Summoned to Thirteenth Grave

by Darynda Jones

  But she wasn’t real. It was only her spirit. She couldn’t die, right?

  Our mother, in a desperate act, screamed a name. Gemma couldn’t make it out, but a second later, an angel appeared, massive brown wings spread, the tips touching the walls on either side of him.

  He was young, around twenty, strong with light brown hair and olive skin. He was magnificent. And also too late.

  With one slash of his gigantic sword, the angel killed the demon. He plunged it into the demon’s heart while Mom dragged herself to Gemma. Gemma stood petrified. Unable to comprehend what she was seeing.

  Mom raised onto her knees and whispered into Gemma’s ear as a blinding light spilled out of the delivery room and filled the air. My light. I could see it from Gemma’s point of view. At one point in her life, Gem could see it.

  The light hit our mother. She placed a hand on Gemma’s cheek, then stood. Walked toward it. Crossed.

  And there it was. My mother’s death recorded through my four-year-old sister’s eyes. I concentrated harder and remembered. I remembered what she told Gemma that day over twenty-eight years ago.

  She bent closer to Gemma’s ear, the reality of what she’d gone through agonizing. The truth of what was to come devastating. No mother wants to leave her children.

  And the words she spoke were no more help than any of the other clues, but she’d said them, and she’d said them to me.

  “Tell her,” she said. “Tell your sister. The heart is both the strongest part of the body and the weakest. Always go for the heart.” She leaned back and looked into Gemma’s eyes. “Tell Charley, sweetheart. Keep it safe, and tell your sister when the time comes.”

  Then she was gone.

  The angel, the one that was too late, walked to the delivery room and fell to his knees. He buried his face in his hands, then looked toward the heavens and spoke in a celestial language that Gemma didn’t understand. But I did.

  “Let me stay,” he said, tears glistening on his face. “I have failed You. I have failed Your children.” His voice cracked, and he had to take a minute to gather himself before continuing. He closed his eyes and whispered again, “Please, Father, let me stay.”

  An instant later, his wings burst into flames. He arched his back in agony as they were burned from his body. The fire billowed along the ceiling, and ashes fill the air around Gemma, floating like glowing embers on the wind.

  When his wings were gone, he fell onto all fours, his shoulders heaving, his breathing labored. He struggled to his feet, falling twice before he managed it.

  Then he walked toward her. Again he spoke in the language of the angels when he put a hand over her eyes and told her to sleep.

  Gemma collapsed into his arms.

  20

  My therapist says I have a preoccupation with vengeance.

  We’ll see about that.

  —T-SHIRT

  I walked down to the kitchen, stunned. The last couple of days had been some of the strangest in a life that defined strange, but this? This was beyond comprehension.

  I strode up to my uncle Bob, curled my right hand into a fist, and slammed it against his face.

  “Charley!” Cookie ran up to us and checked her husband’s eye. “What has gotten into you? Are you infected?”

  But Uncle Bob just lowered his head, the game up.

  “Robert?” she said, her tone wary.

  I eyed him in disgust. “You’re one of them?”

  Reyes grabbed me around the waist and lifted me off the ground when I went back for more. Ubie wouldn’t have fought back. His crestfallen expression told me that much.

  “My mother knew,” I said, my voice cracking. “When she was being attacked, she called out to you. She called your name.” I spoke every word with a vehemence I didn’t know I possessed. “Not my dad or her doctor or even God Himself. She called you.”

  Without looking at me, he nodded. “She had the sight. It’s why she was chosen. She saw what I was years before you were even born. She confronted me. I had to tell her what was coming. Who was coming.”

  “And what, exactly, did you say? What, exactly, was your job?”

  He lifted his chin. “I was sent to make sure you made it onto this plane. That was it. My one job. I was supposed to go back afterwards. Robert Davidson would have died in some tragic accident or just disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.”

  “Then you succeeded,” I said between sobs. “I’m here. I made it at my mother’s expense. Why did you stay?”

  “I let my guard down.” His voice grew hoarse. “It should never have happened that way. Your mother was not supposed to die.”

  “You think?” I said, disgusted.

  He pressed his lips together. “When she passed, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave. I had to stay. I chose to. To watch over you.”

  Reyes’s hold slackened. He seemed just as stunned as I was.

  “How could we not have known?” I asked. “How did we not see it?”

  “Once I lost my wings, I became just as human as anyone else on the street.”

  “All this time. You could have told me. You could have explained so much. I was so … so lost. So alone.”

  “Charley, you had to discover it all for yourself. In your own time. If I had interfered—”

  “Bullshit,” I said from between clenched teeth. “All these years, pretending not to know what I was. Pretending not to see the departed.”

  Amber and Quentin ran in. “What’s going on?” Amber asked.

  “Ask your dad,” I said, before turning and heading upstairs.

  * * *

  I sat on the cot, still stunned. Reyes joined me.

  A combination of fury and embarrassment rushed through me. I ignored both and focused on the matter at hand. “I don’t know what to think. I can’t figure out how to close the dimension. Even knowing what I know, how my mother died, hearing her message to me, I still don’t understand what any of it has to do with the Shade.”

  “What was the message?”

  “Okay, word for word: The heart is both the strongest part of the body and the weakest. Always go for the heart.”

  “The heart?” he asked. “What heart?”

  “That’s just it.”

  “Well, every living thing has a heart, a core of some kind, an energy source that keeps it alive. Maybe we have to find the Shade’s?”

  I twisted toward him. “Of course. We have to find its center, what makes it tick, and destroy that.” I almost laughed. “We have a plan. Now we just have to figure out how to implement it.”

  “The heart would be where we opened it, don’t you think?”

  “I do think. It has to be in our apartment. We just have to get there.”

  “What do you mean?” Reyes asked.

  “I mean, those Shade demons are hanging around for a reason. Maybe that’s it. Maybe their job is to make sure we don’t find the nerve center for their little city.”

  A knock sounded on our door. It was Cookie.

  “What was that?” she asked, her eyes wet with emotion. “I’ve never seen you like that, hon.”

  “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No. He won’t talk to me. He stalked out and went to work.”

  “Figures.”

  “Charley, please.”

  “Gemma crossed through me.”

  “Oh, hon. I’m so sorry.”

  “When she did, I saw what happened when my mother died.”

  “Oh, my God, he killed her?”

  “No, Cook. He was supposed to protect her.”

  “That much I did understand, and you’re wrong. He was supposed to protect you. He succeeded.”

  “I guess. But he was one of them.”

  She closed her eyes and asked, “A demon?”

  “No. Why would a demon be sent to protect me?”

  She lifted a pretty brow. “Reyes Alexander Farrow.”

  “Not exactly a demon, but point taken.”

  �
�So, what was he? Go ahead, tell me. I can take it. Whatever it was, we can get past it. Wait, will he grow scales?”

  “No. He was … he was an angel.”

  She crinkled her forehead and thought. Then she pursed her lips and thought some more. Then, for a long moment, she just stared off into space. “An angel.”

  “Yes.”

  “As in—”

  “Yep. Heaven. Wings. Celestial powers out the ass. Not to mention the sword. Those guys love their swords.”

  “And he gave all that up to be with you? To protect you?”

  “When you put it that way.”

  She put a hand on mine. “There’s no other way to put it.”

  “Oh, but there is. Traitor. Liar. Thief.”

  “Thief?”

  “He stole my candy hearts when I was a kid.”

  She nodded. “He does have quite the sweet tooth.”

  “When I think of all the times he pretended not to see the departed or not to know what I was.”

  “But is that what really matters?”

  “Right now, at this moment in time, yes. Tomorrow, if we make it to tomorrow, maybe not. It’s all still up in the air.”

  “Oh, my goodness.”

  “What?”

  “I wonder if that’s why he’s so good at … you know.”

  “Cunnilingus?”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “And I’m not talking okay-good. I’m talking Olympic marathon.”

  “Okay.”

  “The things he can do with his mouth.”

  “Cook! That’s my uncle you’re talking about.”

  She smiled, satisfaction shining through her pretty expression. “Exactly.”

  My jaw dropped open. Fortunately, I caught it before it hit the floor and put it back on its hinges. “That was low, Cook, even for you.”

  “Keep telling yourself that.” She handed me a file folder. “I know you probably don’t care right now, but…”

  “Thaniel?” I asked. “Any juicy goodness I need to know about?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. I thought I’d let you look it over. And, just my two cents, he doesn’t look like a serial killer.”

  “Ted Bundy.”

  “Right.”

  She left as I opened the file. I really wanted to solve this mystery before all hell broke loose. Literally.

  “Thaniel Just. What are you all about?”

  I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that I knew him. Maybe it was one of those past life things, but unless he was a god, too, probably not.

  I studied his file, promising myself not to devote too much time to it. Cookie outdid herself. She had everything on him. Work history. Schools. Parents. Or at least his mom. His father was never in the picture, so there’s no way of finding out who he was without hunting his mother down.

  Cookie had even tracked down his grandparents. His grandmother had been adopted, but Cookie managed to get the court files on the adoption. They’d been opened years earlier by Thaniel’s mother.

  I totally needed to give her a raise. And I would if she hadn’t won all my money the night before. Now all I could offer her was …

  The records on the adoption caught my eye. His grandmother had been adopted from the New Mexico Mental Asylum. I bolted upright. The mother was listed as an Ilsa Blaine and the father as a Richard Lund. They’d both been patients there in … in the fifties.

  I tore through the pages. Richard had a little sister named Bella Lund who died when she was five years old from dust pneumonia. Blue Bell. Rocket’s sister? Were they talking about Rocket?

  If so, that meant he had a kid and, generations later, that kid was carrying on in his grandfather’s tradition. That explained all the cutting. He had to write the names down. If he were anything like Rocket and Blue at all, he had no choice. They called to him.

  But Rocket? With a kid? Impossible. The very thought boggled to the extreme. He was a large child himself. Either way, the fact remained that for Rocket to beget a kid, he would have to have had sex. With a girl.

  I needed to have a one on one with Rocket, but for now, I needed to see a man about a horse.

  After seeing to the horse—a euphemism I never understood—I hurried downstairs and told the gang about Rocket. “Is that even possible?” I asked Garrett for no other reason than he was nearest to me.

  “Why are you asking me?” His gaze bounced from person to person. “I’ve never been committed.”

  “I just can’t believe it. He’s so … so … well, he doesn’t think like that.”

  “Does he have a penis?” Osh asked.

  When I only frowned, Reyes finished the sentiment for him. “Then, yes, he thinks like that.”

  I didn’t believe it. There had to be some other explanation. “I’m going to talk to Rocket. In the meantime, what about the box? Have you deciphered anything yet?”

  Garrett tilted his head in a noncommittal gesture. “Yes and no.”

  “Okay, what do you have so far?”

  He took out the box, placed it on the table, and slid it over to Reyes. “Open it.”

  Reyes took it, his lids narrowing.

  I pointed. “You just push that corner there.”

  He pushed it, but the latching mechanism didn’t click.

  “Put some muscle behind it,” I said, teasing him.

  He tried again. Still nothing.

  “Let me try.”

  Reyes passed the box to Osh. He pushed the corner to no avail.

  “Ugh, here.” I took it from Osh, pushed the corner, which again drew blood, and slid open the lid.

  “I couldn’t open it, either,” Garrett said, taking it back and looking inside. “It has mystical properties.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked.

  “It’s your world, Charles. I only live in it. When you opened it for me before, I took pictures.” He passed a series of images around. “I’m still working on the outside carvings, which are a combination of text and pictographs. But the interior has text as well, different from the exterior.”

  “I hadn’t noticed before.”

  “It’s faint.”

  “You translated?”

  “I did, partially, and if I’m correct, it’s the same word over and over in several different languages.”

  Reyes took the now-open box and examined the text inside. “It is the same word.”

  I looked inside as well. “What does it say?”

  “Val-Eeth.”

  I started. “That’s the celestial language from my home dimension.”

  “It’s you,” Garrett said. “The god eater.”

  In my early years, I’d apparently taken it upon myself to police the gods. I devoured the malevolent ones and left the benevolent ones alone, thus earning the nickname god eater.

  “This box was left there for you.”

  I exchanged a furtive glance with Reyes. “That’s what Pandu said, but it’s been there since the first century BC.”

  Reyes shrugged. “And you’ve been a god since before the birth of the stars in this dimension.”

  Osh scratched his jaw in thought. “So, does that make you older than Rey’azikeen?” He nodded toward me approvingly. “Robbing the cradle.”

  Horrified, I shook my head. “No. It just makes me older than the stars in this dimension. So that means I’m your elder and you have to listen to what I say.”

  “I do that, anyway.”

  “True.” He was a fantastic listener. “Okay, now that we’ve cleared that up, I’m going to talk to Rocket. See if he did the deed with anyone at the asylum. I mean, seriously. What if this guy really is Rocket’s grandson?”

  “What if he is?” Reyes asked.

  “He could be of use to us. And, really, how does this stuff keep happening?”

  Cookie chimed in then. “It’s like I said before. You attract the supernatural and those who are sensitive to it. Most people might meet one person in their entire lives who are sensitive to
the celestial realm. But you have an entire team of them.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Think about it. How did you first meet Reyes? Rocket? Pari? Me and thus Amber? Quentin? Osh? Nicolette? And now Thaniel? Hell, even your own uncle was a celestial being in another life.”

  I chafed at the reminder. He’d kept so much from me. And he could’ve told me about how my mother died sooner instead of letting us go on a wild-goose chase. Still, only Gemma had the message from my mother. He couldn’t have known. No. I mentally balked. That didn’t negate anything.

  Ignoring the sting in my heart, I stood and smoothed my sweater. “I’m off to see a Rocket about a girl.”

  Then I hurried out before anyone decided to defend my uncle to me. I knew the score and, sadly, I didn’t know if I’d ever get over it.

  * * *

  I found Rocket curled into a corner again. The girls, Blue, Strawberry, and Livia, were gone, off playing hopefully. But Strawberry had been right. Rocket wasn’t comfortable here. He was disoriented. Confused. Unsettled.

  “Rocket?” I sat next to him and put my hand on one of his. He’d had it wrapped around his head.

  He lowered it and smiled at me. “Miss Charlotte, what are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you. To ask you about…” How was I going to put this without causing him distress? I needed to be delicate. Understanding. Supportive. And I needed to do it in 1950s language. “I came to ask you about … about the cat you were keen on.”

  “Cat?”

  Too much. “You know, your sweetheart?” When he still looked confused, I deadpanned him and said, “Your girlfriend.”

  He frowned in thought. “Ilsa?”

  Holy cow. “Yes.”

  He sank further inside himself. “They took her away from me. We broke the rules. No breaking rules or they take you away and you never come back.”

  A lump formed in my throat. “You loved her.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Rocket, I’m so sorry. Did you know she had a baby?”

  He pulled his hand back. “They took her away. No breaking rules, Miss Charlotte. They’ll take you away. They always take them away.”

  My chest cracked open and sorrow spilled out. No wonder he was always so adamant about the rules. They made him believe Ilsa’s leaving was his fault because he broke their fucking rules.