Eleventh Grave in Moonlight

“Don’t tell me. A chair?”

“No.”

“An end table?”

“No.”

“A floor lamp with really nice curves?”

“A couch.”

“Ah.”

“Seriously, Cook, if stealing weren’t illegal, I would’ve taken him home with me. And slept on him. And possibly licked him.” Parting was such sweet sorrow.

“Well, you’ve licked worse.”

“Why? What have you heard?”

3

Talking to yourself is okay. Answering back is risky.

— BRIAN SPELLMAN

I parked in front of our office building, partly because I worked there and partly because there was an actual space open. On Central. In the middle of the day. That rarely happened. Of course, I usually parked at the apartments behind our building. Partly because I had my own parking space with a sign that warned any would-be trespassers of car booting and disembowelment should they even think about parking there, and partly because I lived there. Mostly because I lived there.

But, hey! Free space!

Just kidding. There was a meter.

I fed it a few quarters, ignored yet another angel watching me from the building top next to ours, and took the outside stairs to our second-floor offices. Mr. Farrow, my slightly sexier half, would be at work in the café below, and I wasn’t sure what all he’d wanted to talk about. Thus, I decided to avoid him at all costs.

Cookie was at her desk, looking rather perky in a hot-pink, frilly thing. I could totally use that in my streetwalking gig. It would be a tad big, but that’s what bondage straps were for.

“Hey, Cook,” I said, hanging up my jacket.

“Hey back.”

Uh-oh. Doldrums. I could feel them coming off her in waves and hoped it wasn’t contagious. I was already depressed. I’d recently found out that, as a god, I couldn’t die except at the hands of another god. What if I became suicidal? What would I do? The fact that I couldn’t die would make me even more depressed, and there wouldn’t be a damned thing I could do about it.

Oh, well. Best cross that bridge when I got to it.

“What did you do last night?” she asked, her gaze glued to her computer screen, her voice listless, which was completely at odds with the searing pink she was wearing and the spiky black hair that framed her round face and cerulean eyes.

I sat in the chair across from her, the one I’d secretly named the Winter Soldier. It had a mysterious vibe with a murky, possibly sordid past. “I went onto the dark web. I thought it might be a chat room for demons. Figured I could get some inside info.”

“And how’d that turn out?”

“Bad. Very bad. Hey, is it inside-out day again? I used to love that in, like, the third grade.”

She looked down at her blouse, then pulled it out at the neck, and either searched her seams for a clue or checked out her girls. “Damn it. It is inside out.” She let out a lengthy sigh, stood, and headed for the restroom.

“Hey, you okay?” I asked, noticing the matching earrings and pink bracelet.

“Sure.”

“Cookie?” I said, drawing out the vowels in my best I-know-you’re-a-lying-skank voice. Only without the skank. Cookie was as much of a skank as I was a saint. “What’s going on? You’ve never been into color coordination before.”

She pursed her lips and sat back down. “I don’t know. I feel like something is wrong.”

“It’s the chafing. Once you turn it the right way —”

“No, not with the blouse.”

“Of course.”

“I was trying to be sexy. He didn’t even notice.”

“Our Lord and Savior?”

“Robert.”

“Oh, yeah, that makes more sense.”

Every time I spoke with Sister Mary Elizabeth, my thoughts tended to lean toward Catholicism for a few days. She and my uncle Bob had gotten hitched a while back – Cookie, not Sister Mary Elizabeth – so it made sense that she would try to be sexy for him.

I leaned closer and put on my best sympathy face. “Cook, what’s up?”

“I think I’m losing him.”

“Oh, please. You couldn’t lose him if you were seventeen, on a date with Thor, and he was your virginity. The man is so into you, Cook.”

She filled her lungs. “Maybe at one time. I think he’s having an affair.”

If I’d been drinking coffee, I would’ve spit it out in a fit of coughs. Thank God for small miracles. “Oh, hon, you know that’s impossible, right? He has ED.”

She gaped at me. “He most certainly —” When she realized I was teasing, she stopped gaping and glared instead.

She was right. ED was no joking matter. “Okay, he doesn’t have erectile dysfunction, but it’s fun to say out loud, and the thought of Ubie having an affair is hilarious either way.”

“Why? Because he loves me so much?”

“No. Well, yes. But seriously. There’s just no way. That man is head over heels, and he would never do anything to hurt you like that.”

“I don’t know.” She punched a few keys on her keyboard. “He hasn’t touched me in three days.”

It was my turn to gape. For a solid minute.

“What?”

“Three days?”

“Yes.”

“You’re ready to call it quits after three days in desert conditions? The key is hydration. And possibly a vibrator.”