“He’s really gone.” I fought a tightening in my throat. “But I learned so much that night. He showed me so many things. Things that I’m not sure how to tell Reyes.”
“Like what?” She glanced around, checking for the aforementioned entity. “What more could there possibly be? You are so incredible. A supernatural being beyond anything any of us ever expected. There can’t be anything left.”
I let a sad smile lift one corner of my mouth. “You might be surprised.”
She folded her arms at her chest. “No. Not possible. Nothing would surprise me. I’m sure of it. I am unsurprisable at this moment in time.”
“You’re absolutely sure?”
She grew wary. She knew full well not to assume such a thing. I had to razz her a little, though.
I reached into my pocket after a furtive glance around myself, just to make sure there were no gods close by, and brought out the pendant. To her, it would simply look like a necklace. Like a beautiful, aged pendant from an era long past, but a pendant nonetheless.
To me, however, it was like a galaxy inside another galaxy wrapped in an opal. It sparkled and shimmered and lured me closer every time I looked at it.
Cookie gasped. “That’s beautiful. Did your father give that to you somehow?”
I shook my head. “No. This was a gift from Kuur.”
“Well, that was nice of him,” she muttered, not sure how to address that one.
“Right? It’s not every day a guy gives a girl he’s trying to kill a beautiful necklace. Especially one from the 1400s.”
“The 1400s?” she asked, sucking in a soft breath of fascination. “You’re really lucky. If he hadn’t been hired to kill you, I’m sure he would’ve been a great guy.”
“But, Cook, this isn’t just any necklace.”
“Of course it’s not. It was given to you by an evil assassin from another dimension. It can’t just be any necklace.” She filled her lungs and girded her loins, metaphorically. “Okay, hit me. What is it? I can take it.”
“Inside this innocent-looking pendant with this innocent-looking jewel and these innocent-looking carvings is another dimension.”
Cookie had started to reach for it. Just to touch it. She stopped and slowly pulled her hand back.
“And it’s not just another dimension. It’s a hell dimension. Kuur was sent to trap me inside it for all eternity. The bad part is I sent him, a demon-like being from another dimension, into a hell dimension in which dozens of innocent people have also been sent. And now I have to get them out, one by one, all while leaving him inside. And to make matters worse—”
“It gets worse?” she asked, her face turning an ashen white.
“I have no idea how to do any of that.” I had regained all my memories as a god, but for some reason, things didn’t work quite the same in my human state of affairs. I still had to learn everything.
“Well, we all have our little problems, right? Of course this one makes mine sound a little pathetic in comparison.”
“Don’t you dare say that. Amber’s growing up, and it’s hard to see that happen. She’s just a little girl in our eyes.”
“Charley, you had to send your daughter away before you even got to know her. My problems are ridiculous in comparison.”
“They most certainly are not. Of course, I didn’t tell you the best part yet.”
“There’s more?”
“Cookie, don’t you know me by now? There’s always more.”
“In your world, yes, there is. I’m ready. Whatever you got, I can handle it.”
“Okay, one of the things I learned when my father crossed was that Reyes, my beautiful, breathtaking husband, is a god.”
I figured I’d give her time. She clearly needed it. She was now gaping at me, her mouth hanging open far enough to cause a triple chin. When I’d given her long enough—we did have cases to see to, after all—I said, “He’s one of the gods of Uzan.”
“Wait, aren’t they bad?”
“Very.”
“Oh, Charley. I’m not sure I understand.”
“Join the club. I don’t even know if he knows. Satan tricked one of the three gods of Uzan. He trapped him using this jewel.” I brushed my fingers over the glass covering the gem, the dimension, inside. “It’s called god glass.”
She leaned closer but still kept a safe distance. “Why—how are there innocent people inside?”
“Long story involving an evil priest. Suffice it to say, it’s very powerful, and from what I could tell when this pendant was open, very big.”
“I—I don’t even know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything yet. It still gets better.”
Her eyes rounded, but I plowed forward.
“Let’s say, for argument’s sake, I can stop the gods of Uzan. Let’s say I can stop Reyes if I have to, using this glass.”
“Stop him?” she asked, panic-stricken.
“If I have to,” I reiterated. “And let’s say Michael—you know, the archangel?—let’s say he lets me live.”
She paled further, but I kept going. Best to just get it all out there.
“Let’s say I can get Beep back, and we can, I don’t know, save the world or whatever we’re supposed to do.”
Cookie nodded, right there with me.
“There’s something even worse.”
“Than a hell dimension in a necklace?”
“Yes.”
“Than the fact that an archangel tried to kill you?”
“Only that one time, but yes.”
“Than the fact that your daughter is destined to battle Satan for control of Earth?”
“Yep.”
She shook her head, at a complete loss. She leaned forward and put a hand on mine. “Charley, what?”
“Reyes is paying child support.”
She stilled. Blinked. Furrowed her brows. “What?”
I fought the wetness springing between my lashes. “Reyes—my Reyes—is paying child support. I saw a receipt.”
“Okay,” she said, taking a moment, “let’s just say that, yes, Reyes paying child support is worse than all that.”
“I don’t understand your point.”
“Who is he paying? I mean, is it to an old girlfriend?”
“You think he has old girlfriends?” I asked, sniffing.
“Charley, you have old boyfriends, right?”
“Yes, but—but I wasn’t in prison for ten years. And he couldn’t have been terribly fertile going in. He was, what? Twenty?”
“Old enough to get a girl pregnant. Trust me.”
“But what makes you think he even knew any girls?”
“Have you seen that boy?”
“I mean, he was really shy growing up.”
“Because that’s such a chick deterrent.”
Damn it. She was right. Hot, sexy, shy guys? Like a blazing inferno to an ovulating moth. “How many old girlfriends do you think he has?”
“I’ll look into it.”
“Like, a guesstimate. Five? Ten?”
“I’ll look into it,” she said, but this time she had her soothing I’m-here-for-you voice on. It helped.
“You will?”
“Absolutely. Besides, there has to be an explanation. He would have told you if he had a child.”
“Maybe he just found out. He hasn’t been paying it long. Three or four months, I think. Either that or his other child is only three or four months old, which would mean he got someone else pregnant before I conceived Beep.”
“No,” Cookie said, shaking her head. “There’s no way. Charley, he is crazy about you. He crossed the badlands of a hell dimension just to get to you. He waited for centuries for you to be sent to Earth. He gave up everything, even his memories, to be born a human just so he could see your smile.”
“When you put it that way … but let’s face it, Cook. I’m not the easiest person to live with on a daily basis.”
“Like he is?” When I dropped my gaze, she
added, “Charley, you’re amazing, and you know I think the world of you, but perhaps we should focus on more pertinent details of all this.”
“Right,” I said, straightening my shoulders. “Exactly. It’s not about when. It’s about whom. And did he love her?” I gasped when the next thought hit. “Does he still love her?”
“Well, I actually meant along the lines of the fact that Reyes is an evil god hell-bent on destroying Earth and an archangel wants to kill you. But we can start with that.”
I drew in a deep, cleansing breath. “No, you’re right. I need to just put on my granny panties and deal. We have a case. No more thongs for me.”
“We have a case?” she teased.
“A real one,” I said with a nod. “And according to Nick the Pri—Nick Parker, an innocent man could go to prison if we don’t figure out who really killed his girlfriend, Emery Adams.”
“See? It’s good to keep busy. Keeps your mind off all the other, total-annihilation-and/or-death-by-an-angry-celestial-being stuff.”
“But you’ll still look into it, right? The child support?”
“You know I will. Now, go do private-investigator-y stuff. I’ll see what I can dig up here.”
I nodded. Throwing myself into my work would keep my mind off the other things. Like Cookie said, the total-annihilation-and/or-death-by-an-angry-celestial-being things. Not to mention the most pertinent of our problems: Reyes’s other child.
What I did not place in that category was the Beep thing. I didn’t ever want to stop thinking about her. Not for a minute. I’d been there, done that in New York. It would not happen again.
Not that I was worried about the possible outcome of that scenario. I was going to get my daughter back. No god in this dimension or the next was going to stop me.
5
My love is like a candle.
Carry me with you and I’ll light your path.
Forget me and I’ll burn your fucking house down.
—T-SHIRT
I heard footsteps in the hall outside my office where a balcony overlooked Calamity’s, Reyes’s restaurant-slash-bar. The creaking of floorboards stopped on the other side of the door.
I walked to it and waited, knowing who stood on the other side. I could feel the emotions cording through him like the center spirals of a tornado. Also, I could smell red chile. Gawd, I loved that man.
“Are you going to let me in?” Reyes asked from the other side. Not, like, the other side, but …
“Depends. Do you know the secret password?”
“Chile.”
I swung the door wide. “Holy green chile, Batman. You’re good.”
“I like to think so,” he said, his eyes sparkling. He was holding two plates, but when I stepped back to let him bring them in, he stayed in the hall. “You have to invite me in.”
I narrowed my lashes. “Is your middle name Dracula, by chance?”
“Close.” But he still didn’t come in.
So, I swept my arm in a grand gesture and said, “You are officially invited into my humble abode.”
Humble was taking things a bit far, because while we were away, he’d had the entire top floor of this building remodeled as well, and yet he kept the restaurant exactly as my father had left it. As though to preserve the memory for my sister and me. But my office now resembled a posh Manhattan apartment, minus the dining room table, all soft colors and smooth lines.
He still didn’t step inside. I glanced around, suddenly self-conscious. Did I have offensive material up? I didn’t see any but, admittedly, my tastes ran a little west of the norm.
I turned back to him, and his expression had changed. He’d grown serious in the space of a heartbeat.
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“What?”
“Invite me in.”
He’d lost me. “Of course. I mean, you do own the building.”
“We,” he said, his voice hard. “We own the building. And that’s not what I asked.”
Without another word, he stepped forward, and while still holding a plate in each hand, he bent down and put his mouth on mine. I raised half-closed fists to his chest and melted into him. Most of me did, anyway. Some of me melted into my panties.
He hadn’t kissed me, really kissed me, in a week. His mouth, like fire against mine, grew more demanding instantly. He ran his tongue over my teeth then plunged it deeper, and I had to curl my fingers into his shirt to keep from unbuttoning his jeans. The heat that perpetually surrounded him scalded my lips, soaked into my hair, brushed flames over my skin, pushed between my legs.
Even with all that, the niggling in the back of my mind nudged its way forward. That part of me that worried about how much control the Razer had over him. Over my husband. Would he be a threat to our daughter? Would the god of destruction someday take over? Or was the god in him—like the one in me—a part of who he was now? A part of his makeup? Ingrained into his DNA?
I was Val-Eeth, the god Elle-Ryn-Ahleethia. But I was just as much Charley Davidson. We were not two separate beings. Two separate personalities. Was it the same with Reyes, the last and youngest god of Uzan? Was it simply who he was now? Could a being made of absolute evil change when melded with something good? I had high hopes that it could.
Then there were the child support payments, and suddenly I was in the tenth grade, wondering how many girls my boyfriend had kissed before me. How many he’d groped in the backseat of his father’s Buick. How many bases he’d stolen before he got tagged out.
Reyes had to sense my hesitance. Was that it? Why he’d been pulling away?
He tensed, and I knew that he felt my concerns. I sucked in a sharp breath of arctic air between our mouths. It was like ice on my teeth. It startled me, and I broke off the kiss, wondering where the cold air had come from.
A sad smile lifted one corner of his mouth. He licked his lips slowly as though to savor our encounter, then said, “That’s what I thought.”
I blinked at him. He’d told me he could no longer feel my emotions. Not since I’d learned my celestial name. Not since I’d dematerialized my human body and come into my powers more fully. Surely he couldn’t sense my dilemma now. “I don’t understand.”
He lowered his head. “Then I can’t help you.”
“Reyes—”
“Eat,” he said, pushing the plates into my hands. They were scalding hot, as though they’d just been taken out of an oven, and I wondered if he’d done that. “I’ll send Valerie to pick up the plates.”
He turned and left a half second before I said, “Valerie?”
But he kept walking, taking the stairs three at a time, his movements quiet, lithe, and powerful. After a moment, I went back inside and took Cookie her plate, because while Reyes may have been raised in hell, I did not quite have the aptitude for scalding heat like he did.
“Hot,” I said, my voice breathy as I practically dropped the plates on her desk.
“You can’t ply me with food.” She didn’t even bother to look up from her computer.
“Reyes made it.”
“Oh!” She jumped out of her seat to get forks and napkins, then headed for the Bunn to refuel.
I sat across from her chair. We often ate in the reception area. It let potential clients know we were human, too. We had to eat. And hydrate. And dehydrate in the form of pee. Just because they wanted us to stake out their wandering spouses at the most ungodly hours known to man did not mean we didn’t need a potty break every so often. There were laws, even! We had rights!
Just kidding. We ate in the reception area because it had the best view of the UNM campus. People watching was fun and educational.
“We have a new case,” I said when she came back with a full cup.
“So you said, but what about our old case?”
“Oh, I solved that last night. I just have to work up the nerve to meet with Mrs. Abelson.”
Cookie’s face fell. “Her husband is cheating?”
“W
orse. He’s been hanging with a group of college kids, playing video games and experimenting with cannabis.”
“And how is that worse?”
“Have you met Mrs. Abelson?”
“Oooooh,” she said, drawing out the syllable in understanding. “Gotcha. Want me to set up a time to meet?”
“No.”
“Great, I’ll call now.”
“I don’t think I can deal with her.”
“Well, somebody has to deal with her, and it’s not going to be me.”
“No.”
She picked up the phone and was dialing the woman’s number through my protests.
“Please, no?”
“Rip off the Band-Aid,” she said, punching numbers in with her pen.
“I don’t want to.”
“Of course you do.”
“I like the Band-Aid right where it is.”
“You’ll feel better.”
“Bandages make me look noble.”
“Just rip that puppy off.”
“It’ll hurt.”
“So will a lawsuit when Mrs. Abelson finds out you made her suffer with doubt longer than she had to.”
I gasped. “She can’t sue me.”
Cookie’s brows inched heavenward. “Have you met Mrs. Abelson?”
I caved, crestfallen. With wilted shoulders, I held out my hand for the receiver.
After setting up a meet for later that day, I decided to pester my assistant. Well, pester her more than I already was. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing.”
She reached up and turned off her monitor. So, naturally, I reached over and turned it back on.
“I was working, I swear,” she said through a mouthful of tortilla, eggs, papas, and red chile. “Then, a few clicks later, I was lost in the devil’s lair.”
“You got lost in our apartment again?” I filled my own mouth, paused to let the fact that I’d just eaten a tiny piece of heaven sink in, then leaned closer to examine the photograph on the screen. “It’s fake.”
She’d been looking at strange and unexplained photos from the past. All black and white. All admittedly creepy. I’d fallen down that rabbit hole a few times myself. It was hard to blame her when the majority of our workdays of late had consisted of sharing cute cat videos and clips of Ellen on YouTube.
The Curse of Tenth Grave Page 5