The Trouble with Twelfth Grave

I walked forward, the world not quite moving right. Everything was too harsh. Too acrid. Voices were muffled as though they were all underwater, and yet they were too loud, assaulting my senses and making me dizzy.

Glancing to the side, I saw Uncle Bob holding Cookie in his arms as she sobbed. She fought him a moment, trying to wrench free, and I got the impression she’d been doing that off and on for a while now. His expression grave, he tightened his hold, then nodded at an EMT.

The young technician administered a shot as Cookie wailed into Uncle Bob’s chest.

Another crowd, smaller, was huddled around a kid on the ground. A blond boy about sixteen sat on his knees, doubled over with his arms wrapped around his head.

Quentin.

A couple of girls sat beside him, rubbing his back as a cop tried to talk to him through an interpreter. But he was beyond talking. He rocked back and forth from his knees to his arms, cradling his head, so distraught he’d vomited onto the pavement.

Then he saw me. No, he felt me. He looked up and watched as I walked toward a tarp-covered body on the ground, his expression full of remorse. And anguish. And grief.

Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to get close to the body lying in the center of the parking lot, but I’d shifted and straddled both planes. If anyone tried to stop me, and they did try to stop me, their arms went right through my only half-corporeal body. They would gape at me, too shocked to try it again, until the next officer rushed forward and gave it a shot.

I felt Reyes at my back as I walked, not quite sure my feet were on the ground. I felt his emotions. As astonished and grief-stricken as my own.

“Charley?”

I turned to Cookie. She’d spotted me and tried, once again, to wrench free from her husband.

Uncle Bob’s expression crushed my heart. While Cookie’s blossomed into one of hope, his was far less optimistic. He lowered his gaze in resignation.

I knelt beside the body and pulled back the tarp to see Amber’s precious face, her mouth bruised and swollen, her huge blue eyes open, looking toward heaven like she now knew what so many others did not.

Then I caught sight of her from the corner of my eye. The assistant coach who’d threatened the kids. She stood in a group of teachers talking softly in the distance.

I started to stand, to walk over and snap her neck, but Quentin had somehow gotten past the perimeter guards as well. He stood over me, his chest heaving with emotion.

I sank back down and looked up at him, waiting for an explanation, but his eyes were locked onto the girl he loved, his face wet with tears and blood. After an eternity, he spoke.

“I tried to stop him,” he said, his signs listless, barely readable. He was in shock. “A man. A priest. I tried to stop him. He grabbed her, seemed to beg her for help, but she couldn’t understand him. So he hit her. Again and again as fire came up out of the ground. It tried to pull him under. I kicked him and hit him to get him off her, but he just—” He sank to his knees beside me. “He just disappeared.”

No. I shook my head. I’d stopped him. I summoned him and—

“Two hours,” Cookie said, sobbing on my other side. I blinked at her. Uncle Bob had flashed his badge and escorted her past the perimeter. “She’d been gone for two hours before we got here. Beaten and burned. Same as the others.” She broke down again.

The priest must have been in the middle of attacking her when I’d summoned him.

“Five minutes earlier,” I said, my voice soft with disbelief. “If I’d been five minutes earlier. If I hadn’t gone to the warehouses. If I’d summoned him the second I learned his name.”

I hadn’t even thought of Amber when compiling my list of potential victims. She’d showed signs of clairvoyance, but I’d never even considered her a candidate. She didn’t see the departed like Quentin or even Pari. She had never been a part of that world. Not in that way.

“Why were they here so late?” I asked Cookie.

“Basketball game,” Uncle Bob answered for her. “Playoffs.”

My lungs filled with cement and I could barely see past the wetness in my eyes. But it was Cookie’s anguish that broke me. Her excruciating agony that made my decision.

Michael appeared as though the archangel monitored my every thought. He pinned me with a warning glower.

I turned back to Reyes, to my beautiful husband whom I’d fought so hard for these past days, and whispered, “I’ll find a way back. I promise.”

Instantly registering where my thoughts had landed, he lunged forward, but before he could grab me, before he could stop me, I laid my fingers across Amber’s pale cheek. Her lids fluttered, and a soft pink hue blossomed across her face. She filled her lungs with air a microsecond before the world fell away from me.

The last thing I felt before completely disappearing into the ether was the heat, the blinding heat, of Reyes’s incomprehensible fury as I was cast into a lightless realm.