They all gaped in surprise.
“You know where this is?” Reyes asked.
Garrett pointed to it. “I do, too. Los Ranchos.”
“The school where they found Meiko is in Los Ranchos.” I looked from one to the other. “Then what are we waiting for?”
Cookie came up just as we took off toward the front door. “Call Uncle Bob!” I shouted to her. “Tell him to meet us at the Village Hall in Los Ranchos.”
“Now, wait just a minute,” she said in full mommy mode.
We all stopped and circled around toward her.
“I am tired of you gallivanting across the country and leaving me here only to have to watch you come back shredded and covered in blood.”
I walked back to her. “I’m sorry, Cook. Sometimes I forget.”
“What? How much I care about you? How much you mean to me?”
I’d traumatized her by walking into the warehouse after a lion attack. I should’ve been more considerate. “Yeah, I guess.”
She filled her lungs, then asked, “Now, where are you going, and why? And will there be lions?”
I laughed softly. “Meiko described the view from where they are keeping his mother and sister.” I showed her the picture.
“That’s in Los Ranchos.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, good heavens, what are you waiting for? Get out there.”
“Thank you. Can you call Ubie and let him know? Oh, and Kit. She is the agent on the case. She’s been looking for a reason to arrest me. I’d rather not give her one.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll take care of it. Go.” She shoved me toward the door.
“Wait,” I said, stopping everyone again. “What if the abductor sees the troops file in? He might do something.”
“Like kill them?” Quentin asked. Luckily, Meiko didn’t know much sign language.
Cookie nodded. “No, you’re right. Okay, text me when you want me to call in the troops.”
“Thanks, Cook.” She could’ve totally taken her husband’s side, but she trusted me enough to hold off. Also, I signed her paychecks.
* * *
We took Misery while Garrett followed in his truck, hopping onto Coors and then over Alameda to the North Valley. Thankfully, traffic had died down a bit.
Los Ranchos was a very old, very prestigious part of Albuquerque that sat on the east side of the Rio Grande. It had beautiful established houses and stunning new ones, and surprisingly, the area from Meiko’s vantage was in one of the more affluent neighborhoods.
The abductor must be keeping them in a basement or a shed in a backyard, perhaps.
We pulled up to the Village Hall. I turned to Meiko, who sat in the backseat with Amber and Quentin. “Is that the bird you saw?”
His eyes lit up. “That’s it. It’s snow, but it doesn’t melt. Is Mommy here?”
“We’re going to look for her, sweetheart. Does anything else look familiar?”
He looked around then shook his head. “I could only see the bird when the car was gone. Sometimes I couldn’t see the bird at all. The wood was in the way.”
“The car?” I scanned the area. “What kind of car, sweet pea?”
“A big one. Big and square.”
“Do you remember what color it was?”
“White.”
Since the day was cool enough to leave the kids in the car, ordering them to lock it and stay inside, Reyes, Garrett, and I got out and started searching the area. Meiko’s vantage could have been from the residential area to the north of Village Hall, or it could’ve been across the street.
While the guys looked for a square, white vehicle, I studied the picture and worked my way backwards, checking out the statue from different angles.
Once I had a good idea which direction to look, I headed that way, ignoring the Shade demons that stood watching us from the middle of Rio Grande Avenue. As cars drove through them, I focused on a small area across the street.
Garrett and Reyes walked back to me, unable to find what we’d suspected was a white van.
“Do you feel anything?” Reyes asked.
I closed my eyes and reached out but was mostly met with the mundane, everyday lives of the residents. Then I felt a spike of grief, of utter devastation, as though from a woman who thought she’d lost her child.
Lifting my lids, I pointed. “There.”
One corner house, older than most of its neighbors but well maintained, had a beautiful floating patio out front with a pergola and a fire pit.
We began walking toward it cautiously, checking the house for anyone watching us from the inside.
I gestured toward the patio. “Look underneath the wood floor.”
“Glass block,” Garrett said.
Reyes took my hand. “Someone’s watching.”
A curtain moved inside the house.
“That’s okay. We’re just interested in who built their pergola.”
Garrett kept pace but scanned the area, admiring it. “We’ve got this if you want to get a closer look at it.”
“Oddly enough, I do.”
While they walked to the front door, I went to inspect the pergola. Most of the yards on this block were fenced off, but this one wasn’t. Thank God for that. If it’d had a fence, Meiko wouldn’t have been able to see the bird.
The guys knocked on the door, and an elderly woman answered. While they chatted, I sat on the patio and glanced around. When I was sure no one was watching, I shifted onto the supernatural plane, just for a peek.
The patio sat on top of a buried shipping container. It had a door with several locks on the end closest to the house. The only light filtering in was from the glass blocks, and if one were to climb up on the tiny counter—Meiko, for example—he could’ve seen out them.
A woman lay on a mattress on the floor, curled into a ball, while a little girl ate oatmeal and colored. Belinda’s pain stole my breath, the depressive state she sank into dark and perilous, and I worried just as much for her daughter as herself. If something were to happen to Belinda, Molly could be her abductor’s next target. If she hadn’t been already.
The locks jiggled, and seven-year-old Molly ran to hide in a cabinet under the sink. Consumed with grief, Belinda didn’t move.
It was the woman. She opened the door to check on them. No, to warn them, a broom handle in her hand. “Reyes’ll be back soon,” she said, her voice full of vehemence. “Don’t you make a sound or I’ll tell him.”
She walked to the cabinet where she knew the girl hid and slammed the broomstick against it.
The girl, God bless her, didn’t make a sound.
Tears slid down Belinda’s cheeks, wetting her tangled hair. She’d given up.
The nasty woman turned to Belinda then and hit her leg with the stick. Belinda just tightened the ball she’d curled into, falling into herself. Into darkness.
I wondered why Belinda wouldn’t try to overpower the older woman and get out. Then I saw the chain on her ankle, thick scars underneath attesting to how long it had been there and how many times it had very likely become infected.
Reyes, my Reyes, stood beside me, both of us straddling the tangible and intangible worlds.
“We can’t materialize here,” I said. “Belinda’s psyche is already fractured.”
“I think it’s time to call in the reinforcements.”
I agreed just as a vehicle pulled up outside.
“Let them know,” Reyes said before rematerializing outside.
I ran through the acidic wind of the supernatural realm until I spotted Quentin. Even straddling the two planes as I was, Quentin saw me, his blue eyes sparkling with hope.
I gave him the signal to call the cavalry, offering a quick nod before slipping back into the small room that contained Belinda and her daughter. A microsecond before I evaporated from Quentin’s sight, I watched him nudge Amber with his elbow, excitement evident on his handsome face.
And then I was back with Belinda. I could just make
out the voices of my husband and Garrett, the box expertly soundproofed, as the two men walked around the patio in faux admiration.
But I felt another emotion I hadn’t expected. Excitement. Not from Reyes or Garrett, but from the driver.
Staying incorporeal, I hurried to Reyes’s side, not sure why. He would’ve known the driver recognized him immediately. He would’ve felt the rush of adrenaline. The prickle of elation.
Reyes’s gaze narrowed when the man got out of the van and walked up to them. “I went to school with you.”
He smiled. “You did. Not for very long, though.” The man, chubby with shaggy blond hair, thick glasses, and a creep factor somewhere between hair-raising and terrifying, held out his hand.
Reyes took it, then introduced Garrett. “We were just admiring your patio. My wife and I bought a house down the road and were wanting something like this built. Do you have the contractor’s name?”
“Really? Well, I—I did it myself.”
“Oh, damn. Nice job.” He turned to Garrett, eyebrows raised expectantly.
“Look,” Garrett said, “we’re good friends and all, but I’m not building you a patio.”
“Where did you say you bought a house?” Fake Reyes asked.
Reyes pointed north. “Down the road about half a mile.”
“Oh, you bought Pearson’s house.”
He was lying. Testing Reyes. “No. The McNallys’? Devon and Angela?”
“Ah, yeah, that’s right,” he said, lying again, which was fine since I doubted Reyes had ever met a Devon and Angela McNally in his life.
Fake Reyes had slipped a hand into his pocket.
“It’s been a long time,” Reyes said, trying to keep him busy until Ubie and/or Kit showed up, but the man was growing more suspicious by the moment.
The woman, whom I could only assume was his mother, walked out then. “Everything okay?”
Fake Reyes nodded. “Sure, this is Reyes Farrow. I told you about him. We went to school together.”
“Oh, yes. My son told me a lot about you.”
“It’s all lies,” Reyes said, turning into quite the charmer. “Your son is really talented.”
“It was mostly a kit,” Fake Reyes said.
Garrett patted one of the wood beams. “Don’t sell yourself short. You did a great job.”
Reyes pointed to the van. “What are you doing now?”
“Oh, you know. Little of this. Little of that.”
“Well, don’t let us keep you.” Garrett patted Reyes on the back.
“Okay, then.” Fake Reyes—or FR as I liked to call him in casual situations—pulled his hand out of this pocket and shook both of theirs. “Maybe I’ll see you at the market.”
The farmers’ market they had every Saturday a few months out of the year. But I didn’t know if Reyes knew about it.
“Sure,” he said, going along either way.
I didn’t get it. FR didn’t seem particularly obsessed with Reyes. Why take his name? What on earth had he hoped to accomplish by it?
“Wasn’t there a woman?” the old biddy asked. This was like a horror movie. A mother who indulged her son anything. I couldn’t imagine what Belinda had been through.
“My wife. Yes.” Reyes gestured down the road. “She wanted to get some air, so she walked home.”
“That way?” FR asked, pointing south.
Reyes let a slow smile spread across his face. He’d implied earlier the house was in the other direction. He knew he was busted.
And, sadly, FR knew he was busted as well. He put his hand back in his pocket.
“Something’s not right,” I said to Reyes from the supernatural plane.
He nodded.
I whirled toward the patio and then whispered, “Reyes.”
He turned and saw it, too. Smoke coming from below the patio.
I materialized inside. Fake Reyes had some kind of incendiary device set up. He was torching the place.
“Reyes!” I yelled. The smoke already hung thick in the air.
I heard Molly coughing from the cabinet.
Reyes burst through the door, splintering the frame.
“She’s chained up,” I told him before opening the cabinet door to find Molly curled up much the same way her mother had been. “Come with me, sweetheart. It’s okay. I’m going to get you out of here.”
She jumped into my arms, her eyes wild with fear as the smoke roiled around us.
I made the mistake of breathing it in and almost vomited for my effort. “It’s not just smoke,” I said through a series of coughs.
“I know.” Belinda fought Reyes, trying to get to her daughter.
“I have her. Belinda, I have Molly.” I wrapped a towel around the girl’s nose and mouth and hurried through the hall, but the smoke was just as thick there.
Frantic, Belinda didn’t calm. She couldn’t. She tore at Reyes’s shirt trying to get past him to her daughter.
Garrett charged in, but the smoke was so thick I didn’t see him. We collided. He helped me up, ripped the girl out of my arms, and rushed up a set of stairs.
Sirens wailed in the distance, but I was beginning to black out. Whatever the abductor had ignited was powerful.
I stumbled back into the room just as Reyes wrenched the chain out of the wall. “I don’t want to risk breaking her leg,” he said by way of explanation, but he needn’t have.
We took Belinda into the house and out the front door to join her daughter.
She burst into tears, and between fits of coughs and sobs, she apologized to Molly.
FR’s mother hit me with a broom as I rushed past. Unbelievable.
Fake Reyes stood livid. That’s when the crazy began to shine through. Your everyday child molester-slash-abductor would have jumped in the van and run like the sissy he was. But this guy, he stood there, shaking with rage despite the sirens wailing in the distance.
“You don’t even remember,” he said to Reyes, his teeth clenched, his head bowed as he looked on. “You don’t remember me.”
Reyes glared at him, and then an instant of recognition flashed across his face. “Hale.”
“I told you. I told you what I was. You wouldn’t listen.” The man started stabbing his own leg with a pocketknife he’d drawn. “You wouldn’t listen.”
“You were angry with him, not me.”
Garrett placed Molly on the ground, her tiny, malnourished body convulsing from the coughing fit she was in.
I dry heaved into my sleeve, I was coughing so hard. After fending off another attack of the broom witch, I went to check on Belinda. “Reyes, what’s going on?”
“So, this is him,” the guy’s mother said, her disgust evident.
He nodded.
“You were all he cared about,” she said, accusing Reyes of some unknown crime. “It was all about you while I could hardly get the time of day from him.”
After a fit of coughs, Belinda passed out.
“Reyes, we need to know what was in the fire. What chemicals he used.”
People were pulling over to help, the smoke thick and acrid. Amber and Quentin ran over to warn them away.
“Stay out of the smoke!” I yelled to them. “It’s toxic!”
“Even if she makes it,” Hale said, a grin of pure evil transforming his features, “she’ll die of cancer within a year. They both will.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said, kneeling beside her. I placed a hand on her chest and let my energy flow into her. Her lids fluttered open as I hurried to Molly and did the same. They both stopped coughing instantly.
His expression morphed to one of surprise. “You’re like him.”
The old lady came at me again, her broom handle at the ready. “Witch! You stay away from my son!”
“Oh, that’s original.” I sidestepped her first swing, then turned back to my husband. “Reyes, this is getting silly. Who is he, and why is this crazy woman trying to hit me?”
Reyes bit down, disgust evident in
every hard line of his face. Then, almost reluctantly, he said, “This is Earl Walker’s only biological son.”
19
Some people are like Polaroids.
You have to shake them violently before they make any sense.
—TRUE FACT
Earl Walker’s only biological son? He could have said the man was Satan’s uncle and I would’ve been less surprised. “I didn’t realize he had another biological child besides Kim.”
“None that he claimed.” He said it with a smirk that drove the guy over the edge.
The woman finally hit her target, bashing me on the shin with the broom handle. Pain like I hadn’t known since, well, that morning shot through me. Before I could do anything about it, Reyes had swiped the broom from her, moving so fast she didn’t see him.
But Hale seemed to know a little something about my husband, probably from the monster he called Dad. He held up his hands as though to surrender, but he nodded toward his mother. She grabbed Reyes’s arm, feigning a heart attack. In the split second Reyes glanced down at her, Hale dove at Belinda and jammed the knife into her jugular.
While we jumped to her rescue, Hale ran inside his house.
Blood gushed out of her by the bucketsful. She held both hands to her throat, her eyes wide with terror as the life drained out of her so much faster than I ever imagined possible. With one touch, I healed her again, but my anger knew no bounds. Everything he did to this poor girl and those adorable children.
Hale was either going to kill himself or barricade himself inside, forcing a standoff and hours of tedious negotiations and attention from news crews. But the way I saw it, the man was joining his father in hell whether he died today or not. Why not move things along?
“Dutch,” Reyes said, realizing my anger had gotten the better of me.
But I shifted before he could react. I found Hale inside the house and slammed into him, pulling a part of him with me as I passed through his corporeal body.
I dragged his soul out kicking and screaming. There were hundreds of people in the hospital, fighting for their souls. Why should this prick be allowed to keep his?
The moment his spirit left his body, hell came calling.
A black hole opened up beneath him, his shocked expression all the satisfaction I needed when claws from the underworld wrenched him from the earthly plane and into theirs. At least Lucifer had a use on occasion.
Summoned to Thirteenth Grave (Charley Davidson #13) Page 20
