Eighth Grave After Dark (16 page)

Reyes took another step toward him. I stopped my husband with a hand on his chest, but only because he allowed me to.

Then I faced Osh. “Tell me.”

The grin Osh wore was completely unnecessary. He enjoyed antagonizing Reyes far too much for my comfort. “He hasn't slept since the attack.”

“What?” I whirled around. “What attack? When were you attacked?”

“The one eight months ago,” Osh explained. “He would be useless in a fight now. If the Twelve somehow get across the border—”

“Eight months?” I asked, astonished beyond belief. “Is he kidding? You haven't slept in eight months?”

We were supernatural, sure, but we had human bodies and human needs. No wonder he looked so tired and disheveled all the time. I'd once gone three weeks without sleep. It about killed me. But eight months?

“Why?” I asked him.

“Oh, but we haven't gotten to the best part,” Osh continued.

Reyes's jaw muscle leapt. “Don't do this. I stopped. It didn't work and I stopped.”

“What?” I asked, squelching a shudder of fear.

“You stopped after how many attempts? A dozen? More?”

“I stopped,
Daeva
. That's all that matters.”

I dug my nails into Reyes's biceps to remind him I was there. “Just tell me,” I ordered Osh.

“He thought he might have found a way to kill the hounds.” He glanced at me, his eyes twinkling with mirth. “He was wrong.”

“To kill them?” I looked from Osh to my husband then back again. “And what way was that?”

This time Garrett spoke, but he did it minus the smirk. “He dragged them onto holy ground, thinking it would kill them.”

The shock that jolted through my body was like sticking a fork into a light socket. I turned to Reyes, aghast and appalled and dumbstruck that he would even try such a thing. “You did what?” I whispered.

He didn't answer at first, and when he did, his demeanor was that of a schoolboy being chastised after having been ratted out. “I only tried it a few times. It didn't work, so I stopped.”

“Fifteen,” Garrett said. “He tried it fifteen times.”

The thought of Reyes not only fighting a hellhound, but dragging one onto the consecrated ground—on purpose!—and then fighting it, sent the world spinning beneath me. Before I knew it, the floor disappeared.

“Maybe if he'd had a little sleep, he wouldn't have had his ass handed to him on a silver platter every time,” Osh said into the darkness surrounding me. “Those fuckers can fight.”

I sank to the ground as though in slow motion. The edges of my vision blurred, then three sets of hands landed on me until Reyes lifted me into his arms. Even though I weighed 1,014 pounds, he carried me with ease to the stairs and up to our room. Where Denise, Gemma, and Cookie were. This was not going to end well.

“She's still here?” I asked Gemma, trying to shake the fog from my head. “Are you kidding me?”

“I had to apologize,” Denise said, both hands still covering her mouth. “Is she okay?”

The glare Reyes shot her would have shriveled a winter rose. But no one ever accused Denise of being a winter rose.

“I'm okay, hon,” I said, gesturing for him to put me down.

He did so slowly, then steadied me until I had my footing. “I'm not leaving you alone with her, so don't even think about it.”

“Reyes, it's okay. She didn't mean to slap the living shit out of me.” I said the last bit while leveling my own glare on her.

She had the decency to look embarrassed.

“It's not her I'm worried about. Is that what you were doing in the field with Angel?”

He hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

He was lying. I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I raised my chin and turned from him. After a moment, he left.

Then I turned on the woman who'd made my life hell growing up. “What are you still doing here?”

“I wanted to explain.”

“Charley,” Gemma said, “if you'll just hear her out, I think it would be good for both of you.”

“Why? She has never listened to me. Why should I have to listen to her? I should mark her soul for Osh. Oh, wait, she doesn't have one.”

“I don't have one?” she said from between gritted teeth.

There she was. I knew the helpful, nurturing routine wouldn't last long.

“You think I'm a big joke,” she said, her face the picture of rage.

“Hon, you're not a joke. You're the punch line.”

“You didn't even go to your own father's funeral.”

Gemma gasped.

“You've been holed up in here for months like you're in witness protection or something.”

“The only one I need protection from is you.”

“That's it! Sit down! Both of you.”

Denise sat on the bench at the end of the bed, while I crossed my arms over my chest again, showing just how defiant I could be.

Gemma reached over, grabbed my ear, and led me to the chair in the corner of our tiny room. “Ow, holy cow, Gem! Katherine the Midwife is not going to be happy with you.”

“Her name is just Katherine. You have to stop calling her Katherine the Midwife.”

She let go and I rubbed my abused cartilage. “How did you do that?”

“Sit down!”

“No, really. I'm having a kid. I need to know how to completely incapacitate someone by grabbing their ear.”

“Sit down.”

I sat down. “So, you'll tell me later?”

“You need to listen to what Mom has to say.”

“No, I don't.”

“She deserves that much, Charley.”

“Wait, you were there. Right there through our entire childhood. You saw it. You saw what she put me through. And might I bring up the slap I just received.”

It was the second time in my life Denise had slapped me in front of a crowd, and it was just as jolting and humiliating as the first time.

“I saw you both going at each other like children on a playground our whole lives.”

“Yeah, but she always started it.”

“That's not what I saw.”

“What about the time she dragged me off my bike in front of all the neighbor kids because I didn't do the dishes? Or the time a boy threw dirt in my face, right in my face, and she turned away, refused to do anything about it? Or the time she tried to run me down with her car?”

Denise sucked in a sharp breath. “I never tried to run you over with my car.”

“Oh, right, I just made that one up. But you admit to the other things.”

“Charley, oh my God,” Gemma said. “Can we stick with nonfiction here?”

“What? I needed backup just in case you didn't find the other events horrific enough. I know what I'm saying seems childish and ridiculous for me to be holding a grudge for so long, but she was like that every day of my life. In everything that I did. She never complimented me. She never took up for me. She never stopped nagging me about the stupidest things. It was like she made it her personal mission to make sure I knew I was less than she was. Mothers don't tear down, Gemma. They build up. Like she did with you.”

“That's not true, Charley,” Gemma said in her psychiatrist voice.

“She slapped me in front of all those people. I was five years old.”

“Charley, look at that from her perspective. It was a horrible situation. You told a woman whose daughter had been missing for weeks that her daughter was in front of her.”

“She was.”

“We're mere mortals, Charley. We didn't know that. Mom was mortified. She was horrified and she panicked.”

“Like a few minutes ago?” I rubbed my cheek. She had the decency to look ashamed. “Were you panicking then?”

“Yes,” she said.

I looked at Gemma and scoffed. “Did you know that same woman sent me a bike after I led the cops to her daughter's body. Your mother wouldn't even let me have it.”

Gemma looked stunned. “Of course. You helped bring her closure.”

“Even a stranger believed in my abilities, and she—” I looked her up and down. “—made me feel like a freak every chance she got.”

“I didn't think you should be rewarded for doing what you did to that poor woman. You had to learn that was wrong. You don't just blurt stuff out like that, even if it's true.”

“Well, I learned, all right. Don't you worry about me. Is this over yet?”

“No,” Gemma said. “Mom wants to explain.”

“I was just trying to teach you.”

“No.” I stood and paced. “No, you were so indifferent to me. You hated me. That's not teaching. That's punishing.”

“I never hated you.”

“You were completely indifferent to me. If not hate, then what?”

“I wasn't indifferent.”

“You were a monster!” I yelled. “Why are you even here? Why are you even talking to me?”

Her shoulders shook a moment before she cleared her throat and tried to gather herself. No way was she making me the bad guy in all this. Tears may have worked on my dad, but they would not sway me an inch.

“I wasn't indifferent, Charley.”

A humorless laugh escaped me.

“I was scared of you.”

I sighed, unable to believe she was pulling this shit.

“I was scared to death of you. You were something else, something … not human, and I was scared of you.”

“Oh, so now you believe in all this?”

“Please listen to her, Charley. It's taken us a long time to get to this point.”

“So, you've been counseling her? Five syllables: antipsychotic. They do wonders.”

“You owe her at least a little of your time.”

“She treated me like shit my whole life. The only thing I owe her is my middle finger and a cold shoulder.”

“You're right,” Denise said. “You're absolutely right.”

“See?” I said to Gemma.

“If you will let me explain,” she said, “I will leave tonight and I will never come back if that is still your wish.”

“Can't beat that with a stick. Shoot.”

Her cheeks were wet and her fingers shook as she stared down at her lap. “When I was little, my mother was in a car accident.”

Not her life story. Damn it. I had to pee. This could take forever.

“They had her in ICU. They'd stabilized her, so they let me and my dad in to see her. It was so scary seeing her hooked up to all those machines.”

I gazed longingly at the door, wondering if anyone would notice if I just slipped away for a few minutes. Beep was playing hopscotch on my bladder, and this was clearly going to take a while.

“My dad left to get coffee, and Mom woke up while he was gone. She looked at me sleepily and held out her hand right before the machines started going crazy. Her blood pressure dropped. The nurses and doctors came in and they tossed aside one of the blankets that was on her. A blue blanket.”

Blue wasn't my favorite color.

“They were working on her, trying to bring her back. I guess she was bleeding internally. She woke up again while they were working on her, but the machines were still going crazy. She looked up at nothing and spoke. Just said things like, ‘Oh, oh, okay, I didn't realize.' She had a loving look on her face. When I looked over, I saw what she was talking to. An angel.”

I saw an angel once, too, but now probably wasn't the time to bring it up.

“He disappeared. Everyone had forgotten I was even there. They took her back into surgery, performing CPR on the way, but she was already gone. When my father came back, he dropped his coffee. I tried to tell them there was an angel, but all he saw was the blanket. He thought it was a blue towel.”

I suddenly knew where this was going. When her father died, I was four. He came to me and asked me to give her a message. Something about blue towels. I was too young to understand. Later, I didn't care.

“They came back and told us she was gone. My dad broke down. I tried to tell him about the angel, but all he saw was a blue towel.”

I was going to need a blue towel if I didn't get to the bathroom soon.

“He said sometimes a blue towel is just a blue towel. That became our mantra. Anytime anything unexplained happened, we repeated it. But we didn't talk about the actual event until about two years before I met Leland.”

Wonderful. We were jumping ahead in time. I crossed one leg over the other and tried not to squirm. Gemma sat beside her on the bench and put a hand over hers. They were always so close. I'd tried to understand over the years, but some things were just impossible to explain. Like UFOs and bell-bottoms.

“My dad had a massive heart attack, but he survived. Then one day we were having dinner and he looked at me and said, ‘Sometimes a blue towel isn't just a blue towel.' Sometimes it's more. But by that point, I'd grown up. I was a bona fide skeptic. And—” She ducked her head as though ashamed. “And I didn't believe him. After everything that had happened, I didn't believe him. I chalked it up to the medication they had him on. But then, right after I met your dad, I was in a car accident.”

“So, the point of this story is to not get in the car with you or any of your relatives?”

“Charley,” Gemma said, her voice monotone. Nonjudgmental. I loved psychology.

“Your dad rushed to the hospital. He had to bring you girls. They said I nearly died.”

Nearly
being the salient word.

“I guess because he was a cop, they let him bring you two in to see me.” She laughed humorlessly. “I was pretty out of it.”

Like now? I wanted to ask.

She looked at me at last. “That's when I saw it.”

I had so many comebacks, it was hard to pick just one, so I remained silent.

“I saw your light, Charley. But only for an instant.”

“I didn't know about your light,” Gemma said. “Not until Denise told me.”

“Join the club,” I said. “I can't see it either.”