He cleared his throat and said, “We found a body.”
My vision blurred as he spoke, as I looked at my dad, at the two gunshot wounds in his chest.
“We have reason to believe it’s your father.” After a long moment in which he allowed me to absorb what he’d just said, he asked, “Did you find anything more about what he was doing? Whom he was investigating?”
Though I didn’t feel it, the phone slipped from my fingers. Reyes caught it and told the captain I’d call him back before ending the call.
“Dad,” I whispered, unable to take my gaze off the gunshot wounds, the blood that had saturated his light blue shirt.
I started toward him, but he took a step back, ducked his head as though ashamed, so I stopped.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m sorry, pumpkin. I never knew.”
“What?” My vision was so blurred, my heart so suddenly empty, I could barely focus on him. I could barely keep my knees from buckling.
“I never knew how truly special you were. I mean, I knew you had a gift, but I never knew the depths of who you were. Of what you were. You’re amazing.”
“Dad, what happened?”
“You’re a god.”
“Dad, please. Who did this?”
He nodded as though coming to his senses. “There are people out there, honey, people who know what you are. I tried to stop them. I was trying to find out exactly who they are when they caught on.”
“Where did all of those pictures come from?” I asked him, referring to the pictures of me in his hotel room. “Is that who… Did the people who took those pictures do this?”
“No. But they know who did. They’ve been following you. Studying you. Recording every event in your life since the day you were born.” He bit out the last words as though disgusted with them. With himself for not realizing it. “They know more about you than I ever did. But you can’t trust them. They aren’t here for you. They’re here only to observe and report back.”
I knew it. “The Vatican. They report to the Vatican.”
He seemed surprised that I knew. “But there are others. They’re called the Twelve.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “We know about them.”
“They were sent,” he said, beginning to fade.
“Dad, where are you going?” I asked, rushing forward.
“I have to go. I’ll let you know when I learn more.”
I made it to him, but he put his cold hands on my shoulders to try to force me to pay attention.
“Charley, listen. They were sent. The Twelve. They were sent by something very, very bad.”
“I know,” I said, his essence fading from my sight.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “They weren’t —” He glanced behind him, and just as he disappeared, he said, “They were sent.”
I stood staring into an empty space as the last word drifted toward me. The coolness on my shoulders faded slower than my father had. I closed my eyes, unable to bear the void in front of me. The void in my heart.
“Dutch,” Reyes said.
I turned and rushed into his arms, overwhelmed by the sobs bursting from my body. How would I tell Gemma that our father had died? That he died because of me? Because of what I was? The loss crushed me as nothing had before. I clung to Reyes and let the pain slip inside me, let it rattle my bones and score my flesh.
After an eternity of anguish, I peeled off his shoulder and went to the bathroom to get cleaned up. Then I came back out, my shoulders set in determination. “I can’t leave,” I said, prepared for an argument. I now sounded like I had a cold from all the crying, and I wondered how long I’d sobbed into Reyes’s wet T-shirt. “I have to find out who killed my father, and I can’t do that from a safe house in the mountains.”
Reyes lowered his head. “You have to trust your uncle to find that out.”
“My uncle doesn’t know what he’s facing. I do.”
He stepped closer, growing ever wary. “We’re leaving.”
I stepped closer, too, reached up, and wrapped a hand around his throat. “I can drop you right now and leave you quivering in my wake.”
He nodded and spoke softly, as though speaking to a wounded animal. “You can do a lot more than that to me, Dutch.”
Satisfaction welled in my chest.
“But before you do, think of our daughter.”
That one threw me. Reluctantly, I lowered my hand and retreated a step, not wanting to think about anything but the fact that my father had been shot and left to bleed out in a fucking storage unit.
“We have to get her to safety,” he continued. “You know that as well as I.” He lifted my chin. “The moment it’s safe, we’ll figure out who did this.”
“And when will that be, Reyes? When will it be safe? We have no idea how to stop them, much less kill them.”
“We’ll figure those things out,” he said. “But we can’t do that here. We’re too vulnerable, too available, but we will figure this out.”
In a fit of fury, I jerked my chin out of his grasp, grabbed my overnight bag, and stuffed a few random articles of clothing inside it.
“You keep telling yourself that,” I said before scooping up Mrs. Thibodeaux’s fishbowl and storming out the door. I would go with him. I would become a prisoner at some abandoned convent for the sake of our daughter, but the moment she was safe on earth, the moment I knew they couldn’t get to her, there would be hell to pay for those who had done this. Not to mention the fact that Reyes’s father would soon discover the folly of trying to position himself between an angry mother and her cub.
The earth rumbled with every step I took, with each idea that formed and solidified in my mind. If I had to, I would raise hell from the depths of the unseen myself and rip that bastard to shreds.
He wanted a war? He’d get one.
Excerpt: Reyes’s POV
I watched as Dutch stormed out of her apartment, fishbowl sloshing water over the sides, overstuffed bag dropping articles of clothing in her wake. The light that radiated from her core burned hot with anger, turning it to a gold as dark and shimmering as her eyes. That, combined with the pain of her father’s death, washed over my skin like an electric wind. She was so incredibly powerful and growing more powerful every day. Soon she’d be an uncontrollable force. An unstoppable creature. She would be the god that she was born to be, and she would no longer need me. No longer have use for me.
I waited to hear her footsteps on the stairs before I summoned the mutt. Angel, she called him. Her investigator. He appeared beside me and I tilted my head in question.
After stuffing his hands in his pockets, he nodded. “You were right. He’s spying for someone.”
“For whom?” I asked, not in the mood for games.
“Look, pendejo, I’m doing this for her. I work for Charley. Not you. She deserves to know.”
The punk had always been afraid of me, but he was getting bolder. I’d have to rip that bandanna off his head and wrap it around his throat soon. But now was not the time.
Instead of acting on my instincts, I glared at him.
It worked. The mutt bit down and said, “I don’t know who it was. Some guy in a black Rolls. A rich fuck with more money than sense, if he’s doing what you say he’s doing.”
I nodded. That would be my father’s emissary. And the spy the kid had been following on my orders was one of Dutch’s newest hard cases. He’d been watching her for a while. And I’d been watching him.
I wondered how to tell her that a deadhead, one she considered a friend, was spying on her for my father. With everything else going on, she would not take it well.
His name was Duff, and Dutch, like so many before her, had been taken in by his baby-faced charm and childlike stutter. But I knew him for what he really was. He’d been in prison for a reason, after all.
“Keep an eye on him. Let me know if there are any changes.”
“What if Charley needs me?” he asked
.
“Then be there for her, but get back to the deadhead the minute you’re finished.”
With a nod, the mutt started to leave, but then stopped. “Will this guy hurt her?”
“Duff?” I asked him.
“No, the rich fuck.”
“Only if we give him the chance.”
The kid bowed his head. “I can take him out.”
“And deny me the pleasure?” I took a purposeful step closer. “I would not suggest that course of action.”
He took a wary step back. “Fine. He’s all yours. But I get the ghost.”
“Duff will be all yours when we’re finished with him.”
“Hell yes,” he said. Pleased with that, he disappeared.
I followed Dutch out the door, wincing at the soreness I still felt from the fight with the Twelve. That one had me stumped. They seemed impossible to kill, but there had to be a way. I had to find a way. For Dutch and the kid. Our kid. I just needed a few more pieces to the puzzle. Once I figured out who’d summoned them, the hellhounds, I could take that guy out. They’d be more vulnerable then. Easier to crush.
I had yet to figure out the part that the Daeva Osh’ekiel played in all this, but I’d use him for now. If he so much as blinked wrong, I’d sever his spine. It was the least I could do.
I stepped into the ink-like night. Dutch sat in her Jeep, the engine idling, her expression hard. I walked around to the driver’s side and opened the door. Her emotions hit me like a freight train, and I felt her fight tooth and nail to hold back the grief that threatened to consume her.
“I have to call Gemma,” she said.
“You can call on the way. I’ll drive.”
After a moment, she turned to get out. A tear pushed past her lashes and slid down her cheek. She brushed it away angrily, the incredible energy radiating out of her rumbling the ground beneath us.
I didn’t dare stop her as she pushed past me to walk around and get in the passenger’s side. The emotions roiling inside her were like at that stage of a nuclear bomb when the first atom has been split and the rest are on the verge of exploding. She had unlimited power and no means to control it. Not yet. She could destroy so many in such a small span of time and not even know what she’d done until the deed was complete. It would devastate her beyond anything she’d ever felt before, so I stepped aside, not wishing to be responsible for the damage she could inflict, for the immeasurable loss of life. And I didn’t want to be eviscerated myself. Not just yet. I wanted to see our daughter. I wanted to see, if only for a moment, the being destined to destroy my father once and for all.
Then I could die knowing he would suffer for his crimes against humanity and I would spend eternity with the only creature in the universe who could bring me to my knees with a mere whisper.
Darynda Jones, Seventh Grave and No Body
(Series: Charley Davidson # 7)
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