Darynda Jones - First Grave on the Right

“Charley,” he said, his voice a warning, and my heart rate skyrocketed. He gripped my arm and began winding us through the crowd again.

“What happened?” I asked at his back, hope evident in every syllable. Reyes had to be alive. Something miraculous had to have happened. Why else would Ubie ask such a question? Why else would all these people be here?

“I don’t know, Charley,” he replied, his voice drenched in sarcasm. “Nobody knows, Charley. Perhaps you can explain how a man can just disappear off the face of the Earth.”

“What?” That brought things to a second standstill. “What are you talking about?”

Uncle Bob stopped again and turned back to me. “I knew how important this was to you, so I came up here to talk to the judge myself. Not that it helped. She couldn’t justify keeping your friend on life support when he was obviously brain-dead and it was costing the state a fortune to keep him alive.”

“You drove up yourself? For me?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, pulling at his collar in discomfort. “So, I figured the least I could do was be here when they took him off life support. But when I arrived, the place was in an uproar. He was gone.”

“Gone?” I squealed. I cleared my throat. “Gone where?”

He leaned in again, his voice a harsh, desperate whisper. “Not just gone, Charley, disappeared.”

“I don’t understand. He escaped?”

“You’ll have to see this for yourself.”

We hastened through the front doors and into a small security room.

“Show her,” he told the security officer, who obeyed immediately.

After he typed a couple of commands into his computer, I asked, “What is this?”

“Just watch it,” he said.

The monitor showed footage from a security camera. I recognized the area. “Is this outside Reyes’s room?”

“Just watch,” he repeated, all mysterious and annoying-like.

Then I saw movement. I leaned in closer. Reyes’s door was open, and the black-and-white footage centered directly into his room. He moved, raised an arm to his head, then shot up and looked around. The resolution was so low, it was hard to see anything definitive, but it was most assuredly Reyes. And he was awake. As if gaining his bearings, he calmed, took a deep breath, then turned toward the camera and smiled. He smiled! A wicked, lopsided kind of grin that had me melting into my boots.

A glitch in the footage caused the screen to go static, then black a fraction of a second, and when the picture returned, he was gone. In a heartbeat. He was literally there one moment then gone the next, his bed rumpled and empty.

“Where’d he go?” I asked the bemused security guard, who shrugged.

“I was hoping you could tell us,” Uncle Bob said.

Reyes was certainly otherworldly, but the ability to dematerialize a human body simply didn’t exist. At least not that I knew of. Course, I didn’t figure Satan had a son until a few hours ago either. “Uncle Bob,” I said, hedging away from the truth, “I didn’t really tell you everything.”

“Ya think?” Uncle Bob motioned for the security guard to leave.

After he was gone, I said, “It’s just … well … I’ve never really told you everything.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, even more perplexed than before.

“I mean, I’m different. You know that. But I’ve never told you exactly how different I am.”

“Okay,” he said, his tone wary, “how different are you?”

I couldn’t imagine how telling Uncle Bob I was the grim reaper or that Reyes was the son of Satan would benefit the situation. Some things were better left unsaid.

“Let’s just say that I’m more different than you know and that, yes, a part of Reyes is super-supernatural.”

“Which part?”

“Um, the super-supernatural part?”

“I want more than that, Charley,” he warned, stepping closer. “You have to explain this.”

I eased down onto the edge of the security guard’s chair, my back stiff, my jaw clenched shut. One word came to mind repeatedly. Crapola. How on Earth could I explain the dematerialization of a human body? If that’s really what happened.

Just then, Neil Gossett walked in. His gaze landed on me instantly, then darted to Uncle Bob in a gesture of guilt, like we shared a secret. Which, in a way, we did. He just didn’t have all the details.

“Mr. Gossett,” Uncle Bob said, holding out his hand.

“Detective,” Neil said as they shook hands. “Anything new?”

Uncle Bob looked back at me then. “Nothing substantial.”

Both Ubie and Neil knew just enough to be dangerous. And neither knew the whole story. I wondered how long I could keep their questions at bay. I’d already revealed more about myself in the last week than I had in my entire life. While it was freeing in a way, it was also risky to invite so many people into my world. I’d done it before. And I’d paid the price.

“Who’s Dutch?” Uncle Bob asked, gesturing toward the monitor, and my breath caught in my throat.

Though I hadn’t touched it, the screen was now black. In the center sat that one solitary word followed by a blinking cursor, and relief flooded me so completely, I thought I would slide off the chair. Reyes. Reyes Alexander Farrow was alive. I stared a long time at the nickname he’d given me the day I was born, wondering if he could still come to me, if we could still be together. Then I felt him brush across my mouth, and I knew my life would never be the same again.