Eighth Grave After Dark

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 gone 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.”

His grin reappeared in full force. “Somehow I don’t think, even if you’d been born in the 1800s, you would’ve become a nun.”

He had a point. I shooed him out and turned to the mirror to freshen my makeup, but as the steam cleared out of the room, I saw something unexpected. Names carved into the walls behind me.

Horrified, I looked up as though I could see into the attic. “Rocket!” I shouted, stomping my bare foot.

He appeared instantly. Rocket had died sometime in the 1950s. He was big, over six feet, and cuddly. He always reminded me of a giant bear I’d had as a child.

“What are you doing? I told you, you can’t write the names on the walls anywhere but in the attic.” Reyes and I had added extra Sheetrock up there so Rocket didn’t damage the original structure.

“But, Miss Charlotte, I’m running out of room up there.”

“Well, you’re just going to have to go over the names that you already have. Think layers. Like you did at the asylum.”

“Fine, Miss Charlotte, but I’m going to scratch through the paper. Nurse Hobbs doesn’t like it when I do that.”

Nurse Hobbs must have been a nurse at the asylum where Rocket had grown up. From what I could gather over the years, which wasn’t much, Rocket had been committed to an asylum when he was very young. He’d probably had his gift even when he was alive. He knew the names of every human ever to exist who’d passed away, and he made it his personal goal to document them all. I couldn’t imagine what his parents must have thought when he was a kid as he wrote name after name of those who’d passed on anything he could find. Back then, having him institutionalized would have been the norm.

I grinned at his analogy. Anyone who thought of walls as paper needed to get out more. “We’ll get new paper. It’s okay.”

Rocket had moved in shortly after we did. He’d had something to tell me one day that was apparently of vital importance. It involved a kitten that had wandered onto the property and got stuck in the asylum. It had likely been abandoned by its mother and Blue, his five-year-old sister whom I rarely saw, was very worried about it. So part of Cookie’s job for a couple of days was to go search for the kitten at the asylum and bring it to the convent, because by then Rocket had moved in. He said Blue had moved in, too, but I had yet to see her here. Of course, in all the years I’d been going to visit Rocket in the asylum, I’d seen her only three times. She was painfully shy. But I also knew that where Rocket went, Blue was sure to follow.