Fifth Grave Past the Light

  I was so fascinated with what he was doing, how he was speaking to me, I didn’t answer him at first.

  “Dutch,” he said, the voice growing clearer, the nudge growing more insistent, “may I enter you?”

  I responded in kind, mentally and in Ancient Aramaic. “Yes.”

  In an instant, he sent his essence inside me, penetrating not only my mind but every molecule in my body. I felt soft tendrils of pleasure lace down my spine, curl into my abdomen, settle around my heart. As though a sensual smoke had entered me, my skin began to respond. It tingled and tightened until it felt too small for my body. My blood began to boil. The crests of Danger and Will hardened as a prickling hunger spiraled and nipped. My muscles contracted and released with sensuality. Hot ribbons of ecstasy spread through me.

  The probing grew harder, more demanding, as it pooled at the apex between my legs and swelled inside me. Then it moved, pulsated, bucked, and milked me closer to the edge. Scorching, pulsing waves rocked inside me, bathed me in sweet, unimaginable heat. Reyes locked me in his arms, then nudged with his mind again, sending the sensations deeper, harder, faster. Anticipation throbbed between my legs until I could take no more. I needed his flesh inside mine.

  “Rey’aziel,” I said from between clenched teeth, writhing beneath him. I sank my fingernails into his back. “I order you.”

  He buried his fingers in my hair, spread my legs with his hips, and entered me in one long thrust. I gasped aloud as the swell of orgasm crested and rushed over me like a whirlwind of liquid fire. That was all it took. One thrust. One piercing impalement to unleash the storm.

  I cried out but Reyes’s mouth came down on mine as he embedded himself farther inside me. Then he pulled out, trailing kisses to my ear, clutching the inside of a thigh to hold me wide, and plunged into me again and again until the crest reappeared. I clawed at him, urged him deeper, reveled in his pleasure.

  “Dutch,” he said into my ear, his hold so tight, I should have screamed in agony, but I relished the feel, the strength of his orgasm as it crashed into me. He tensed, his breathing labored as it shuddered through him in sweet, astonishing waves.

  When he came down off his high, he rolled over and took me with him until I was on top. Then he locked his arms around me, refusing to let go. Not that I wanted him to. He sought the comfort of my neck, burying his face in the crook before saying with a muffled voice, “We should date.”

  I laughed, curled him into my arms, and kissed the soft spot underneath his earlobe. “You’re going to have to go to obedience school for that to happen. You have authority issues.”

  “Never mind. We should have sex again and then date.”

  “Since you put it that way, okay.” I squeaked out a protest when he rolled me back over with a growl and started the whole thing again.

  It was a pretty weak protest.

  14

  If god is watching us, the least we can do is be entertaining.

  —BUMPER STICKER

  Someone was knocking. Pounding. And as I fought the lids that wanted to stay closed and the body that wanted to stay horizontal, I swore by all things holy someone was going down. Whether that someone ended up being the intruder or me remained to be seen, but come morning, one of us would by lying on the ground, moaning in agony.

  “What the bloody hell?” Reyes asked, fighting lethargy as well.

  I tried to answer, but my voice came out sounding more like a rabid moose with a head cold, so I shut up and wiggled out from under his arm and Artemis’s hind legs. Then I fell off the bed, which wasn’t that unusual.

  “You okay?” Reyes asked, his face buried in a thick down pillow. The guy had taste.

  “Mmm,” was all I could manage as I navigated the room in search of underwear and a bra. I just had them. How far could they have gotten?

  The knock sounded again. Then voices. Then footsteps followed by a lighter tapping on Reyes’s door, and I realized the earlier knocking had not been on his door but either Cookie’s or mine. Artemis raised her head, but only for a moment before sleep won out.

  I found the towel Reyes had been wearing and wrapped myself into it. If people were going to knock on doors in the middle of the night, they needed to be prepared for the consequences. After dodging a coffee table and narrowly missing a planter, I found the door and opened it. Then I saw the front door, so I closed the pantry door and headed that direction.

  Another soft knock sounded. More voices.

  “What?” I asked, tearing open the door. I could almost see at that point, though everything was a blur of grays and blues. Until I saw Cookie.

  “Oh, Charley,” she said, wearing a fuchsia robe and lime green slippers. My pupils constricted in horror. “Mr. Swopes was looking for you.”

  “Call me Garrett,” he said to Cookie.

  She smiled bashfully. Darn it. Uncle Bob had better get a move on.

  Then Garrett turned to me. “Charles. Late night?”

  “What the fuck, Swopes?” I still sounded like I had a head cold. “Do you know how rude it is to knock on someone’s door at —” I had no idea what time it was. “— early in the morning?”

  “I thought that was your favorite pastime.” He wore a heavy tan jacket and had a backpack thrown over his shoulder.

  Reyes walked up behind me in a pair of long pajama bottoms, his hair mussed, his jaw shadowed, his lashes tangled. Tangled! Freaking men. Sexy just didn’t get any sexier. Cookie sucked in a soft breath when she saw him. Garrett stiffened.

  “It is,” I continued, rubbing my left eye with a fist, “but I’m privileged. You have no excuse.”

  “Can I sever his spine?” Reyes asked. He put his arms on the doorjambs on either side of me and stepped forward until his body molded to mine.

  Garrett straightened further, accepting the challenge. They were almost the same height, same build, same blinding good looks. I had such a hard life.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said under my breath. I looked up and chastised Reyes with my infamous death stare, then led Garrett to my apartment, opened the door, and shoved him inside. “Wait here,” I said, adding a warning edge to my voice before going back for my clothes. “Sorry he woke you, Cook.”

  “Can I make some coffee?” she asked, the hope in her voice so endearing, I couldn’t possibly refuse her. “Sure. Though I think Swopes is more of a beer guy.”

  “Coffee’s fine,” he said from inside my abode.

  I grinned at her. “Coffee it is.”

  Garrett called out again. “And bring your boyfriend with you.”

  After tearing her eyes off Reyes, Cookie headed into my apartment while I herded the son of evil back into his and hurried to find my clothes. How my socks ended up in the kitchen sink was beyond me, but I found everything else with relative ease and began getting dressed in the stylish contemporary bathroom. My bathroom was contemporary, too. Or it would be if we were living in the late seventies.

  Reyes stood with his arms crossed, leaning against the doorframe, watching me with a particular interest as I jumped to get my pants up faster. “I didn’t realize you two were so close,” he said.

  The sensation radiating off him raked over me, left tiny slits in my skin as though someone had thrown a box of razor blades at me. I sucked air in through my teeth, suddenly understanding what he went through earlier at the bar. This was jealousy.

  No, I’d felt jealousy. This was jealousy from a supernatural being. From Reyes Farrow.

  “Yes, you did,” I said, playing it off. “And we aren’t close. We’re colleagues. Kind of. Have you seen my other boot?”

  He gestured toward the receiver under his flat screen, where one leather boot sat perilously close to toppling off.

  “Oh, thanks. So, are you going over?” I asked him.

  He shrugged an indifferent affirmation.

  “Thinking about getting dressed anytime soon?”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, waggin
g an index finger.

  “What?” he asked, all innocence and myrrh. He knew exactly what I was referring to.

  “You put on a shirt or you stay home. You’ll give that poor woman a heart attack.” Cookie would have enough to deal with having both Garrett and Reyes in the same room together. If one of them were shirtless… I shuddered to think.

  He grinned and went to his closet, looking just as good going as coming.

  By the time we got there, the coffee was brewed and Cookie had brought over a basket of muffins. Muffins! She was such a great hostess. I only brought an open pack of gum with pocket lint on it. Both Reyes and I had to navigate around the throngs of departed women. Our actions had to look odd to the two nonsupernatural beings in the room, but they didn’t say anything.

  We sat in my living room, Reyes and I on Sophie and Garrett and Cookie on lesser chairs who were apparently unworthy of names. The guilt of my negligence tried to get a foothold. I didn’t let it, assuring it that I’d just been busy. The chairs would get names first chance I got.

  Garrett busied himself by taking books and materials out of the backpack he was carrying. From the looks of things, I was about to get some answers. Sweeeeet.

  “Do you want to take off your jacket?” I asked him.

  “No, I’m good. I just wanted to explain a few things, what’s been happening and what I’ve figured out.”

  “Sounds ominous,” I said, settling deeper into the sofa. Reyes threw a possessive arm across the back, almost touching my shoulders.

  Cookie noticed, her expression full of longing before she caught herself.

  Garrett’s gaze darted toward the movement as well, then back at me. “You have no idea how ominous. But first, you might want to know something about how I got started in the bond enforcement business.”

  Not the direction I thought the conversation would take, but okay. “You were in the military.”

  He took a stack of notes and sat back. “Right, and that training definitely comes in handy. But you know how I told you my dad was an engineer working in Colombia?”

  “Yes,” Cookie said, chiming in. “He was kidnapped and you never heard from him again.”

  “Exactly. What I didn’t tell you is why I’m so good at my job. I have a talent for reading people. I see the world through a different lens than most.”

  Sounded legit.

  “My father was the first person in my family to go to college, to really do something with his life. But his ancestors were a little less academically inclined. Basically, I come from a very long and very well established line of con artists.”

  “Con artists,” I said in disbelief. “Like real con artists?”

  “Yep. Grifters of every size, shape, and color. And that’s probably why it took me so long to believe in what you could do. In who you are. We don’t harbor an overabundance of trust, especially when we use the same tactics for a con. We know every trick in the book.”

  “Wait, for real?” Cookie asked, still trying to wrap her head about it.

  I was right there with her. “Like genuine con artists?”

  “All the way back to a great-great-grandfather of questionable morals who claimed to be a Romani prince and an enslaved grandmother who used voodoo to raise the dead.”

  “Wow,” Cookie said, “that’s so cool.”

  “Yeah. My dad put himself through college by setting up cons and selling moonshine. He was a pretty famous moonshiner, actually.”

  “My dad’s pretty famous, too.” We all turned to stare at Reyes.

  “Wait,” Cookie said, recovering first, “could your grandmother really raise the dead?”

  “No, hon. Thus the term con artist.”

  “Oh, right. But that does explain why you didn’t believe Charley for so long.”

  Garrett continued. “Exactly. Even after I saw cold, hard evidence, it took a bit of convincing.” He raised the notes he had in his hands. “And what if this whole thing, everything that happened when I died, the story, the setup, the trip to hell and back, what if it was all just an elaborate con? Smoke and mirrors to get me to do Lucifer’s bidding? I’m kind of like you, Charles. I can tell when someone is lying, and Lucifer was lying to me about how Reyes is going to destroy the world.”

  Finally! Someone with some common sense.

  “How do you know?” Cookie asked.

  “Because he spent a lot of time, too much time, trying to convince me of that, of how bad Rey’aziel is, of how he is going to kill you, Charles, everyone —” He seemed to fight for the right words. “— everyone… close to me, then destroy the world in a fit of rage.”

  “And you think he was lying?” I asked.

  “I know he was. He creates a way out of hell, a portal like you named Rey’aziel, then sends him away? Why would Lucifer send the portal, his only way out of hell, to Earth to get you? There has to be a pretty fucking good reason to risk his only way out of that hellhole he lives in. But Junior’s been bad.” He shook his head at Reyes. Reyes ignored him. “And so now, instead of fixing the problem, Roger Ramjet has increased it sevenfold. And Daddy’s thinking, ‘Well, shit.’ ” He glanced at me. “Let’s just say he’s really upset about the whole ‘Reyes was born on Earth to be with you’ thing.”

  “You know about that?” I asked.

  “I know about everything. Lucifer supposedly sent Reyes to get you, to take you back to hell with him so he would have a key into heaven, but Romeo changed his mind and decided to stay on this plane to be with you? To be with the very being he was sent to bring back? Why would he wait an eternity for you, risk so much by sending his only escape route onto this plane, to then turn around and send his army to try to kill you?”

  I shrugged. None of it had ever made any sense to me, but who was I to judge? My plans often went awry. Much like my thoughts. Hold the phones. Maybe Satan had ADD, too. It would explain a lot.

  “Think about it,” Garrett continued.

  I was. How could I not?

  “They’ve been trying to kill both of you since you were born. Earl Walker was supposed to kill you, Reyes, but he became obsessed instead. Some pedophile was supposed to kill you, Charles, but Reyes saved you. Again and again. A bond, an otherworldly connection, was formed before you were even born, and it’s strong. It’s kept both of you alive. If that connection is ever severed, you’ll each be much more vulnerable. And I think that’s what they wanted. To sever that connection. To keep you apart until one of you could be killed. But they’ve failed time and time again.”

  He was right in at least one aspect: Reyes and I were supposed to grow up together, but he was kidnapped and everything that he’d planned went up in flames.

  “Why else would he send hundreds of thousands of his troops to their deaths just to try to navigate the void of oblivion? God made it very difficult to get out of hell. There’s a void, like a moat around a castle, and it’s almost impossible to navigate. That’s why he created Reyes. He is a key, a map through the void. And he wanted to make sure at least one being made it onto this plane who could send you to your grave.”

  I crossed my arms. He had me on some points, but lost me on others. He didn’t send Reyes to kill me but to get a portal. Any portal.

  Garrett scrutinized the notes, deep in thought. “But then that pesky connection crept in. It’s kept you alive decades longer than most reapers.”

  “Hey,” I protested, suddenly offended. “I’m not that old. I’m twenty-seven. Holy cow.”

  “But most reapers die young, right? Because most reapers don’t have a lovesick supernatural assassin guarding their asses.”

  Reyes had told me that very thing. Most reapers’ physical bodies pass young and then they do their duty for hundreds of years incorporeally.

  “But this still begs the question, why would he want you dead, Reyes? You? The only being in existence that could navigate the void? Because you’re going to destroy the world? That’s what’s been keeping him up at nights? He cares that much
about humans?” Garrett scoffed. “He cares nothing about us. We’re points in a game, and Earth is the ultimate playing field, but the only one keeping score is him.”

  Cookie’s brows drew together in concentration as she absorbed Garrett’s story.

  “And he wants a portal to heaven?” he continued. “Why? So he can get his ass handed to him on a silver platter? Again? Why would he want back in there? What’s that old saying? It’s better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven? And he’s the ultimate ruler with hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of beings to serve him. To worship at his feet.”

  “So if getting ahold of the portal, aka me,” I said, indicating myself with a sweep of my hand, “isn’t not his motivation, then what is?”

  “Fear.”

  “Fear?”

  “Think about it. He created a son to do his dirty work, and like any pigheaded teenager, the son rebelled. Refused to do his father’s bidding. It was never about a war. It was never about Lucifer getting back into heaven. It’s about something else, something that only he would fear.”

  I was sitting on the edge of my seat, chewing on my nails. I totally should have made popcorn. “Okay, so what? What’s he so scared of?”

  Garrett pressed his mouth together, then said softly, “You.”

  I straightened. “Wh-what? Why would he be afraid of me?”

  “No idea, but I have to tell you, I’m more than a little impressed.”

  “Me, too. I rock,” I said, pretending to go along with it. He’d lost it. He’d gone over the edge of a waterfall and landed on a sharp, pointy boulder.

  Before I could give him my professional opinion of his mental state, he pinned Reyes with a stormy gaze. “You weren’t sent to get her, to bring her back, were you?” When Reyes didn’t answer, he continued. “You were sent to kill her, just in case all the elements that seem to work naturally against a reaper fail. Just in case she lived through all the evil beings on Earth who were attracted to her light, who were drawn to her essence. You were insurance, sent to make sure she was put in the ground before she had a chance to breathe.” He leaned forward, spoke directly to Reyes. “You were created to assassinate her. She would still have been the reaper. She just wouldn’t have had a life as a human. So for some reason, it is Charley in human form that is a threat to him. And you exist for one reason and one reason only. To kill the only being in the universe who was prophesied to bring Daddy down.”