Eighth Grave After Dark

“Please,” he said, giving me a light shove of dismissal. “I’m more scared of him than of you, but only on days that end in Y.”

“Wait, why are you scared of him? Did he threaten you?”

“No. He doesn’t have to. Have you seen his angry side? Not something I want to mess with.”

“Then clearly you haven’t seen mine.”

He scoffed. “Your angry side is like when Mrs. Cleaver burns the muffins.”

“That is so offensive. I’ve never made muffins in my life.”

“Whatever, chiquita. I ain’t spilling, so take your threats and—ow!”

I’d taken hold of his arm and sank my nails into his flesh. “What?” I asked, forcing him closer. “What was that?”

“You can torture me. It won’t help. I can’t tell you, but just know everything he’s doing is for you and your baby’s safety.”

I let go. “For Beep?”

“Yes,” he said, rubbing his arm.

“Just give me a hint, then. Angel, if she’s in danger—”

“If?” he asked, his voice incredulous. “Have you looked around? Of course, she’s in danger. You both are. I’m not sure why that hasn’t sunk in.”

“It’s sunk in. It’s completely sunken, but—”

“I ain’t talking. You’ll have to ask Rey’aziel.”

He disappeared before I had a chance to argue further. Damn it. I hated being left out of the loop. I loved loops. People didn’t understand that about me.

I heard a loud crash coming from the dining room slash study. While we had assigned a small room past the dining hall to be our office, the dining hall itself had become our study. Reyes, Osh, and Garrett Swopes spent a lot of time in there, scouring over the texts Garrett uncovered, trying to find out how to kill the Twelve. Osh insisted they couldn’t be killed. Only sent back to hell. So now they were trying to figure out how to do that as well. While it would be only a temporary fix, we would take what we could get.

I hurried there and came upon a very upset Garrett Swopes and a poor, innocent chair on which he’d taken out his frustration. He’d also knocked over a stack of notes, the same stack he’d been slaving over for weeks. He was funny when he was upset, so I almost didn’t intervene. But he saw me anyway and gave me his back, embarrassed.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

He was still in the nice button-down he’d worn under his jacket.

“I thought you had to leave early to work a skip for Javier.”

“I did, but they picked him up this morning.”

“Oh, well, that’s good.” I nodded toward the papers. “No luck?”

He shook his head. “None. There’s nothing in here about how to kill the Twelve.” He’d hired a doctor of linguistics to translate the texts, and although Dr. von Holstein didn’t get through all of them, he’d gone through a good amount. It was all quite fascinating. Much of what this guy named Cleosaurius wrote was about me, aka the Daughter of Light, and Beep, whom he referred to as the Daughter. He did say on one or two notations that she would be a melding of light and darkness, me and Reyes respectively, and he prophesied that Beep, though he never called her that, would be the downfall of Lucifer. That she would destroy him. And while pretty much everything he wrote went against Revelations and the predictions written therein, some of it coincided with the ancient texts. The four horsemen, for example, although Cleo simply called them the bringers of great suffering.

He also prophesied about the Twelve and said what we’d been hearing over and over: Twelve would be sent and twelve would be summoned. So, then, who did the sending and the summoning? Surely Lucifer had sent the Twelve, the hellhounds patrolling our borders night and day. But who summoned the other Twelve? And how did they play into all of this? And how on earth did we kill them?

“I’m sorry, Charles,” Garrett said just as Reyes and Osh were walking in. “There’s nothing in the texts to indicate how to kill them. At least not in the texts Dr. V translated. There was a lot he had yet to get to. It would have taken him years to translate it all.”

“It’s okay. I’m going to give Sister Mary Elizabeth a call later. Maybe she found something.” Sister Mary Elizabeth could hear the angels speak. Like literally. And though she couldn’t interact with them, she did come up with some pretty good intel occasionally.

I sat on a chair and flipped through a few pages. Reyes sat beside me as Osh stood eating a BBQ sandwich. It smelled amazing and my mouth watered involuntarily.

“Food’s ready,” Reyes said as he studied me. His heat scalded my skin, and even though he was still wearing the white button-down and his hair had been neatly cut, he now wore a day’s growth along his jaw. And he looked tired. His eyes had that sleepy look and, while incredibly sexy, Reyes just didn’t get sleepy. He had infinite energy. Or that’s how I’d always thought of him.

I still couldn’t help but wonder what he had going with Angel. He recruited the departed to spy for him. Maybe he was doing something similar with Angel, but why spy on me? It wasn’t like I could go anywhere. We were all stuck.

Perhaps that was why the air fairly crackled with tension. Why he was so blisteringly hot. Reyes was unused to feeling helpless, and now he was like a cornered wolf, ready to strike at anything that moved. While he was fantastic today, his energy seemed to be ratcheted tight, like he might explode given the smallest reason.