He nailed me with an expression I’d never seen from him. Pity. “He stopped being Reyes the moment he entered that hell dimension, love. Untie me.”
“We need a plan.”
“We need to get the fuck off this plane.”
“Osh, not everyone here can do that.”
One corner of his full mouth tilted up. “Not my problem.”
His statement shocked me. I wouldn’t have been more stunned if he’d slapped me upside the head. “You’re going to leave us?”
He held my gaze a long moment before having mercy on me. “No, sweetheart. I just wanted you to feel betrayed.”
I eased back onto my heels. “Why?”
“Because you need to get used to it. He’ll kill you, sugar, and everything you love, starting with the people in this room.”
Cookie gasped.
Gemma popped out of her chair.
Garrett turned to look out the window.
I shook my head. “No,” I said, standing my ground. “He’s still Reyes. Somewhere inside, he’s still Reyes.”
The ropes that held Osh fell off him like paper ribbons. Garrett tensed, readying for a battle. A battle he would’ve ultimately lost, but he would’ve put up one hell of a fight.
Osh clamped both hands onto my arms, then stood and pulled me up with him. We locked gazes, his teeth clenched like he wanted to shake some sense into me.
“I’m not budging on this, Osh.”
“You’re the god eater. You can take care of this right here and now.”
I pushed away from him.
Uncle Bob stepped between us, glared at Osh a second, then turned to me. “What’s he talking about?”
“Some stupid prophecy.”
“It’s not a prophecy,” Garrett said. “You’ve done it here, on this plane.”
“Once, and I didn’t even know what I was doing.”
When the men started to argue about the logistics of my devouring my own husband, which screamed cannibal in my humble opinion, my temper soared. Just a little. Just enough to cause a tiny quake to shake the room around us.
All conversations ceased.
“The answer is no. I would never resort to such a tactic with my husband, so the argument is moot. We need a plan. Not conjectures and innuendoes. A solid plan.”
“We need two plans, actually,” Osh said.
Garrett sank onto the love seat by the window. “What do you mean?”
“The problem is twofold. Even if we could somehow capture a volatile deity—and then, what, stuff him in a bottle?—you have another issue that even an act of God couldn’t fix.”
I frowned. What else could there be? “What are you talking about?”
“The god glass. The hell dimension. You said the gates were opened.”
“They were pretty much destroyed,” I said with a nod.
“Then you have created a dimension within a dimension. An anomaly. A singularity.”
“What? Like a black hole?”
“In a sense. The new dimension will grow, slowly at first, then faster and faster as it feeds off this dimension. As it gains mass. Eventually, it’ll take over.”
I walked to Garrett and sat beside him. “So, yeah, that’s bad.”
“Sounds bad,” Angel said.
Osh shook his head. “That’s not the bad part.”
“It gets worse?” I asked.
“To be blunt, the demons residing within said dimension will inherit the Earth.”
“There are demons?” Cookie asked. “No one mentioned demons.”
Uncle Bob raised his hands and patted the air to slow things down a bit. “Okay, okay, a singularity, but first things first. Let’s deal with Reyes, try to bring him back or capture him or whatever we have to do. Then we can worry about the Earth-devouring hell dimension, which, believe you me, is not something I ever thought I’d hear myself say.”
“I agree,” Garrett said. “We need to concentrate on Reyes.”
“That’s easy enough. He’s jealous,” Osh said. “As most gods are. When you touched Angel’s face—which, who wouldn’t?—you got a reaction out of him.”
“So, he’s watching?” Angel asked.
“More like monitoring, and he’s probably focused purely on Charley.”
“Why do you say that?” Gemma asked, chiming into the conversation at last.
“Because she’s the only one in the entire universe who can eat him should she get hungry enough.”
Gemma looked from me to Osh, then back again. “But won’t he know what we’re doing?”
Osh shrugged. “That’s always a possibility, but we can’t let that stop us from trying.”
“What do you suggest?” Garrett asked.
“I suggest running, but since no one else is in—”
“Drugs,” Garrett said.
Osh nodded. “That might work. We can all do drugs. Then we won’t care when the world is either destroyed by a volatile god or overtaken by a demon-infested hell dimension.” He grinned at Garrett. “Good thinking.”
“No, drugs. Charles was drugged just the other day. They worked on her despite her being a god.”
I shook my head. “Too many complications, and we don’t even know if they’d work on him. Before, yes, but now that he’s full blown god? Who knows what effect they’d have?”
“They worked on you,” he argued. When I continued to shake my head, he gave up. “Okay, fine. You’re a god. How would you track and capture yourself?”
“I’d lure me in with coffee, then keep the cups coming. Trust me, I wouldn’t go anywhere. I doubt that would work on him, though. Not all gods enjoy java as much as I do.”
Gemma, who wasn’t caught up on the latest Charley facts, began making her way to the front door. “Oh, my,” she said, glancing at her watch. “It’s getting late and I’m supposed to meet Wyatt for breakfast.” Wyatt was a cop and a former patient she’d broken all professional codes of conduct to date. I was so proud of her. “Great meeting, guys. Same time tomorrow?”
“Gemma,” I began, but she was out the door before I could get another word in. The only thing we heard was her footsteps as she practically fell down the outside stairs.
“Poor thing,” Uncle Bob said. He offered me condolences with an encouraging pat on the head. “She always had blinders on when it came to your abilities.”
“Can you blame her?”
“Not in the least. Remind me to check on her later.”
“I think Swopes is onto something,” Osh said.
I stood and began pacing the floor. “I’m telling you, it won’t work.”
“Why not?” Swopes asked. “It worked on you when that evil cult drugged you and threw you into that trunk.”
“Actually, they threw me into the trunk and then drugged me.”
“Seriously?”
“And there’s a fatal flaw in your plan, Swopes. Reyes isn’t exactly coming home for dinner. How am I supposed to drug him?”
“We lure him,” Cookie said.
The room turned its attention to my delectable neighbor.
“Great idea, hon, but with what?”
When her gaze landed on Garrett and she grinned possibly the most mischievous grin I’d ever seen her wear, I knew I wasn’t going to like this plan.
5
If I manage to survive the rest of the week,
I would like my straightjacket hot pink and my helmet sparkly.
—TRUE FACT
We had a plan. So that happened. Didn’t matter that it would never work in a hundred thousand years, we had a plan. Mazel tov. I warmed up my coffee as the rest of the wild bunch planned my death. Reyes was going to kill me if he hadn’t decided to do that already.
I leaned against the wall that separated my office from Cookie’s. It hadn’t been that long ago when Reyes appeared to me in this very room, pressed me into that very wall, ran his mouth along my neck and over my cheek.
As I thought back to that day, he walked up to me, wearing a white button-down with the sleeves folded up to his elbows, exposing his sinuous forearms. I always loved that shirt. He knew it.
His mouth tipped up at one corner into a sultry grin. The kind that made women drop their panties. The kind that turned my legs into a plate of spaghetti.
“What are you drinking?” he asked as he strode forward. He looked like an animal, sleek and powerful and sensuous.
“Battery acid,” I teased, pretending my heart wasn’t pounding a little faster.
He didn’t stop his advance until we were almost touching, and then he braced a hand against the wall behind me near my head and the other on the opposite side at my waist. Locking me in. Begging me to make the first move.
“I want my tongue in your mouth.” His voice caused a rush of heat that washed over my skin and settled in my abdomen.
“Then, by all means, put it there.”
His gaze dropped to the object currently under discussion. “You won’t bite?”