Summoned to Thirteenth Grave Read online

  Okay, fine. I’d get to the bottom of that look once I got my husband alone. We’d promised. No more secrets. And I intended to hold him to it.

  “So, people are fleeing the crime scene?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Yeah,” Garrett said, snapping to attention. “The interstates are in total gridlock while a rowdier bunch has taken up looting.”

  “Great,” Reyes said, his anger spiking.

  “What exactly is going on, guys? I mean, what is this infection doing?”

  Garrett’s expression turned guarded. “It starts out like the flu. But then it changes. It’s like they go insane.”

  “From all the records I’ve read,” Cookie said, “they all think there is something inside them trying to get out. They hurt themselves trying to get it out, then eventually, they hurt others. They become uncontrollable.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath and turned my attention to Reyes. “Possession?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen a possession like this. Most people don’t know they’re possessed, despite what Hollywood would have you believe.”

  “Has anyone—” I stopped, unable to even think it. “Has anyone died?”

  Everyone suddenly had somewhere else to look.

  I stilled, then insisted, “How many?”

  “Charles—”

  “How many? How many deaths have we caused?”

  “We don’t know,” Reyes said. “Six. Maybe seven.”

  I sank onto a nearby sofa, thankful there was one there to catch me. “We did this. We caused deaths. Human deaths.”

  “We don’t know that,” Garrett said, but he needn’t have bothered. A glaring truth was difficult to ignore.

  “Are we sure this is from the hell dimension?”

  Cookie stood and grabbed a map off the desk. “Most of the activity centers here.” They’d drawn a huge circle over part of Albuquerque. And our apartment building sat smack-dab in the middle of it.

  “I can see it, too,” Reyes said as he came to stand beside us.

  “What?”

  “The edges of the hell dimension. Quentin calls it the Shade.”

  “He can see it, too?”

  He nodded. “From the roof. It’s just a little darker than the rest of the world, and it’s expanding exponentially.”

  “I get that, but what exactly is making people sick?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” he said.

  “If it’s expanding,” I said, a bowling ball settling in my stomach, “how long do we have?”

  “Until it takes over the world?” Garrett asked. “We don’t know, hon.”

  “Why would your mother’s death have anything to do with this?” Reyes asked, repeating an earlier sentiment.

  “I don’t know. The wraiths didn’t say it had anything to do with it specifically. Just that if I found out the truth, that truth would help us stop this.”

  Three voices hit me at the same time. “Wraiths?” Garrett, Cookie, and Amber asked.

  “It’s a long story. Let’s just say they came in peace.”

  “Okay,” Garrett said, “I thought your mother died while giving birth to you.”

  “She did. That’s what I don’t get. Reyes, did you see anything unusual?”

  “Uncle Reyes saw you being born?” Amber asked, fascinated.

  “That’s another long story,” I said to her. “But, yes, Reyes was at my birth. At my mother’s death. I only remember a black robe—”

  “You remember being born?” Amber asked, her eyes now like saucers.

  “Long story,” I reminded her. It was before I knew him, of course. Before I knew he was the supernatural being who followed me around and kept me out of harm’s way as a child. Then I turned to him. “Do you remember anything unusual? Anything, I don’t know, supernatural?”

  “No. Your mother seized, and then the monitor flatlined. And she … she crossed through you. To me, at the time, the whole thing was very unusual. That was the first time I’d … the first time you’d summoned me. I didn’t understand what was going on.”

  “I didn’t, either. But what would that have to do with anything?”

  “Who else was at the hospital?” Garrett asked.

  “Just my dad. Oh! Gemma and Uncle Bob were there, too. I forgot. They were in the waiting room.”

  “You saw them?” Amber asked.

  “No. But Gemma told me years later she’d been there. She said she’d fainted and Uncle Bob found her.”

  “That’s interesting,” Reyes said. “Why would she have fainted?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know. Speaking of which, where is Ubie?” I asked Cook.

  “Your uncle is working late. All the chaos and vandalism. The captain called everyone in.”

  I nodded. “What about Gemma?”

  Cookie shook her head. “I called her, tried to get her to come out here, but she said she had clients. She couldn’t leave yet.”

  “Yep, that’s Gemma for you.”

  “Pari, too,” she added.

  My breath hitched. “She’s still there?”

  A phenomenal tattoo artist and a queen of snarky comebacks, Pari was another of my best friends. She’d died for a few minutes when she was a kid and could now see into the supernatural realm, though she didn’t have a clear picture of it like Quentin, and now Amber, did.

  “Said she had clients coming in tonight, but she promised to pack a bag and be here after her last one left.”

  “Damn. If anyone should be wary, it’s Pari. She can see them. Not like you, Amber, but … Guess I’m going to have to fetch the both of them.”

  First Reyes then Garrett slapped me with stares of incredulity.

  Reyes stood so he could tower over me. Establish his dominance. He was so cute when he did shit like that.

  “Like hell you are,” he said.

  “You said you were going in to investigate what exactly was happening to the infected. This is our chance.”

  “This is my chance,” he argued. “I’ll go in, check out the lay of the land, get Pari and your sister, and come back.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, humming aloud. I put my hand under my chin in thought. “Where have I heard that before?”

  “Dutch,” he said in warning.

  So.

  Cute.

  “Oh, right!” I brightened. “You said something very similar the night you convinced me to send you into that hell dimension and wait while you ‘checked out the lay of the land,’” I said, adding air quotes, “and then bring you right back out none the worse for wear. Easy peasy. Only you didn’t come back out.”

  “You are not going in there.”

  “You got trapped. Eons later, in otherworldly time, you broke out of said hell dimension, shattering the gate, and released it onto this plane.”

  “You are not going in there,” he repeated, that time through clenched teeth.

  “You are not stopping me. I’m getting Pari and Gemma and checking out this Shade dimension for myself.”

  Reyes glared. Cookie took that as her cue to clear the plates. Amber gawked, her face full of blatant fascination. Garrett went back to an ancient book he was reading, presumably for research.

  “We don’t have time to mess around,” Reyes said.

  “Now we don’t have time to mess around? Where was that sentiment three hours ago when we melted sand into glass in the middle of the Sahara Desert?”

  Reyes’s expression remained impassive. He didn’t embarrass easily.

  I tilted my head in curiosity. “I’d assumed we didn’t have time to mess around, considering the deaths and all. But maybe there’s more? Is there something else you’d like to share with the class?”

  He turned away, thought for a moment, then said softly, “We only have three days.”

  4

  A lot of days I truly expect my horoscope to say,

  “Just don’t kill anyone today.”

  —MEME

  Three
days? We only had three days? And then what? No one moved as we waited for more information.

  Silence stretched out so long that when a male voice spoke from the shadows, we all jumped and turned in unison.

  “He didn’t tell you?” Osh asked, walking forward.

  I might have only been away ten days here on Earth, but for me it felt like lifetimes. Osh, or Osh’ekiel, was a former slave demon, a Daeva. And while he might have looked nineteen with shoulder-length sable hair, clear, bronze-colored eyes, and his requisite top hat, he’d been around for centuries and had probably been alive for several millennia.

  True, he lived off the souls of others, but he’d made a solemn vow to only live off the dregs of society henceforth. Which was why I let him stay.

  Good thing I did. He was powerful. A strong ally. And he’d saved every life in the room at least once. Also, I’d missed him.

  He spared a quick glower for my baby daddy, then strolled to me, a grin full of warmth and mischief lighting his face.

  I met him halfway and wrapped myself around him. “Where have you been?” I asked into his shoulder.

  “Looking after your rug rat.”

  I lurched back. “She’s okay? She’s safe?”

  “For now.” He tossed Reyes another glower.

  “Osh, this isn’t his fault. I’m the one—”

  “Who created that thing in the first place?”

  “That’s not the point.” I did tend to gloss over that part. The part about how Reyes, both a hellraiser and a hellmaker in his youth, had been the one to create the dimension that was slowly eating away at my reality. “But he made it for me.”

  “He made it on a ruse for you. His own Brother tricked him into making it, but we both know who it was really meant for.”

  Anger lashed out of him and stole my breath. I hadn’t seen him that mad at Reyes in a long time. But he wasn’t angry for himself. I had the distinct impression he was angry for Beep. Which made sense. He was destined to be a part of her army. A big part.

  If what I saw still held true, he was destined to be the Warrior. The one who would either be by her side when the war with Lucifer began, or not. Either way, his participation, or lack thereof, could tip the scales in favor of or against my daughter.

  He didn’t know any of that, of course, but he cared so much for her. I couldn’t imagine he would abandon Beep when she needed him most. Not unless there was another obstacle I hadn’t seen. An outside force keeping him from her side.

  “That doesn’t matter now,” I said to him. “All that matters is what we do to stop this.”

  His jaw tightened then relaxed as he refocused on me and offered a sympathetic smile. “So, how long?”

  My brows slid together. “How long?”

  He ran a fingertip under my jaw, waiting for me to catch on.

  “Oh. Right. The time differential phenomenon. One hundred seven years, two months, fourteen days, twelve hours, and thirty-three minutes.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m sorry, sugar.”

  “Me, too. I missed everyone so much.”

  He pulled me into yet another hug. I couldn’t seem to get enough of them. Delight rushed through me until I remembered what Reyes had said.

  I turned to him. “What do you mean we only have three days? Three days until what? It swallows the Earth whole?”

  He lifted a wide shoulder. “Something like that.”

  Cookie gasped. “Three days?” she asked, worry spiking within her. All the stress she’d been going through was taking its toll. I could feel it gnawing at her.

  I walked over to him. He was leaning against a desk. I joined him. He reached over and hooked two fingers into the belt loop on my jeans.

  “Why three days?”

  “I’ve done the math. The more the dimension expands, the more mass it acquires. The more mass, the faster it will expand until, in less time it took to gain a mile, it will encompass the entire planet.”

  Damn. His answer sounded perfectly legit, but something was off. I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. His emotions were so tightly packed, so tightly controlled, it was impossible to read him at times. But I felt a niggling of deception, like he was telling the truth but not the whole truth. What was he leaving out?

  I shook off my doubts and focused on the business at hand. “Well, then, I guess we’d better get started.”

  “What’s with the kid?” Osh asked, gesturing toward the little boy hiding behind the sofa.

  “I’ll try to talk to him,” Amber said, and I realized she’d been easing closer and closer to him during our entire conversation. “Quentin will be in soon. He can help, too.”

  “Thanks, Amber.” I didn’t have time to deal with a kid right then and there. This new ability of Amber’s might come in very handy.

  “I’ll go with,” Osh said, stealing a bite off the plate I’d abandoned.

  “Count me in, too,” Garrett said, closing the book he’d been reading.

  “Osh, I’d rather you keep an eye on Beep,” I said, only a little jealous that he’d spent more time with my daughter than I had. Though from what Reyes had told me before, Osh kept his distance. Watched from afar and let the Loehrs do the actual caretaking of Beep. That was probably best, since he’d never taken care of a kid in his very long life.

  “I have Angel on it.”

  Angel. I’d been longing to see his sweet face since I materialized.

  “As wonderful as Angel is, he’s still departed. There’s only so much he can do should something happen.”

  Osh gave me a thumbs-up, took another bite, then vanished.

  “And you,” I said to Garrett.

  He was in the middle of shrugging into his jacket. He stopped and raised his brows in question.

  “You’re human.”

  “Not all the time,” he said, joking.

  “I don’t want to risk you getting this infection.”

  “Well, I don’t want to risk you disappearing again.”

  I crossed my arms. “And what would you do if I did?”

  He looked at the ceiling in thought. “Watch you?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So, this is your way of telling me I’m useless?”

  “No.” I walked closer and put a hand on his arm. “This is my way of telling you I need you here, researching this thing.”

  He let his jacket slide over his wide shoulders and down his long arms before hanging it back onto a hook. I only noticed how alluring his actions were because Cookie noticed—if the little spot of drool on the corner of her mouth was any indication.

  “Amber, you see what you can find out about the little one.”

  She brightened. “I love it when I have an assignment. A cool assignment. Not a lame one like my latest school assignment.”

  “And what is your latest school assignment?”

  “I have to rewrite an essay about how I’m going to change the world when I graduate high school.”

  “You have to rewrite it?” I asked.

  “Yeah, my teacher didn’t appreciate my first one where I wrote about being in Beep’s army and how we were going to fight Satan for the survival of the human race. He said he didn’t want fiction.”

  I gasped. “The gall.”

  “Right?”

  Chuckling, I turned to Cook. “And you.”

  She paused and turned back to me, a taco halfway to her pretty mouth.

  “You see what you can dig up about my mother’s death.”

  “On it. Wait, what?”

  “I need to know who signed off on the death certificate. Who her doctor was. The nurses that were in the room when I was being born. Anything and everything you can get.”

  “Is there a reason?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Okay, I’m on it.”

  * * *

  Reyes and I took Misery, my cherry-red Jeep Wrangler, into battle. We had to infiltrate the war zone, and we need
ed a backseat to extract Pari and Gemma. I should have been a general. Or, at the very least, a lieutenant. I totally had the lingo down.

  As Reyes drove closer to our old haunts, I understood what he’d meant earlier. The closer we got to the expanding hell dimension, a.k.a. the Shade, the more I could see the line between the non-occupied areas of Albuquerque and the occupied.

  Looking at it from the outside in, the barrier was like the ocean at night, only perpendicular to Earth’s surface. It undulated in waves of shimmering darkness, and I didn’t even have to shift onto the celestial plane to see it.

  Reyes sat in the driver’s seat, idling at a stoplight. “As much as I hate to say this, there’s another hiccup we need to consider.”

  I stifled a groan. “Aren’t you all sunshine and rainbows.”

  “I’m not saying it’ll become an issue, but it’s worth mentioning.”

  “Fine,” I said, taking in the sights and sounds of my hometown. Since we were headed in, and most people were headed out, we didn’t come up against much traffic. Small victories. “Hit me.”

  “Lucifer.”

  “Ah, how is dear old Dad?”

  “He’s the best at what he does. He’ll use any situation to his advantage. He’ll think of ways to manipulate a situation before you or I even realize there is a situation.”

  “You think he’ll come after her through all of this.” And by “her” I meant Beep. Our daughter. The girl destined to defeat him.

  “It’s possible. And, again, if I think it’s possible now, he thought it was possible days ago. But he won’t come at her head-on. He’s all about stealth. If he does try something, we’ll be blindsided.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Nothing. Just be aware. Take note of anything…”

  “Unusual?” I supplied. “Because the ever-expanding hell dimension sparking a zombie apocalypse isn’t unusual enough?”

  “Point taken. Just be aware.”

  “What about your Brother? Where does He stand in all of this?”

  “Free will opened it.”

  “Seriously?” I said, gaping at him.

  “According to your best friend, Michael, free will opened it, free will has to close it.”