I leaned closer as the bailiff brought him a tiny white cup of water. “Yes. It’s me. Now cut this shit out.”
“But you … you’re—”
“I don’t get it. You’ve known me for years. You’ve never worshiped me before.”
“You’re … a god.”
I pushed the cup to his mouth and chuckled at the bailiff, dismissing Parker’s statement with a wave of my hand. “I think it’s his blood sugar. I solve one case for him, and suddenly I’m a god.” I added air quotes for effect.
The bailiff shot me another warning. With his brows. They were very expressive.
Parker slowly slid off the chair onto one knee, his head bowed again.
I lifted him back up. “Stop it,” I said, my voice more of a hiss than an actual whisper. “I mean it. Stop worshiping me. Jehovah is already pissed.”
“Okay,” the court reporter said. “An ambulance is on the way.”
I was beginning to think he really needed one. He was sweating and panting, and his red face was turning more of a fuchsia. I figured he was somewhere between a panic attack and a heart attack. Either way, the guy had to calm down.
I took his jaw into both of my hands and lifted his face to mine.
“Nick,” I said softly, soothingly, “be still.”
He calmed instantly. A cool warmth left my fingers and soaked into him, like a supernatural version of Icy Hot.
Whatever it was, it worked. His breaths slowed, and his face paled to leave red splotches along his cheeks.
“I think he’s okay,” I said to the others.
He just stared at me, unable to speak. When the ambulance arrived, they gave him oxygen and started an IV before wheeling him out. I followed until they loaded him in the van.
“I’m sorry, Nick,” I said as he watched me. “I just wanted info on your CI. We never found him.”
He took off the oxygen mask. “My wife is pregnant.”
That was fast.
I showed my palms. “I swear it’s not mine.”
“What do I call you?” He was serious.
“Charley. Charles. Chuck. Goddess Divine.”
He didn’t crack. I was losing my touch.
“I’m kidding about that last one. Parker, I’m just Charley.”
“You were never just Charley.”
Damn. What the hell did I show him?
“I—I had no idea.” He was shaking, and the ambulance guys really wanted to head out.
“Grant Guerin?”
“I don’t know.” He wasn’t lying. “But I can try to find him.”
I squeezed his hand before turning to jump out. “Thank you.”
“Nobody knows, do they?”
I turned back. “Knows?”
“What’s coming. Nobody knows.”
I scooted closer again as the EMT took Parker’s blood pressure. “What are you talking about? What’s coming?”
He’d been a million miles away. He blinked and focused on me again. “You.”
“Miss, we need to go.”
“Me? Parker, what do you mean?”
“Miss.” The guy was getting more impatient.
So was I. Left with little choice—aside from knocking the guy out with a defibrillator, which was probably bolted down—I slowed time. First, to buy more of it. And second, to shut the guy up.
His movements came to a complete stop in suspended animation. A roll of tape he’d dropped hung in midair, his hand just below it ready for the catch.
Parker didn’t notice. Nor did he notice the shadow pass by. I looked over my shoulder. An angel stood at the doors to the ambulance. It was the one that had been crouching on Misery. His massive wings blocked the sun as he looked in the van.
I ignored him. At least, I pretended to. As I spoke to Parker, I reached toward the ground, my palm facing the floor of the van.
“What do you mean?” I asked, just as I felt Artemis, my guardian Rottweiler, rise into my palm.
She paced around to my back, her teeth bared, her growls low as she watched the angel. Her sharp eyes would miss nothing, and I would have some sort of warning should the celestial being try anything. Though what he would try, I had no idea.
Parker’s eyes filled with moisture as he thought back. “You should warn them not to make you angry,” he said, his voice full of sadness. “They should never make you angry.”
“Who? Those guys?” I gestured toward the EMT.
“No. Everyone. All of them. Any of them.” He gave me a chastising frown. “You were a hungry, hungry hippo.”
Ugh. This was like talking to Rocket, a savant friend of mine who’d died in the fifties. He’d had electroshock therapy before he died. Had I done the same thing to Parker? Had I scrambled his brain?
“Parker, what did you see?”
“You.” He lifted a hand to my face. Parker wasn’t the tender, loving type, so it startled me. Time slipped, but only a little before I caught it again. “I saw you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You ate too much, and now your power is too great even for you, god eater.”
Had he somehow gained access to memories I’d lost? Or had he seen the future? No. That was impossible.
“I saw seven become one. The thirteenth. The most powerful. I saw you devour them all and become … become what you are. All for him.”
Artemis growled by my side, but when I turned back, the angel was still standing stock-still. His head bowed, he gazed at me from beneath thick lashes. His stunning face void of any expression. But time was screaming toward us. I could only hold it for so long.
“Parker, enough with the cryptic shit. What did you see?”
“Ice.” He smiled, then a soft laugh overtook him. “Ice. First hell, in your infinite anger, then everything else.”
“Hell? You saw hell freeze over? Like literally?”
But it was too late. Time had bounced back with a thunderous roar. Parker said something else, but the rebound of time drowned it out.
“In or out,” the EMT said, oblivious. “Now.”
“Fine.” I rose and stepped down from the van.
The angel was gone. Artemis followed me out, and I called to Parker just before they closed the door, “Grant Guerin!”
He nodded, then disappeared.
I could only wrap my head around three words: What, the, and fuck.
* * *
I called Cookie on the way to the pediatrician’s place where Mrs. Foster worked as an office manager.
“So, you know how you go into a situation expecting one thing and something else comes along and blindsides you? Something you never saw coming?”
Which is the definition of blindside. “I do, actually. What happened?”
I relayed what happened in tremendous detail, telling her how Parker began worshiping me in the middle of a cross-examination, how he knew I was a god, how he believed I’d somehow managed to get his wife preggers which, oddly enough, I had. It was a whole transfer of mystical healing elements when I’d kissed him, but I wasn’t about to go around claiming I could help couples get pregnant. I’d have to change the name of my business to Davidson Investigations and Fertilization Clinic. Then I gave Cookie time to absorb it all.
After a few minutes, she asked, “Charley, what the hell did you do to that poor man?”
“Fuck if I know.” I was just as lost as the next person. “He called me a god eater. He said he saw seven become one.”
Artemis had hitched a ride. She was sticking her head out the window. The closed window. My closed window. She may have been incorporeal to the rest of the world, but to me she weighed about a thousand pounds. And driving with her in my lap was like trying to steer in a full-body cast. This could not be safe.
“Well, let’s think about it. He saw seven become one. That makes perfect sense. You are the descendent of the seven original gods from your dimension, right? Once all the other gods merged down to one, you were all that was left. You were the thirteent
h.”
“Oh, right. I hadn’t thought of that. But I had nothing to do with their joining. Two gods merge to become one. To become stronger. And they just kept doing it until I was the only one left.”
“He called you a god eater?”
“Yes. What the hell is a god eater?”
“I don’t know. Sounds ominous.”
“I was going to say pretentious, but okay. Hey, I know. We should call Garrett. He’s our research and development guy. Maybe he’s come across something like this in his reading.”
When one looked at Garrett Swopes, research and development was so not the first thing that came to mind. He was more a combination of GI Joe and a Chippendales dancer. But he’d really gotten into the whole research gig. He could know something.
“I’ll get right on it.”
“You okay?”
“I will be just as soon as you figure out what’s going on with my husband.”
I loved it when Cookie called Ubie her husband. I was such a romantic. “You didn’t happen to come up with a reason for me to be visiting the office manager of a pediatrician’s practice, did you?”
“How much do you know about copiers?”
* * *
“Copiers?”
The young girl behind the desk took the tried-and-true attitude of sheer boredom and transformed it into an art form. She barely looked out of high school. Nobody mastered the epitome of boredom like a teenager. Sadly, as we aged, we lost the delicate intricacies of the skill set. It was rather like losing an ancient language or a potato soup recipe.
“Did you say copiers?” she asked again above the earsplitting screams of a surly toddler. I’d fought demons and malevolent gods and even Lucifer himself, and nothing terrified me more than an angry two-year-old.
“Yes. If I could just talk to your office manager—”
“We already have a copier.” She popped her gum and continued to stare.
I forced a smile. A plastic one I’d found on sale at a consignment store a few weeks back. “Yes, but you’ve never tried the Eureka Mighty Mite.”
“That’s a vacuum cleaner.”
“Or the CLS550.”
“That’s a Mercedes.”
Holy shit, she was good.
“Look, is the office manager in or not?”
After drawing in a long, deep breath that sucked most of the oxygen out of the room, she called out, “Eve!”
I froze in anticipation as Mrs. Foster, a.k.a. Reyes’s abductor, walked around a corner. Reyes had been right when we talked about them a few weeks ago. While Shawn Foster had light coloring to the extreme, Mrs. Foster had dark hair and eyes. She looked in her early fifties, her short hair curled and styled to perfection. Her crisp business suit and thick-heeled pumps perfectly matched. She looked about as much like a child abductor as I looked like, well, the grim reaper. But the moment her gaze landed on me, her emotions rocketed into overdrive.
She stopped short and stared a long moment before catching herself. “Can I help you?” she asked, walking forward.
Did she know who I was as well? Shawn Foster, her would-be son, had busted me casing their house. Had she done the same?
“Hi,” I said, offering her the same plastic smile I’d flashed her colleague. Thank goodness it was BPA-free. “I was wondering how happy you are with your copier.”
I tried to register the emotions bombarding her nervous system, but they were all over the place. Surprise. Dread. Suspicion. Distrust. But mostly extreme interest sprinkled with a healthy dose of fear. So, mostly negative.
“Salespeople aren’t supposed to come to the front desk during business hours. What was your name again?”
I held out my hand. “Buffy. Buffy Summers-s-s-sault.” I seriously had to quit watching Joss Whedon reruns.
“And you work for?”
“Malcolm Reynolds? Maybe you’ve heard of him? He owns Serenity Office Supply?”
Holy crap on a crack pipe, I was usually better at this. It was her reaction to me. She either knew who I was or … or what? Knew what I was? But how could she? Shawn could see my light. Could she as well? Was it a family thing? But he wasn’t even her biological son. I didn’t get it.
Or maybe she knew Shawn had hired me, which would make a lot more sense. I’d have to warn him.
“Okay, well, I think we’re pretty happy with our copier. Do you have a card, though? Just in case?”
“Yes.” I nodded to emphasize the fact that, indeed, I most definitely had a card. Just not on me. “Yes, I do. In my car.”
“How about a brochure?”
“Yep.” I nodded again. “In my car as well. I seemed to have forgotten everything.” I knocked on my head to make sure it was still attached. “Still there,” I said with a nervous laugh.
The entire time we spoke, the receptionist’s jaw dropped in increments until her mouth hung open at an odd angle. Add a little drool dripping down one side of her chin, and I was right there with her. Idiot. Of the blithering sort.
“You know what? I’ll go get our extra-special promo pack with all my information and be right back.”
Mrs. Foster inclined her head as though agreeing that might be best, but she reminded me of a duck. Or that saying about a duck where it’s just chilling on the surface, all calm and collected, but underneath the water it’s paddling its little webbed feet like crazy. She looked cool on the outside, but her insides were churning like a gathering storm.
I took off before I could do any more damage. So much for stealth. I only hoped she wouldn’t connect any of the dots. Shawn had come to me, after all. Unless he told her of his pursuit, she couldn’t know. I crossed my fingers just in case the act really did have some magical ability to bring one luck.
The look on my husband’s face when I stepped off the elevator, however, would suggest otherwise.
6
A lot of people are only alive because I shed too much hair to ever get away with murder.
—MEME
I stepped off the elevator into the parking garage and stopped short as I spotted my husband leaning against a concrete column about fifty feet from me. But he graced me with only a quick glance. I could feel his anger from where I stood. I’d been having problems lately deciphering his emotions, he was so tightly wound, but there was no mistaking the quiet rage pulsing around him.
He was angry about my investigation. Well, he’d just have to get over it. I raised my chin and started toward Misery. That’s when I noticed what he was glaring at, and my apprehension eased. A bit. He stood between me and an angel.
I considered walking over to him, but he shook his head and said softly, “Go.”
He didn’t need to tell me twice.
I hoofed it to my bright red Jeep, but when I got in, I propped my head against the steering wheel and just sat there. What the hell just happened in that doctor’s office? I was normally so cool under pressure. Buffy Summersault? If I’d just risked the safety of one of my clients, I’d never forgive myself. Shawn had come to me in the strictest of confidences. It didn’t get much more delicate than investigating your own parents for child abduction. What would they do if they found out he knew?
When I looked back at Reyes, he’d shifted his attention from the angel and onto Mrs. Foster. She rushed out of a side door and hurried to a gold Prius, her movements harried, her expression lined with worry.
“And just where might you be going?” I asked no one in particular.
I turned the key, but the moment I threw Misery into drive to follow the nice kidnapper, a knock sounded on my window. My heart jumped into my throat. I turned to see the receptionist motioning me to roll the window down.
“Hey.” I couldn’t help but notice the stiff line of her mouth.
“You upset Eve,” she said.
“Yeah.” I watched as the taillights of the Prius disappeared around a corner. “Sorry about that.”
“You don’t really sell copiers, do you?”
“Sure I do. I ha
ve a card right—”
I looked around Misery, ignoring the smirk my thirteen-year-old investigator sent me from the passenger’s side. Artemis bounced up in the backseat when Angel popped in, whining in excitement, her stubby tail wagging at the speed of light.
I understood. That was often my reaction when Reyes appeared.
Angel reached back and rubbed her ears, before nodding toward the actual angel loitering in the dark garage, and asking, “What’s with all the angels?”
“Oh,” the receptionist said. “Okay. Sorry.” She started to turn. I was clearly about to lose a lead. Her demeanor was one of concern and apprehension, not triumph for having busted me for fraud.
“Okay,” I said, stopping her. “I don’t sell copiers.” I let it go there. If she had something to say, she would. If not …
She faced me again.
“She’s hot,” Angel said.
“Then what were you doing here?”
“I was just getting a feel for the place. You know, should I ever need a pediatrician.” I bowed my head and tried to ignore the fact that I would’ve been in need of one had I been able to keep my daughter. But she was safe. That was my mantra. Beep was safe. Safer than she would be around me.
“You’ll get her back,” Angel said.
I had one hand on the gearshift. He covered it with his. I turned mine up and laced our fingers together.
“You know, we could make out and she would never know.”
I rolled my eyes, then held up an index finger to the receptionist. “Excuse me.” I took my hand back and picked up my phone so I could pretend to talk on it, but first I had to set up my pretend conversation. “Hello? Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”
“Are you going to do this all day?” Angel asked.
I cast him my evilest grin. And continued. “Seriously? No way. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”
Angel laughed, then slowly leaned forward like he was going to kiss me. The little shit.
“You do realize my husband is not fifty feet away.”
And he was now watching us from beneath hooded lids.
Angel snorted and moved in even closer. “I’m not afraid of your husband.” When Reyes’s arm snaked around his neck and he pulled Angel back against his chest as he materialized, locking him in an inescapable chokehold, Angel added through a strained larynx, “Much. I’m not afraid of him much.”