Seventh Grave and No Body Read online

  Praise for Darynda Jones:

  ‘Hilarious and heart-felt, sexy and surprising, this paranormal has it all… An absolute must read – I’m already begging for the next one!’ J.R. Ward, No.1 New York Times bestselling author

  ‘From its unique premise to its wonderfully imaginative characters, Jones’s award-winning Charley Davidson mystery series… will continue to attract and delight a broad spectrum of readers’ Booklist (starred review)

  ‘Jones perfectly balances humour and suspense… will leave readers eager for the next instalment’ Publishers Weekly

  Darynda Jones has won several awards, including a 2009 Golden Heart in the Paranormal Category for First Grave on the Right and the 2012 RITA award for Best New Book.

  She lives in New Mexico with her husband of more than 25 years and two sons, the mighty, mighty Jones boys.

  Visit Darynda Jones online:

  www.daryndajones.com

  www.facebook.com/darynda.jones.official

  www.twitter.com/Darynda

  By Darynda Jones

  First Grave on the Right

  Second Grave on the Left

  Third Grave Dead Ahead

  Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet

  Fifth Grave Past the Light

  Sixth Grave on the Edge

  Seventh Grave and No Body

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Piatkus

  978-0-3494-0344-1

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 Darynda Jones

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  PIATKUS

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Seventh Grave and No Body

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Darynda Jones:

  About the Author

  By Darynda Jones

  COPYRIGHT

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Excerpt: Reyes’s POV

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  For Dana

  You are a font of positive energy.

  You are effervescent, exuberant,

  brilliant, and dazzling.

  Where would I be without you?

  Yep, “resting” in an institution, most likely.

  Thank you for everything, radiant one.

  Your kung fu is strong.

  Acknowledgments

  The following is a list of people to whom I owe a mountain of gratitude. Some of these individuals are a tad off-kilter, but we’d have it no other way.

  My undying gratitude list includes but is not limited to:

  Alexandra Machinist: for your amazing energy and unwavering support.

  Jennifer Enderlin: for your utter brilliance and enthusiasm.

  Eliani Torres: for your tireless efforts and incredible attention to detail.

  Stephanie, Jeanne-Marie, Esther, and everyone at St. Martin’s Press and Macmillan Audio: for all your wonderful work behind the scenes.

  Nick and Mitali: for attempting to keep me in line.

  Angie Bee: for the BEST LINE EVER!

  Monica Boots and Marjolein Bouwers: for your help with translations.

  Cait, Rhianna, Trayce, and Jowanna: for your smarts and dedication.

  The Grimlets: for being the best a girl could ask for.

  My family: for everything that you do.

  Jowanna Kestner: for the diamond thing. JUST AWESOME!

  Netters: for letting me hug you in public. You are the light in my heart.

  The Mighty, Mighty Jones Boys: for being my gorgeous everythings.

  Readers everywhere: for your love of reading.

  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

  1

  I often question my sanity.

  Occasionally, it replies.

  — T-SHIRT

  If the woman howling from the backseat of Agent Carson’s black SUV weren’t already dead, I would’ve strangled her. Gladly. And with much exuberance. But, alas, my ex-BFF Jessica was indeed dead, and ranting on and on about how her death was entirely my fault. Which was so not true. It was only partly my fault. I wasn’t the one who’d kicked her off a seven-story grain elevator. Though I was beginning to wish I had. At least then I would’ve had a reason to listen to her harp ad nauseam. Life was too short for this crap.

  After rolling my eyes so far back into my head I almost dislodged them from their sockets, I glanced over at my driver and the owner of said SUV, Agent Carson. Actually, it was FBI Special Agent Carson, but that was way too many syllables, in my book. I’d tried to get her to change her name to SAC – or even FBISAC, since we could’ve called her Phoebe for short – but she’d have none of it. Her loss. No telling how much time she could save if she didn’t have all those syllables to deal with.

  Fortunately for SAC, she couldn’t hear Jessica, but the other supernatural entity in the car – one Mr. Reyes Alexander Farrow, the hot hunk of corporeal manliness sitting in the middle seat of the long SUV – most definitely could. It was his own fault, however. He was the one who’d insisted on playing bodyguard ever since we found out a group of hellhounds had escaped from molten gates down under and were on their way to this plane to dismember me.

  As a diversionary tactic – since I had the innate ability to visualize my own dismemberment to an alarming degree – I was working on some of the cold cases SAC had asked me to look into, to see if anything caught my eye. And the folder containing an unsolved ten-year-old multiple murder definitely caught my eye.

  Well, okay, they all caught my eye, but this one seemed to pull at me. To lure me. It begged to be solved. Five people – two adults and three teens – had been killed one night while preparing to open a summer camp for special-needs kids. They were each stabbed multiple times and found in a sea of blood by another camp supervisor the next morning. Another young girl, the only daughter of the two adults, was never found.

  The only real suspect they’d had was a homeless man who scavenged the campsites in the area, stealing food from campers when they went on hikes or slept. But the forensics unit found no evidence linking him to the crime scene. Not a fingerprint. Not a drop of blood. Not a single strand of the suspect’s hair.

  And so the case went unsolved. Until now. The FBI had finally wised up and put Charley Davidson on the task of bringing a killer to justice. Because that’s what Charley did. Brought killers to justice. She also found lost dogs, exposed cheating spouses, and tracked down the occasional skip. And she rarely referred to herself in the third person.

  I had a few other specialties as well. Mostly because I’d been born the grim reaper. I could see dead people, for one, a fact that helped me solve many a case. Odd how easy it was to solve cases when one could ask the victim whodunit. Not that I could always rely on that natural advantage. Some people
didn’t know who’d killed them. That was rare, but it happened. A traumatized brain was a complicated brain. Still, I got good intel most of the time.

  In this case, however, the chances of finding the departed just hanging out at the crime scene where they’d died ten years earlier were slim. It was worth a shot either way, which was why I’d agreed to let SAC pick me up at the ungodly hour of 6 A.M. to show me the crime scene firsthand. Along with me, however, came a bit of baggage, and it was sitting in the two backseats. Jessica, my ex-BFF, blamed me for her death. Ad nauseam. Reyes, my affianced, blamed me for his sour mood. I chose to ignore them both.

  “The view is gorgeous,” I said as we wound up the Jemez Mountains. The sun was barely clearing the treetops, casting an orange glow over us. The pine and juniper glistened with the early morning dew, their shadows sliding across the window as we drove deeper into the pass. We didn’t see a lot of green in Albuquerque, so the fact that all this lay just an hour away boggled my mind. I loved the Jemez.

  “Isn’t it?” SAC agreed.

  “My dad used to bring us up here on his motorcycle. But isn’t all this reservation land?” I asked. “How did the FBI get jurisdiction?”

  “Tribal law is complicated,” she said, her brown bob swaying as she glanced in her rearview for the hundredth time that morning. But she wasn’t checking for traffic. She was checking on the surly man behind her. “In a case like this, we actually would’ve had jurisdiction, because the campsite isn’t on Pueblo land. Either way, it only makes sense to bring in outside authorities. One of the teens was Native American, which is a whole other issue, but the tribal council was more than happy to have us do the investigation.”

  She tightened her grip on the steering wheel, her gaze darting again to the rearview. I couldn’t blame her. Reyes was certainly something to look at. Since I could feel emotions radiate off people like others could feel the weather, I felt every infusion of warmth that rushed through her with his nearness. He affected her like hot tea on a winter’s day, but she hid it well. I had to give her kudos for that. She was curious about him but guarded. Since Reyes, dark and dangerous, was an enigma even to me, SAC was smart to be guarded. But there was no denying the raw magnetism, the sensuous allure he unconsciously sent out in sweet, pulsating waves.

  Either that or I was ovulating.

  No, wait. No chance of that. It was him. A side effect of being created by the most beautiful angel ever to fall from the heavens, forged in the fires of sin and degradation. All the stuff one’s mother warns one about.

  I struggled to keep from taking a peek every few seconds myself. But just for good measure, I decided to risk a quick look-see. I took out my phone, flipped the camera for a selfie, and focused it on the man riding in the middle seat. He leaned into one corner, sitting spread-eagle across the seat, one arm thrown over the back of it, watching me from underneath his lashes. Studying me.

  I raised my chin a notch, refusing to be affected by his shadowy, brooding gaze. I was just as mad at him as he was at me. For two weeks now, he’d insisted on escorting me everywhere, forgoing his responsibilities at that bar and grill he owned to be my babysitter.

  Of course, I was now carrying his baby, and she was kind of a big deal. Destined to save the world and all. So I couldn’t be too angry. And he was damned nice to look at, even when he scowled. In fact, if I were totally honest, that scowl only added to the allure that was Reyes Farrow. Damn it. When I scowled, I looked constipated. Leave it to the son of Satan to turn a scowl into the stuff of fantasies.

  It wasn’t like he had a reason to be mad at me, though. Not that mad, anyway. I’d tried to sneak out of the apartment without him, to go on this case with Agent Carson alone and get some one-on-one girl time. I soon found out that was the wrong thing to do. He told me so repeatedly before she’d arrived outside my apartment building entrance, reminding me that the Twelve, aka the aforementioned hellhounds, were hot on my heels. But even if they made it through the void of oblivion that resided between hell and this plane, and even if they did manage to escape into this dimension, they would still have to find me. And demons, even hellhounds, had their limitations on this plane.

  So, after a ten-minute lecture that involved Reyes reiterating – repeatedly – and me tapping my foot in impatience, Agent Carson pulled up in her SUV. We’d thrown her when we both climbed into her official vehicle, but I quickly explained that Reyes, my affianced, had separation anxiety.

  She took it well. She was supercool like that. Most of the time. There was one exception, when she’d threatened to have me arrested and promised I’d spend the rest of my life in prison if I didn’t cooperate fully. Like I wouldn’t have cooperated without her threats. Besides that one tiny incident – and maybe two more where I’d thought she was going to either shoot me in the face or drop-kick me to China – she was full of marshmallowy goodness. And Reyes seemed to be the campfire that melted her creamy center. She was warm. Really warm. And her warmth was making me warm. Like a lot. I couldn’t be 100 percent, but I was pretty sure we were in the midst of a ménage.

  “As if” – Jessica the departed banshee said from the backseat – “that weren’t bad enough, I will never get married. Never! Do you know what that feels like?” Her long red hair shook almost as bad as my hands. Caffeine withdrawal sucked, as evidenced by the quivering of my limbs. But she was vibrating with anger. A vindictive, spiteful kind of rage that turned her hazel irises to a bright shade of green.

  Jessica and I had been besties in high school until I made the mistake of telling her not only what I could do – see dead people – but also what I was – the grim reaper. I’d learned that last bit myself only when a robed figure, an incorporeal being I used to call the Big Bad, approached me in the girls’ restroom and told me. That robed figure turned out to be Reyes, I found out a decade later. I had yet to confront him on that. What was he doing in the girls’ restroom in the first place? The perv.

  Jessica didn’t handle my admission well. I’d thought her made of kindness and strength before the day she turned on me. Fear transformed her into something I didn’t recognize. Her vehemence, her wrath and betrayal, stole my breath. I cried for days – not in front of her, of course; never in front of her – and sank into a deep depression that took me months to recover from.

  When she started showing up at Reyes’s bar and grill, I hadn’t seen her since high school. Lots of women started showing up at the bar and grill when Reyes bought it from my dad. Sadly, Jessica hadn’t changed. She still hated me and took every opportunity to be spiteful and manipulative in front of her friends. When a notorious crime lord mistook her for a close friend of mine and abducted her, holding her hostage to force me to do a job for him, events had not ended well. And I thought she’d hated me before!

  So, in a vehicle with four people, three of us were angry. I felt like breaking into a chorus of “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Other),” but I doubted anyone but me would get it, especially since Agent Carson didn’t know the truth about me. And she had no idea there was a departed crazy woman hitching a ride with us before her inevitable trip to hell. Surely she was going to hell. Jessica had not been a nice person. There must be a special, less volcanic portion of hell that was partitioned off and set aside for people who weren’t all bad, just a little vindictive. They could call it the drama queen ward. It would be a huge hit.

  Listening to Jessica’s rant about how she was going to be a spinster forever – did people still use that word? – I decided to text my sulking affianced:

  Can you do something about this?

  He dug his phone out of his pocket, an act that was so bizarrely sexy, it mesmerized me for a solid three seconds, then read my missive. His face remained impassive as he typed.

  A second later, my phone chimed.

  Why would I do that? It’s getting you hot.

  What? I turned and stabbed him with an appalled expression, then typed back, my fingers flying over the keyboard:

&nb
sp; Wrong kind of hot, mister. This kind of hot leaves bodies in its wake. It takes no prisoners. It’s very… testy.

  “The minute you try to get married,” Jessica continued, her rant a never-ending drone of threats and complaints, kind of like I imagined the life of an IRS agent might be, “I will rip your dress to shreds the night before your wedding day and, and —”

  Reyes was apparently getting hot as well. He offered me a quick wink, his ridiculously long lashes making his mocha eyes sparkle in the early morning sun, then tossed a deadly glare over his shoulder. Jessica’s eyes widened at his unprecedented attention, and the yapping stopped immediately. Deciding to pout in silence, she let her fiery red hair fall over her shoulders as she crossed her arms at her chest and stared out the window.

  With a satisfied smile, I typed,

  I owe you.

  I know.

  Do you take payments?

  I have several installment plans. We can hammer out the details when we get home.

  My insides jumped in delight. Gawd, it was hard to stay mad at him.

  Deal.

  “So, where are you from?” Agent Carson asked Reyes. “Originally?”

  I whirled around to face him again, this time pinning him with a warning glare. Carson was an FBI agent, but I was all about stealth. Surely she wouldn’t pick up on my silent threat.