He picked up the sheet again and began.
“King!” I said, gazing up at him. “It’s talking about a king.”
“No,” Reyes said, straightening in his chair. “A queen. If you take into account the first word of the sentence, it is describing a feminine subject. He’s just saying the actual word wrong. It’s queen.” He looked up at Garrett. “Keep going.”
Garrett picked up the chair he’d upended and sat down beside us to read the line yet again.
“That’s not bad,” I said. “I got it that time. The queen, though the first—”
“—will be the last,” Reyes finished. Then he looked at me.
“You. It’s talking about you, only using the word ‘queen’ instead of ‘god.’”
“It makes sense,” Osh said, joining us at the table. “He had to be careful what he wrote or be considered a heretic.”
“Or in league with the devil,” Reyes added.
Osh nodded. “Like a witch. He would have been condemned and most likely stoned to death.”
“What a horrible thought.”
“So, if you’re the queen in this passage,” Osh said. “How are you the first and the last?”
Reyes was staring at me, and I tried to ignore it at first because it wasn’t a come-hither stare but more like a you’re a freak kind of stare. Either that or I was projecting.
“What?” I asked him at last.
“It is talking about you,” he said as though astonished. “You are the first pure ghost god.”
I frowned. We’d had this conversation before. “I thought I was the thirteenth. What the heck?”
He shook his head. “You are the thirteenth god, but the first pure ghost god.”
With as much dramatic flair as I could muster, I threw myself—mostly just my head—across the table. “You never give me the entire picture of anything. I’m so confused.”
Reyes laughed softly. “Okay, here’s what I know: There were seven gods, or what we would call gods, in your dimension. They were the original gods. They created everything there, like the God of this dimension created everything here.”
I turned to him, trying to understand. “So, like another galaxy?”
“No,” Osh said. “Like another universe. This one is taken.”
“There are other universes?” Garrett asked.
“There are as many universes as there are stars in the heavens of this one.”
Garrett sat back, as impressed as I was. “Okay, so in mine, there were seven gods. Not just one.”
“Yes, for lack of a better term. They are actually very different entities, but we will go with ‘god’ for now.”
“Gotcha. Going with god. And we have seven.”
“You had seven. Eventually, through time, there were thirteen total entities, including you. But you are the only one left. The last of your kind.”
I did the dramatic thing again and Reyes laughed again.
He pushed my hair out of my face. Tucked it behind an ear. “The original seven weren’t like your god. They could procreate, but only once.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. Why only once?”
“Because once they created another god, what I’m calling a ghost god, they melded together and became one. They ceased to exist. Their union created another being—”
“Like Beep!”
“—like Beep, only they converged into one being, a single ghost god, with all the power of the two that merged to produce it. Therefore, the new entity is more powerful than the individual gods that created it. It’s like two stars colliding to create a single supernova, one that can live forever and has an endless supply of energy. And now, in a process that took millions of years, or even billions, all of the original gods have converged, either with each other or with another ghost god, until there is only one left. And they were magnificent. They were great celestial beings floating in space with the power of a billion suns.”
I sat back, impressed. “Okay, this is a really cool story.”
“Thank you.”
“But why am I the first as well as the last?”
“If you do that math—”
I gaped at him in horror. I had no idea there would be math involved.
He ignored me. “—you’ll realize that seven original gods, and the ghost gods they created, could only have produced a thirteenth if all of them had eventually merged. All seven of the original gods and three of the original ghost gods had merged until only two ghost gods were left. For the first time, two ghost gods, with the power of all those who came before them, merged and you were created from their union.”
I squeezed my eyes and tried to envision the process. “I don’t think you’re very good at math.”
“I’m very good at math.” He took a pencil and paper and drew me a chart with X’s representing the originals and O’s representing their offspring, the ghost gods. He was right. Seven, when boiled down to one, was thirteen total. Seven original and six ghosts.
“So, it’s like my mother and my father gave up their lives to create me?”
“Yes, and no,” Osh said. “They still live inside you. If this is right, the power surging through every cell in your body could destroy this universe. Could destroy a million universes and everything in them. Thankfully, your species is very kind. I like to think the gods before you are sort of like—” He looked at Reyes for the word.
“Like counselors,” Reyes offered.
“Exactly. They’re like counselors. They’re still there inside you, in the consciousness and memories that define your genetic make up. You’re just a separate entity”
“So, to answer your question,” Reyes said, “you are the first pure ghost god, the only one created from two ghost gods. And because there are no more, you are also the last.”
“That’s kind of sad,” I said. “But they’re all still here?” I placed a hand over my heart.
“Like advisors.”
“Think about it, though,” Osh said, gazing at me in awe. “All that power, all that energy, the potency of seven original gods, has been harvested and passed down to you.”
Reyes looked at Osh and did something I’d never seen him do. He sought Osh’s counsel. “This is where I get lost.”
Osh nodded to encourage him.
“Why is she here on this plane? If she is the last god of her universe, of her people, the very last of her kind, why is she here?”
“That’s something even I can’t fathom.”
“The first time we had sex,” I said, making Reyes a little uncomfortable and Osh perk up, “I saw you see me.” I looked at him. “I saw you pick me out of a thousand beings of light. They were all just like me. There has to be more of us.”
“They were not all just like you. To give you a metaphor of what your dimension is like, imagine God, the god of this dimension, among his angels. He is not one of them. He created them. He has the power to reduce them all to ash with a single thought, but he still lives among them. And his angels, while more powerful than the mortal life in his realm, are not like him, though they are made of a similar substance. Of a similar light.”
“So you saw me among my angels?”
“Metaphorically speaking. And, again, you have to understand, all of this took place over millions of years. Probably billions. The gods of your dimension are more ancient than any other beings I’ve ever come across.”
I had an epiphany. “Then I’m older than you.”
“What?” he asked.
“You may be centuries old, but I’m older. I’m millions of years old.”
He grinned. “Yes.”
“I robbed the cradle,” I said, quite pleased with myself. “I wish I remembered all of this.”
“From what I understand, you will once you know your celestial name. It’s like a safety switch. But you aren’t supposed to know your celestial name until your physical body dies.”
“But I did die!” I argued. “When the Twelve attacked us. I stuck a blade in
my chest and died, baby. I saw the heavens above us. Trust me.”
“You died, but you came back,” Osh said, struggling to understand himself. “That’s the only way it makes sense. You didn’t take up your position as the grim reaper like you’re slated to do.”
“So, the other grim reapers, the ones that reaped, for lack of a better phrase, before me, they were from my world as well?”
“Yes,” Reyes said. “But they were like the angels. No god has ever taken on such a menial task.”
“Then why leave the gene pool?” Garrett asked. “Why bring in a being—a god, no less—when you already have people for that?”
Reyes nodded, agreeing that the whole thing was utterly illogical. “Like I said before, it’s like sending a queen to do the janitor’s work.”
“Or a god,” Osh said, “to clean up someone else’s mess.”
Garrett sat in thought, then looked at me. “So, whose mess are you here to clean up?”
7
A friend will help you if someone knocks you down.
A best friend will pick up a bat and say, “Stay down. I got this.”
—TRUE FACT
Cookie and I compared notes as we ate some of the wonderful fare Reyes and Osh had grilled up. We came up with very little, unfortunately. She was still waiting on information from Kit, and as long as I was stuck at the convent, I just couldn’t do much. I felt helpless, and the dread that had taken up residence in the back of my neck concerning the Loehrs weighed on me. I didn’t know how to tell Reyes what I’d done.
I begged Cook to go, spend at least the night with her husband in a nice place, but she was adamant about staying. Gemma and Denise were still there, too. They’d been hanging out a lot. It was weird and a little disturbing. Well, Denise was a lot disturbing, but she kept to herself mostly. She picked up our plates and made herself useful. So there was that.
Quentin and Amber went back to watching movies, which reminded me, I needed to call Sister Mary Elizabeth before it got too late. If anyone had the lowdown on what was going on up top, it would be her.
Reyes got up from the table to clean the grill. Gemma found a plush corner in the living room in which to read. Uncle Bob had to get back to the city. Osh was nowhere to be found. That guy kept odd hours. Kit sent over the interviews they’d done with all of Faris’s friends, and Cookie couldn’t wait to dive in, so I took the opportunity to chat with Garrett, since we were the only ones left at the table. All our conversations were about prophecies and hellhounds. I wanted to know how he was doing. Kind of. Really I wanted to know how his son was doing and his baby mama, Marika.
I gestured him to move closer. He frowned suspiciously, then scooted his chair over. Like half an inch. Jerk.
“So?” I asked, drinking a cup of hot chocolate. Another one. Since I was officially off coffee until Beep was born, hot chocolate had become my friend. We weren’t as close as me and mocha latte, but we were getting there. It took time to build a relationship. Trust had always been an issue for me.
“So?” he asked, drinking a beer, his beverage of choice.
“How’s Zaire?”
One corner of his mouth went up. “He’s good. I get to see him almost every week.”
“And what about Marika?”
He lifted a shoulder and leaned back in his chair, straightened out his legs in front of him. “She’s doing well. We’ve been talking.”
I scooted closer. “And?”
“She wants to try dating again.”
“Dude, that’s great.”
“I don’t know. She used me to purposely get pregnant and didn’t tell me.”
“Of course she didn’t tell you. What would you have done if she had?”
“Run in the other direction. But it’s still not okay, Charles.”
He was right, of course, but we all make mistakes. I decided to remind him of that. “Do you remember that time I was helping you out with a bust—?”
“You mean that time you butted into my stakeout because you wanted me to lick your coffee cup?”
“Exactly. And what happened?”
“The guy came home. I busted him. End of story.”
“No, before that.”
“You tried to poison me.”
“No, after that.” And I didn’t try to poison him. I just wanted to know if my cup was poisoned. It tasted … poisony. Turned out, I just didn’t rinse well. So much for my theory that my landlord at the time was trying to kill me.
He drew out his exhalation to make his point. A long, needless point. “Fine. I get it.”
“No, what happened?”
“I went into that diner to get a cup of coffee.”
“No. You went into that diner to try to get a date with one of the waitresses.”
“I know the story.”
“And why was I really in the same neighborhood as you?”
“Because you were staking out that diner.”
“I was staking out that waitress. And why was I doing that?”
“Charles—”
I shoved an index finger over his mouth.
He glared.
“Why was I doing that?”
“Because you figured out she was spiking men’s coffees with eyedrops.”
“Yes. She had this weird vendetta thing going on and was purposely making men sick. I saved your ass. You could have died.”
“I wouldn’t have died.”
“You could have gone into a coma like poor Mrs. Verdean’s husband.”
“So, where are you going with this?”
“You made a mistake hitting on that woman when your gut told you she was about as stable as a three-legged chair. We all make mistakes.”
“What Marika did wasn’t a mistake. It was quite intentional.”
“I get it. I do. I just hope you give her a second chance is all. Especially now that she broke up with her boyfriend.”
“She broke up with him?”
I nodded, knowing that would get his attention.
“I don’t know, Charles. Chicks are crazy.”
“Duh. That doesn’t mean you can’t keep trying.”
“Maybe it could work. I mean, I’ve always wanted a family. And Zaire is great. Marika has her moments, too.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said, punching his arm. “So, did you get it?”
“Is that the only reason you’re talking to me?”
It wasn’t, but I couldn’t let him know that I genuinely cared about him. “Of course.”
His mouth widened into a grin that made his silvery eyes sparkle. “It’s behind that weird box.” He nodded toward the potato bin.
“Sweet!” I scrambled up to check out my new toy. “I’ve always wanted a sledgehammer.”
At about half my height, the handle wasn’t bad. The head of the sledgehammer was about the size of a Big Gulp. All in all, it seemed pretty nonthreatening.
I took the handle and tried to pick it up, ignoring the skiptracer at the table. His snickers would not deter me from my task.
“Fine,” I said, dragging it from behind the potato bin and across the floor.
“You aren’t going to kill anyone with that, are you?”
“That’s certainly not the plan,” I said, huffing and puffing as it scraped along the tile with an awful, horror-movielike sound.
“You realize this floor is over a hundred years old.”
I felt bad about the floor. I really did, but I couldn’t pick the stupid thing up. “It’s much heavier than it looks.”
“Would you like some help?”
“Nope,” I said, winded. I’d traveled about two feet. “I got this.”
There was a tiny room off the kitchen with a wooden closet of some kind. Nobody knew what it was, even Sister Mary Elizabeth. It could have been a confessional, for all I knew. Either way, no matter what we did, we could not get the door open. Normally, that wasn’t a big deal. But the more I thought about it, the more it ate at me. There could be anything
in that closet. There could be a dead body. Or a mountain of gold. Or a staircase to a secret passageway.
After months of trying to pry it open, I couldn’t take it anymore. This was my last hope. That door was coming open if I had to tear down the wall around it.
Garrett got up and followed me to the room that we had set up as the laundry room. Though I’d refused his help physically, he decided to help in other ways. He watched and chuckled and assured me I was batshit every so often. So, there was that.
After an eternity, we got to the door, a thick wooden thing set in the middle of a wall in the small room. The wall butted up against the room that Cookie and I had set up as our office, but we’d stepped the rooms off. There was a good five feet of space in between that wall and the office wall. So what was there?
I was about to find out.
As Garrett watched from the doorway, swigging his beer pretty as you please, I pulled with all my might to try to at least get the sledgehammer off the ground. I wasn’t weak. I could lift stuff. Heavy stuff. Well, heavy-ish. This thing was insane.
I set it back down just as Reyes walked up. He wore the same doubt-ridden grin as Garrett.
“Gonna get it open, are you?” Reyes asked, wiping his hands on a towel.
“Yes, I am.” I set the hammer down to take a break. “We need to know what’s in there. There could be anything. I mean, why is it locked?” I examined the door for the thousandth time. “No, how is it locked? There’s no lock.” I pointed to emphasize the absurdity of it all.
The door was massive. In a convent with regular doors and regular walls, why was this door—the same door that was impenetrable—so thick? So sturdy? Reyes had even tried to see into the closet incorporeally. He couldn’t get in!
“I mean, aren’t you even curious? What kind of room is impenetrable even to something that is incorporeal?”
I struggled to lift the sledgehammer again, but now I had an even bigger audience.
“She at it again?” Osh asked.
“Hardheaded as the day is long,” Reyes said.
My frustration rose to new heights. “Okay, Mr. Smarty Pants, if you aren’t going to help, what were you talking to Angel about?”
His gaze narrowed. “What do you mean?”