Guilt rocketed through me. I’d never lost control like that. Or had I? Was that why the archangel Michael had tried to kill me in the diner in New York? Did I truly have no control over my powers?
Osh coughed and then straightened, falling back against the wall kitty-corner to me. He rested his head on the wood paneling as well. Closed his eyes. Drew in long, deep breaths.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to Reyes.
He wrapped his long fingers around my neck and buried his face in my hair. He smelled like a lightning storm. His emotions electricity. His body the desert after a rain. Fresh. Starkly beautiful. Dangerous.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his breath warm on my neck.
“I am now.”
He pulled back, took one look at my face, then stepped out of my embrace and turned away from me. I lifted a hand to my cheek and whirled around to face a picture, trying to see myself in the reflection of the glass, but I could only see a blurred outline of my features. Still, they looked pretty unremarkable. What was so wrong with me that my own husband would turn away?
“Your eyes,” Osh said, practically reading my mind.
Reyes growled at him, but he’d never seen my husband as much of a threat. I wondered how he would feel if he knew he was a god. Then again, he may already know. He was there, after all. When Lucifer created his one and only son, siphoning the energy from a god to mold him, using the fires of hell to temper him. To make him strong. To make him indestructible.
Before I could ask about my eyes, I heard Cookie tearing down the stairs. She rushed through the restaurant, stumbled into the office, took one look at me, and knew something was wrong.
“What happened?” she asked, a hand over her heart.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
I stepped over to Osh, and he stiffened. Guilt flooded every molecule in my body, dousing it in acid, the taste bitter in my mouth. What had I done?
“I’m sorry,” I said to him. I reached up and put my hand on his throat. He didn’t fight me this time, either. In fact, he practically leered.
“Oh yeah?” he asked, completely ignoring the man behind me. The one I was married to. A slow grin raised one corner of his mouth. “How sorry?”
He took hold of my shirttail and pulled me closer, and even though he was deflecting, drawing attention away from the fact that I’d just attacked him, I raised my arms and pulled him into a hug.
“Very,” I said into his ear.
He wrapped his arms tight around me. “I’m sorrier,” he said, and he meant it. He truly did wish he could tell me where my daughter was, but we’d decided. No one would know her location but Osh and, naturally, the Loehrs, since they were her caretakers for the time being. Beep’s guardians knew, too, of course, her army of the ragtag sort, but they were never to leave her side.
And her side was a sight to see. She had my dimension’s version of an archangel, the man I used to call Mr. Wong, a skilled warrior and leader. She had the three bikers who swore loyalty to Reyes and me. And she had twelve huge, ruthless, and completely adorable hellhounds known as the Twelve.
She had an army, and still they’d had to move her.
My chest tightened again with the thought, and I tamped down a wave of dizzying anxiety.
I slid out of his hold and wrapped an arm in Cookie’s. “Okay,” I said to him. “I won’t ask where she is again. For now. But can you at least tell me why you had to move her?”
Reyes stepped behind me, and I inched back until we were touching.
“The signs were all there,” Osh said, eyeing Reyes as though he’d personally fucked up. “Bodies started showing up, one by one. The first ones were two counties over. Then they started getting closer, like something was homing in.”
“The bodies?” I asked Reyes.
“Is this about Beep?” Cookie asked.
I nodded. “They had to move her.”
Cookie’s worried expression mimicked the fear thundering through me. I led her to a chair and sat her in it before sitting in the one Reyes held for me. “What do bodies have to do with anything?”
“You want to tell her?” Osh asked Reyes.
He took a knee beside me, and I wondered if he thought I’d lose it again. I wondered even more if I would.
“We have something of a checklist. An outline of things to keep a lookout for. It’s how we know the gods are getting close. And one of the signs is dead bodies. But how did they look?” he asked Osh.
“I wouldn’t be here if they didn’t fit the criteria.”
Reyes bit down and cursed under his breath before coming back to me. “A supernatural entity can’t just shift onto this plane carte blanche. It doesn’t have that kind of authority. In order to be able to interact within the parameters of the plane, it has to be able to shift fully. And the only way to do that, as you may have noticed, is to inhabit a human.”
“But,” Osh said, “a human’s body is too fragile to hold a god for more than a few hours. It begins to decompose instantly and at a much faster rate than normal.”
“But demons can do it,” I argued. “They’ve possessed people for years at a time. They’ve even kept an injured or sometimes a dead body going for months.”
“Yes,” Reyes said. “A demon can do that. Pretty much any supernatural entity from any dimension that can find its way onto this plane can possess a human to shift fully.”
Osh pushed off from the wall and turned to look out a high window. “But while a demon can keep a human body in a state of animation for an eternity, a god is simply too powerful for a vessel as fragile as a human to hold.”
He turned back to Reyes. Let him take over. “A god can only keep a body animated for a little while before its cells eventually begin to disintegrate and meld into one another. Until it no longer looks human.”
“And what happens to the person it possessed?”
“Nothing that hasn’t already happened. He or she will have died the instant the god hijacked the body. It’s like putting the core of a nuclear reactor inside a human and watching the person melt around it.”
Cookie’s hands curled into fists around the fingers I’d laced into hers. She was shaking visibly, her pretty brows drawn into a severe line.
Osh didn’t notice. “If there is a god in the area and he is using and discarding bodies at will, he is onto Beep’s scent. And like any good bloodhound, he won’t give up until he has his prey firmly between his jaws.”