Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet (17 page)

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 pint-sized 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.