The Trouble With Twelfth Grave
Page 23
Reyes gave a single, solitary nod, then all was right with the world. In an instant, the plane had righted itself.
I sat in Reyes’s lap at the table as we explained everything that happened at the chapel, including how Reyes ended up with Garrett’s pajama bottoms.
Pari sat enthralled, and Garrett took it remarkably well, mostly because he was astounded by the whole center-of-the-sun thing. I had to repeat that story three times, a little astounded myself.
But our regaling had to be cut short when Garrett’s date, the one he forgot to cancel, showed up with lasagna and breadsticks. Zoe from Hope Christian Academy. Garrett made the introductions all around, but when he got to Pari, the look that passed between the two women could only be described as thunderstruck.
With an arm wrapped around my husband’s neck, I looked into his eyes and said, “So, the dark, whooshy things in our apartment, that wasn’t you swooshing around, was it?”
He shook his head. “The wraith demons. Our apartment is ground zero. The hell dimension is expanding exponentially, and it’ll take over this world if we don’t stop it. This entire dimension.”
“You didn’t think of that before you shattered the god glass inside our humble abode?”
A sexy grin lifted one corner of his mouth. “Sorry.”
“Don’t ever leave me like that again.” I wrapped my hands around his throat and pretended to choke him. “Promise.”
His gaze dropped to my mouth and lingered there as he said, “You first.”
Just as I was about to kiss the man I’d loved, quite literally, for millennia, my phone rang in my bag. I dug it out as Pari insisted on helping Zoe with plates and flatware. Poor Garrett. Still, served him right. He needed to set things straight with the mother of his child.
I checked the phone. It was Cookie, and I silently chastised myself for not calling her sooner.
“Hey, Cook. We’re all alive. I meant to call—”
“Ch-Charley?”
The sound of Cookie’s voice straightened my shoulders. “Cook, what’s wrong?”
“Charley, something … something happened. She…” The phone went silent for a moment before Cookie broke down, sobbing into the phone.
I shot out of Reyes’s lap. Dread dumped adrenaline into my system by the bucketsful. “Cookie, what happened? Where are you?”
“What’s going on?” Garrett asked.
“The school,” Cookie said, her voice cracking. “She’s here. I thought she was at her school in Albuquerque.”
Reyes stood and listened beside me.
“Which school? Is it Amber? Cookie, did something happen to Amber?”
“The—the School for the Deaf.”
With hardly a thought about Zoe and what this would do to her, I dematerialized instantly and rematerialized at the New Mexico School for the Deaf in Santa Fe. Emergency vehicles of all shapes and sizes swam around me. Lights glared into the darkness. Kids and adults stood around a border the emergency crews had set up. I followed the flashing lights to the parking lot beside the gym.
I walked forward, the world not quite moving right. Everything was too harsh. Too acrid. Voices were muffled as though they were all underwater, and yet they were too loud, assaulting my senses and making me dizzy.
Glancing to the side, I saw Uncle Bob holding Cookie in his arms as she sobbed. She fought him a moment, trying to wrench free, and I got the impression she’d been doing that off and on for a while now. His expression grave, he tightened his hold, then nodded at an EMT.
The young technician administered a shot as Cookie wailed into Uncle Bob’s chest.
Another crowd, smaller, was huddled around a kid on the ground. A blond boy about sixteen sat on his knees, doubled over with his arms wrapped around his head.
Quentin.
A couple of girls sat beside him, rubbing his back as a cop tried to talk to him through an interpreter. But he was beyond talking. He rocked back and forth from his knees to his arms, cradling his head, so distraught he’d vomited onto the pavement.
Then he saw me. No, he felt me. He looked up and watched as I walked toward a tarp-covered body on the ground, his expression full of remorse. And anguish. And grief.
Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to get close to the body lying in the center of the parking lot, but I’d shifted and straddled both planes. If anyone tried to stop me, and they did try to stop me, their arms went right through my only half-corporeal body. They would gape at me, too shocked to try it again, until the next officer rushed forward and gave it a shot.
I felt Reyes at my back as I walked, not quite sure my feet were on the ground. I felt his emotions. As astonished and grief-stricken as my own.
“Charley?”
I turned to Cookie. She’d spotted me and tried, once again, to wrench free from her husband.
Uncle Bob’s expression crushed my heart. While Cookie’s blossomed into one of hope, his was far less optimistic. He lowered his gaze in resignation.
I knelt beside the body and pulled back the tarp to see Amber’s precious face, her mouth bruised and swollen, her huge blue eyes open, looking toward heaven like she now knew what so many others did not.
Then I caught sight of her from the corner of my eye. The assistant coach who’d threatened the kids. She stood in a group of teachers talking softly in the distance.
I started to stand, to walk over and snap her neck, but Quentin had somehow gotten past the perimeter guards as well. He stood over me, his chest heaving with emotion.
I sank back down and looked up at him, waiting for an explanation, but his eyes were locked onto the girl he loved, his face wet with tears and blood. After an eternity, he spoke.
“I tried to stop him,” he said, his signs listless, barely readable. He was in shock. “A man. A priest. I tried to stop him. He grabbed her, seemed to beg her for help, but she couldn’t understand him. So he hit her. Again and again as fire came up out of the ground. It tried to pull him under. I kicked him and hit him to get him off her, but he just—” He sank to his knees beside me. “He just disappeared.”
No. I shook my head. I’d stopped him. I summoned him and—
“Two hours,” Cookie said, sobbing on my other side. I blinked at her. Uncle Bob had flashed his badge and escorted her past the perimeter. “She’d been gone for two hours before we got here. Beaten and burned. Same as the others.” She broke down again.
The priest must have been in the middle of attacking her when I’d summoned him.
“Five minutes earlier,” I said, my voice soft with disbelief. “If I’d been five minutes earlier. If I hadn’t gone to the warehouses. If I’d summoned him the second I learned his name.”
I hadn’t even thought of Amber when compiling my list of potential victims. She’d showed signs of clairvoyance, but I’d never even considered her a candidate. She didn’t see the departed like Quentin or even Pari. She had never been a part of that world. Not in that way.
“Why were they here so late?” I asked Cookie.
“Basketball game,” Uncle Bob answered for her. “Playoffs.”
My lungs filled with cement and I could barely see past the wetness in my eyes. But it was Cookie’s anguish that broke me. Her excruciating agony that made my decision.
Michael appeared as though the archangel monitored my every thought. He pinned me with a warning glower.
I turned back to Reyes, to my beautiful husband whom I’d fought so hard for these past days, and whispered, “I’ll find a way back. I promise.”
Instantly registering where my thoughts had landed, he lunged forward, but before he could grab me, before he could stop me, I laid my fingers across Amber’s pale cheek. Her lids fluttered, and a soft pink hue blossomed across her face. She filled her lungs with air a microsecond before the world fell away from me.
The last thing I felt before completely disappearing into the ether was the heat, the blinding heat, of Reyes’s incomprehensible fury as I was cast into a lightless
realm.
Also by Darynda Jones
Eleventh Grave in Moonlight
The Curse of Tenth Grave
The Dirt on Ninth Grave
Eighth Grave After Dark
Seventh Grave and No Body
Sixth Grave on the Edge
Death and the Girl He Loves
Fifth Grave Past the Light
Death, Doom, and Detention
Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet
Death and the Girl Next Door
Third Grave Dead Ahead
Second Grave on the Left
First Grave on the Right
About the Author
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author DARYNDA JONES won a Golden Heart and a RITA for her manuscript First Grave on the Right. A born storyteller, she grew up spinning tales of dashing damsels and heroes in distress for any unfortunate soul who happened by, annoying man and beast alike. Darynda lives in the Land of Enchantment, also known as New Mexico, with her husband and two beautiful sons, the Mighty, Mighty Jones Boys.
Visit Darynda at www.daryndajones.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Also by Darynda Jones
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE TROUBLE WITH TWELFTH GRAVE. Copyright © 2017 by Darynda Jones. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover illustration by Herman Estevez
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jones, Darynda, author.
Title: The trouble with twelfth grave / Darynda Jones.
Description: First edition. | New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017032067 | ISBN 9781250147554 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250147578 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Davidson, Charley (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | Women private investigators—Fiction. | Women mediums—Fiction. | GSAFD: Occult fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3610.O6236 T76 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032067
e-ISBN 9781250147578
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First Edition: October 2017