The Dirt on Ninth Grave

  “So you’ve come to kill her?” he asked Michael.

  The air pushed out of my lungs as if I’d been punched.

  “It cannot be helped.”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “Get off this plane now, and I’ll let you live.”

  But we weren’t on a plane. I glanced around just to make sure. Nope. No plane.

  “I have been sent, Rey’aziel.”

  “Then you have been sent to your death.”

  “I would’ve thought after the nick I gave you last time —”

  “Funny. Most of the blood on my shirt was yours.”

  Michael rolled his eyes. Did angels really do that? “We could be at this all day.”

  “What does He want, exactly?”

  “The Val-Eeth to do her job. It is why He allowed her onto this plane in the first place. To stop the fallen one.”

  Reyes tilted his head. “And here I thought He allowed it so she could be the portal. His portal.”

  He lifted a shoulder. “That, too. But, as it were, there is a loophole in the original agreement with your father.”

  “Ah. So killing two birds with one stone.”

  He didn’t disagree. “But, alas, it would seem two gods is one god too many.” He gave him a chastising scowl. “Five is an invasion.”

  Reyes took another step closer to me. “We know about the three gods of Uzan. You’re strong, Michael, but you’re not that strong. I’ve seen how they fight. And, you know, there is the matter of them being gods. You’re going to need our help. We can get all three of them off this plane for good.”

  He stilled, his lids narrowing. “You can get them off? All three gods of Uzan?”

  “Yes.”

  He thought a moment, let his piercing vision rake over Reyes. “And you’re going to cast them out?” He sounded thoroughly unconvinced.

  “You of all angelic asshats should know what I’m capable of.”

  Michael lifted his sword, slowly, nonthreateningly, and placed the tip at my throat. He raised my chin with the cool blade. Studied me. Judged me. “Will that be before or after she collapses the universe with her temper?”

  The dark smoke that cascaded over Reyes’s shoulders and pooled at his feet materialized into a black robe. He pulled a sword from underneath it and did the same thing, lifted his sword until his blade rested across the angel’s throat. “It will be sometime before she collapses the universe with her temper and after I collapse your lungs with my blade.”

  Unmoved, the angel shot him a sideways glance. “He’ll come after you if you fail. Personally.”

  “I doubt that.”

  The angel lowered his sword, but Reyes held his steady. He clearly had trust issues. “I have your word?” the angel asked. “You will cast out all three gods from this plane?”

  “You have my word.”

  “No matter the cost?”

  “No matter the cost.”

  I suddenly got the feeling Reyes was being played. The barest hint of a smirk lifted one corner of Michael’s mouth. He was pleased with the bargain he’d just struck. A little too pleased, in fact, and I couldn’t help but wonder what Reyes had gotten himself into.

  Before Reyes could react, Michael raised his right fist and slid his wrist along the razor-sharp edge of Reyes’s blade. Then, as though self-mutilation were a sport, Reyes did the same. He dropped the hilt into the palm of his left hand and sliced his right wrist open on his sword.

  My hand shot up to cover my mouth. Blood gushed out of the deep opening and ran in rivulets over his forearm. They stepped toward each other and started to shake on it, but Michael paused, holding back for one last assurance.

  “Your word. All three gods of Uzan will be banished from this plane and will never, ever return.”

  Reyes knew something was going on. Had known from the first. I could feel the turmoil bubbling inside him. He lowered his head and watched Michael from underneath his dark lashes, his eyes glittering, his brows knitting in thought. After a moment of contemplation, he gave one quick nod.

  Michael grabbed his forearm close to the elbow before Reyes could change his mind. Reyes followed suit, and their mutilated wrists touched in what amounted to a blood oath.

  With an archangel.

  What were the odds?

  I felt the need to ask one burning question. “So there’s more than one god?”

  They didn’t answer. As soon as the deed was done, Michael took on an expression way too smug for the direness at hand. “The bargain has been struck, Rey’aziel. The blood exchanged. You cannot, for any reason, back out.”

  Reyes stepped closer to me. “I don’t plan to.”

  “I am well aware of this… uncommon sense of honor you’ve gained while here in His realm.” He sheathed his sword. “Just don’t forget where you came from.”

  Reyes didn’t take the bait. He watched and waited for the angelic asshat to leave.

  Michael turned to go, then stopped and said, “I just thought you should know, I couldn’t have killed her either way.”

  I felt Reyes still.

  “She dematerialized her human form. She fused it together with her celestial energies. Now, even her physical body is immortal. Only another god can end her life. Father was on his way to do just that, but now that we have an agreement…”

  Oddly enough, Reyes seemed more confused than upset. “You did it on purpose. Why? We would have agreed. It is to our advantage to cast out the gods. You didn’t have to threaten her.” He took a bold step, closing the distance between them. “Why?”

  “Some bargains are just too good to pass up.”

  An unsatisfied growl rumbled out of Reyes’s chest. Giving up for now, he said, “You need to fix this.”

  Michael admired the surroundings once again. “Clean up your own mess.”

  “For old time’s sake,” Reyes said.

  In an instant the world was back where it belonged. The windows stood fully intact. The coffee cups rested on their respective tables. People sat talking and laughing as though their cook hadn’t just sealed a blood pact with an archangel to cast gods out of their world.

  I glanced around for Reyes, then looked through the pass-out window. He was behind the grill, cooking, as if nothing had happened. My mouth formed a perfect O. Had I just hallucinated everything?

  When Reyes glanced at me from underneath his lashes before reaching up to the spice rack, I knew that it had all been real. A huge gash ran the length of his arm. I hadn’t imagined anything. I inched backwards to the front doors as what I’d done came rushing back.

  I’d gotten angry and risked the lives of my best friends? I was some sort of time bomb that would eventually collapse the universe? God – the God – wanted me dead? What kind of monster was I? Reyes stopped what he was doing. Gauged my emotions. Saw the fear in my eyes. Just as he started after me, I burst out the door and took off.

  I thought of nothing but running. Nothing but getting away from people before I hurt someone. The otherworld raged around me as I ran. Its wind blistered my skin and scorched my lungs. I shook out of it and fought to stay in the tangible world, where it had just started to snow.

  I kept running, my legs pushing forward as though they had an unlimited source of energy. The last time I tried to run, I got half a block and almost keeled over.

  This was not me. This was the being Michael wanted dead. The one God wanted off His planet.

  Slowing to a stop, I fell to my knees and panted. My breaths made puffs of white fog in the air, and my jeans were wet from the snow.

  Then the wind scorched me again. I looked down at my arms. At my hands. Blisters started to bubble on my skin. The wind began to peel it off my muscle. I let out a quick scream and scrambled back. I forced myself to snap out of it, to find the snow again, the snow and the freezing wind that I’d complained about for weeks. But something dive-bombed me, and I couldn’t tell from which world it came. It happened again, and I huddled on the ground. Was it a bird?
A spiritual being?

  I squinted and focused on the sparrow trying to protect its nest. I seemed to be teetering on the razor’s edge between two worlds, unable to get a foothold in either.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and flinched.

  “Janey,” a male voice said. “What’s going on? Did you take something?”

  Ian. It was Ian.

  “I need to go home,” I said, near panic.

  He stood and looked around. “How did you get up here?”

  “Where?” When I took in my surroundings, I realized we were on top of a mountain peak, looking down at the city. “I need to get back to town. I need to get home.” When he didn’t say anything, I asked, “Can you take me?”

  He helped me to his patrol car. “Are you working?” I asked him. He was in uniform.

  “Just got off. Hold on.”

  He went to his trunk, rummaged around, and came back with a bottle of water.

  “You’re dehydrated.”

  We started down the steep and curving roads, over the Hudson and toward Sleepy Hollow.

  “What were you doing up there?” he asked me for the tenth time.

  I was getting a better grip on the worlds around me, more able to keep one on one side and the other on the other. I just needed sleep. The edges of my vision blurred, and by the time we hit the highway, I was out.

  I awoke to cabinet doors banging and a cup breaking in my kitchen, but I was in my empty bathtub with all my clothes on and no memory of how I got there.

  “You don’t have a drop of alcohol,” Ian said as he stormed into the minuscule room. “What the hell?”

  “Ian, what are you doing?” I put my hands on either side of my head to try to stop the room from spinning. Or at least I tried to. They flopped past my face and fell to my lap. I had zero muscle control.

  I tried to look at Ian but couldn’t lift my head.

  “What were you doing up there?”

  “I went for a run. Ended up at the top of that mountain. Why? Do you own it?”

  My words were slurred, but he seemed to understand me okay.

  “I have… friends up there.”

  “You don’t have any friends.” I giggled, an embellishment he did not appreciate.

  “You’re just like all the other fucking bitches.”

  I might not have known a lot about my previous life, but I was pretty sure I didn’t like being called a bitch.

  “You’re all just teases and whores until you get what you want, then you’re on to the next sucker that you can stand to fuck long enough to get what you want.”

  “We never had sex,” I reminded him. He didn’t appreciate that either.

  He knelt beside me. “If I could knock the shit out of you, I would, and trust me when I say I’d enjoy it.”

  “I’m having trust issues today.”

  “This is where I made my mistake with Tamala. Nobody gets it right the first time, you know. They hesitate.” He made tiny marks on my skin, some shallow and a couple much deeper. “They chicken out. Then…” He sank the knife into my wrist.

  The pain cut through to my marrow. Blood dripped down the side of the tub and onto my pants. My head lolled back, and I hit the spigot.

  He grabbed a handful of my hair. “Be careful,” he said with a hiss. “Any other mark will cast doubt on a suicide ruling.”

  “Sorry,” I said. Whatever he’d given me made this entire situation seem a little funny. This would make the third time today someone, or something, had tried to kill me.

  I snorted as he worked on my other wrist. He made fewer marks on that one because he said once they make the first cut, their adrenaline is going and they’re better with the second one. So that was good to know for future reference.

  “My first one is up there,” he told me. “On the mountain. I go up there to talk to her sometimes.”

  “That’s so nice.”

  He finished slicing into my wrists and sank on the floor beside me. “Her name was Janet. I didn’t try to make hers look like suicide or anything, so I had to bury her. The constant weight of that, of someone finding her body and some stupid little mistake I made leading the investigators back to me… It puts a lot of stress on me.”

  When my head lolled back again, he pulled it forward. “Careful, damn it. I told you, any other mark will cast suspicion.”

  “Any mark?”

  “Any mark.”

  “Like this?” I asked and lifted my arm.

  The look of utter disbelief on his face when I showed him what I’d scratched into my skin made me burst out laughing. His mouth did a fish thing when he read, Ian was here, and I doubled over.

  Seriously, this day just got better and better.

  He grabbed a handful of my hair, twisted his fingers into it, then – in an act I felt was a bit much – slammed my face against the rim of the tub. My head bounced back, and a blindingly sharp pain shot through me. He did the face-slam thing a few more times. Eventually it stopped hurting, so there was that.

  “Not laughing anymore, are you, bitch?” he said into my ear. He wrenched my head back, and the irony of it all – that there would be a soulless man in a trench coat and fedora standing behind my captor and attempted murderer – struck me as hilarious.

  My shoulders shook, and I thought Ian was going to come unglued.

  He wrenched me closer until we were nose to blood-red nose and asked, “What?”

  I looked past him and tried to raise an index finger to show him, but before Ian could turn around, the man placed his hands on both sides of Ian’s head and twisted. Ian’s neck snapped with a loud crack. Then he went completely limp and fell to the side.

  The man grabbed a towel off my counter, tore it into strips, and wrapped them around my hemorrhaging wrists. “Can’t lose all of this,” he said with a flirty wink. “We’re going to need at least a couple of drops.” He frowned down at Ian. “I have to say, he was the easiest human to manipulate I’ve every encountered.”

  “He was a douche,” I said, trying not to giggle.

  “I agree.”

  He lifted me out of the tub and carried me to the place where he would kill me.

  No, really this time.

  22

  Every girl wants to be swept off her feet.

  It’s when you put her in the trunk that she starts to freak out.

  —INTERNET MEME

  “Thankfully, it takes a lot to kill you now,” he said to me as his driver took us through the streets of Sleepy Hollow in a black Rolls-Royce. “That Jeffries kid could have beaten you for days. Would not have made the slightest difference.”

  I was worried about getting blood on his seats, since it was gushing out of my nose and from a gash over my left eye, but he didn’t seem to mind at all.

  “You’re the nicest man who’s tried to kill me all day,” I told him.

  “Thank you.” He turned toward me. “I appreciate that. So many people, mostly humans, don’t understand what goes into preparing something like a political assassination or a mass suicide or a ritual sacrifice. It’s exhausting.”

  “I hear that.”

  “And then take somebody like you,” he said, waving a dismissive hand, “a god, no less. Talk about prep work. One word: years. That’s all I’m saying.”

  I gave him a horrified expression. That was dedication.

  “Oh, and I won’t even go into how horrible the record keeping was back in the 1400s.”

  “Dude, they didn’t even have computers.” I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know how they got anything done.”

  “Amen.”

  I was busy trying to spit hair out of my mouth when he started humming the Blue Öyster Cult song “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” I socked him in the arm. “Oh my God,” I said, floored. “You’re James.”

  He tipped an invisible hat, as he’d taken off the aforementioned fedora. “If you want to get technical, this human’s name was Earl James Walker. He was your husband’s… well, I don’t know what.
He raised him, if you want to call what he did raising. That guy was a crude piece of work. Anyway, just thought it would be a nice twist.”

  “I’m married?”

  “Oh, sweetheart, you really don’t remember, do you?”

  I shook my head, causing another rush of blood to ribbon over my eye.

  “Well, you won’t have to worry about that much longer.”

  That made me feel better. I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep. But I’d barely managed a few nonproductive Z’s when my eyes fluttered open again. I was tied to a rather comfy chair in the middle of a gigantic warehouse with a fire blazing behind me in a stove.

  My face had stopped bleeding, and James was wiping it with a warm towel.

  “I just want you to know this isn’t personal.”

  “Thanks, James.”

  There were several men working on this or that, all dressed casually in an array of light jackets and jeans, and a handful of departed stood sprinkled about, probably acting as lookouts.

  One of the departed was a man who’d come into the café quite often. He never spoke to anyone and never sat in my section. I took that as a sign that he wasn’t into small talk. The lanky man towered over most of the others and looked like he ate a lot of roughage when he was alive.

  James finished up, the towel that was once white now dark red, then went to supervise the unloading of a massive trunk.

  The departed man disappeared from his spot and reappeared next to me. He knelt beside me and used my body as a shield from James’s line of sight. “Charley,” he said in a soft whisper, “you have to snap out of it. This is the real deal, hon.”

  I was busy doing the head-bob thing, fighting the urge to drift off to sleep again. “Is that my name?” But he’d disappeared.

  James glanced over his shoulder, so I acted natural. Lolled my head back to check out the ceiling. Lolled it forward to examine my blood-encrusted nails.

  When he turned back to the box, Dead Guy appeared beside me again.

  I tried to focus on him. Did I really have an ally? “Can you… Can you get Reyes?” I asked. “Reyes has a sword.”

  “No,” he whispered sadly.

  “What? Why? You’re like the worst ally.”