Summoned to Thirteenth Grave

by Darynda Jones

  Awareness prickled up my spine. “You know Merry?”

  “I did, yeah.”

  The prickling turned to sharp stabs of apprehension. “It’s funny, you speaking about her in the past tense like that.”

  He finished his energy drink in one gulp. “Oh, yeah? Why?”

  “Since she has yet to be found.”

  “You’re awfully trusting, coming inside when you think I had something to do with her death.”

  “So, she is dead?”

  Reyes stood at the doorway, watching our exchange.

  Thaniel glanced at him, then asked, “How would I know?”

  “That’s a good question. How about I ask you another?”

  “Nah.” He tossed the can into the trash and went to the fridge for round two. “I think I’m done answering questions.”

  “You haven’t actually answered anything I’ve asked.”

  “Not true. If you consider all the half answers I gave you, you have almost three whole answers.”

  There was something about him. Something so … not completely human.

  He was studying me when his eyes began to water. As though they stung. Or … as though he were looking at a very bright light.

  He turned away before any wetness slipped from between his lashes, but the evidence was still there no matter how hard he tried to hide it.

  Holy shit, could all of Albuquerque see into the supernatural realm? I was feeling less and less special by the minute.

  Whatever his story, he clearly wasn’t a serial killer. “Look, you need to get out of Albuquerque.”

  “You worried about me?”

  I ran my fingers over a beautifully carved knife. “The infected zone is expanding.”

  “I have an incredible immune system.”

  “So did Typhoid Mary. I hear you have a high tolerance for pain, as well.”

  He appraised me with wariness and suspicion, then asked so softly I almost didn’t hear him, “What are you?”

  At last. “Why do you ask?”

  He cracked open his second energy drink. “No reason.”

  Oh, but there was. Very few people could actually see my light. Well, more could now than, like, two days ago, but still. He knew I was something other. Something not completely human. Rather like him.

  “I guess the real question is,” he continued, taking another swig midsentence before finishing with, “what the fuck is he?”

  He gestured toward Reyes with a nod.

  Reyes’s mouth formed an easy smile, completely unconcerned.

  14

  Trust me. You can dance.

  —VODKA

  Thaniel claimed he had to go to work. He was lying, but he wanted away from the likes of us. I could hardly blame him. Besides, I had the only real answer I’d needed from him. He wasn’t a serial killer. What he was exactly was still up for debate, but that was the only answer that mattered at the moment.

  The sun had started to set, so we headed back to HQ, avoiding the Shade like it was the plague. Mostly because it was.

  “We have two days left,” I said as we pulled into the warehouse’s gated lot, and just saying that aloud caused a spike of apprehension.

  “I know. I just can’t figure out what your mother’s death has to do with anything.”

  “Join Club Clueless. Fifty percent off today only. At least we lost our shadow.”

  “I’m right here,” Gemma said.

  “Not you, hon. The other—”

  Reyes cleared his throat and gestured ahead.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  The Shade demon was still following us. Still hovering. Still being icky. Hopefully it’d stay outside. Keep its stalking relegated to an outdoor activity.

  With everything that was happening, we were worried about the team’s morale. I thought about setting up counseling sessions for everyone with Gemma, but she probably needed them worse than any of us. We hadn’t been attacked.

  To our surprise, however, the team seemed to be working through their frustrations. We walked in to find a tableful of people with jobs to do eating pizza, drinking beer, and playing strip poker.

  Score!

  Then I realized nobody was stripping. I hated when that happened. Still, one should always look on the bright side of eternal damnation should the Shade win.

  I leaned toward Reyes. “I’m going to call this my homecoming party.”

  He raised a brow. “I’m going to call this your bankruptcy proceedings.” His smirk grew wolfish. He went to join the illicit festivities and added, “Hope you brought cash.”

  “Hope you brought a pretty box for your ass, because I’m about to own it.”

  His shimmering gaze captured mine. “In your dreams, Davidson.”

  I almost laughed out loud. He only called me Davidson during competitive activities. He took that shit seriously. My mutilated Monopoly board proved that.

  And there was this Twister mat a while back, but that was destroyed for an entirely different reason.

  Before I sat down to join the other slackers, I strolled over to Gemma to make sure she was okay.

  “Are you going to play?” I asked her, taking a seat at her side.

  “No. I’ll just watch.”

  “Not as much fun as playing.” I elbowed her but got no response. “Gem, I know you’re worried about Wyatt.”

  She nodded. “I can’t get ahold of him.”

  “How about we ask Uncle Bob?”

  “Okay.” Gemma had always been moody growing up, but this time I understood. Fear for a loved one’s life was rarely a walk in the park. Unless it was Jurassic Park. Then maybe.

  The rectangular table on which they’d played would never win the “Best Table to Play Poker On” award, but not all tables sought that kind of attention. That kind of validation. Sitting around the large chunk of metal were some of the best people I’d ever had the pleasure of meeting.

  Reyes sat down between Cookie and Amber. On either side of them, Ubie and Quentin, with Meiko sitting on his lap, kept their cards hidden from straying eyes. The rest of the table accommodated the likes of Garrett, Osh, Pari, Donovan, Michael, and Eric. The whole team.

  Almost.

  My dad would have loved this, and not because he was a gambling addict in his youth. No, he would have cherished this moment as much as I did.

  I savored the scene as long as I could, memorizing each face. Each smile. Each laugh. This was a room filled with greatness. With gifts and talents that were unmatched the world over. A god, a warrior, a spiritualist, a healer, a scholar, a magician, a caregiver, a ruler, and a handful of guardians.

  This was my world. These were my people. True, they were the same people I was about to wipe the floor with, but they were my people nonetheless.

  Gemma and I walked up behind Ubie, partly to ask him about Wyatt, but mostly to freak him out. I’d seen him play cards too many times to let this opportunity slip by.

  I bent down until I was right over his shoulder and said, “Uncle Bob, have you heard anything about Wyatt?”

  He panicked and hunched over to cover his cards, his lids forming narrow slits of distrust. Leery was a good look for him.

  “What?” he growled.

  “Wyatt. Gemma wants to know if you’ve heard anything about him.”

  He relaxed, but only a little. Wise man. “No. And that’s good. Means he’s fine.” Without looking up, he asked, “Are you okay, Gemma?”

  She nodded. “Good as gold-plated plasticware.”

  “That’s the spirit,” I said, slapping her on the back. “Uncle Bob, do those two queens make that a good hand considering you only have non-matching, single-digit numbers on the other cards?”

  His jaw tightened, and he let loose a long, heavy sigh before throwing his cards on the table. “I fold.”

  “So, no?”

  * * *

  Blowing off steam. That’s what this was. We’d faced so much together over the last year, we deserved this and more. Like
more coffee. And more Oreos. Both of which I planned to partake.

  My problem with poker was twofold. First, I had a slight problem remembering what beat what. My question to Ubie earlier had been genuine. Sure, I knew my timing sucked, but the question was totally legit.

  Second, and I saw this as both a blessing and a curse, I tended to bet big. That meant I also lost big. But, hey, it was Reyes’s money. My investigations business was apparently broke. I made a mental note to accuse Cookie of embezzlement later.

  Amber had Quentin cut the deck, then spouted off the rules for the hand, speaking an unfamiliar language—and I knew them all—as she dealt the cards. “Texas Hold’em. Jokers wild. Buy-in is ten.”

  I had no idea what she was saying. That girl had many sides. Deep sides. Scary sides.

  When she finished, she signed everything she’d just said to Quentin, who gave her the universal gesture for rock and roll. Kid was born to play poker. He could spot a tell from a mile away. A mile and a half on a clear night.

  Meiko hadn’t quite caught on to the fact that Quentin was deaf. He asked him question after question, pointing here and waving there, which could be why he was sitting, a.k.a. hovering, in Quentin’s lap as opposed to anyone else’s. Q was the only person with the ability to see him who could also completely ignore him.

  Meiko flashed Amber the rock-and-roll symbol as well, and then he and Quentin high-fived, Q’s blue eyes sparkling with mirth as the boy’s tiny hand slipped through his. I had a serious premonition that kid was going to make a great dad someday. And if it happened to be with Amber, it’d better be far, far in the future. Like a decade. Or two.

  Several hours later, I hadn’t mopped the floor with anyone so much as scraped a push broom across it, irritating one and all.

  Uncle Bob was about to kill the lot of us, screaming about how unfair it was to play poker with a bunch of mutants with supernatural gifts. I felt the name-calling was a not-so-silent cry for help, but he refused to agree to therapy. Donovan offered to roofie him, so that was nice. I shook my head, though. He’d totally arrest us all. Especially me.

  “You’re the worst of them all,” he said, jabbing a finger in my direction.

  I didn’t argue. Mostly because he’d nailed it. But could he really blame me? Cheating was easier to swallow than losing.

  Cookie, however, was proving to be a bit of a badass. Who knew? And Osh, well, he’d decided it was Pick on Charley Night. I could’ve sworn that was last week.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “How is it you can remember every single language ever spoken on Earth, not to mention a shitload of celestial languages, but you can’t remember that a full house beats a flush? And you have so many tells, it’s impossible to learn which one means what.”

  I smirked. “Where I’m from, that’s called strategy.”

  “Where I’m from, that’s called a motive to kill.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I leaned forward. Gave him my best Mona Lisa. Lowered my voice and said, “I can remember that a queen of gods beats a joker of demons every time. Did I have a tell that time?”

  Cook and I high-fived as she dealt the cards. Apparently, we were taking turns. Nobody told me we had to shuffle. I was really bad at shuffling, which the entire room found out when it took me twenty minutes to get the cards to form a riffle, then bridge together. So much harder than it looked.

  We played way too late into the night until the entire event devolved into Reyes and I strategizing less and flirting more.

  Every scorching gaze sent shivers down my spine. Every time he licked his lips, I warmed in places tucked into unmentionables.

  Osh told us to get a room.

  Garrett offered the use of his if we’d just leave.

  And Ubie suggested we get a hotel room somewhere far away. Like China.

  After a few begs and pleads for mercy, I developed the distinct impression they were trying to get rid of us.

  Jealousy was so unbecoming.

  But we did accomplish one thing throughout the game: a plan.

  Considering we had a world to save, one would think sleep a good option in downtime like this. A benefit, even, but not Team Beep. Hell no. We stayed up all night, the lot of us, betting away our children’s futures and brainstorming ideas on how to stop a hell dimension from taking over the world. And the longer we played, the better the ideas got.

  For example, I had the idea of having Reyes create another dimension, one not quite so hellish, and moving everyone on Earth there. Sadly, he was a little rusty on the dimension-building front. Which was sad, because I really wanted red clouds, purple oceans, and little creatures called latte-lites that pooped coffee beans.

  I totally needed to get into the dimension-designing biz.

  Garrett wanted to nuke it. The dimension, not my idea.

  Pari wanted to upload a computer virus. She loved Independence Day. And Will Smith. Mostly Will Smith.

  Quentin wanted to send it through a portal, like, say, me. But sending a hell dimension through me and into the heart of heaven wasn’t any way to win friends and influence people. Especially celestial people. Godly people—namely, God.

  Reyes was a portal, too. The darkness inside of him led straight to Lucifer’s hell. But, while a bitch to get to, it was still in this dimension. In this celestial realm. Kind of like two cities in the same county.

  Uncle Bob wanted to call in reinforcements. He couldn’t understand how Reyes’s Brother could just sit back and let this happen. We were riding the same wavelength there, and I had to wonder what the Big Guy was thinking. If nothing else, He could’ve sent His angels to stop the demons from possessing people.

  Cookie thought it’d be super fun to send her ex. Not that he could do anything to stop the hell dimension or the Shade demons, just that it would be super fun to send him.

  The biker gang, Donovan, Michael, and Eric, wanted me to summon Beep’s hellhounds, the Twelve, to eviscerate all the demons inside it, thereby rendering the dimension harmless. But I wasn’t sure all the hellhounds in all the gin joints in all the world would even make a dent. We had no idea how many demons existed. There could’ve have been millions for all we knew.

  And so the ideas went, one after another, until they deteriorated into things like, “Maybe we could bind the Shade demons with Silly String,” and “What if they’re allergic to strawberries? We could feed all the infected strawberries.”

  On and on until Amber, God bless her, stopped all of us in our tracks when she asked, “Why can’t you just put it back into another piece of glass?”

  And that was what I sat there thinking about when the first rays of sunlight crested Nine Mile Hill.

  “How did you do that?” I asked Reyes before raising him $100 million. Only three of us were still actually playing: Reyes, Osh, and me.

  Gemma had gone to bed hours earlier.

  Having lost his house and his motorcycle to Quentin in a daring yet somehow moronic bet, Garrett went back to his translations.

  Amber and Quentin had fallen asleep on the table, forcing us to play around them while Meiko braided Amber’s hair. Or tried to, since he was incorporeal and couldn’t actually get ahold of it.

  The biker boys were drinking bourbon and watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, saying if the world was about to end, they were going to go out watching Sarah Michelle Gellar kick demon ass.

  And Cookie and Uncle Bob were snuggling in a dark corner, talking quietly about everything they were going to do when all of this was over. But apparently not quietly enough, because I really didn’t need to know how heavenly Ubie’s massages were and how Cookie wanted one every day for a year to do that thing he liked with her—

  “How did I do that?” Reyes asked, interrupting my thoughts. “Well, first I looked at my cards and then I didn’t make a $100 million bet with a pair of twos.”

  I gasped, indignant. “I don’t have a pair of twos. How do you know I have a pair of twos? Have you been cheating all night?”
/>   “Duh,” he said, ripping the cards out of my hand with a wicked grin.

  Osh groaned and tossed down his cards. “Dude, I could’ve won that hand. I’d be so rich right now.”

  “With what? A pair of threes.”

  He lifted a shoulder, pouting.

  I set my jaw, rising above. “But, since you’re asking, no. I meant, how did you put a hell dimension in the god glass?” Originally, the hell dimension resided in an opalescent piece of jewelry called god glass. When Reyes escaped, it shattered. But how did it get inside the glass in the first place?

  “I didn’t put it there. I built it inside of it.”

  Fascinated, I leaned forward as he dealt another hand. “How?”

  He lifted a single brow.

  “C’mon, Reyes. How did you do it? How do you build an entire dimension, and inside a piece of glass, no less?”

  He stopped what he was doing and gave me his full attention, albeit with a frown. “It’s just what I do.”

  When my mouth stretched into a thin line, he continued, trying his best to explain something that was so mystical, so magical, I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

  “How do you breathe? How does your heart beat? You just do. It just does, and building a dimension is just what I did.”

  “Right.” I straightened in my chair. “Okay, but how?”

  A helpless grin softened his features, his five-o’clock shadow framing them to perfection. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  “You could try.”

  “Oh, my God, not this again.” Osh sank lower in his chair. “I can’t take it.”

  “Jelly?” I asked.

  Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Amber had said. The god glass had supposedly been forged by a god, a.k.a. Reyes, and was unbreakable. But Reyes broke it. Maybe he was the only one who could. Maybe that connection he had as its creator gave him a certain amount of control over it. A power.

  I looked at the three of us, the three most powerful beings on this plane, and I knew somehow that it would come down to us. That the outcome of this entire ordeal would boil down to us three.

  “I do have another idea,” I said, narrowing my lids in thought.