The Trouble with Twelfth Grave

Or maybe there was more to it than that.

Either way, I needed to take a closer look at this case. It wasn’t Rey’azikeen. I knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt. But the deaths did coincide with the shattering of the god glass. With the opening of the gates.

When Reyes had broken out of the hell dimension, when he’d shattered the god glass to free himself, he’d also freed everything inside. The poor souls that had been trapped by the sinister priest darted straight through me, but I’d never felt or seen the priest, the evil man who’d put them all there in the first place.

A suspicion that had been simmering in the back of my mind reappeared. Being in a hell dimension for over six hundred years had to wreak havoc on one’s mental state, and his hadn’t been exactly stable to begin with. But if my suspicions were right, he hadn’t gone to hell, the hell of this dimension, as I’d suspected.

If my suspicions were right, he was still on this plane.

But his presence on this plane didn’t explain why those people had died in such a horrible way or why Nicolette was so savagely attacked.

I hurried back to the office to pore over the files for the hundredth time. I was missing something. I had to be. The connection. There had to be a connection, and I was missing it.

I grabbed the files off Cookie’s desk, put on a pot of the good stuff, double the good stuff, then sat at my own desk to study. To dissect. To search for any commonalities between the victims. I combed through their files, but all I got was the usual, so I hit their social media sites.

Out of the three deaths, one man and two women, including the woman found yesterday morning in the convenience store restroom, only one had her social profiles set to private. Cookie had a way of bypassing those kinds of nuisances. I did not.

The other two victims, a woman named Indigo Russell, who was found in her home three days ago, and a man named Don Koske, who was found in his car the day after, seemed the polar opposites of each other. Taking into account the latest victims, Patricia Yeager and Nicolette, made the differences even more glaring.

An accountant, a recording artist, a court clerk, and a nurse.

Hopefully, a search of their social media accounts would give me a broader picture of their lives and habits. Something had to connect them. But three and two-thirds cups later, I’d found nothing.

“Think about it,” Cookie said. She’d joined in the search. I now officially had a search party. She couldn’t look at the pictures of the victims’ bodies, but she was fantastic at poring over pictures on social media outlets.

“I’m thinking,” I assured her. “It’s all I’ve been doing for hours.”

“Nicolette is a very unusual girl. She has a gift. A supernatural gift. Maybe she somehow lured the entity to her. Like, maybe—”

She stopped talking when I jolted upright and gawked at her, lids wide, mouth slightly open.

“You had an epiphany,” she said, letting a grin cut across her pretty face.

“No, Cook. You did.”

I grabbed my mouse and went back to Indigo Russell’s Tumblr account. Something had caught my eye, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.

“Look,” I said, pointing.

Indigo had posted a picture about a year earlier. The image depicted a dark, leafless forest, stark and eerie, and hiding behind a tree lurked a demon with bright red eyes and sharp claws.

“It’s not just the picture,” I said, pointing to the description. “It’s what she says about it.”

“Every night,” Cookie read aloud. “This is what waits for me every night since the incident.” She looked back at me, empathy evident in the lines on her face. “Wait, what incident?”

I had gone back to staring at a picture of Indigo taken by a friend of hers on a camping trip. Ensconced in a sleeping bag, Indigo was barely awake when the culprit stole into her tent and snapped the shot. Her hair had been a mess, her face soft with the lingering remnants of sleep.

“Cookie, I’ve seen her. Look at the date of that picture.” I sat back in thought. “Remember when we first met Quentin?”

“Of course, poor baby. He’d been possessed by a demon because he could see into the supernatural realm. Several demons had possessed people sensitive to their world. Because only those people could see you, and they were after you. They wanted to kill you.”

“Yes,” I said, pointing to Indigo. “Cook, she was one of them. I remember her that night.”

“You mean during the fight in front of our apartment building?”

“The demons were using humans as both bloodhounds and shields so they could try to kill me. To kill Beep. My light wouldn’t hurt them as long as they were inside a human. We had to literally pull them out before we could kill them.”

I stopped and studied Indigo’s features, her large eyes and long, dark hair, and I remembered her from that night. Sitting off to the side during the battle. Rocking back and forth, trying so desperately to shake off the demon inside her.

“She was one of them, Cook. She fought the demon with everything she had, but it still managed to control her to some degree. After the fight, after we killed all the demons, she ran off. I never found out her name or where she was from. Nothing. And she was right here in Albuquerque the entire time.”

“And now she’s gone,” Cookie added. “Despite surviving that nightmarish ordeal, she’s gone.”

“Exactly. What if you’re right? What if it works the other way? What if the same people who can see into the supernatural realm can be seen by the supernatural realm? What if they are targets because of it?”

“It would explain why both Indigo and Nicolette were attacked by a supernatural entity.”

“And it could explain the others. We have no way of knowing. Unless…”

I thought back to the case of Joyce Blomme and the haunted house. I had been curious as to why Joyce, the departed grandmother and great-grandmother of the current occupants, could only see two of the three people in the house that night.

“I need to run an errand. To interview a potential witness.” I could have called Chanel Newell, but I wanted to interview her face-to-face. To gauge her reaction to my questions, because most people who are sensitive to the otherworld had a difficult time admitting it, even to someone like me.

“Again?” Cookie asked. “You get to have all the fun.”

“It’s the woman from the other night whose grandmother was haunting her house but the grandmother thought that the granddaughter was haunting her house and I had to tell the grandmother that she had died thirty-eight years ago and that she was, in fact, the haunter, not the hauntee.”

“Oh,” Cookie said, standing to walk back to her desk. “Okay, then. I’m good here.”

“Thought so,” I said, unable to suppress a slight giggle.

I headed that way. Or tried to. The door opened before I could get to it, and one Detective Forrest Joplin stepped into the humble offices of Davidson Investigations.

I tensed. Mostly because he hated me with a fiery passion. He didn’t understand how I solved cases. Thought Uncle Bob indulged me too much. Thought I used nefarious means.

He was right. I used any means necessary, but that was no reason to hate my innards. My innards had nothing to do with my cases.

“Detective,” I said, sweet as could be. My world may have been coming to an end, my friends may have been attacked and suspected of foul play, my husband may have been turned into a volatile god, and I may not have slept in several days, but no way was I letting Detective Joplin know any of that. I beamed at him. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Agitated, probably by my mere presence, he glanced at Cookie, then back at me. “Can we talk in your office?”

My smile widened. “Of course. As long as Cookie can be in there as well. I may need a witness.”

“A witness?”

“You seem miffed. If I get another heated scolding because I solved one of your cases behind your back, I need a witness. You know, for when I file a complaint.”

He raked a hand through his military buzz. “I’m not here to scold you, Davidson. I’m here to warn you.”

I clapped in excitement. “Even better. Can we record it?”

He stepped closer to me. “Your uncle is snooping around my case, and if he’s snooping, odds are you put him up to it.”

I looked over at Cookie. Her face turned an odd shade of purple.

“Cook, you talked to Uncle Bob already? I thought that was going to be, you know, pillow talk.”

“It was. That was the plan, but then—”

“Cookie,” I said with a gasp, beaming at her with pride. “You got a quickie?”

“Charley, I hardly think this is the time.”

I propped a hip on her desk. “Oh, it’s the perfect time.”

“I just asked him if he could check into that thing we were talking about when we were talking about, you know, that thing.” God, she was good at collusion.

After another moment of awkwardness in an already awkward stalemate, my quota for the day had been filled, and I let her off the hook.