Eleventh Grave in Moonlight

by Darynda Jones

  Artemis pawed at them, wanting to play, too. Angel chuckled, ducked under Reyes’s arm, and lunged into the backseat to wrestle with her. Thank goodness the laws of physics didn’t apply. There was no way all three of them would have fit in my backseat had they been corporeal.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be watching Uncle Bob?” I asked him.

  “I have been. He’s perfectly safe. Swopes is on watch now.”

  “Oh, okay.” I’d trust Garrett Swopes with my own life, so I felt Ubie was safe in his hands.

  Angel let out a squeak that I assumed was a plea for help, but I ignored it.

  “Sorry about that,” I said to the receptionist, pretending to end my pretend call.

  “That’s okay.”

  Reyes materialized in my passenger seat but stayed firmly planted in the supernatural realm. Otherwise she would have been in for quite the shock.

  She kicked at the ground. “Well, I’ll let you go. I got off early and—”

  “I guess Mrs. Foster did, too?” I asked, nodding toward the exit.

  She lifted a shoulder. “I guess.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  The girl narrowed her lids. “Why do you want to know?”

  “No reason.” Either a paw or a foot landed on the back of my head. I coughed to cover up my sudden lurch forward, then refocused on her as Reyes shot a warning glare over his shoulder. “But if I did have a reason, is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

  “Drop the case,” Reyes said.

  But the receptionist’s reaction caught my attention. A sadness came over her. She looked down and took a long drag off an e-cigarette. “Not really. I just thought maybe you were, I don’t know, investigating or something. Like undercover maybe.”

  Unless she knew what I did for a living, that was an odd thing to think. “Why would I be undercover?”

  She shrugged again. “Because there was an investigation, but then nothing happened.”

  “Really?” I was having a hard time hearing her over Angel’s screams. Apparently Artemis was going for the jugular.

  “I’m not kidding, Dutch,” Reyes said. He leaned close until his mouth was at my ear. “Drop the fucking case.”

  I tried to make my next move appear completely innocent, as though I were just looking around when I turned to face off against my husband.

  His gaze sparkled with a mixture of interest and frustration. His expression hard. His full mouth set. Until I dropped my gaze to it and whispered the one question I knew he wouldn’t answer: “Why?”

  He eased back, the muscles in his jaw working as he turned away from me, propped an elbow on the window frame, and rested a hand at his mouth in thought.

  We had agreed a few days ago no more secrets between us. Ever. Funny how long that accord didn’t last.

  “Besides, if you were undercover,” the girl continued, “you’d know more about copiers than you do. You would have brushed up on them so you didn’t look like you were undercover.”

  “Ah”—I raised an index finger and turned back to her—“but maybe that was all part of my master plan. Maybe I went in without knowing that much about copiers to throw you off my scent, so to speak. If I’d known too much…” Okay, that sounded dumb, even to me. “Never mind. What’s your name, hon?”

  “Tiana.”

  “Tiana. That’s gorgeous.”

  She shrugged and nodded a shy thank you.

  “Can we go somewhere to talk?”

  As she mulled over my proposition, I ignored Angel’s pleas for help and my husband’s sudden shift into a draconian style of domesticity. Thankfully, Angel’s cries were more laughter than agony. But Reyes’s mistaken impression that I’d actually comply with his ridiculous demands lay somewhere in that gray area between adorable and assault with intent to kill.

  Tiana nodded and said, “Okay. As long as it’s far away from here.”

  * * *

  To say that the receptionist was paranoid would have been an understatement had she not had good reason. We sat in an out-of-the-way restaurant in Rio Rancho called the Turtle Mountain Brewing Company, which was about twenty minutes from where she worked.

  Reyes had dematerialized the moment I started Misery, his heat scalding my skin and leaving it warm the entire trip. I’d lost both my other two passengers when Artemis plowed into Angel as I was going seventy on Paseo Del Norte. I watched as they fell onto the pavement. Cringed as car after car rolled over them. Or, well, through them. They were so into re-creating the Battle of Gettysburg that they didn’t notice, thank goodness.

  The devastation of losing my passengers didn’t affect my appetite in the least. I was enjoying a killer green chile pizza called the Chimayo. I wanted to marry the pizza and have its babies, but the server said it was already spoken for. Damn it.

  My jesting, however, had eased the tension roiling in Tiana’s stomach. She chowed down on a sub called the Sun Mountain. It looked amazing, and I had to resist the urge to ask for a bite. At least until we got to know each other better. I gave it ten minutes.

  “You don’t understand. It’s not any one thing,” she explained. We were, of course, discussing her coworker. “I can’t really put my finger on it. I mean, Eve and her husband are, like, super religious.”

  “Religious?”

  “Yeah, but not your everyday kind of religious. They’re like the nut kind of religious. They believe they are here for a reason.”

  “Here?”

  “On Earth. They think God put them here to…” She laughed softly as though the very thought made her uncomfortable. “I can’t even say this out loud without cringing, but they think God put them here to fight evil.”

  “Okay,” I said, a little taken aback. “Well, it’s good to know we have someone on our side, yes?”

  She let out a breath that was part amusement and part relief. It must have felt good to talk with someone about her concerns.

  “You don’t think they’re the good guys?” I asked.

  “I think they think they are, but they go about it the wrong way. I’m surprised Dr. Schwab hasn’t fired Eve. Especially after her latest catastrophe.”

  That perked me right up. I encouraged her to elaborate by inching closer.

  She met me halfway. “She told one of our mothers that her son was evil. Told her to be careful and watch for signs of the beast.”

  I sat stunned, torn between laughter and alarm. “The beast? Who would tell a mother something like that?”

  “That’s what I mean. She’s crazy. Said the kid had a darkness about him.”

  A darkness? Could she really see into the supernatural realm? “And she told her that at the doctor’s office?”

  “No.” Tiana shook her head and took a drink of water. “That’s the only reason she still has a job. She doesn’t work directly with the patients unless she has to contact them for billing or insurance information. According to Eve, she just happened to run into the mother at a grocery store in the South Valley. A store that’s all the way across town from work and the Fosters’ house. Why was she shopping for milk all the way across town?”

  “Good question. What did the doctor say?”

  “Well, it was the woman’s word against hers. She denied saying it, of course, but why would that mother make up something so bizarre?”

  “I agree. I don’t suppose I could get the woman’s name?”

  Tiana was more professional than I gave her credit for. She shook her head, albeit regretfully. “Sorry. They have pretty strict laws about stuff like that.”

  I was beginning to like her more and more. The girl had ethics. I had ethics.

  No, wait, that was epics. I had epics. Epic ass. Epic boots. Epic looks, but only when I was drunk. Tons of epics.

  “I understand.” Besides, if I really needed the info, I could get Uncle Bob to get it for me. But I didn’t want to cause the woman any more grief than was necessary. And I certainly didn’t want to get Tiana in trouble or cast any susp
icion her way in the workplace. “So, I get that this is a little disturbing, but I’m sensing something more.”

  She put down her fork and shifted in her seat. “There was another incident. The cops came, but they could never connect the two.”

  “The two?”

  “That’s why I thought you might be undercover or something. You know, like they were still investigating, but I guess not.”

  “I can’t tell you everything,” I said to her. “But I can promise you, if I find anything to implicate Mrs. Foster of any wrongdoing, I have a ton of connections with the APD.” A ton meaning one in the form of Uncle Bob. Some might say he weighed a ton.

  Okay, he wasn’t that big. In fact, he seemed to be losing weight lately. And not in a healthy way.

  “Well, after that incident, Eve kind of eased up on the whole religion thing. At least while at work. Personally, I think Dr. Schwab ordered her not to bring it up again. But this one mother came in with her two kids and … it was so weird. When Eve saw the kids, she had the strangest reaction. Like all the blood drained from her face. She turned white. And the look she gave the mother. If looks could kill.”

  Okay, even if the kids did have some kind of dark aura or something, why look at the mother that way?

  “Did she say anything about it to you?”

  “No. Saint Eve doesn’t exactly confide in me.”

  “Saint Eve?” I asked with a grin.

  “That’s what we call her at the office. All that holier-than-thou crap. Her husband is just like her.”

  Interesting.

  “So, no, she didn’t say anything to me. I just kind of overheard her on the phone talking to her husband.”

  “Nice. And?”

  “She told him that a little girl had come in with her mother and baby brother. She said the girl was marked.”

  I stilled. Swallowed hard. Then asked as nonchalantly as I could, “Marked?”

  Tiana shrugged. “No idea what she meant. And I wouldn’t have thought much about it except for the fact that…” She shook her head and took another drink. “Never mind. It’s crazy.”

  “No, Tiana, please tell me. What happened?”

  “It’s going to sound crazy. One thing can’t possibly have anything to do with the other.”

  “You might be surprised.”

  “It’s just, later that night, the little girl disappeared.”

  I covered my shock by wiping my hands on a napkin and sitting back in thought.

  “It was all over the news. About two months ago?”

  About two months ago I’d been sequestered away in a convent. I missed a lot. “Did they ever find her?”

  She shook her head. “No. She’s still missing. I can’t tell you who it is, but it’s public knowledge.” She took out her phone, pulled up a webpage, then laid her phone on the table and looked away. Girl was good. Nobody could prove she’d told me a thing.

  I leaned over and glanced at the page entitled Find Dawn Now. It had been set up by friends of the family and offered a reward for any information on the whereabouts of three-year-old Dawn Brooks. Brown hair. Blue eyes. And beautiful.

  I could look into it more later and ask Uncle Bob what he knew about the case.

  Tiana’s phone darkened, and she pulled it back to her. “The mother came in a couple of weeks ago with her baby boy, Dawn’s little brother, for a checkup. She was a basket case. So different from when I first saw her.” Tears shimmered in the young girl’s eyes. “She broke down in Dr. Schwab’s office. I don’t think she’s doing very well.”

  The walls of my chest tightened. “I can’t imagine that she is.” At least I knew where my daughter was. I knew she was safe. Well cared for and loved. This poor woman had no clue, and statistically, children missing that long, those that weren’t taken by an estranged parent, were rarely found alive. “Do you think Mrs. Foster had something to do with her disappearance?”

  “I know how it sounds.” She sat back, dejected. “I get it. I just found it odd. The whole thing. They had just come in for a one-month well child visit for the little brother. It was just weird, you know? Eve gets all pale and freaks out. Goes to the bathroom to call her husband. Makes some excuse to leave work early, then that very night the girl is abducted from her home, and Eve is out sick the rest of the week.”

  “She called in sick?”

  “She missed four days of work.” She bowed her head as though ashamed. “I know how thin it sounds, but something just wasn’t right. So, I … I’m the one who called the police. Or, well, I had my cousin Elias call the police and talk to the detective in charge of the case. I was afraid someone would get the recording and know it was me. I could get into a lot of trouble.”

  “Not if there was a threat of danger or wrongdoing, Tiana. Don’t feel guilty.”

  “Maybe. But it didn’t do any good. They looked into it. Eve and her husband said they were home that night, watching a movie. Their son corroborated.”

  A current of electricity rushed over my skin. It carried dread and suspicion. “Their son?”

  “Yeah, I guess he lives with them? He’s getting his graduate degree or something. He’s really nice looking. I met him when he came to pick up his mom for lunch one day.”

  “Tall? Blond?”

  “That’s him. Shawn Foster.”

  “I’ll look into it, Tiana. I promise.” If Mrs. Foster was still up to her old abduction tricks, I wanted to be the first to know. But what startled me most was the whole supernatural slant to all of this. Could she really see auras? Had she seen my light? Had she seen Reyes’s darkness when he was a baby?

  Considering everything I knew thus far, it was a strong possibility Reyes’s darkness was why she took him in the first place. That would also explain, to a degree, why he wanted me to drop the case. He was so sensitive about the whole son-of-Satan thing.

  “Also”—I pointed to her sub—“are you going to finish that?”

  * * *

  I thought about skipping my business class, but I’d need those skills once I took over the world. Still, I was running a little early, and since Osh’s digs were close, I decided to pay him a visit.

  Osh was a Daeva, a slave demon, who had escaped hell much the same way Reyes had. Only Reyes had used a map. The tattoos on his shoulders and back were literally a map of the void between hell and this plane. Osh navigated the void using only instinct and skill. Few demons were that clever.

  I hadn’t seen him since I forced him to swallow my soul so I could sneak up on one of the malevolent gods without my bright-ass light giving me away.

  But swallowing a god’s aura, even for a Daeva, was lethal.

  I trapped the malevolent god and got back to him before he exploded with all the energy he’d ingested, but the ordeal had taken its toll.

  All the lights were out at Osh’s. Before I’d tried to disintegrate his innards with my energy, he’d been on Ubie patrol, taking a shift, tailing my rascally uncle to keep Grant Guerin from killing him. But since the incident, he’d been lying low.

  I knocked lightly, waited a whole three seconds, then let myself in. He never kept his house locked, in the hope of a thief stopping by. I’d agreed, when we first met, to let him feed off the souls of those who did not deserve them, but I mostly meant murderers and rapists and pedophiles. Still, if someone had the gall to break into another person’s domain, that someone had better be willing to accept whatever may come.

  His house, a really nice two-bedroom in the traditional Santa Fe style with muted colors and warm hues, was completely dark. I took out my phone and turned on the flashlight.

  A voice originating from a dark corner startled me. “You’re not a thief.”

  I turned to see Osh—or Osh’s shadow—sitting in a recliner. “Am too. I stole a Jolly Rancher from Circle K when I was seven.”

  “So, I can sup on your soul?”

  He sat with his knees apart and his hands on the arms of the chair. When I shined my flashlight on him, he
squinted and frowned at me.

  I walked closer and turned on a lamp beside his chair. That time he scowled.

  “I think we tried that already.” I took a seat on his sofa. “You almost exploded. Which, thank goodness, you didn’t. You’d never have come out of Garrett’s carpet.”

  He tried to charm me with a lopsided grin. “I said sup. Not swallow in one, nuclear gulp.”

  It worked. Osh, or Osh’ekiel, as he was known in the supernatural realm, looked about nineteen in human years, but he was hundreds of years old. Since time was different down under, it was impossible to tell how old, exactly, but his pale skin, shoulder-length blue-black hair, and shimmering bronze eyes made him quite popular with humans of all ages.

  Still, I’d known for months he’d play an important role in things to come. I knew he’d be by my daughter’s side. I knew she’d love him. But I also knew he was created and raised in a hell dimension. Still, I trusted him. He would love Beep. He would give his life for her. But the prophecies that foretold of Beep’s coming trials also said that there was one who would either lead her to victory or be her downfall.

  I believed that prophesied entity to be Osh, though I had no way to know for certain. I saw through the veil, but most of what I saw was vague, and none of it was set in stone. If Lucifer won, if he found Beep and killed her before she could fulfill her prophecy, he would be unstoppable.

  For some reason, Reyes and I had not been in the visions I’d seen. We were either dead by the time she came of age or unable to assist her, which led back to the being dead part, because nothing but nothing would keep me from helping my daughter short of that.

  But she would love him. Osh. Beep would love him with all her heart. And he would love her back. Mythology in every culture in the world had stories of infants being promised to royalty or celestial beings or hideous beasts, but for it to be real, for it to actually exist, was both surreal and disturbing.

  “You keep looking at me like that.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like you’re trying to figure me out.”

  “Sorry. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”