Deal.
“So, where are you from?” Agent Carson asked Reyes. “Originally?”
I whirled around to face him again, this time pinning him with a warning glare. Carson was an FBI agent, but I was all about stealth. Surely she wouldn’t pick up on my silent threat.
He studied my mouth, not the least bit worried about my warning glare, then said at last, “Here and there.”
I relaxed against the seatback. He didn’t say hell. Thank God he didn’t say hell. It was always hard to explain to friends how, exactly, one’s fiancé was born and raised in the eternal flames of damnation. How his father was, in fact, public enemy number one. And how he’d escaped from hell and was born on earth as a human to be with his true love. As romantic as it all sounded, it was difficult to articulate without garnering a visit from men with butterfly nets.
“You been in Albuquerque long?” she asked him.
Now she was fishing. She knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was. He’d been something of a local celebrity when the state released him from prison for killing the man who’d raised him – raised being an insanely generous term. They’d really had no choice when said man showed up alive and well-ish. Reyes did have to sever his spine, but he was still living and breathing. Through a tube! That was the best part. Still, all the news reports about Reyes’s wrongful conviction were making him pretty popular. Not quite so popular as Heisenberg and Pinkman, but one could hope.
“As long as I can remember,” he said in answer to her question.
“He bought Dad’s bar and grill,” I told her, changing the subject.
“I heard that,” she said. She’d done her homework. She probably knew his shoe size and how he took his coffee.
Coffee.
I started drooling at the thought. It had been several hours since I last had a cup. I’d read a couple of days ago that caffeine was bad for little budding babies and had to psych myself up to quit. I was not going to make it. No way. Nohow. It just would not happen.
“So, you’re adjusting?” she asked Reyes, referring to his life on the outside.
“How about AC?” I asked her, changing the subject again. I’d felt Reyes tense with her prying questions, but she was honestly just curious. Surely he felt that as clearly as I did. Then again, we hadn’t had the greatest morning. Probably best not to push.
“What?” she asked.
“Your name. Special Agent Carson is rather impersonal, considering all that we’ve been through, don’t you think? And you’ve repeatedly thwarted my attempts to change your name to SAC.”
“You’re lucky I caught you. It’s a crime to change someone else’s name without their consent.”
“Details.” I waved a dismissive hand. “What I’m getting at —”
“Kit,” she said, interrupting me.
“Kit?” I asked, rather stunned.
“That’s my first name.”
“Your name is Kit Carson?”
She bit down, her jaw working hard, and said through gritted teeth, “Yes. Is there something wrong with that?”
“No. Not at all.” I rolled it over on my tongue. “I like it. Kit Carson. Why does that sound so familiar?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“So, I can call you Kit?”
“Only if you want to be arrested.”
“Oh.”
Her mouth softened. “Just kidding. Of course you can call me Kit. You can call me George if you want to. Anything as long as you stop calling me SAC.”
“I like George, too,” I said, “but I’ve already named Reyes’s shower George. I’m afraid it would get confusing if I ever asked Reyes something like, ‘Did you clean George’s knobs?’” I raised my brows at her. “You see where I’m going with that.”
A light blush crept over her face. “How about we stick with Kit.”
“Works for me.”
“Are you okay?” she asked, and I followed her line-of-sight to my hands.
I knew it. I looked like I was coming off crack. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. I just quit caffeine.”
She blinked in surprise several times before recovering. “Ah, well, that would explain the lack of coffee. It’s weird seeing you without a cup in your hand.”
“It feels weird.”
“So?”
I questioned her with a quirk of my brow.
“Are you going to explain? Why did you, of all people, quit caffeine?”
After a quick glance over my shoulder, I said, “We’re pregnant.”
Kit had a knee-jerk reaction to that bit of news. Like literally. Her knee jerked and hit the steering wheel, sending us careening into oncoming traffic. Or it would have if there’d been any traffic at that moment.
She corrected the wheel, took a deep breath, then said, “No way. For real? You? A mom?”
I gaped at her. “What the hell? I can be a mom. I’m going to make a great mom.”
“Oh,” she said, trying not to look so shocked. “No, you’re right. You’ll make a great mom. You’re going to take classes, though, yes? Learn what it takes?”
“Puh-lease. I so have this. I’m going to buy a goldfish. Try that on for a while. You know, start off small and work my way up to a kid.”
“You’re comparing raising a goldfish to raising a kid?”
“No.” I was getting defensive, even though her gut reaction had been spot on. I could think of no one less qualified to be a mother than moi. “I’m just saying, if I can keep a goldfish alive, surely I can keep a kid alive.”
She stifled a giggle behind a fake cough. That was original. “You do realize there’s more to raising a kid than just keeping it alive?”
“I do indeed,” I said, sounding way more confident than I felt. “Believe you me, I got this.”
“And once you work your way up to a kid, where’re you gonna get the kid? You know, to practice on?”
“I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I was focusing on the goldfish.”
“Ah. Good idea.” She said it, but she didn’t mean it. I could tell.
I turned to look at the trees as Jessica chimed in from the backseat. “That poor child. Having you as a mother? Talk about cruel and unusual.”
Reyes must have shot her another glare, because she shut up. Not sure why he bothered. Jessica was right. And though Agent Carson had been teasing, she still nailed it: I knew nothing about being a mother. The only example I’d ever had was that of a witch in wolf’s clothing, a stepmother who thought more of her begonias than she did of me.
Who was I kidding? This kid was in so much trouble.
A heaviness pressed into me. The same heaviness that had been pressing into me since I first learned of our little bun in the oven. The pregnancy was an accident, of course. We hadn’t been practicing safe sex by a long shot, but who’d have thought Reyes could get me pregnant? He was the son of Satan, for goodness’ sake. I’d just figured it an impossibility.
So, Satan was our daughter’s grandfather. Her father was literally created in hell. And her mother worked part-time as the grim reaper. We were the very definition of dysfunctional, and that was on a good day. I usually saw the gun clip half full, but this was just not a pristine situation. Nothing about her environment would be safe. I caused more trouble than gonorrhea.
My phone chimed. I glanced down at Reyes’s text.
Look at me.
I didn’t want to. He had to feel what I was feeling, and he probably felt sorry for me. Possibly even defensive. But both Kit and Jessica were right.
He sat waiting patiently for me to turn around. I swallowed back my self-doubt and turned to look over my shoulder.
To my surprise, his expression had hardened. He studied me with a crackling storm glittering in the depths of his irises. “Stop,” he said, his voice soft, dangerously soft – so soft, I had to strain to hear him. He reached out and ran a thumb across my lower lip. “Je bent de meest krachtige magere hein ooit en je zou je door meningen van anderen aan het wankelen laten b
rengen?”
Translation: “You are the most powerful grim reaper ever to exist, and you would let the opinions of others give you pause?”
Response: Apparently.
I raised my chin and tucked a brown lock behind my ear. He’d told me that a dozen times – the most powerful reaper bit – but none of them, not a single reaper who came before me, had ever gotten knocked up. We were breaking new ground here, and he would just have to deal with my insecurities. Normally, no, I would not let the opinions of others give me pause, but I was, after all, still human. At least in part. And being a mother was serious business.
The fact that he was speaking Dutch was not lost on me. It was what he called me: Dutch. What he’d called me from the day I was born. But I’d never heard him speak it, and the beautiful foreign language expressed in his deep, smooth voice felt like warm butterscotch in my mouth.
He lowered his lids and gazed at me, my reaction stirring him. He reached out with his heat, like tendrils of liquid fire, and it washed over me. Pooled in my abdomen. Settled between my legs. They parted involuntarily, as though to give him permission to enter. But now was certainly not the time.
“Stop,” I whispered back, echoing his command.
A dimple appeared at one corner of his mouth. “Maak mij.”
“Make me,” he’d said, the challenge glittering from between his lashes almost my undoing.
“This is it,” Kit said, either oblivious to our flirtations or choosing to ignore them.
Just as she pulled the car onto a dirt entrance to the campgrounds, my phone rang. It was Cookie.
I drew in a deep ration of cooling air as I answered, pretending my affianced was not trying to seduce me. I couldn’t take him anywhere. “Hey, Cook.”
Cookie Kowalski was not only my very best friend on planet Earth, but she was also my receptionist slash research assistant who was darned near becoming a fantastic skiptracer. And she was my neighbor to boot, who cooked a mean enchilada. Like, really mean. Like so hot under its corn tortilla collar that my taste buds tingled for days after eating them – aka, perfect.
“Hey, boss. How’s it going?” she asked.
Normally we had coffee every morning and discussed the day’s business, but I’d left so early, I didn’t get to explain that I couldn’t have coffee with her anymore. And I’d never get to have coffee with her again. The thought sent me into a deep, dark depression, the one where I curled into a ball and sang show tunes to myself. Then I remembered it was only for another eight months or so. Maybe I’d get lucky and the little bun in the oven would pop out a couple weeks early. I’d have to do jumping jacks and run a couple of triathlons when I reached the beached-whale stage. Hurry her along.
“I’m investigating a cold case with Agent Carson. What’s up?”
“Oh, sorry to bother, but your uncle called. He has a case for you.”
Kit pulled up to the main gate, turned off the SUV, and started riffling through her briefcase.
“No bother, but Uncle Bob can bite me. I’m not talking to him.” I was a tad irked at the moment with my uncle, a detective on the Albuquerque police force.
“Okay, but he has a case for you,” she said again, her voice singsong.
“Don’t care.”
“It’s right up your alley. There’s been a rash of suicide notes.”
“That’s not right up my alley. That’s, like, two blocks over from my alley.”
“It is when the people who supposedly wrote those notes are missing.”
I straightened. “Missing? Where’d they go?”
“Exactly,” she said, a satisfied smirk in her voice. “Right up your alley.”
Damn. She had me. I felt rather than saw Reyes smile from the backseat. “We’ll be back in a couple. Fill me in then.”
“You got it.”
We hung up as I took in the area. The sign that used to announce a visitor’s arrival to the Four Winds Summer Camp was now covered with boards that simply said CLOSED with a few NO TRESPASSING signs posted here and there for good measure.
I glanced at Kit. “I’m surprised they’ve kept the camp closed all this time.”
She shrugged. “Would you send your kid to a camp where a mass murder took place?”
“Good point.”
“And I guess it’s partly out of respect as well,” Kit continued. She gestured toward the metal gate. “We’ll have to hike it from here. The gate is padlocked and I don’t have a key.”
From our vantage, I still couldn’t see the outbuildings or lake, but I felt a gentle tug from just over the hill. There was certainly something there.
This was going to be tricky. Kit didn’t know anything about my abilities, for lack of a better term. And after my high school fiasco with Jessica, only several of my closests knew. Even with them, I’d kept it to myself as long as I possibly could. So, investigating a crime scene with her so near and nothing else to really distract her could prove sticky, as I tended to talk to dead people.
Hopefully, however, my plan would work. If Reyes was going to tag along, the least he could do was be a distraction. We got out of the SUV and I nodded toward him. He nodded back, albeit reluctantly, and we were officially on a Mission: Impossible episode. I so wanted to dart around humming the theme song, but I didn’t want to add to Kit’s already low opinion of me.
I closed my door and started the hike up the trail to the grounds. Reyes seemed to magically appear beside me, but he didn’t press the issue of my – gasp! – walking away without him. He was just going to have to deal. I needed him to direct Kit’s attention elsewhere if we came upon any departed. I could always use my cell phone, pretend to talk into it when I was actually speaking to a departed, but that got me only so far. Sometimes the situation demanded a more assertive approach. For example, I’d once had to put this guy who died in a convenience store robbery in a headlock. It was really awkward, since there had been several cops standing nearby. I barely escaped a padded cell with that one, but the guy told me what I needed to know, so it was totally worth it.
But for some reason, I didn’t want Kit to see anything like that. She was good people. I didn’t want her to think of me as a raving lunatic. It tended to put a damper on relationships.
We hiked through thick foliage and across overgrown brush to get to a clearing sprinkled with outbuildings and a small lake. The grounds before us, once a thriving summer camp for kids, were now a series of crumbling cabins and neglected vegetation.
“This didn’t happen on Friday the thirteenth, did it?” I asked, noticing a small wooden rowboat in the middle of the lake, completely empty. It rocked gently to and fro. This was way creepier than I’d thought it would be.
“No,” Kit said, walking up behind me.
I strolled to the sunlit clearing, stepping carefully around a patch of prickly pear, and watched as children, all girls, skipped rope, played hopscotch in the dirt, created Jacob’s ladders out of threadbare pieces of string, and fell back in the grass, giggling until their bellies hurt.
The scene reminded me of my childhood. Long before Jessica came around, I’d had a best friend like that. Her name was Ramona. She had skin the color of dark coffee and wore her frizzy hair in two braids that started behind her ears and ended before they touched her shoulders. They stuck straight out to the sides more often than not, and that is one of my most cherished memories. I thought the sun shone just for her. Her laughter warmed me to the deepest depths of my soul.
She was hit by a car while riding her bike to my house when we were seven, but we played together for years afterwards, until she figured I’d be okay if she left. When she crossed through me, I saw the true meaning of love, and I’ve never forgotten it. It wasn’t until I met my current BFF, Cookie Kowalski, that I realized that that kind of love could exist more than once in a lifetime. Philia. A deep, selfless friendship. A loyalty of epic proportions, in which one is willing to sacrifice anything for the other.
And looking at these girls,
who’d surely died under tragic circumstances, I saw that kind of love, that kind of closeness, no matter the horrid circumstances that brought them together. They played and skipped and laughed as though their lives were filled with cupcakes and cotton candy.
“It’s sad,” Agent Carson said, taking in the view before us. “Seeing it abandoned like this. Run-down. So utterly lifeless.”
“Explain to me again how many people were killed that night,” I said.
Reyes leaned against a tree and was watching the serene tableau with a gentle smile on his face. I’d forgotten how much he liked kids. Thought they were cool. He would make a fantastic dad. Maybe his longcomings could make up for my short ones once we entered into the sacred realm of parenthood.
“Five,” Kit said. “And one girl disappeared that night. We’ve never found her.”
I nodded. “Any suspects named Jason?”
She scoffed softly. “No, but there was a Mrs. Voorhees on our persons-of-interest list. She had seemed troubled.” Kit gazed at me a long moment as I watched a little girl, quite a bit younger than the rest, take a cautious step closer to us. She had startlingly white hair with a pixie cut that matched her doll-like face, and she wore a dress that fairly exploded in a cascade of powder blue ruffles. Not exactly the attire one wore to summer camp. But one of her most adorable qualities was her ears: They stuck out and curved up a little, and if I believed in elves, I’d swear she was one. Or perhaps she was a tree sprite.
“What?” Agent Carson asked at last, doubt and curiosity in her tone. “Why did you want to know how many were killed when you’ve been over that file with a fine-toothed comb?”
I knelt down, pretending to take a closer look at the ground, as though I were some kind of tracker. I coaxed the elfling closer with a smile. “Just double-checking,” I said, opening a hand out of Kit’s line of sight. Many more had died here than just those five victims. I scanned the grounds again as the elfling made up her mind. At least eight girls played in the field around us. Possibly nine.
The elfling gazed at me, her attention rapt as she took in the bright light that forever surrounded me. Only the departed and a few other supernatural beings could see it. I could not, however, but it was apparently nothing short of amazing.