Darynda Jones - First Grave on the Right

“Reyes,” I whispered, but almost before I’d gotten his name out, he was in front of me, covering my mouth with his hand.

His robe tingled along my skin, sparked along my nerve endings like static electricity. With eyes blazing, he shifted, liquefied, straddled two planes at once. After a moment, he let his hand drop and replaced it with his mouth in a kiss that had me shivering despite the heat that surrounded me.

“Remember,” he said before he vanished, “if they find you, they will have access to all that is holy. The portals must be kept hidden at all costs.”

I swallowed hard, because an urgent sadness had filtered into his voice. “What costs are all costs?” I asked, almost knowing the answer before he said it.

“If they find you, I will have to terminate your life force, to close the portal.”

A jolt of shock rocketed through me. “Meaning?”

He pressed his forehead against mine, closed his eyes as he spoke. “I will have to kill you.”

He dissipated around me, his essence ribboning over my skin, through my hair until only the frailest elements lingered, falling softly to the Earth. For the first time in my life, I knew what was at stake. I had answers I no longer wanted. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed, though I had no one to blame but myself.

I knew dating the son of Satan would turn out badly.

“You obviously had waaaaay too much fun last night.”

I tried to pry open my lids and orient myself to the environment at the same time, but I couldn’t quite manage either. “Am I still naked on my living room floor?”

Cookie whistled. “Wow, you had more fun than I thought.” She sat on the edge of the bed, bounced a little to irk me, then said, “I made coffee.”

Ah, the three magic words. My lashes fluttered open to the blessed image of a coffee cup hovering in front of my face. I squirmed and shimmied into an upright position, then took the cup from her.

“And I brought you a breakfast burrito,” she added.

“Sweet.” After a long, rich draw, I asked, “What time is it?”

“That’s how I know you had fun last night,” she said with a chuckle. “You rarely sleep this late. Well, that and your pajamas were all over the living room floor. I picked up most of your things, but your bottoms are in Mr. Wong’s corner. No way am I venturing into Mr. Wong’s corner. So, are you going to spill now or later?”

With a shrug, I said, “Now, I guess, but I’ll have to give you the Reader’s Digest version.”

“Deal,” she said, sipping her own coffee and gazing over the rim expectantly.

“Well, I found out it takes a lot more to kill me than it does the average human.”

An astonished frown commandeered her features.

“I found out Rosie Herschel never made it out of the country. Her husband killed her before he came after me.”

Her frown turned to alarm.

“I found out that Reyes is a god of sex and all things orgasmic.”

Now confusion.

“And I found out that he is, in fact, the son of Satan and that if they, meaning the beings from the underworld, find me, he will be forced to kill me.”

Back to alarm.

“Yep,” I said, thinking back, “that’s pretty much last night in a nutshell. Do you think I’m psychotic?”

She blinked, worry lining her face.

“Because at this point, my sanity is all that I have. Well, that and a breakfast burrito.”

She blinked some more.

“Holy smokes, is that the time?” I asked, looking at the clock.

She just glanced at it, apparently unable to talk. I couldn’t imagine why. She was holding her coffee cup.

But it was almost nine. I jumped out of bed, heedless of my lack of clothing but heedful of the soreness that seemed to be fusing the vertebrae at my neck together, and rushed into the bathroom to get dressed. At ten o’clock, the state was scheduled to take Reyes off life support. If that injunction didn’t go through …

I couldn’t think about that now. Uncle Bob had a judge on it. Surely it went through.

After dressing in a dark sweater and jeans, brushing my hair into a ponytail, and downing four ibuprofen at once, I rushed to the office, where I had all the numbers on the case listed on an array of colorful sticky notes. I snatched them up, then booked out the door.

Cookie met me on the stairs, and I told her where I was headed. She mumbled something about needing a raise, but I hurried past her and rushed to the parking lot.

On the way to Santa Fe, I tried Neil Gossett at the prison, but he was out. I tried the Guardian Long-Term Care Facility, but a flustered receptionist said she couldn’t give out patient information over the phone. I tried Uncle Bob, but he didn’t answer. I tried the judge’s clerk, where I’d filed the injunction, but she said the request had gone to the courthouse in Santa Fe.

Panic was setting in. What if the injunction didn’t go through? What if the judge in Santa Fe denied the request?

At two minutes to ten, I pulled into the care facility to an array of flashing lights and bustling activity. My heart palpitated with anxiety. Maybe something happened at the facility and the state didn’t get to do their thing. If that were the case, surely they would have to postpone the killing of Reyes Farrow to another day.

Then I saw Uncle Bob’s SUV with the crunched-in bumper. What in the world was he doing here? The moment I threw Misery into park, my door opened.

“Your cell is dead again,” Uncle Bob said, holding out a hand for me.

“Seriously?” I took it with one of mine and dug my cell out of my purse with the other. “I just called you.” Sure enough. Dead as a doornail. I totally needed a new battery. Preferably one that was nuclear charged and lasted twelve years without giving me a brain tumor.

“I tried you at the office earlier,” he said as I stumbled out of Misery. He sounded weird, distracted.

“I tried calling you on my way up here. You didn’t pick up. What’s going on?” A prickly kind of awareness laced up my spine. Ubie was acting strange. Not that strange was out of character for him, but he was acting stranger than his normal, everyday strange.

He closed my door and led the way through the melee of cops and health-care professionals.

“Uncle Bob,” I said at his back, fighting to keep up with him, “did something happen to Reyes?”

“The injunction didn’t go through,” he said over his shoulder.

I skidded to a halt. A combination of disbelief and downright denial stole my breath as I stood there running a thousand scenarios in my head. If they took him off life support and he died, would he cross? Would he stay? Could we even have a relationship if he was departed? Maybe they would take him off life support and he would just wake up. He would be okay. I angled for a Hollywood ending with each hypothesis, hoping for what was most likely impossible.

“Charley,” Uncle Bob said as he stopped and turned toward me, a hint of warning in his voice that shot my nerves to attention. “Are you telling me everything you know about Farrow?”

Something was up. That whole woman’s intuition thing was tingling, among other womanly things. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, well, you told me—” He leaned in and softened his voice. “—that he’s supernatural. But I thought you meant like you. Not like, you know, super-supernatural.”

All I could think was, Oh, my god ! Why was Uncle Bob asking me such a thing? Surely Reyes was okay if Ubie suspected super-supernatural phenomena. “So, um, why do you ask?”