Eighth Grave After Dark

He stared at me a long moment, and what I saw was like something from a dream. Black fog drifted off his shoulders and down around him like a great cape. It pooled at his feet. His lips parted and he ran his tongue over his bottom lip. Or, Reyes’s bottom lip.

Enough with the gawking. “Lucifer, I presume.”

“You are more beautiful in your true form, but this isn’t bad either. You’ll taste good, I’m sure.”

“What did you do with my husband?”

“You mean my son? The son I created to carry out a mission, and he couldn’t even do that.”

“And yet you don’t seem disappointed.”

Osh was easing closer to me. Lucifer offered him a disinterested glance, then asked me, “Why would I be disappointed when my son did exactly as I knew he would? He always defied my orders. Why should my order to kill you be any different?”

“So, you knew he would disobey you?”

“It’s in his nature. He was never one to follow the rules. And I knew he would want to be with you, the Val-Eeth, the last of her kind, the most beautiful and the only pure ghost god ever to exist. He always was attracted to power.”

“You know nothing about me.”

“I know that you are the first god of pure light, the first pure ghost god born of two ghost gods ever to exist. I know you are the thirteenth. I know you have inherited all the power from all the gods ever to exist in your realm, and yet here you are, playing games with me. I am honored and appalled that you would think so much of these humans to risk your life for them. You must realize you have left your realm vulnerable. No telling what you’ll go back to.”

“What do you want?”

“So many things. Where to start?”

The conversation left me fighting for air. It was Reyes. It was his voice. It was his beautiful face. But absent his mannerisms and his convictions and his compassion. This being was nothing like my husband. And yet I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone in this room, including my precious daughter, was still alive. Clearly, he could sic the hounds on us anytime he wanted. What was he waiting for?

“Actually, I have all I want right here. I’ve taken over my son’s body, a feat that took some doing, as I first had to weaken him by making him worry about you and your creation so much he couldn’t sleep. I had no idea it would take months to get him to the point where I could overtake him, but it was certainly worth the wait. I mean, look at this.” He flexed and stretched, trying out his new body. “I do believe he is as beautiful as I was.”

“More so, I’m sure.”

“Well, there you have it. I made a good choice, because the other choice was to track down the champion, the escaped Daeva, and take him instead. I’m just not sure I would look good in teenager.”

Lucifer’s admission surprised Osh, who’d clearly had no idea that he had been an option.

“But don’t worry, traitor. I have plans for you.”

“Why do you need a body at all?”

“Have you seen the looks my kind gets in this world? Also, I didn’t want to live like a vampire. We can live in the light only if we have a human host. But you know that. Do you also know that no human can contain me? So I created a son.” He checked his nails and smiled in approval. “You should understand before we go much further, I’ve been preparing for this very day for centuries. But one doesn’t just escape from hell. One needs a map, so the mapmakers slaved for thousands of years to create a key to the gates that held me in. We lost millions to the void in the process. I couldn’t risk it falling into the wrong hands, so I imprinted it on my son. In him, actually, thereby creating not just a map, but also a key, a portal. Then I destroyed the original and all those who helped create it, save one.”

He focused on Osh again, accused him with a glare. “One was never found. Naughty boy. Did you eat my mapmaker?”

Osh said nothing.

“I wondered where he’d gone off to, but since you are the only Daeva ever to escape hell and make it to the other side, I’ll assume you had something to do with his disappearance. And so,” he said, refocusing on me, “I was stuck once again. I was hardly going to risk the void without the key, but then one day, I was minding my own business, melting the faces off a few thousand humans, when my son decides to risk a trip back home for that trinket on your finger.”

The orange diamond. I pressed my mouth together to keep from gasping.

“Following him out of the void undetected proved far easier than I imagined. It’s such a vast thing and he was traveling at the speed of light, him being a portal and all. And then I was free. Well, free-ish.”

He hooked his hands behind his back as he explained, and I couldn’t figure out what he was waiting for. Why was he telling me all this? Why he was stalling?

“I was quite tired of living in the shadows. The remedy for that was also easy. Weakening my son was not. But when one is plagued with nightmares of his wife and child being ripped apart by hellhounds every time he closes his eyes, he’s bound to miss a few nights’ sleep.”

I leveled my best scowl on him. “You tortured him.”

“Naturally.”

Osh was about five feet from me, and I wondered what he was up to. Then I happened to look at Garrett and realized he wasn’t out. He was faking. Great. They probably had a plan. I was so bad at plans, I wished they would have clued me in to theirs.

“You realize this is not going to end well for you,” I said.