The Dirt on Ninth Grave

by Darynda Jones

  I didn’t know anything. That was the problem.

  “So, just to be safe,” James continued as he roasted the key around a campfire and told ghost stories, “the volunteer sent the priest through the portal to the hell dimension—not Lucifer’s, by the way—and then the monks, normally a nonviolent bunch, beheaded the brave man so he could never open it and speak the priest’s name again.”

  “Snap out of it,” Dead Guy whispered.

  I scowled at him. “I can’t,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Of course you can. Stop overthinking it and just remember. It will take everything you have in your arsenal to take on Kuur.”

  “Kuur?”

  He nodded toward James. “He’s an emissary from Lucifer’s army. An expert assassin of any type of being in any of the known dimensions.”

  “Well, his name is very manly.”

  Dead Guy clenched his jaw. My humor wasn’t for everyone.

  “Snap out of it before it’s too late.”

  “Then what? It’s not like I can fight them.”

  He stepped even closer. Cupped my chin and lifted my face to his. “Once you remember who you are, you won’t have to.”

  “Got it!” James called out as he retrieved a small piece of metal from the fire.

  He turned back to me, and Dead Guy appeared at his position across the room, staring into space as dead guys were wont to do. If James did see him near me, he didn’t seem to give a rat’s.

  “And in their infinite wisdom,” he continued, because this was apparently The James Show, “the monks made this box to hold the portal. To keep it safe.” His expression changed to one of frustration. “Then they buried the box under a thousand feet of dirt and neglected to tell anyone where it was. Fuckers.”

  I gave him a dubious frown. “That little box is holding a portal to a hell dimension?”

  “It is.”

  “Is it a hell dimension for tiny people? Because I promise you, I won’t fit.”

  “Ah,” he said, understanding my doubt. “Your human mind has limited you to a certain way of thinking. Things don’t always work the way you believe they should. There are dimensions with creatures that fly from star to star, feeding off their energy. There are worlds with pebbles the size of your fingernail that could power this entire planet for all eternity. There is a galaxy with a world where the oldest living creatures are slowly melting and flooding the lands, drowning millions. There is so much you could have seen.” He held up a small silver key, formerly a big iron one, he’d fished out of the fire. “But hell dimensions can be fun, too.”

  “Have you seen it?” I asked, growing more nervous by the heartbeat. Sadly, my heart was racing.

  “Not this one.” He pointed to the box. “Only one way in or out of the dimension you’re going to.”

  James put the key in the lock and turned. The lid opened with a soft sigh, and a light shone out of it. He reached in and drew out a beautiful round pendant. It was really a locket, but the top piece was clear glass. Inside was a smooth jewel, the likes of which I’d never seen before. My vision laser-locked onto it like a homing beacon. I sat transfixed. Wherever it went, my gaze went.

  James laughed, delighted with my reaction. “It’s called god glass. And if you just happen to be a god, like you are, you will see the untold treasures of a dimension accessible only through this glass.” He seemed almost jealous of the things I saw. The dancing light. The shimmering water.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “How can that be a hell dimension?”

  “There are many kinds of hell, love.”

  The pendant emitted a soft glow of colors. “Why send me there? Why not just kill me?”

  “Someone didn’t pay attention in God Composition 101. You’re a god. Gods cannot be killed except by another god. But they can,” he said, holding up an index finger, “be trapped. Especially one that has amnesia and can’t remember that it’s a god. But even then, there are rules. A set of conditions that must be met for the transport to take place.”

  “Which are?” I asked to keep him talking. I squinted, gritted my teeth, made grunting sounds, all in an attempt to stop time. I finally gave up. Clearly I had a faulty timer.

  “The only way to trap a god is if it takes physical form first. It can be anything from a houseplant to a kangaroo, but once the god chooses its form, one drop of its life force—in this case your blood—and the recitation of the god’s name, and that god is trapped for all eternity. Unless, of course, the being who put it there, and only that being, decides to set it free. There is no other way out.”

  “If you put me in there and then you die, what happens then?”

  “No more mocha lattes for you.”

  “So it really is like hell. Only worse.”

  He laughed softly, then took out a handkerchief and polished the glass.

  I gave him a blurry once-over. “I guess you have nothing to worry about, then, being soulless and all.”

  “Not true.” He tapped a corner of the kerchief on his tongue and continued to polish.” I am a sentient being. I have an essence, an aura, if you will, just as you do.”

  “But it’s not like a human soul.”

  “Neither is yours,” he said, seemingly offended. “And thank goodness. Human souls don’t tend to fare well. They were not created to survive the psychological atrocities of a hell dimension. The priest brought a soul back once. A young girl from a French village not far from where he lived. He’d fallen in love with her, and when her father refused the priest’s offer of marriage, citing age as the main reason—the priest was in his forties and the girl was twelve—”

  “Ew.”

  “—the priest sent her soul to hell.”

  “To punish her. And her father,” I said, knowing how men like that thought.

  “Very likely. But obsession is a tricky thing. Her family took care of her catatonic body, but she was no longer the vibrant girl he remembered, the one he fell in love with, so for the first time, he opened the portal again and called out her name.”

  I eased up in the chair, my curiosity growing. “What happened?”

  “She woke up at home in her body, but according to his writings, she came back … different. He called her a berserker, most likely because she knew what he did to her and she screamed every time he came near.” He leaned in, his voice full of intrigue. “But she became quite famous for a gift she’d received thanks to her time in a hell dimension. The gift of sight.”

  “Like psychic?”

  “Indeed. She went by many names, but you know her as Joan of Arc.”

  Astonishment sent a pulse of electricity over my skin.

  “Read the history books. There’s a reason she refused to give out her real name to anyone ever again.” He straightened his shoulders and said, “Enough. Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  He turned to give the box to one of his minions. In that instant, Dead Guy appeared beside me and whispered into my ear. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I have no choice but to leave you now.”

  Alarm clutched around my heart. “You’re leaving me?”

  “Be ready.” And then he was gone.

  James turned back, took the pendant in both hands, pushed the latch on one side, then let it fall open in his palms. It was about that time I lost all control over my bodily functions.

  * * *

  “Be ready,” Dead Guy mouthed again from across the room.

  I barely saw him. I was much more concerned with the lightning strikes that burst from the pendant. The ones that lit the entire warehouse, that branched out and crawled across the ceiling, leaving sparks and burn marks in their place. I winced as a hot wind rushed over my skin, causing it to bubble and crack, the acidic sand peeling away at the reddened layers.

  And yet none of that concerned me. Lightning, hot wind, acidic sand blasting away at my skin—that part I could handle. It was the other part that had me doubling over.

  James’s minions stepped back to a sa
fe distance. All but one. Of course, he was the one with the knife.

  James yelled over the noise, delighted with the events. “No human, unless gifted with sight, would ever have seen any of this! The priest could never have known the true power he’d held in the palm of his hands.” He watched the swirling clouds and the lightning bursts and laughed. “I never imagined it would be like this.”

  Apparently the people inside the dimension screaming in terror did not compute. For me, it was agony. I didn’t just hear their screams. I felt them. I felt flesh rip and bones crunch. I smelled burned hair and rotting wounds. I tasted old blood and fresh bile. This was not a place built to hold human souls. These people were not sent there because of the choices they made while alive. They were sent there because an asshole of the worst kind decreed it so.

  My hands gripped the chair so tight, my fingernails started breaking at the quick. The captives’ suffering sliced into me until my entire body felt like a mass of raw nerve endings. I had to get them out. I had to set them free.

  I looked over at Dead Guy, my vision blurring and growing dark at the edges.

  He was turned toward me and had hunkered down as though preparing for a race. “Now,” he mouthed. Then he took off.

  He sprinted toward me, and suddenly I realized what he was going to do. He was going to cross. I didn’t feel it was the best time, but when several minions noticed and tried to tackle him, he dodged them. Zigzagged around them. Hurdled an arm here, a leg there, until with a last desperate glance, he dived inside me.

  James looked on but seemed more confused than worried. And then it was silent.

  The first thing I heard was a steady, solid tone that stretched on forever, and I knew the sound was not good. I looked over at a man in hospital scrubs. He sat on a stool, his shoulders shaking with grief.

  Then I was in his arms and he was smiling down at me. Through the agony I felt to my core, through the utter sense of loss, he smiled.

  “Looks like it’s just the three of us,” he said, and another bout of sorrow ripped through him. It shuddered through me as well.

  It was Dead Guy. My father. And he sacrificed our time together to cross so that I could snap the fuck out of it. So that I would remember who I was. What I was. My life through his eyes rushed at me like a film on fast forward, including the wife he lost and the daughter he gained on one fateful night. He deluged me with memories of myself through his eyes, of all the things I did growing up, of all the abilities I had, of the good I did by helping him solve crimes—he’d been a detective—and put bad men behind bars. Of all the things he did wrong and a few he did very, very right.

  He showed me the time he taught me to ride a bike, pretending I was doing it all on my own, holding a finger on the back of the seat for good measure as he ran beside me cheering me on.

  He showed me the time he held me in his arms as I cried for hours because a little boy I’d befriended crossed through me, and I saw how his stepfather had killed him. I felt it. For weeks, I felt the sting of that man’s fists. The agony of his kicks. Together we put the man behind bars, but it had been a powerful lesson for my father. He saw what I went through when I helped him with his cases. He saw what the memories of others could do to me.

  He showed me the regret he often felt at having married a woman who could not love me, no matter how hard she tried. Despite everything, I grew up okay. I wasn’t a perfect kid by a long shot, but he loved me beyond measure.

  And then he was gone. He was killed, and he saw the celestial part of me for the first time. My light mesmerized him. It beamed out of me as though I were made of glass to become a blinding beacon of hope.

  He’d had no idea. He knew I had gifts, but this was different. This was world changing.

  He also saw what Reyes was. The darkness. The danger. But by then he knew enough about me and my world to see Reyes as a protector. A warrior who would give his life for me. A husband.

  And he saw Beep coming from a light year away.

  Beep.

  I stilled, put the flashbacks on pause.

  Beep. I had a baby. Reyes and I had a little girl, and she was made of stardust and light and warmth. Because of me, because of my light, because of who I was and what I was made of, we had to send her away to live with some very good people. There were beings after her, and my light would lead them straight to her.

  He showed me crumbling when they took her away. He’d been there when I cracked. When my powers reached nuclear meltdown levels and I exploded and vanished, only to end up here, in Sleepy Hollow. And now I knew why.

  Earl James Walker. Kuur. He’d found the god glass and he knew how to use it. With the intention of sailing to the other side of the world and dropping the box into the ocean there, the monks’ ships sank off the coast of what would become New York.

  They rowed ashore with the box, traveled as far inland as they could before exhaustion and disease overtook them, then spent the next month burying it as far underground as they could in a little spot off the Hudson River.

  Dad vowed to do everything in his power to help us keep Beep safe, so—a cop to the core—he went undercover. He infiltrated Satan’s ranks and learned everything he could. And now he was relaying everything that he’d learned to me in astonishing Technicolor.

  He’d been spying on the emissaries for Reyes, trying to locate all twelve. And he sacrificed himself, his mission, and any more time he could have with me to force me to snap out of it. To save myself and, in turn, my daughter. The one destined to destroy Satan. The tiny creature the emissaries called the Ravager.

  But I called her Elwyn.

  Elwyn Alexandra.

  My heart swelled with all the emotion coursing through it. When they’d taken Elwyn away, it was simply too much to bear. After everything Reyes and I had been through, after every obstacle we’d overcome, that was the straw that broke me. The one that sent me here to this town with no memory.

  When the replay stopped, I sat there in astonishment. I would never see him again. After everything he did for me, for us, he was just … gone.

  James was staring at me, not sure what to think. Why that man had crossed. He nodded to his minions, and they reluctantly continued with their task, which was basically to hold my arm so James could get a drop of blood onto the pendant. It was that easy. One drop of blood. The unfortunate’s name spoken. And the soul would be transported to a dimension of eternal torment.

  James studied me. Deciding his men had secured me, he lowered the pendant, and one of the minions sliced my finger. I wrenched my arm away and slapped James on the face, raking my nails across his cheek.

  “Hold her!” he shouted over the winds, angry for the first time that evening.

  They wrenched my arm and held it still as he pushed a drop of blood onto the glass. A bolt of lightning shot out of it, but I held steady.

  His expression changed from wary to elated. He lifted the pendant to the sky and spoke my name.

  “Elle-Ryn-Ahleethia.” Of course. My celestial name.

  He said it softly. Lovingly. And then he waited.

  And waited.

  He glanced at the blood on the glass and said it again, louder this time. “Elle-Ryn-Ahleethia!”

  Nothing.

  He shook the pendant in his palms. Looked at his minions, confused. Then let his gaze wander to me. And he stilled.

  He was sharp. I’d give him that. He caught on faster than I thought he would. He snapped his hands together to close the pendant, but a microsecond before it shut, I said it.

  “Kuur.”

  Thankfully, he had a short name. The locket clicked closed, and silence blanketed the area. He waited with bated breath, realizing I’d stolen his blood when I slapped him and put that on the glass in place of my own.

  I heard a series of sharp thuds. Someone was pounding on a metal door. Then I heard a sharp bang and, in my peripheral vision, saw a sequence of struggles. I didn’t dare take my focus off Kuur, but I could just make out
the smooth, deadly shape of my husband as he snapped neck after neck to get to me. Another skirmish, just as short as the first one, involved Osh and three minions. Garrett took on two more when they tried to run.

  But Kuur’s eyes were glued to the pendant. He was just about to release a sigh of relief when a lightning bolt reached out and grabbed him. Tiny branches like spider legs crawled around him. Ripped at the beast inside. Closed like a fist.

  And he was gone.

  The pendant hung in midair for several seconds, then dropped. I reached out and caught it. Then, so that word of this did not leak, I obliterated every departed present with a single, devastating thought.

  23

  We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn.

  —UNKNOWN

  I packed up what few earthly possessions I had, which mainly consisted of a dozen or so articles of clothing, a tube of mascara, lip gloss, hair bands, and a killer collection of boots. Even amnesiac me had had a thing for boots. I also packed the trinket box, but the pendant I kept in my pocket. I still had some work to do in that area. I was going to get those human souls out of there if it was the last thing I did.

  At first I thought James’s minions had taken Ian’s body and cleaned up the place, but Reyes, who hadn’t left my side since he lifted me into his arms and carried me out of that warehouse, informed me that he and “the guys” had done it.

  Exhaustion had overcome me after the fight. There were bodies scattered across the warehouse floor. Reyes snapped one last neck and pushed the minion aside before sprinting toward me and sliding on his knees to kneel before me. And I looked into the familiar—and painfully handsome—face of my husband. My beautiful, surreal husband.

  “Dutch,” he whispered, scanning my face for injuries. His dark irises shimmered with relief that I was alive and relatively unharmed, considering the situation. Then he saw my neck, and the flames that forever sheathed him grew slowly. Steadily. Lethally.

  “That was fun,” Osh said as he walked up to assess my condition for himself.