She glanced toward the door, then said, “Jonny’s my ex.”
“You were married?”
“Don’t act so surprised.”
“No, I’m not. It’s just—”
“You think I can’t land a man?”
“Kit, that has nothing to do with that. You’re just so all-business. I’m a little surprised you took the time.”
“Well, I’ve been married.”
“And to a Fed, no less. Aren’t there rules against fraternizing with the help?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Kind of. Not really. It depends, but yes, he’s a Fed.”
I sat taken aback.
“I like to call him my FedEx.” A tiny smile broke through her severe expression. “He hates that shit.”
“Too bad he didn’t take your name.”
She groaned. “I know, I know. His name would have been Jonny Carson. I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t go for that.”
“Did you ever go by Waters?”
That rankled her feathers. “No, I’d already been established in the bureau, so I kept my name.”
“Maybe that was the problem.” I raised my brows, chastising her with them. They were quite unsettling at the right angle. “Maybe you weren’t totally committed to the marriage.”
Her jaw dropped. “You’re going to give me marital advice? You’ve been married, what? Eight minutes?”
I gasped. “More like eight months.”
“And have you taken his name?”
I cringed, glanced over my shoulder at my totally understanding husband, then said, “We were pressed for time.”
“Ah, yes.” She nodded, taking in the surroundings. “You had to drop everything and get to the ‘safe house.’” She added air quotes.
“Exactly.”
“Are you going to tell me why you’re out here?”
I pulled my lower lip in through my teeth. “You don’t want to know.”
She leaned closer. “What if I did want to know? Would you tell me?”
An uneasy smile spread across my face. “Probably not. Some things are better left unknown. I’m just so floored you were married,” I said, expertly changing the subject. “There’s so much about your life I don’t know.”
“Look who’s talking. The woman who solves crimes using almost supernatural methods and yet won’t tell me anything about how she does it.”
I checked my watchless wrist. “Well, would you look at the time.”
“Charley.”
“We have a wedding to get ready for, right, Cook?”
Cookie nodded her frazzled head as I shoved Kit past Reyes and toward the front door. I opened it and saw two vans parked in the driveway. One from the caterers. One from the florist. And Jonny was standing on the porch, one hand holding a bottle of water, the other stuffed into a pocket. He straightened when we walked out.
I still couldn’t believe it. Kit had been married. I also couldn’t miss the spike of emotion that leapt inside her when she saw him again. She was still in love with him. I wondered if I should tell her that he was still in love with her, too.
He turned to us as Kit addressed Cookie. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt your wedding preparations.”
Cook waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, please. We’ve been cooped up here for months, going a little crazier with each passing day.”
Before she could run in the opposite direction, I lunged forward and gave Kit another quick hug, but it was an excuse to whisper in her ear. “I’ll call you tonight and let you know if she’s alive.”
Kit nodded, deciding not to question in front of Jonny how I could possibly know that.
When I released her, I added, “I’ll do everything I can. I promise.”
“I know you will.”
Jonny didn’t seem quite so confident, but he did have the decency to apologize for his behavior. “I’m sorry I lost my temper.”
“Don’t give it a second thought. You’re upset. I understand upset.”
He nodded, probably relieved I wasn’t threatening to file a complaint against him.
After waving them off, we hurried back in and closed the door before God and all his creation saw us in our robes.
Reyes walked up to us, and Cookie, suddenly self-conscious, tried to smooth down her hair. It was a bit like trying to tame a hurricane. He wrapped an arm around my waist and I leaned into him, reveled in his heat.
“Did you see him?”
When he finally tore his gaze off the door, he raised a brow in question.
“Mr. Wong. He’s here.”
The slight lifting of one corner of his mouth would suggest that he already knew.
“How long has he been here?”
“Since this morning. You didn’t feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“The shifting of energy.” He turned toward Mr. Wong, though we couldn’t see him from where we stood, as there was an adobe wall between us. “I just wonder what he’s doing here.”
“Me, too.”
“Me, three,” Cookie said, wringing her hands.
I took another look at her, and I couldn’t hold back any longer. I burst out giggling.
“What?” she asked, patting her hair. “I’m getting ready. What’s the big deal?”
I strode forward and gave her one of my larynx-crushing hugs. “You,” I said into her robe. “You are the big deal.”
“I think two of the three people standing here would argue with you on that,” she said, crushing my larynx back.
The door reopened. A frazzled Gemma tiptoed in and closed it behind her. My blond-haired sister was already sporting her wedding attire, a powder blue cocktail dress with matching ankle boots, only she’d added huge, dark sunglasses that didn’t make her look like an insect at all, and she’d gathered her bangs into a pointy ponytail. She’d always loved unicorns growing up, but this was taking it a bit far.
She stopped when she noticed us. “What are you doing?” she said in a hisslike whisper, and I could’ve sworn she slurred her words. “Cookie, you’re getting married in an hour and a half. What are you doing down here? In your robe? With your hair?” Horrified, she pointed at Cookie’s head. Then her demeanor changed. “Unless that’s how you’re wearing it, in which case, it’s so pretty. I love it. It looks really good on you.”
I laughed out loud and she slammed an index finger over her lips. “Shhhh,” she said, hushing me way longer than was necessary.
“Are you hungover?” I asked her softly, appalled. “How many drinks did you have?”
“I don’t know. I lost count at three. Or twelve. I’m just not certain.”
“What were you doing?” My astonishment knew no bounds. “Why would you drink that much when you knew we had a wedding the next day?”
“I was trying to keep up with Cookie.”
“Are you insane?”
She swayed back against the door and shushed me again.
“Cookie’s like a competitive connoisseur. The last guy who tried to outdrink her ended up in traction for a month.”
Cookie came to her own defense. “Only because a man named Jose Cuervo convinced him he could fly. Not my fault.”
But Gemma wasn’t listening. “What is up with your hair?”
“Gemma, she’s not wearing her hair like that.”
“Oh, thank God.” She placed a hand over her chest to still her racing heart. “I was worried. Okay, in, in, in.” She shooed us forward. “We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
I turned toward Reyes and raised a brow. “Some more than others,” I teased. He could go naked for all I cared, though I doubted Uncle Bob would appreciate that as much as us girls.
Reyes gave me a quick squeeze, then left us to it.
“Where’s Denise?” I asked. Not that I cared where my stepmother was, but I wanted to be prepared for her grand entrance. It always caused an unsettling sensation in my stomach.
“She’s out back, ordering the decorators around,” Gemma said.
r /> “Sweet. Keeps her out of my hair.”
With a chastising sigh, Gemma placed her manicured hands on her hips. “Charley, you have to promise me, for Cookie and Uncle Bob’s sake, you will be nice to Mom today.”
“What?” I asked, incredulous that she would even say such a thing. That she would trust me so little.
Her expression didn’t change. I caved. She was going to be one of those stern mothers all the kids on the playground talked about as though she were something to be feared.
“Okay, whatever. I’ll be nice. At least until the wedding’s over. But once the rings are on the fingers, it’s every evil stepmother for herself.”
Gemma rolled her eyes. “You guys need group therapy so bad.”
“Oh, hell no,” I assured her. “I’ve had more than enough of that woman over the last eight months.”
Denise had been coming out to the convent several times a week. Each time, she had another excuse. She noticed we were out of dish soap or she wanted to make sure I was okay. She was apparently a pediatrics nurse when she’d first met my dad, and that gave her another reason to invade my much-loved privacy. To bombard me with questions about how I felt, my blood pressure, was I taking the vitamins she brought, did I have any swelling? She had never, in my entire existence, paid so much attention to me. I’d learned long ago to be wary of any attention she tossed my way. Everything she did had an ulterior motive. Perhaps without my dad around to give her a sounding board for all things horrid and bizarre about Charley Davidson, she had no one else to turn to. But I was hardly a good alternative.
“She’s lonely, Charley.” Gemma’s expression turned sympathetic.
“Well, let her go be lonely at your house.”
“I work. I can’t very well have her hanging out at my office all day, scaring my clients away.”
“So she has to come here and scare all the dead people away instead? I have clients, too.”
“She’s hurting right now.”
“I know, I can feel it. The sadness. Every time she comes over, all I can think about is Dad, and it breaks my heart all over again. As long as she keeps coming over, I can’t heal.”
“Charley, maybe she needs to heal, too.”
“I’m sure she does. I just don’t care.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“You can’t be serious. After everything she’s put me through, you would still defend her?”
“Maybe she needs your forgiveness. She knows what she did was wrong.”
“What she did?” I asked, growing more annoyed by the second. “You say that as though there was only a single transgression. She did everything wrong, Gem.”
While Denise took to Gemma like a duck takes to à l’orange, she’d never quite bonded with me, if the menacing scowls and the constant digs were any indication. Any mother—step or otherwise—who tries to get her daughter committed to a psych ward because she’s a little different from the other kids at the park doesn’t deserve that daughter’s love. But I’d tried. For years, I’d tried to be more like Gemma so our stepmother would like me. I once studied for two days for a spelling test just so I could get an A on a paper that would sit next to Gemma’s on the refrigerator. I was so proud when I’d succeeded that I ran all the way from the bus stop to show it to her, and I fell on the way, but I made it home relatively unscathed. Denise took the paper with the bright red A on it out of my hands, gave it a quick glance, then sent me to my room without dinner for ripping my backpack when I fell.
That night, when I snuck out of my room to get a spoonful of peanut butter, I found the test wadded up in the trash. About three seconds later, I had an epiphany: There would be no winning her over. Denise despised me. Period. It’s hard when the only mother a girl has ever known despises her. To learn that at age seven was quite the blow to the ego. I took the test back to my room, smoothed it out the best I could, and pinned it to a corkboard where I kept pictures my dad had taken of my real mom while she was pregnant with me. Before she died giving birth to me. They served as a reminder. Anytime I tried to gain Denise’s approval, I looked at that crinkled A and rethought my objectives. The way I saw it, my acceptance of Denise’s indifference saved a lot of heartache for me and a lot of disappointment for her.
“And she knows that,” Gemma pleaded. “She knows she did everything wrong. What she doesn’t know is how to talk to you about it. How to apologize. You make it so difficult.”
“I make it difficult?” I asked, astonished.
“Charley,” Gemma said, using her clinical voice, soft and nonjudgmental, “until we talk about it, until we sit down and really delve deep into our pasts, none of this is going to be resolved.”
What Gemma so often forgot was that no matter how soft and nonjudgmental her voice was, I could feel the emotions raging beneath her calm exterior. We’d been having this same conversation for weeks. No, months. And I could feel her frustration. Now that Denise was open to the idea, Gemma wanted us to bond. To be besties and go shopping together.
I’d rather walk into a den of hellhounds.
“You mean if we don’t have a long heart-to-heart, issues that have gone unresolved for decades will continue to be unresolved?” I asked, feigning horror at the thought before lifting one shoulder in an apathetic shrug. “Works for me.” I turned and climbed the stairs, effectively ending the conversation.
I heard Gemma release a sad sigh.
3
CREMATION OF THE BODY IS FINAL.
—SIGN IN FUNERAL HOME
I decided to finish getting dressed in the bathroom while Cookie and Amber put on their final touches in the bedroom. Walking down the narrow hall, I felt the history of the place leach out of the walls. The wood slats creaked beneath my weight, and I could just imagine what it would have been like being a nun here two hundred years ago. Well, not a nun, but a person, interacting with the Native Americans, watching their children play, growing food in the gardens below. What a rewarding life they must have led. And they were brave, the women of the frontier, whether a nun, a native, or a homesteader.
Yet their lives must have been so hard, especially without cell reception. I balked at the challenge of having only one bathroom on the entire floor. Every room had a sink and mirror, but when you had to go, you had to go. Thankfully, Reyes had added central heat and cooling, but I feared him changing the tone of the place, its historical feel, so we hadn’t upgraded too much. We kept the rooms upstairs small and sparse, with stoves in each one. Even though they were no longer used, they still worked and could heat the tiny rooms quite nicely. We also kept the downstairs almost all original, patching the walls here and there and fixing the flooring. The former convent would make a great restaurant and B and B for the right owner, but it needed to be registered with the Historical Society to preserve its richness.
Another small renovation we did was add a working bathtub and separate shower in each of the two bathrooms, one upstairs and one down. Though not so fancy as George—that is, the stone shower in Reyes’s apartment—the bathrooms had really come along, compared to the originals. While they’d been updated back in the 1940s, plumbing had improved by leaps and bounds since then.
I knocked softly on the bathroom door and, receiving no answer, opened it. A burst of steam hit me in the face, and I could only pray the glitter wouldn’t melt off my face. Or melt my face off. Either way. I swiped at the steam and walked in on a half-naked slave demon as he was wrapping a towel at his waist.
“Osh,” I said, covering my eyes. “I knocked. What the hell?”
A wicked grin spread across his handsome face. I knew this only because my fingers were accidentally open. It wasn’t my fault I could see him in the almost-buff. While he looked nineteen, he was centuries old. Older than Reyes, actually. But somehow that knowledge didn’t make me feel less perverted every time I took in his slim, muscular form. Created a slave in hell—or a Daeva, as they were called—he had lived a hard life. I couldn’t imagine what he’d g
one through. To be a slave was one thing. To be in hell was one thing. But to be a slave in hell? The concept boggled my mind.
Why did they need slaves in hell anyway? What exactly did they do? The only inkling of their duties I had was that some of them were, for lack of a better phrase, pressed into service, forced to fight in the demon army. I first met Osh while he was trying to win souls in a card game. He’d won one from a client, which I wanted him to return. But that’s what he did. He supped on human souls. Fortunately, I’d convinced him to sup only on the souls of humans who did not deserve them, like murderers, drug dealers, child molesters, and lobbyists.
But that’s where I’d first learned that Osh, or Osh’ekiel as he was called down under, escaped from hell centuries before Reyes did. In fact, he was the only Daeva to escape from hell, and though Reyes didn’t trust him at first as much as I did, he’d grown to depend on him for Beep’s sake. The demon did seem to have Beep’s best interest at heart.
Reyes had once told me that the major difference between Osh in hell and Osh on earth was that his scars were not visible in his human form.
It made my heart ache for him. Normally. Not today, though.
Osh looked me up and down, a wolfish grin softening his youthful face. “I heard you. I was just getting kind of lonely. Figured I could use some company in here.”
After giving up the pretense of purity, I lowered my hand and rolled my eyes. “Please. Like you could handle this.” I hitched a thumb over my shoulder. “Scoot. I need to finish getting ready.”
“I need to shave,” he volleyed.
“You can shave in your room.”
“My room is the size of a broom closet.”
“So is mine. You didn’t have to move out here, you know. You could’ve stayed in your posh house in the city.” We’d secretly put him in a broom closet, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
“And leave you guys to fend off the hounds of hell without me? No way. But, yeah,” he said, giving his head a shake, “this place is weird.” Water droplets flew off his shoulder-length black hair and onto my face.
I pursed my lips as though that would faze him. “I agree. It’s a good thing I was never a nun in the 1800s.”