband that much.”

  “Oh, pumpkin, I’ve seen him naked. What’s not to like?” She wiggled her brows, and I gaped, appalled. Appalled that, for once in my life, I had no argument. No sarcastic comeback. No snippy comment. Because she was right as rain on a scorched desert.

  I looked my husband over once again. Watched his back muscles ripple with each step he took. Our apartment was much bigger now, so it took a lot of steps to get to the bathroom. A lot of rippling.

  One of those ripples was inside me. A ripple of unease. So much had changed. Way more than I was comfortable with. Which brought me to the third, but far from final, reason for my gloom. My husband hadn’t touched me in days. Since we got back, in fact. Normally, he had trouble touching anything besides me, but he hadn’t offered his services in over a week. A very long, very lonely week, made even lonelier when I’d been blindsided by a receipt I stumbled upon. He’d made a payment to the Texas Child Support Division.

  He was paying child support.

  He had another child.

  I closed my eyes again, trying to figure out if I ever really knew the man I married.

  2

  You can’t control everything.

  Your hair was put on your head to remind you of that.

  —MEME

  Just as Reyes was about to disappear into the bathroom for a visit with George the shower, the front door crashed open. It banged against the wall, and I jumped all the way to the twenty-four-foot ceiling. At least it felt that way.

  Reyes, completely unalarmed, paused to watch Cookie, a curvy thirtysomething goddess with short black hair and a challenged sense of accessories, and her lovely daughter, Amber, a tall, slender, thirteen-going-on-seventy-year-old with long, dark locks and delicate, wing-shaped eyebrows, practically stumble over themselves to get inside. A quick glance told me Reyes found them amusing, if the sexy tilt of his mouth was any indication.

  I, on the other hand, was still searching for my heart. I glanced back up at the ceiling. No heart there, but the blond boy dangling his feet where three thick metal beams converged was still there. He’d been hanging out since I got back a week ago and had yet to talk to me. Or anyone, for that matter. Had he always been there and we’d just never seen him? Stuck in the storerooms on the roof? Had he died there? No one found a body during the renovations that I knew of, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have been killed there and dumped somewhere else.

  Once Cookie and Amber settled in front of me—Amber’s face full of excited intrigue, Cookie’s full of horror, but that was pretty much her morning look until she got some rocket fuel in her—I tore my attention off the boy and offered it to them.

  They started talking at the same time, each interrupting the other over and over until it was impossible to tell who was speaking at any given moment.

  Cookie started it off with a “There’s something you have to see.”

  Then Amber chimed in. “It’s everywhere.”

  It went downhill from there.

  “You won’t believe—”

  “I think you should—”

  “So many hits—”

  “It’s crazy—”

  “You’ll be—”

  “You’ll be—”

  “—famous.”

  “—exposed.”

  “This is awesome!”

  “This is so bad.”

  I finally reached up and gently placed a hand over each of their mouths. They hushed instantly, then Cookie mumbled, “Fine. Amber can tell you.”

  Appeased, I lowered my hands. Amber giggled, risked a quick glance at the hotness walking back our way, then shoved her phone into my hands.

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

  I took the phone, leaning in for a quick hug in the process. She kissed my cheek and curled me into her long arms for a solid five seconds. She’d been doing that since D-Day, the day I got back. She hadn’t been allowed to go to New York to babysit my pathetic ass. Or to try to knock some sense into my amnesiaced brain. Whichever way one wished to look at it. And the moment we got off the escalator at baggage claim, she ran past her mother and tackle-hugged me. All the way to the ground.

  She hadn’t seen her mother in a month, but she’d been talking to her every day. Me, she’d had no contact with for a month, and her exuberance was proof that she liked me. Her tears were proof that she really liked me.

  Which was kind of wonderful. I really liked her, too.

  “Okay,” she said, pulling away. “Take a look. You’re going to die!” She clapped her hands over her mouth excitedly.

  Cookie seemed to grow a little paler.

  Reyes shifted for a better look, and I couldn’t help but notice where Amber’s eyes landed: at the waistband of his pajama bottoms. The waistband that hung low enough to show an inkling of the dip between hip and abdomen. That sweet spot that turned women to jelly.

  It didn’t concern me that Amber was only thirteen. What concerned me was that she was thirteen and I was pretty sure her sweetheart, Quentin, had a similar dip. Hopefully she didn’t know that. Yet.

  I lifted the phone, angled it so Reyes could see, and pressed PLAY.

  The video read: UGANDA, AFRICA. POSSESSED GIRL AND EXORCIST.

  Okay. A bit dramatic, but who was I to criticize?

  Then a young African girl materialized onto the screen. A girl I recognized from my time in the Peace Corps. The shot was a close-up of her face with a night-vision camera. Her skin was covered in scratches. Her lips, cracked and bleeding, pulled tight over gnashing teeth. Her eyes solid white. Drool slid from the corners of her mouth as the camera pulled back to reveal her neck arched. Head thrown back. Chest heaving in furious pants.

  She lay on a pallet on a dirt floor, her wrists and ankles bound by a very concerned, very loving father. Faraji. He’d been helping us dig a well for his village, and when I’d first met him he was distant. Wary of us newcomers. It was not unusual. Many villagers on our journey had welcomed us in an almost celebratory manner. But others, mostly men, were not so keen on having us invade their territory, Peace Corps or not. Faraji had been one of them.

  I’d taken note of him instantly, not because of his standoffish behavior, but because of the deep sorrow that emanated out of him.

  No, not sorrow. Fear.

  Terror, actually. So much so that I found it hard to breathe around him, and digging a well without the ability to fill one’s lungs was not an easy way to dig a well.

  We’d been in the village
about three days when I finally followed him home one night. Or at least, I thought I was following him home. I found out later it was an abandoned hut, and he and his family had been in hiding. I felt the reason long before I got to the ramshackle hut. Like needles on my skin. Like acid in my mouth.

  I’d never felt anything like it. And when I stepped inside unannounced, I’d never seen anything like it, either. His twelve-year-old daughter, Emem, lay in the throes of a heated battle with whatever had taken up residence inside her. Nkiru, Faraji’s wife, sat beside their daughter. Pressed a cool cloth to the girl’s head. Rocked back and forth in prayer.

  She looked up when I stepped under the eaves of their hut that amounted to little more than a well-fortified lean-to.

  “Faraji,” she said, her voice shrill and harsh. Eyes like saucers, she glared at her husband. “Get her out.” She spoke in her native language, believing I wouldn’t understand. “The elders will take our daughter.” She tightened her grip on the child’s forearm. “The elders will kill her.”

  Faraji had turned and was staring at me in horror, unable to believe that I’d followed him. Or that I’d been able to follow him without being detected.

  I’d wondered how long the situation had been going on. The girl looked skeletal. Dehydrated to the point of emaciation, except for her beautiful, scar-covered face. From various markings on the floor, I got the feeling they had been consulting a shaman-type healer. And why wouldn’t they? This was no medical condition. Whatever was in her burned my lungs and seared my eyes.

  I crept forward, but Faraji stepped in my path. I felt the turmoil rise within him. He had a choice to make.

  At first, I thought he was weighing the pros and cons of allowing me to try to help him. He wasn’t. I soon realized he was trying to decide if he should let me go and risk the village finding out about his daughter or kill me. I got the feeling he was leaning toward the latter. Mostly because he’d tightened his grip on the machete he’d been carrying. Steeling himself to do what had to be done.

  “May I see her?” I asked. In his language. I swallowed back my heart before it jumped out of my chest. He could’ve killed me before it managed another beat. I was hoping that speaking to him in his language would give him pause. It did.