Summoned to Thirteenth Grave (Charley Davidson #13)

by Darynda Jones

  They followed suit, calling us Pak Reyes and Bu Charley.

  “Pandu is writing the fourth book, but it is not going well,” Kasih said.

  Surya offered a worried smile.

  “Why?” Reyes asked. He had to duck to get into the room.

  “He will not eat,” Surya said, concern written clearly on his face. “The visions have become violent. They are of a lightless realm that is taking over the earth.”

  I tried not to react. If their sudden focus on me was any indication, I failed.

  “Please continue,” I said.

  “He goes into a rage, throwing things and screaming.”

  “He even had a seizure,” Kasih added. “I am worried he is being punished for seeing into their realm. I am worried the demons stole him from me.”

  “That hasn’t happened,” I assured her, hoping like hell I wasn’t lying.

  She relaxed, but only a little. “He says we are all going to die, for this is the realm the Dark Star created for the Star Eater. It holds the feasters of souls.”

  Reyes stood far above everyone else in the room, so when they turned their attention to him, they had to crane their necks.

  “Like Osh?” I asked him, keeping with their language.

  “Osh’ekiel?” Kasih said, surprised.

  I inclined my head. “You know about him?”

  Her voice was soft when she spoke. “The soul eater, yes. But these are different. Osh’ekiel was born into slavery. He lives off the souls of others, siphoning and swallowing only what he needs for nourishment. The feasters gorge upon them. They rip them apart and grind them to dust with their teeth until there is nothing left.”

  They damned sure nailed it.

  “They do indeed. May we see him?”

  She nodded and took me to a small room at the back of the house. For the area, their home was a mansion, but to me, it was warm and filled with love and respect for their families and traditions.

  They pulled back a curtain. The room was lit with only a single candle with Pandu’s gaze glued to it as though he were in a trance. But the minute I entered the room, he turned toward me.

  A tiny child, he looked no older than five-year-old Meiko. His slender build did nothing to take away from the chubbiness of his cheeks and huge, dark eyes. He wore a pair of white pajamas and blue sandals.

  He held up a hand, beckoning me.

  I knelt in front of him and placed my hand into his. With a smile, he held up the other. I repeated the action, letting him drape his hands over mine before making the introductions.

  “Hello,” I said in Bahasa Isyarat Indonesia, Indonesian sign language.

  An epic smile swallowed his face. He let go of my hands and said, “I knew who you were when you came inside my father’s house. I waited.” His signs were fluid and complete, not like a child’s at all.

  When he draped his hands over mine again, I asked, “How did you know?”

  He laughed, throwing his head back, and it made me laugh in return. “I saw your light. You are the First Star. The Star Eater.”

  I hesitated, unable to believe how amazing this kid was. “Can you see the light from the candle?”

  He shook his head. “I can only feel its warmth on my face.”

  My heart grew. Just a little. “But you can see my light.”

  “All can see your light eventually.”

  He had a point. “Your parents said you are not eating. You are upset.”

  “You are, too.”

  “You see more than most.”

  His grin widened, the shimmer in his irises mesmerizing.

  “Mas Pandu, how do I stop it?”

  “I only see what has come to pass, but long ago, when the world was much younger, I saw what you seek placed beside the dead. It was placed there for you and lies inside the tombs. You must find the heart.”

  I blinked in confusion. “For me? When was it placed there?”

  “Centuries ago. It is deep in the earth and is protected by the house of the pontiff. It is guarded by man and guarded by beast, and only the pure can enter.”

  “The house of the pontiff. Do you mean the house of the pope? The Vatican?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yes, below the city. But only you can go.” He turned and looked straight at Reyes and yet didn’t see him directly. It was as though he saw through him. “He cannot go.”

  “Reyes? Why not?”

  “He is the darkness. Only the light can enter.”

  I felt a wave of shame spike within my husband.

  So did Pandu. “Your darkness is not born of malevolence, but of void, one that waits for light to fill it. The light from the First Star. When it does, you will become more than you ever imagined. I cannot see this, but I have read it in the prophecies.”

  He needed to get together with Garrett. “Can I ask you a question?” I said, asking him a question.

  He dipped his head.

  “How are you only seven years old?”

  “Because my body was born seven years ago.”

  I laughed softly. “But your soul?”

  “It was born with the stars.”

  With his fingers draped over mine, I brought them to my mouth and kissed them. He put a hand on my face and closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again, he said softly, “You must hurry. Time slips like sand through my fingers.”

  I started to rise, but something stopped me. “Mas Pandu, would you like me to heal you? I’m not sure I can, but I can try.”

  “If you heal me, I will not be able to hear. I will not be able to see.”

  For a second time, I kissed his fingers.

  When his mouth widened and his eyes crinkled, the candlelight washed over his face just so, and I saw deeper into his eyes. I saw planets and moons and nebulae. I saw stars being born and supernovas exploding. I saw galaxy upon galaxy as far as space and time would allow. A celestial realm. I saw an entire celestial realm within him.

  I blinked back to the Milky Way and gaped, and I could’ve sworn he saw me. His smile, knowing and wise, tuned mischievous.

  “Can we see each other again?” I asked when he’d draped his hands over mine.

  “You are the First Star. I will see you always.”

  16

  If history repeats itself, I am so getting a dinosaur.

  —T-SHIRT

  We said our good-byes to Pandu and his family.

  “Did you see that?” I asked Reyes when we stepped outside.

  “I did.”

  “It was . . . he was . . . I didn’t know that was possible.”

  “We’ve seen it before.”

  “True.” We’d seen something similar in Beep’s eyes, but she was a portal to any dimension in any realm that existed. The dimension didn’t live inside her; she simply had access to them. “Reyes, we need to stop this. We can’t let it get to Beep or Pandu.”

  “I know.” With time running out, he wrapped me in his arms and shifted. We materialized . . . in Paris.

  “I think we missed the mark.”

  “I thought we could grab something to eat. We need to wait until the museum closes. Which gives us two hours.”

  I gasped. For like a minute. “We need to see the Eiffel Tower.”

  “We can do that.”

  “You’re not going to throw me off it, are you?”

  The corners of his eyes crinkled with mirth. He was mirthy. I loved making him mirthy. “I wasn’t planning on it, but if that’s what you want . . .”

  “No, I’m good. Thrilling as it is, I’ve been thrown off enough buildings to last a lifetime.”

  “I threw you off one.”

  “Which was more than enough.”

  We ate at an outside café on Rue d’Arcole, close enough to Notre Dame for me to see its spires. The food was as delectable as the scenery. We heard over a dozen languages as we ate, the street crowded with tourists from all over the world, as our waiter, having found out we were from the States—New Mexico, to
be precise—sang a made-up song about our home state. Even Reyes chuckled at him, but once he brought the crème brûlée, shit got real. Reyes tried to sneak a bite and almost lost an arm.

  What no one tells you is not to materialize on the top of the Eiffel Tower—the very top, not inside the observation deck—during high winds. After almost falling to my death three times, and nearly causing an international incident when alarms started blaring, we hightailed it out of there.

  Two seconds later, we found ourselves outside Vatican City in Rome. Mostly because we couldn’t materialize inside Vatican City in Rome. Something was stopping us. A force field of some kind. A spell, maybe?

  Reyes held out his hand, testing the invisible barrier. “You’ll have to go without me from here.”

  “You mean, Pandu was right? You can’t go into the city?”

  “I doubt Pandu is ever wrong.”

  “But I don’t understand. You’ve been on sacred ground before. Hell, we lived in an abandoned convent for eight months.”

  “It’s not about that. It’s protected.”

  I scanned the area, trying to see the barrier, too. “From what?”

  “From me.”

  “You mean, beings like you.”

  He looked me up and down with a dark expression I couldn’t decipher. Not harsh. Not angry. Just curious. “There are no beings like me. I thought you’d figured that out by now.”

  “I just meant, you know, a part of you is demon. Is that what you’re talking about?”

  “No. It’s protected against me specifically.”

  “How do you—? Never mind. Freaking Vatican people.”

  We recently found out they’d been watching us for years. Sending their sheep over to keep an eye on us. To spy. And who knew how many they’d sent?

  “Do you know how to get in?” he asked.

  I began to question Cookie’s presence in our lives.

  “You can’t materialize inside the tombs.”

  Yep. She was one of them. I was certain of it.

  “You’ll have to get a ticket and go in like a tourist.”

  She was a little too understanding.

  “Once you get in, you need to concentrate.”

  A little too forgiving.

  “If it was really placed there for you, the heart will call to you.”

  I was so outing her when we got back. And I thought she was my best friend.

  “Are you listening?”

  “What? Of course. The heart will call me.” I started toward the gardens, then turned back. “Like, on my cell?”

  His jaw tightened, that muscle jumping under the perfectly sculpted plains of his face.

  Mission.

  Accomplished.

  I got another two feet and turned back again. “You don’t think it’s a real heart, do you? He meant that metaphorically, right?”

  His only answer was a slight shrug of his right shoulder.

  Great.

  I might not have been able to materialize in the necropolis itself, but I could materialize at the entrance. I popped in next to an older woman with a poodle in a pink sweater. She was oblivious, but the poodle went berserk.

  As she scolded it in Italian, I sought the entrance to the tombs. The beauty of the area struck me first. The Vatican Gardens lay spread before me. Lush greens punctuated with vivid florals took my breath away.

  After a short walk, I found the entrance to the catacombs. Several stragglers were just now leaving them under the annoyed glare of a guard ready to close up for the day.

  The Vatican Necropolis of the Via Triumphalis sat directly under the gardens. They held over one thousand tombs, mostly common people, and they dated back as far as the first century BC.

  The guards hadn’t closed the entrance just yet, as there were a few more stragglers coming out, so I shifted and straddled two planes at once, rendering me invisible in the earthly one.

  I didn’t know how long I could stay dematerialized. Apparently, the protection spell—which, again, who knew that was possible—wouldn’t allow me to materialize inside the necropolis itself. The farther inside I walked, the more resistance I felt. And it wouldn’t allow me to dematerialize to get out, either. I could only pray I wouldn’t be stuck inside the necropolis all night. We didn’t have that kind of time.

  I just made it past the guards when I couldn’t fight it anymore. The resistance. I materialized and hurried inside before a guard saw me.

  The burial chambers were amazing, the walls carved out of the stone and graves of all shapes and sizes filling the rooms.

  They’d set up catwalks for tourists to see the excavations, but I hid out behind a stone chair—or the tomb of a very short person, I wasn’t sure which. I waited to see if any guards would pass by. One did. I hoped he was just checking to make sure all the visitors left. If he did regular sweeps, I could be in trouble.

  Once he was out of earshot, I hopped up and walked deeper inside, passing various chambers, some more elaborate than others but all incredible. The cool underground caverns could have kept me occupied for hours, but I had a job to do and a man waiting outside who would freak if I took too long.

  I hadn’t missed the fact that he’d barely let me out of his sight since I’d gotten back. Fine with me since in his sight was where I’d dreamed of being for dozens of years in Marmalade time. It was endearing, though. His attention. His—

  Wait a minute. Maybe it had nothing to do with him wanting to be near me. Maybe he’d been sent by the Vatican to keep an eye on me. If I discounted the fact that he was the one they were most worried about and he was, in fact, the son of Satan, it made perfect sense. I was so calling him out when I got back.

  As I strode through the place like I owned it, I noticed the fact that one of the chambers looked just like my first apartment. If all the tombs had been furniture, that is.

  This was getting me nowhere. Reyes said to concentrate. I was totally concentrating, but perhaps I was concentrating on the wrong things. Like conspiracies and my first apartment.

  I stopped at the refrigerator in my apartment, closed my eyes, and concentrated on concentrating. Come on, Davidson. You can do this. Think really hard and try to get past the fact that you haven’t had coffee in, like, an hour. How was I supposed to concentrate when my caffeine dipstick was registering low?

  Maybe I should go get coffee then come—

  It hit me. A magnetic pull, tugging at my insides. Surprised, I lifted my lids and walked toward it.

  I’d felt it before. That same power. That same pulsing strength. But I couldn’t place where.

  To get to it, I’d have to leave the catwalk. I prayed for forgiveness as I climbed the rail and eased into the stone chamber. The magnet pulled me along an unlit passageway. I used the flashlight on my phone and weaved tighter and tighter into the tunnel.

  This section hadn’t been opened to the public yet, and might never be. It was narrow with a low ceiling, as though earmarked, perhaps, for a poorer sect of the population. Just when I thought I couldn’t squeeze any farther, it opened up to a small chamber that was clearly still being excavated.

  Ancient mud clung to one wall while the mud on the other had been removed. The wall had been cleaned to reveal four open tombs, the arches in perfect symmetry to each other. And between two of the arches was a carving of a massive lion. It faced forward, its paw extended, its claws elongated as though taking a swipe at the artist.

  In the middle of the room was a pillar about three feet tall with similar arches around its four sides.

  Kneeling down beside it, I held my flashlight on the words carved on the side. The language I could’ve spoken. Didn’t mean I could read it. It was most likely written in Latin, since most official documents of ancient Rome were. And the words were written in Latin, the letters anything but English.

  I did recognize a couple of words. One, tonna, meant cask or jar. The other, Livia, was a name, and I wondered if it belonged to the tiny, dark-haired girl sitting ato
p the pillar. She wore a sleeveless dress with a sheer shawl thrown over her shoulders. Her hair lay in curls around her head secured with a tiara of flowers. And she was absolutely beautiful.

  This could have been her family’s crypt.

  “Hi,” I said softly, not sure what era she was from or what language she would speak, but she didn’t. Speak. She swung her legs, then jumped off the pillar and pointed back at it.

  It had more writing that I couldn’t read.

  “Do you know what this says?”

  She smiled and pointed again.

  “Okay. This has to be important, right?”

  I looked again and tried sounding out what I could. Which made no sense whatsoever. Not until I stumbled across one word: Cor. Heart.

  Pandu had said to find the heart.

  I sagged against the millennia-old pillar. It wasn’t a real heart. It was only the word heart. I could handle the word. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me. As insanely untrue as that was, in that moment, I took it to cor.

  Turning to the little girl, I asked, “Any thoughts on how to open this?”

  But Little Miss Roman Princess just pointed again. Bossy little thing.

  This room had been partially excavated, including the pillar. If there had been anything inside, someone might have found it already. Just in case, I searched the whole thing for a latch of some kind or a hidey-hole. None that I could see.

  “Okay, if I were a weapon hidden in an ancient pillar . . .”

  The moment I walked into the chamber, the magnetic pull I’d felt before increased tenfold. But as I sat there, it grew even stronger by the minute.

  The girl patted the pillar, right by where the word cor was.

  I shook my head. “I can’t break it. It’s over two thousand years old.”

  She patted again and then put her hand over my heart.

  Son of a bitch.

  I was about to break a two thousand–year-old monument that might have belonged to a little girl who might or might not have been named Livia.

  The pillar was all one piece except for a recessed panel that served as the backdrop for the writing. I held my breath and pushed, trying to break it, as much as it shattered me to do so, while causing the least amount of damage possible.