Eighth Grave After Dark

by Darynda Jones

  “In that field today. I saw you.”

  He straightened. “What were you doing out there?”

  “I was following that sweet departed nun. She’s been trying to show me something and then someone pushed me and I almost fell to my death and were you there? No.”

  A blast of heat hit me then, and I couldn’t tell if he was angry with me or because someone had pushed me.

  “What do you mean, someone pushed you?”

  Oh, thank God.

  “Who pushed you?”

  “Why were you talking to Angel?”

  “Is that what happened to you?” He took my arm and indicated a scrape down the back of it, his touch scalding.

  “Probably.” I shook off his hold and gripped the sledgehammer again. “And I have no idea who it was. I smelled something weird, though.” I straightened and thought about it. “Like lavender or something.” I bent to my task again.

  He stepped to me, curled his fingers under my chin, and lifted my face to his. “Who was it?” The moment he stepped forward, I felt consumed by fire, like I’d been swallowed by a blazing inferno.

  “What were you talking to Angel about?” When he didn’t answer yet again, I stepped out of his grasp and pointed in the general direction of the living room. “Go stand in the corner with Mr. Wong.”

  Cookie had joined us then, doing her best to look over Osh’s shoulder. “Is she trying it again?”

  Reyes turned from me then as though frustrated. “Why is he here?”

  “Mr. Wong? I have no idea.” But I stopped to wonder as Osh and Reyes eyed each other. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Why is such a powerful being in the house?” Osh asked.

  “No. Well, yes—that, too—but I was thinking he needed to get out more. Maybe meet a girl. Try the singles scene. He seems awfully lonely.”

  I pulled on the hammer again, raising it about two inches off the floor, and swung with all my might. It tapped lightly on the door, the sound barely audible above the sound of the spin cycle.

  Then someone else joined us. Gemma stood behind Garrett, but I didn’t think the high-pitched screech that nigh drew blood from my ears was coming from her. Nope. It came from none other than my stepmother.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled, pushing her way into the room.

  Ignoring her, Reyes shook off his misgivings about Mr. Wong, the sweetest man alive, or, well, dead, and stepped to me again. “Are you okay?” he asked, taking my arm and caressing it.

  His touch liquefied my insides. “I’m fine.”

  “A sledgehammer?” Denise howled. “What are you doing letting her lift a sledgehammer?”

  “I’m calling Katherine,” Reyes continued, unfazed by Denise’s rant. “I think we need to be sure.”

  “Katherine the Midwife,” I corrected. Since we couldn’t take me to a medical team to give birth, we’d brought a medical team here. We even had one of the downstairs rooms outfitted with everything a modern midwife would need.

  Denise ripped the handle away from me. “Do you know what that could do to the baby?”

  Was she kidding? “The baby is the safest person in this room, Denise.”

  “Charley, you can’t lift something this heavy.”

  “Yes, I can. Not very far, but—”

  A slap echoed along the walls and I realized my face stung. The moment was so shocking, so surreal, everyone stood in complete silence. Even Denise. She seemed the most shocked of all.

  Reyes reacted first. His heat exploded around me and I slowed time to watch a hand lift to Denise’s throat. He would snap her neck in a heartbeat, before he even knew what he was doing, his anger was so great. I stepped in front of him, put my hands on his wide chest, and pushed with all my might. Then I allowed time to bounce back with my hands still on his chest, my body braced for impact.

  It crashed around me, and Reyes, not expecting my influence, took an involuntary step back. I’d hardly fazed him. He started for Denise again, but I put my hands on his face and drew his attention to me.

  “Mom!” Gemma yelled, tackling the big guys blocking the doorway to get inside. She didn’t know what Reyes was, but she knew he was supernatural and she knew he was as deadly as they came. She got between Reyes and Denise and held up her hands to fend him off.

  “I’m sorry,” Denise said, trying to calm him.

  “Reyes,” I said, my voice soft, soothing. “It’s okay.”

  His anger physically hurt, it was so hot.

  “You have to calm down.” I smiled, trying to lighten the mood. “You’re boiling me alive.”

  He sobered instantly, his eyes shimmering with emotion. A telltale wetness gathered between his thick lashes as he glared at me. Then, ever so slowly, he came to his senses.

  I wiped at a tear that slipped past its glistening cage, but he turned from me, embarrassed and furious and, I suspected, afraid of what he would do.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Denise.

  Both hands were covering her mouth. “Charley, I’m so—!”

  “Get her the fuck out of my house.” Reyes didn’t turn around when he spoke.

  “Come on,” Gemma said, rushing Denise out of the room.

  Garrett helped, ushering them out, and then he and Osh blocked the door in case Reyes changed his mind.

  “I’m okay,” he said to them, but they didn’t move.

  Cookie looked on the verge of tears herself.

  “We’re okay, hon,” I promised her.

  Even unconvinced, she took that as her cue to leave.

  “Reyes,” I said, placing a hand on the small of his back. It scorched my skin. “What is going on? You’re so hot. Your temper is like a ticking time bomb. You leave and you’re gone for hours. And then when you do come back, you stay away from me for the rest of the night. I don’t understand.” I couldn’t even imagine how he’d react when I told him about the Loehrs. The very thought filled me with an all-encompassing dread.

  “Tell her,” Osh said, leaning against the doorjamb.

  “Is it—?” I lowered my head, so afraid of his answer. “Is it me? Is it … how I look?”

  His temper flared again as he faced me. “I can’t believe you just asked me that.”

  “I’m pregnant, Reyes. I’m the size of a blimp.”

  The incredulous look on his face stopped me. He was astounded. “You’re stunning. You’ve never been more beautiful. Don’t you understand what you are? You’re a god and I’m the son of your worst enemy.”

  I got over the beautiful remark, and asked, “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “If you don’t tell her, I will.” Osh was pushing him. Now was not the time. Or was it?

  “What is he talking about?” I asked Reyes as he glared at the Daeva.

  “Okay, fine,” Osh said. “I’ll tell her.”

  The murderous expression he leveled on Osh made me wince.

  He took a step closer to him, his movements dangerously smooth. “It will be the last thing to come out of your mouth.”

  Osh nodded. “’Bout time you grew some balls.”

  In the underworld, Osh had been a champion. Their best and fastest fighter. Even faster than Reyes, so my surly husband said. But he was not as big as Reyes. Not in human form. I wondered if that mattered, though.

  Reyes took another step toward him. I stopped my husband with a hand on his chest, but only because he allowed me to.

  Then I faced Osh. “Tell me.”

  The grin Osh wore was completely unnecessary. He enjoyed antagonizing Reyes far too much for my comfort. “He hasn’t slept since the attack.”

  “What?” I whirled around. “What attack? When were you attacked?”

  “The one eight months ago,” Osh explained. “He would be useless in a fight now. If the Twelve somehow get across the border—”

  “Eight months?” I asked, astonished beyond belief. “Is he kidding? You haven’t slept in eight months?”

  We were
supernatural, sure, but we had human bodies and human needs. No wonder he looked so tired and disheveled all the time. I’d once gone three weeks without sleep. It about killed me. But eight months?

  “Why?” I asked him.

  “Oh, but we haven’t gotten to the best part,” Osh continued.

  Reyes’s jaw muscle leapt. “Don’t do this. I stopped. It didn’t work and I stopped.”

  “What?” I asked, squelching a shudder of fear.

  “You stopped after how many attempts? A dozen? More?”

  “I stopped, Daeva. That’s all that matters.”

  I dug my nails into Reyes’s biceps to remind him I was there. “Just tell me,” I ordered Osh.

  “He thought he might have found a way to kill the hounds.” He glanced at me, his eyes twinkling with mirth. “He was wrong.”

  “To kill them?” I looked from Osh to my husband then back again. “And what way was that?”

  This time Garrett spoke, but he did it minus the smirk. “He dragged them onto holy ground, thinking it would kill them.”

  The shock that jolted through my body was like sticking a fork into a light socket. I turned to Reyes, aghast and appalled and dumbstruck that he would even try such a thing. “You did what?” I whispered.

  He didn’t answer at first, and when he did, his demeanor was that of a schoolboy being chastised after having been ratted out. “I only tried it a few times. It didn’t work, so I stopped.”

  “Fifteen,” Garrett said. “He tried it fifteen times.”

  The thought of Reyes not only fighting a hellhound, but dragging one onto the consecrated ground—on purpose!—and then fighting it, sent the world spinning beneath me. Before I knew it, the floor disappeared.

  “Maybe if he’d had a little sleep, he wouldn’t have had his ass handed to him on a silver platter every time,” Osh said into the darkness surrounding me. “Those fuckers can fight.”

  I sank to the ground as though in slow motion. The edges of my vision blurred, then three sets of hands landed on me until Reyes lifted me into his arms. Even though I weighed 1,014 pounds, he carried me with ease to the stairs and up to our room. Where Denise, Gemma, and Cookie were. This was not going to end well.

  “She’s still here?” I asked Gemma, trying to shake the fog from my head. “Are you kidding me?”

  “I had to apologize,” Denise said, both hands still covering her mouth. “Is she okay?”

  The glare Reyes shot her would have shriveled a winter rose. But no one ever accused Denise of being a winter rose.

  “I’m okay, hon,” I said, gesturing for him to put me down.

  He did so slowly, then steadied me until I had my footing. “I’m not leaving you alone with her, so don’t even think about it.”

  “Reyes, it’s okay. She didn’t mean to slap the living shit out of me.” I said the last bit while leveling my own glare on her.

  She had the decency to look embarrassed.

  “It’s not her I’m worried about. Is that what you were doing in the field with Angel?”

  He hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

  He was lying. I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I raised my chin and turned from him. After a moment, he left.

  Then I turned on the woman who’d made my life hell growing up. “What are you still doing here?”

  “I wanted to explain.”

  “Charley,” Gemma said, “if you’ll just hear her out, I think it would be good for both of you.”

  “Why? She has never listened to me. Why should I have to listen to her? I should mark her soul for Osh. Oh, wait, she doesn’t have one.”

  “I don’t have one?” she said from between gritted teeth.

  There she was. I knew the helpful, nurturing routine wouldn’t last long.

  “You think I’m a big joke,” she said, her face the picture of rage.

  “Hon, you’re not a joke. You’re the punch line.”

  “You didn’t even go to your own father’s funeral.”

  Gemma gasped.

  “You’ve been holed up in here for months like you’re in witness protection or something.”

  “The only one I need protection from is you.”

  “That’s it! Sit down! Both of you.”

  Denise sat on the bench at the end of the bed, while I crossed my arms over my chest again, showing just how defiant I could be.

  Gemma reached over, grabbed my ear, and led me to the chair in the corner of our tiny room. “Ow, holy cow, Gem! Katherine the Midwife is not going to be happy with you.”

  “Her name is just Katherine. You have to stop calling her Katherine the Midwife.”

  She let go and I rubbed my abused cartilage. “How did you do that?”

  “Sit down!”

  “No, really. I’m having a kid. I need to know how to completely incapacitate someone by grabbing their ear.”

  “Sit down.”

  I sat down. “So, you’ll tell me later?”

  “You need to listen to what Mom has to say.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “She deserves that much, Charley.”

  “Wait, you were there. Right there through our entire childhood. You saw it. You saw what she put me through. And might I bring up the slap I just received.”

  It was the second time in my life Denise had slapped me in front of a crowd, and it was just as jolting and humiliating as the first time.

  “I saw you both going at each other like children on a playground our whole lives.”

  “Yeah, but she always started it.”

  “That’s not what I saw.”

  “What about the time she dragged me off my bike in front of all the neighbor kids because I didn’t do the dishes? Or the time a boy threw dirt in my face, right in my face, and she turned away, refused to do anything about it? Or the time she tried to run me down with her car?”

  Denise sucked in a sharp breath. “I never tried to run you over with my car.”

  “Oh, right, I just made that one up. But you admit to the other things.”

  “Charley, oh my God,” Gemma said. “Can we stick with nonfiction here?”

  “What? I needed backup just in case you didn’t find the other events horrific enough. I know what I’m saying seems childish and ridiculous for me to be holding a grudge for so long, but she was like that every day of my life. In everything that I did. She never complimented me. She never took up for me. She never stopped nagging me about the stupidest things. It was like she made it her personal mission to make sure I knew I was less than she was. Mothers don’t tear down, Gemma. They build up. Like she did with you.”

  “That’s not true, Charley,” Gemma said in her psychiatrist voice.

  “She slapped me in front of all those people. I was five years old.”

  “Charley, look at that from her perspective. It was a horrible situation. You told a woman whose daughter had been missing for weeks that her daughter was in front of her.”

  “She was.”

  “We’re mere mortals, Charley. We didn’t know that. Mom was mortified. She was horrified and she panicked.”

  “Like a few minutes ago?” I rubbed my cheek. She had the decency to look ashamed. “Were you panicking then?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I looked at Gemma and scoffed. “Did you know that same woman sent me a bike after I led the cops to her daughter’s body. Your mother wouldn’t even let me have it.”

  Gemma looked stunned. “Of course. You helped bring her closure.”

  “Even a stranger believed in my abilities, and she—” I looked her up and down. “—made me feel like a freak every chance she got.”

  “I didn’t think you should be rewarded for doing what you did to that poor woman. You had to learn that was wrong. You don’t just blurt stuff out like that, even if it’s true.”

  “Well, I learned, all right. Don’t you worry about me. Is this over yet?”

  “No,” Gemma said. “Mom wants to explain.”


  “I was just trying to teach you.”

  “No.” I stood and paced. “No, you were so indifferent to me. You hated me. That’s not teaching. That’s punishing.”

  “I never hated you.”

  “You were completely indifferent to me. If not hate, then what?”

  “I wasn’t indifferent.”

  “You were a monster!” I yelled. “Why are you even here? Why are you even talking to me?”

  Her shoulders shook a moment before she cleared her throat and tried to gather herself. No way was she making me the bad guy in all this. Tears may have worked on my dad, but they would not sway me an inch.

  “I wasn’t indifferent, Charley.”

  A humorless laugh escaped me.

  “I was scared of you.”

  I sighed, unable to believe she was pulling this shit.

  “I was scared to death of you. You were something else, something … not human, and I was scared of you.”

  “Oh, so now you believe in all this?”

  “Please listen to her, Charley. It’s taken us a long time to get to this point.”

  “So, you’ve been counseling her? Five syllables: antipsychotic. They do wonders.”

  “You owe her at least a little of your time.”

  “She treated me like shit my whole life. The only thing I owe her is my middle finger and a cold shoulder.”

  “You’re right,” Denise said. “You’re absolutely right.”

  “See?” I said to Gemma.

  “If you will let me explain,” she said, “I will leave tonight and I will never come back if that is still your wish.”

  “Can’t beat that with a stick. Shoot.”

  Her cheeks were wet and her fingers shook as she stared down at her lap. “When I was little, my mother was in a car accident.”

  Not her life story. Damn it. I had to pee. This could take forever.

  “They had her in ICU. They’d stabilized her, so they let me and my dad in to see her. It was so scary seeing her hooked up to all those machines.”

  I gazed longingly at the door, wondering if anyone would notice if I just slipped away for a few minutes. Beep was playing hopscotch on my bladder, and this was clearly going to take a while.

  “My dad left to get coffee, and Mom woke up while he was gone. She looked at me sleepily and held out her hand right before the machines started going crazy. Her blood pressure dropped. The nurses and doctors came in and they tossed aside one of the blankets that was on her. A blue blanket.”