Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet (Charley Davidson)

9

Two drinks away from girl-on-girl action.

—T-SHIRT

“You okay?” Uncle Bob had asked after I closed my front door. As always, the air crackled with electricity in Reyes’s wake. But I thought it was sweet that Ubie would be concerned about me. He was the one quaking in his discount loafers. He was beginning to understand what Reyes was capable of, and quaking in his loafers was a very appropriate response. Especially since he was the one who put him behind bars.

“I’m fine, thanks. How are you?”

“Late,” he said. “I have a date.”

I tried not to look too surprised. “With a person?”

He frowned. “No, a soda machine. Of course a person.”

Amber giggled, recovering from Reyes’s presence faster than her mother or Gemma did. I gave them a few minutes to absorb everything while I teased Ubie, who only had to recover from his near near-death experience. I was so glad Reyes hadn’t ripped him to shreds. I liked him much better un-shredded. Unlike, say, my preference for lettuce or heavy metal guitar solos.

Getting the feeling I was going to have company for a while, I headed toward my shower. “Well, you better get home,” I said to Ubie. “You can only keep a date tied up in the basement for so long before they become resentful.”

Just as I entered the bathroom, I heard him say, “Talk to your dad.”

Not likely. The shower felt wonderful, even with a furry beast knocking me to and fro. I hadn’t seen this much action in one day for over two months. My body didn’t know what to do. How to act. It wanted my sofa—which might or might not go by the name of Sharon—and cheese puffs, but I realized I was going to have to wean off both. Slowly at first. Maybe I’d downgrade to a recliner and cheese crackers, ease off gradually, then try something healthy like cleaning house and eating an apple.

I shuddered at the thought. Cheese puffs were so comforting. And they were orange. No, I probably shouldn’t rush into anything. I came up with a plan B. Clean house while eating cheese puffs. Comforting and productive.

After Artemis dived into the earth below me, I stepped out of the shower and dressed in a pair of plaid lime green pajama bottoms that had no smart-ass saying whatsoever. But I made up for it with a top proclaiming SARC- was my second favorite -ASM word. Ready to face the masses again, I went back out into the living area.

Cookie and Gemma were in the kitchen, trying out all my cool new gadgets. Hopefully, I’d get a meal out of their efforts. Amber gathered her books when I came out and she stepped over to me. “You’re really loud in the shower,” she said.

I could only imagine what Artemis knocking me into the wall repeatedly sounded like from out here. “Yeah, I tripped.”

“Seven times?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, okay. Well, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry, Charley. I didn’t mean to do that. With Reyes. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“Embarrass me?” I gathered her into my arms. “Amber, you could never embarrass me.”

“Never?” she asked.

“Never.”

“One time, I yelled across the store to Mom and asked her if she wanted the regular or the super-absorbent tampons. I added that, according to the box, the super-absorbent were for those heavy days. Then I asked her to rate her heaviness on a scale of one to ten.”

“Okay, you could.”

“Then while we were standing in line, I asked her why she was buying three boxes of Summer’s Eve in the middle of winter.”

I set her at arm’s length. “Wow.”

“I know, right? I had no idea a person could turn so red.”

“So, we’ve established that, yes, you could indeed embarrass me. But you didn’t. I’m sorry that you know so much of things no twelve-year-old girl should know about.

“I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

I looked over to see what the chefs were doing. When I saw that they were busy, I leaned in to her. “What exactly do you know?”

She smiled. “I know you’re the grim reaper.”

That realization knocked the wind out of my sails.

“And I know Reyes is the son of Satan.”

“H-how do you know all of this?”

“I have really good hearing. And I can listen to all kinds of conversations even while I’m doing my homework.”

“Really?”

She snorted. “I swear, you guys act like I go deaf every time I open a book.” With an evil cackle, she headed toward the door. “I can hear other things, too. Before you came around, I had no idea a man could make a girl scream like that. Reyes seems very talented.”

Certain my eyes resembled tea saucers, I took a quick peek at Cookie to make sure she wasn’t paying attention to us. While I’d never had relations with Reyes other than in my dreams and once while he was incorporeal, those relations were … very satisfying. And apparently Amber knew it.

“Don’t worry. Mom doesn’t know.”

“That Reyes is very talented?”

“Oh, no, she’s extremely aware of that part. She just doesn’t know that I know that Reyes is very talented.” She giggled again, a sound that conjured images of a mad scientist in the making, and just before she closed the door behind her, she said, “But don’t stop on my account.”

Oh. My. God. Cookie was going to kill me.

“So what were you two talking about?” she asked.

I jumped, then smoothed my pajama bottoms. “Nothing. Why? What do you think we were talking about?”

She frowned at me. “Do you think she’s okay?”

“Oh, I think she’s just fine.” The little smarty-pants.

She went back to whisking some kind of batter as Gemma dumped in a powdery substance. I could only hope they were baking brownies. Brownies were like spare batteries. One could never have too many in the house.

“I’m going to sleep with you,” Gemma said as she eyed the concoction and rationed in a little more powder.

“You’re not really my type, but okay. How kinky are we talking?”

“Do you think it needs more?” she asked Cookie, inspecting the bowl.

“One can never have too much powdered sugar,” Cookie said. Then she pointed a whisk at me. “I think you should bottle Reyes and sell him on the black market. We’d be rich.”

I stepped closer. “Dude, what are you whisking?”

“Having recently been in the same room with the hottest man on the planet, I’m probably whisking my virtue.” She chuckled. “Get it? Whisking my virtue?”

Gemma laughed as she measured in more powdered sugar. I took a gander at Cookie’s bowl and scooped out a dollop of white heaven. “So, icing?”

“Yes, we’re trying out your new cake pans.”

“I bought cake pans?” That was so unlike me.

She wriggled her brows. “And you bought a margarita mixer.”

Uh-oh.

I soon found out Gemma had ulterior motives in hanging with me and drinking like a fish on dry land. I could read it in her body language, in the shifting light in her eyes, but mostly when she said, “I have ulterior motives.”

She was determined to help me sleep if she had to get me plastered to do it. So she and Cookie were trying out a frozen margarita mixer I’d ordered during a low point in my downfall. For one week, all I could think about was drinking margaritas—well, that and running my tongue along Reyes’s teeth—but I didn’t have salt—or Reyes’s teeth. I’d also lacked the energy to leave my apartment to get some—or the desire to stoop low enough to beg Reyes to let me lick his teeth after what he did—so I could only wish for a margarita. And dream of Reyes’s teeth.

I’d secretly hoped a margarita would magically appear in my hand, but that would mean I would have to put down the remote, and God knew that was not going to happen.

It was a vicious circle.

But Gemma rarely drank. Maybe a glass of wine with dinner. And I drank only on special occasions. Like Fridays and Saturdays. Cookie on the other hand …

“Wooooooohooooooo!” Cookie raised her arms in triumph. No idea why. “I haven’t had thith much fun thince … thince …” She seemed at a loss for coherent words, but she recovered quickly and pointed toward the door. “Thince Reyeth Farlow walked through that door!” She turned back to me, her expression full of awe. “And, my god, doeth that boy know how to walk.”

Cookie stood on the other side of the breakfast bar, trying to bake brownies in my new electric pressure cooker. While the apartment smelled really good, I didn’t have high hopes for a chocolate fix anytime soon. The cooker beeped and she turned to check it right before she disappeared. It was weird. She was there one minute and gone the next. And her disappearance was quickly followed by a solid thud, the sound echoing off the kitchen floor. I thought about hurrying to her rescue, but didn’t trust my own legs at that point. Gemma was draped over the arm of my sofa—which might or might not go by the name of Melvin—and Aunt Lillian, who swore those were the best margaritas she’d had since that beauty pageant she entered in Juárez, was facedown on my floor. No idea why.

“You’re missing out, Mr. Wong. I don’t know what Cookie put in these, but they’re pretty amazing.” I saluted the boxes that surrounded him, downed the last sip of margarita—or Cookie-a-rita, as they’d been recently dubbed—and decided to get a jump on my letter writing Gemma insisted upon as a form of therapy. Usually therapists stuck to journaling, so letter writing was an interesting twist.

I figured I’d write a letter to Santa. Christmas had come and gone, but I’d missed it, as I was not talking to anyone except for the salespeople for the Buy From Home Channel at the time, and they didn’t seem to want to spend Christmas with me.

I’d had Christmas dinner with Cookie and Amber, of course, and Gemma and Uncle Bob had both come by bearing gifts and a special, sticky kind of depression, but I really didn’t remember much beyond that. Though there was an incredible chocolate cheesecake somewhere in there. The rest was a blur.

I took out pen and paper and jotted down my thoughts.

Dear Santa,

What the fuck?

That was about all I could manage, and it got me nowhere fast. I felt no better for the effort. Gemma’s therapy techniques sucked. I still couldn’t get Reyes out of my head. The image of him letting Amber hug him was too precious. And not what I wanted. I wanted to be angry with him, to shake my fists and snarl, but he’d been fighting demons for me. To keep me safe. It was so freaking hard to stay angry with a guy who was secretly fighting a war in your honor. Damn it.

I herded Gemma to the bedroom and lay down beside her only to stare at the ceiling for two hours straight. Then the wall. The nightstand. The skull-clad tissue dispenser. After hours of nothing but frustration, I eased Gemma’s arm off my face and slipped out of bed. I was really hoping that margarita would help me sleep like it had Gemma and Cookie, but it didn’t. When I was trying to stay awake for weeks at a time, all I could do was drink copious amounts of coffee just to fight it off. Now I wanted to sleep and couldn’t.

The sandman was an ass.

I realized the one person missing from their little ambush was Garrett Swopes, a skiptracer who often worked with my uncle Bob. I hadn’t seen him since I almost got him killed. For the second time. But surely he wasn’t holding that against me. He hadn’t come by and I hadn’t had the desire or the energy to leave my apartment, so I hadn’t heard from him in two months. Not a phone call. Not a text. Not an email. Double gunshot wound or not, that just wasn’t like him.

I decided to hunt him down. He probably wasn’t the same since his near-death experience. He’d seen me. When he died on the operating table, he’d seen what I looked like from the other side, seen what I did on a daily basis. That had to be hard on anyone.

And yet I had no idea if he remembered it. As the escalator to Heaven, I had certain responsibilities that I’d tried to explain to him once. But seeing was believing. Maybe it pushed him over the edge. Maybe the reality was much more disturbing than the idea.

I pushed my feet into a pair of slippers, threw on a jacket, and headed that way.

Driving at three o’clock in the morning had its perks. Like little to no traffic, so I made it to Garrett’s house in record time.

I knocked on his door and waited. That man took forever to answer in the wee hours before dawn. I knocked again. I’d always wondered something: If a skiptracer is arrested and skips, who searches for him?

“Charles!” he growled from behind the door. “I swear to God if that’s you …”

How did he know? I decided not to say anything. To surprise him with my presence.

The door swung open and he stood there shirtless and disheveled. While I didn’t have a particular thing for Garrett, he did make a nice vision. He had mocha-colored skin and smoky gray eyes that alighted on Margaret but dismissed her just as quickly. He was in the biz. Surely he understood my need to pack iron even in my pajamas.

“What’s up?” I asked, way more cheerily than I felt.

“Are you kidding me?” He rubbed an eye with one hand.

“Nope.” I charged through him and went straight for his sofa. But his house was really dark. Weird. “I haven’t seen you in forever. I thought we should talk.”

“There is such a thing as being too presumptuous.”

“You know, I get that a lot. Got any coffee?”

After exhaling loudly so I wouldn’t miss his annoyance, he closed the door with more force than I felt necessary and strode to the kitchen. “What are you doing here?”

“Bugging you.”

“Besides that.”

“I didn’t realize I had to have a reason to visit one of my best friends on planet Earth.”

“Are you trying to stay awake for days at a time again?”

“Nope. Not trying. Just doing.”

He’d been rummaging around the kitchen, and while I couldn’t see what he was doing, the rummaging sounds stopped. I waited. Maybe it was the best-friend statement. Clearly he didn’t know he was one of my best friends. He must’ve felt really honored. Or horrified. It was a win–win.

“Here.”

I jumped. He was standing right behind me, handing me a wineglass. “You’re serving me coffee in a wineglass?”

“No.”

“Is this coffee-flavored wine?”

“No. Drink.” He tilted the glass toward my mouth.

I took a sip and … “Hey, that’s not bad.”

“Drink it all and I’ll give you a ride home.”

“Dude, it takes more than one glass of wine to inebriate me. Remember what I am?”

“Annoying.”

“That’s so uncalled for.”

He sat beside me on the sofa and stretched out his legs. He’d slipped on a pair of jeans, but his feet were bare. They brushed up against a pile of books. I didn’t even know Swopes could read.

“You’re having problems sleeping?” he asked.

“Kind of.” I leaned nonchalantly forward to check out the titles. “Not really. I want to know why you’ve been avoiding me.”

He put his feet on the carpet and sat forward, too, clasping a beer in his hands. He scrutinized the carpet a good minute before he said, “I haven’t been avoiding you.”

The books he had were all on the spiritual realm, heaven and hell, demons and angels. His near-death experience must have affected him more than I thought. “You haven’t been to see me in two months.”

“And you haven’t been to see me in two months. That’s not avoidance on my part, Charles. That’s self-preservation.”

Crap. “I knew this was because I keep getting you shot.”

He sank back into the sofa and sipped his beer. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s not like I can blame you. I’d steer clear of me, too, if I kept getting myself shot.” I took a sip of wine. “That didn’t come out right.”

He took a huge gulp, downing the beer in three seconds flat. When he stood to get another, I stayed him with a hand on his arm. But I did not get the reaction I’d expected. The one I’d grown used to. He stepped back emotionally. Almost cringed inwardly at my touch.

The emotion shocked me. I didn’t realize I disgusted him now.

That was an eye-opener if I’d ever seen one. “I’m sorry,” I said, putting the wineglass on a side table. “I better go. We’ll talk later.”

“No,” he said, but I was already headed for the door.

He rounded the sofa and slammed the door the second I opened it. Standing behind me, he released a slow breath. “I’m sorry, Charles. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I forget that you feel things, that you glean emotion off other people.”

I turned to him in askance. “So, what? You’re going to try to control your emotions around me? Pretend I don’t disgust you?” A hitch in my stupid breath gave away the fact that his reaction had hurt. He’d never hurt me before, not like that, and we’d had some doozies. Why now? Why should I even care?

But I knew. He’d always thought I was crazy, but I’d never disgusted him before. The realization brought tears to my eyes.

“Disgust?” he asked, his brows drawn sharp in consternation. “Is that what you think?”

A breathy laugh escaped me. “Please, Swopes. You can’t hide your emotions. I felt them like a punch in the gut. It’s okay. I just need to go.”

“You may feel emotions, but you suck at reading them if you got disgust out of that.”

“Garrett, please let me leave. I’m sorry I woke you.”

“Hell no. Sit down.” He pointed toward the sofa while keeping the other hand planted firmly on the door.

Fine. He didn’t need to get all huffy. I sat back down and only then did he take his seat again. I got the feeling he didn’t trust me.

“Now, why do you think that you could ever disgust me in any way?” he asked.

“You’re avoiding me, for one thing.”

“So that means I’m disgusted by you?”

“You don’t want to talk about what happened,” I tried again. While I didn’t want to talk about what happened to me, I was all for talking about what happened to him.

“Okay. What happened?”

“You died.”

He stared at me unblinkingly.

“You died and you came to see me. Do you remember?”

“I need another beer.”

I let him get up for a beer but followed. He opened the fridge, popped the top, and downed the whole thing without stopping. After tossing the bottle, he took out another and sipped it more slowly. I sat at his pintsized kitchen table, and he strolled over to join me.

“Can you tell me what you remember?” I asked when he sat down. When he just stared at the bottle in his hands, I said, “Do you remember anything?” I knew he did. He had to have. If not, he would never have reacted in such a way.

“I remember everything.”

I blanched at the thought. “Like what?”

He inhaled deeply and said, “I remember being drawn to your light. I remember that little girl crossing through you. I remember Mr. Wong and the dog.”

“Is that what bothers you? What you saw me do?”

“No.” He looked at me point-blank. “Nothing about you bothers me, besides the fact that you knock on my door at three in the morning. There’s other stuff you don’t know about.”

I frowned at him. “Like what?”

“After I saw you, I went somewhere else. I just figured I was going back into my body since I wasn’t dead anymore.”

“How did you know you weren’t dead in the first place?”

“My father told me. He sent me back. I haven’t seen him since I was ten. He was an engineer for a U.S. company in Colombia. He was kidnapped. Normally they just want a ransom, but something must have gone wrong. We never heard from him again. He just disappeared.”

“But you got to see him?” I asked in awe. All the crossing-over stuff was still such a mystery, even to me.

“Yes. He sent me back. I was pissed.” He turned to look out the window into the black night. “I didn’t want to come back. I’d never felt anything like that.”

“I’ve heard that before. It makes me happy to know that death is just a phase, that we go to another world and it’s wonderful. But you said you went somewhere else?”

“Yes. After I saw you. And it’s not always wonderful.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I went to hell, Charles.”

I stilled. “You mean that metaphorically, right?”

“No. I don’t.”

“You mean literally? Hell? As in fire and brimstone?”

“Yes.”

I sat back, stunned.

“And I learned things. I wasn’t there by accident. I was sent. To learn. To understand.”

“To understand what?”

“What your boyfriend did for a living.”

He didn’t have to elaborate. I knew he was talking about Reyes. Who else?

“Do you have any idea what he is?”

“The son of Satan.”

His expression showed his surprise. “And you’re okay with that?”

“Swopes, he escaped from hell, okay? He’s not a bad guy. Well, not totally bad.”

He scoffed and rose from the table. “Then you need to see what I’ve seen.”

A ripple of fear shimmied through me. “What?”

“He was a general there, you know. The son of evil, yes, but he rose through the ranks of hell all on his own. He was a skilled assassin and he lived for the taste of the blood of his enemies.”

“He wasn’t exactly raised in a nurturing environment.”

“So, you’re going to make excuses for him all night? Why did you come here?”

“I wanted to know how you were. Sorry.”

I got up to leave again, but he stopped me with one thing he said: “He was sent here. For you.”

I turned back to him. “I know he was sent here, but to get a portal. Any portal. Not for me specifically. Then he saw me and fell in love. So he escaped the bonds of his father and waited for me.”

“He fell in love?” The astonished expression on his face told me exactly what he thought of me. “He didn’t escape anything. He was sent. For you in particular.”

“You can’t believe that.”

“Oh, no. You’re right. I mean I was only shown it in hell. Surely my sources are mistaken.”

“Swopes, people don’t just go to the netherworld, then come out unscathed.”

“The fuck they don’t. I did. Then I was dragged out by a force of some kind. And I never said I was unscathed.”

Well, if anything would affect the psyche, it would be a trip to hell. I didn’t know what to say. “What was it like?”

He waved his beer in the air. “You know. Hot. Lots of screaming. Lots of agony. I would not recommend it for a vacation spot.”

“How do you know about—? Who told you about Reyes?”

The look he placed on me was filled with a seething kind of hatred. “His father.”

I sank back into the chair. “So, you two just struck up a conversation over an open pit, compared notes on death and agony?”

“Something like that. He wanted me to see, Charley.”

“See what?”

“What his son was.” He lurched forward as though trying to will me to believe him. “What he did.”

“We all do things we aren’t proud of.”

He laughed harshly and scrubbed his face with his fingers. “You live in your own little world, don’t you?”

“Yes, and I like it here.”

“Well, let me tell you this: I know what he is and I know what you are and I know what will come down if he gets you. I am not about to let that happen.”

Oh, wonderful. “Come down? What, like hell on Earth?”

“Like the worst kind of hell on Earth. Charles, he was sent here. For you. To make all of his father’s dreams come true.”

I stood to get a drink of water. “What you saw, what they told you, isn’t real. He wasn’t sent here. He escaped. He came here on his own.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“Yes,” I said, combing his cabinets for a glass.

“I never figured a grim reaper would be so gullible.”

Screw it. I could get a drink at home. There were few things I hated more than having my intelligence questioned.

I closed the cabinet door and leaned over him as he sat at the table. “So, you’ve been to hell, huh?” When he nodded, I offered a candy-coated smile, patted his cheek, and said, “Sweet dreams.”