Eleventh Grave in Moonlight

by Darynda Jones

  Homeless departed, by and large, rarely wanted to cross. And when they did, it was disorienting, their mental illness often putting the whammy on me for days. So I didn’t offer, though she could have crossed at any time. I had little say in the matter.

  She noticed me at last. Flashed a gap-filled grimace. Leaned closer. “The Jell-O didn’t set. It’ll never work now.”

  I looked up to where heaven supposedly resided. “Don’t I know it.”

  * * *

  I called Cookie, my “best friend slash receptionist slash research assistant slash shoulder on which to cry,” on the way to the parking lot, ignoring the angel perched atop a minivan, watching me with hawklike eyes.

  Angels had a way of setting me on edge. They were all business. And terribly perceptive when it came to said business. They had a mission, and they would not be swayed. I’d tried. A couple of days ago, I’d offered one a C-note to scram. He didn’t bite. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t even look at the hundred I’d waved at him. Steel resolve if I ever saw one.

  And angels were unreadable when they wanted to be. They had the best poker faces this side of Vegas, and their emotions were impenetrable unless I was really close. And close was not a place I wanted to be. Their power felt like an electrical current rushing over my skin. It was unsettling and breathtaking at once.

  As far as looks, they hardly resembled the pictures in the Bible. No curly hair or golden crowns or togas. Nope. This was one area where Hollywood nailed it. Angels wore long dark jackets that flared out at the shoulders, like the riding coats of yore, or perhaps dusters. Their wings arched behind them and folded in at their backs and down their legs, reaching to the bends at the knees. The vision was one of such majesty, such splendor, it was hard to see them as my adversaries. But adversaries they were. At least for the time being.

  The angel staring me down from above had short black hair, eyes just as dark, and mocha-colored skin. And he was stunning. Like all angels, I’d come to realize. They were nothing if not heartbreakingly beautiful.

  Cookie finally picked up on the twelve-hundredth ring, panting and out of breath.

  “Are you getting a quickie at the office again?” I asked, climbing into Misery, my cherry-red Jeep Wrangler.

  “No, Charley, I have never gotten a quickie at the office. I was trying to put paper in the copier.”

  I did not even want to know why that would have her so out of breath.

  “It’s acting up again.”

  I turned Misery’s engine over, put her in reverse, and sped out of there, all the while keeping an eye on the celestial being keeping an eye on me. It was all very cyclical.

  “Did you check the carburetor?”

  “I don’t think copiers have carburetors.”

  “Did you check to see if it had one? Maybe you need to be on top of these things instead of judging others.”

  “You’re absolutely right. I apologize.”

  She didn’t mean it. I could tell.

  Once out of his sight, the tension in my lungs eased, though just barely. “So, I have bad news.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I’m going to have to let you go.”

  “Did we lose money on a case again?”

  “This one was not my fault. I was attacked. And I hate cheap toothpaste, so it’s either let you go or buy cheap toothpaste. Sorry, hon.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Of course, at the rate I’m going, I might need to find a new job as well. Or go back to my old one. My former pimp said he’d hold my corner for me should I ever go back to him.”

  “Aw, that’s so sweet.”

  “Actually, I think his exact words were, ‘If you ever come crawling back to me like the ungrateful bitch you are.’”

  “Well, still, it’s the thought that counts.”

  “Right?”

  “So?” she asked.

  “So?” I asked back.

  “How’d it go?”

  “Not horridly, if that’s what you’re implying. But I didn’t get to say good-bye to Alexander Skarsgård.”

  “Don’t tell me. A chair?”

  “No.”

  “An end table?”

  “No.”

  “A floor lamp with really nice curves?”

  “A couch.”

  “Ah.”

  “Seriously, Cook, if stealing weren’t illegal, I would’ve taken him home with me. And slept on him. And possibly licked him.” Parting was such sweet sorrow.

  “Well, you’ve licked worse.”

  “Why? What have you heard?”

  3

  Talking to yourself is okay. Answering back is risky.

  —BRIAN SPELLMAN

  I parked in front of our office building, partly because I worked there and partly because there was an actual space open. On Central. In the middle of the day. That rarely happened. Of course, I usually parked at the apartments behind our building. Partly because I had my own parking space with a sign that warned any would-be trespassers of car booting and disembowelment should they even think about parking there, and partly because I lived there. Mostly because I lived there.

  But, hey! Free space!

  Just kidding. There was a meter.

  I fed it a few quarters, ignored yet another angel watching me from the building top next to ours, and took the outside stairs to our second-floor offices. Mr. Farrow, my slightly sexier half, would be at work in the café below, and I wasn’t sure what all he’d wanted to talk about. Thus, I decided to avoid him at all costs.

  Cookie was at her desk, looking rather perky in a hot-pink, frilly thing. I could totally use that in my streetwalking gig. It would be a tad big, but that’s what bondage straps were for.

  “Hey, Cook,” I said, hanging up my jacket.

  “Hey back.”

  Uh-oh. Doldrums. I could feel them coming off her in waves and hoped it wasn’t contagious. I was already depressed. I’d recently found out that, as a god, I couldn’t die except at the hands of another god. What if I became suicidal? What would I do? The fact that I couldn’t die would make me even more depressed, and there wouldn’t be a damned thing I could do about it.

  Oh, well. Best cross that bridge when I got to it.

  “What did you do last night?” she asked, her gaze glued to her computer screen, her voice listless, which was completely at odds with the searing pink she was wearing and the spiky black hair that framed her round face and cerulean eyes.

  I sat in the chair across from her, the one I’d secretly named the Winter Soldier. It had a mysterious vibe with a murky, possibly sordid past. “I went onto the dark web. I thought it might be a chat room for demons. Figured I could get some inside info.”

  “And how’d that turn out?”

  “Bad. Very bad. Hey, is it inside-out day again? I used to love that in, like, the third grade.”

  She looked down at her blouse, then pulled it out at the neck, and either searched her seams for a clue or checked out her girls. “Damn it. It is inside out.” She let out a lengthy sigh, stood, and headed for the restroom.

  “Hey, you okay?” I asked, noticing the matching earrings and pink bracelet.

  “Sure.”

  “Cookie?” I said, drawing out the vowels in my best I-know-you’re-a-lying-skank voice. Only without the skank. Cookie was as much of a skank as I was a saint. “What’s going on? You’ve never been into color coordination before.”

  She pursed her lips and sat back down. “I don’t know. I feel like something is wrong.”

  “It’s the chafing. Once you turn it the right way—”

  “No, not with the blouse.”

  “Of course.”

  “I was trying to be sexy. He didn’t even notice.”

  “Our Lord and Savior?”

  “Robert.”

  “Oh, yeah, that makes more sense.”

  Every time I spoke with Sister Mary Elizabeth, my thoughts tended to lean toward Catholicism for a few days. She and my uncle Bob had gotten
hitched a while back—Cookie, not Sister Mary Elizabeth—so it made sense that she would try to be sexy for him.

  I leaned closer and put on my best sympathy face. “Cook, what’s up?”

  “I think I’m losing him.”

  “Oh, please. You couldn’t lose him if you were seventeen, on a date with Thor, and he was your virginity. The man is so into you, Cook.”

  She filled her lungs. “Maybe at one time. I think he’s having an affair.”

  If I’d been drinking coffee, I would’ve spit it out in a fit of coughs. Thank God for small miracles. “Oh, hon, you know that’s impossible, right? He has ED.”

  She gaped at me. “He most certainly—” When she realized I was teasing, she stopped gaping and glared instead.

  She was right. ED was no joking matter. “Okay, he doesn’t have erectile dysfunction, but it’s fun to say out loud, and the thought of Ubie having an affair is hilarious either way.”

  “Why? Because he loves me so much?”

  “No. Well, yes. But seriously. There’s just no way. That man is head over heels, and he would never do anything to hurt you like that.”

  “I don’t know.” She punched a few keys on her keyboard. “He hasn’t touched me in three days.”

  It was my turn to gape. For a solid minute.

  “What?”

  “Three days?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re ready to call it quits after three days in desert conditions? The key is hydration. And possibly a vibrator.”

  “What? No, I’m not ready to call it quits. I’m just worried is all.”

  “Oh, good, ’cause I ain’t taking him back. He’s yours now. You signed all the appropriate documents. In triplicate. I witnessed, remember?”

  “I know. He’s just been so preoccupied.”

  “Well, he is a detective for the Albuquerque Police Department. That comes with a certain amount of stress, hon.”

  She shook her head. “No, there’s something else. Something’s bothering him. I just can’t put my finger on it. It’s like, I don’t know, like he’s in another world all the time. And he’s had—” She caught herself. Cleared her throat. Shook her head. “Never mind. You’re right. I’m just being silly.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t. He’s had what?” No way could she leave me hanging now.

  “I don’t want to worry you.”

  “Cook.”

  “He’s had a bit of a temper.”

  This time, I was stunned. Uncle Bob? He’d always had a bit of a temper, but never with Cookie. “What happened?”

  “It’s nothing. Really.”

  “Cookie Kowalski Davidson.” If he did anything to hurt my best friend or her daughter, blood be damned.

  “He burned a roast last night.”

  “Oh, well, I guess that could be considered abusive. For the roast, anyway.”

  “When he pulled the pan out of the oven, he cursed and threw it across the kitchen and into the sink.”

  “He threw it?”

  “Hard. It actually scared Amber. Then he stalked off to our bedroom and refused to come out even after I’d heated up some leftovers for dinner.”

  My blood came to a slow simmer. It didn’t reach a full boil. I understood frustration as well as the next girl. But that whole macho temper tantrum bullshit didn’t fly with me. “I get your point, but that’s not affair behavior. That’s something else. Something is eating at him.”

  Did he know?

  One of the cool—or not-so-cool, depending on one’s perspective—things about my husband being born in hell was that he could see when a person was slated for his homeland and what he or she did to get the short end of the stick.

  I’d found out only days ago that my uncle Bob was slated for that very destination because of something he did for me. Something he did to save me from a Colombian drug baron who believed that cannibalizing people with any kind of supernatural ability would transfer that ability on to him.

  He was wrong, of course, but he believed it, and there was no telling how many people died as a result of his obsession.

  When some of his henchmen found out about me and my connection to the supernatural realm, they’d planned on gifting me to him to slither into his good graces. But Ubie had found out, somehow, and from what Reyes told me, he’d killed them all in a shoot-out before they could inform the baron about me.

  That was a few years ago. The reason it came up at all was because, unbeknownst to me, Uncle Bob was scheduled to die at the hands of a low-level thug named Grant Guerin. In fact, he was destined to die two days ago, but we’d thwarted the attempt.

  Thanks to my husband’s keen powers of perception and the fact that killing my uncle was how Guerin had been slated for hell himself, we’d known exactly where and when Ubie was to die at his hands.

  We’d staked out the place, but he must’ve spotted our guy there and taken off. Thus, when Ubie showed up, Guerin wasn’t there. Ubie was saved. Kudos for us.

  But until Reyes actually saw Guerin again, we wouldn’t know if we’d only postponed the inevitable. If Guerin killing Ubie was still in the works.

  Because of this, we kept up the round-the-clock surveillance on Ubie. And why I’d scolded Angel in the psychiatrist’s office. He’d been on Ubie detail for the last few days.

  We thought we’d found Guerin a couple of times, but he continued to slip through our fingers. I needed to know if the threat on my uncle’s life had been neutralized or only postponed. And we wouldn’t know that until we found the little snake.

  Cookie lowered her head. “I was worried that might be the case. And all I can think of is that he’s lost interest in me. How pathetic am I?”

  “On a scale of one to Kanye? You don’t even register. You’re not pathetic. Trust me, I’d know.”

  She sniffed. “Yeah?”

  “Absolutely. Or you won’t be once you turn your blouse right side out.”

  The front door to the office opened, and a tall—very tall—blond guy walked in.

  I stood to welcome him to Davidson Investigations when recognition flooded my cells and rushed down my spine like a jolt of electricity.

  There are moments in life that leave you stunned. Moments that take your breath away and make you forget your native tongue.

  Reyes’s brother walking into the office was one such moment. Not that brother. Not the godly one. The other one. The one that could have been his brother by kidnapping had the people who kidnapped him as a child not handed him over to a monster. That was my suspicion, anyway.

  I’d been investigating the Fosters before my world got turned upside down, before I’d ended up, first, living in an abandoned convent for eight months while the bun I’d popped in the oven baked to simple perfection, and after, living in upstate New York for a month under the throes of amnesia because of having to give up said perfect bun.

  As far as I could tell, the Fosters panicked when their families got suspicious. That was my best guess, anyway. Why else kidnap a child and then get rid of him weeks later? So, instead of handing Reyes back to his birth family, they sold him to Earl Walker. Or just handed him over. Either way, they gave Reyes to a monster. And not in the supernatural way, either. Earl was a man so evil, so vile, it wafted off him like a toxin.

  Cookie and I had yet to figure out if Shawn Foster, the man standing in my office waiting for me to speak to him, was a legitimate adoption or if he, too, had been kidnapped.

  “Are you Ms. Davidson?” he asked, his voice low and smooth.

  When Cookie had first described Shawn Foster to me, she’d commented on how opposite he was in looks to Reyes. But that applied only to his coloring. Where Reyes was dark, Shawn was light. Literally and celestially. His aura was stunning. Brighter than most. More pure. He had blond hair cropped short and pale skin. But his features were bizarrely similar. Beautiful. Angelic. Very much like Rey’aziel’s. Which would explain why my suspicions shifted into overdrive.

  “Yes.” I stepped forw
ard and took his outstretched hand. “Sorry, you just look really familiar.”

  “I should,” he said with a grin. “You’ve been investigating me for a while now.”

  * * *

  We stood in an awkward silence, mostly because it took me a moment to recover from his statement. He knew I’d been investigating him. His parents. Did he know about Reyes? He was younger than Reyes. My age, actually. And from what we found out earlier about him, he was living with his parents again while he went to graduate school at UNM. He was in engineering. And he was still gazing at me, waiting for his statement to sink in.

  “Oh, right. Well”—I shot a save me expression to Cookie, who was still busy trying to reset her jaw—“not so much you as … your parents.” I realized too late that investigating his parents could seem worse than investigating him.

  “Good,” he said, dropping my hand and acknowledging Cookie with a nod. “Then you’ll have a jump start on my case, should you choose to accept it.”

  “Your case?” I asked, gesturing toward my office, which was just past Cookie’s, a.k.a. our reception area.

  “Yes. I’d like you to find my real parents.”

  I almost tripped, then closed the door, giving Cookie one last holy crap look before it closed completely.

  “Please, have a seat.” I offered him the chair across from my desk, then went straight for the Bunn. “Coffee?”

  “No, thanks.” He was still standing, checking out the digs. “This is nice.”

  “Thanks. My husband recently had it redecorated.”

  “Right.” He sat down at last and put a folder he’d been carrying on my desk. “He owns the bar and grill downstairs.”

  Was that all he knew? I could only hope at this point. “Yes, he does.”

  I’d been having strange encounters with both the living and the dead, with both demons and angels, with poltergeists and the mentally unstable, my entire life, but I could honestly say this rated really close to the top.

  I sat across from him and took a sip of liquid courage. “How did you know about the investigation?”

  “I didn’t. Not at first. But when I saw you drive by my parents’ house the other day, I remembered seeing you parked down the street about a year ago.”

  “You have a great memory.”