“Then how about you help me understand?”
“I can try. What else would you like to know?”
“Okay, if what you say is true, why would he want me? Satan? If not for access to heaven?”
“Rey’aziel has kept a lot from you. I’m surprised, considering we have the same agenda.”
“What would that be?”
“Like I said before, to take him down. To end him once and for all.”
“And you think I can do that?”
“No. I don’t. I only know that you are a key player. Somehow, someway, you are the key to it all, and Lucifer knows that. God, as humans like to call him, did what he said he would. He cast Lucifer and all like him from heaven. Now it’s just a game of souls. Like chess.”
“And humans are the pawns.”
“For Rey’aziel’s father, yes. Not for God. Comparing the two is like comparing the feelings a mother has for her child to those that a serial killer has for the same child.”
“But you don’t know what my role is exactly?”
“Sadly, I do not.”
“Okay, then, what did you mean by marking souls?”
Now he was looking at me like I’d lost my mind. “Um, your job.”
“My job is to mark souls?”
“Yes.”
“But I’m a portal. I thought my job was to help people cross.”
“That’s only part of your job. You can see guilt, deception, maliciousness for a reason, Charlotte.”
“So, I mark them as liars or murderers or what?”
“You’ll know when the time comes.”
“But I don’t have the right to judge people. I’m pretty sure the Big Guy upstairs would be upset if I went around judging his flock.”
“You will not sentence the guilty. You simply filter their passage after death. You sift through them and prepare them for their final journeys. Think of yourself as one of those machines that sorts coins into the right slots, separating the quarters from the dimes.”
“I’m a sorter?”
“Of sorts,” he said, flashing his teeth.
“No,” I said, mentally stomping my foot. “I want it all. What is my job, exactly? What can I do, exactly?”
“You realize when your human body ceases, you will be shown everything.”
“I’ll get a crash course in grim reaperism?”
“Something like that.”
“But what about until then? While I’m still here on earth?”
“Your only job as far as I’m concerned is to live. This isn’t usually a problem for reapers. No reaper has lived as long as you have. Ever.”
“I’m only twenty-seven.”
“Exactly. And that’s about twenty-two years longer than most have ever lived.”
“Reyes told me that, too. That most reapers’ physical bodies passed quite young and they did their jobs for the next five hundred years or so incorporeally. I’d always wondered how they knew what to do. I didn’t realize it would be downloaded into my brain when I pass.”
“So, he’s not keeping all the fun facts to himself. Just the important ones.”
Another wave of heat suffused the room.
The Dealer glanced up. “I felt that.”
“Lay it out for me,” I said. “Let me have it. Marking souls is my job? That it?”
He leaned back in his chair again. “I could tell you and piss off Rey’aziel, an entity we most definitely want on our side if we are going to win this thing. Or I could take his lead and let you figure it out as you go.”
“I vote for option A.”
“I can only assure you that when you’re ready, you will see souls. You will know how to mark them. You already know when to let people cross, when to help them or force them across. You’re already on your way.” He studied his hands. “While you are the key player in all of this, Rey’aziel holds the most sway in your destiny.”
“Why?”
“He’s the Thirteenth beast. Or didn’t he mention that?”
Reyes appeared again in all his cloaked glory, the darkness that undulated like a black ocean of night filling the room to capacity. I was getting good intel. I didn’t need him disrupting this font of information.
“Reyes isn’t a beast, and he’s certainly not a hellhound.”
“Close enough. He was only slightly more civilized than the Twelve. Why do you think Lucifer sent him to kill you?”
“Then why? Why does Satan want me dead so bad if not for the lock and key thing?”
“What lock and key thing?” he asked.
“It’s just, that’s what I thought this was all about. They told us that if the key is inserted into the lock, we would open a portal straight from hell into heaven. Blah, blah, blah. And now you’re telling me that has nothing to do with it?”
He lowered his head in thought. I’d thrown him. His brows slid together and he chewed on a nail as his mind raced. Like any human might do. It was hard to see this kid as anything but a kid. I knew from past experience, though, how big a mistake that would be.
“I don’t know,” he said, scanning me from head to toe. “If you’re the lock and the key is—”
Dawning showed on his face. I saw it, and felt it, the moment it hit him. He took a wobbly step back, absolute astonishment knocking the air out of him.
I glanced down at myself. Chocolate brown top. Black jeans. Killer boots. “What?” I asked him.
“I can’t believe I didn’t see it. You said this friend of yours has the prophecies. Do you mean Cleosarius’s prophecies?”
“Yeah. And?”
“If I can see them, I’ll give back the dagger.”
“Deal. But, seriously, what?” I gestured to myself.
He winked and led me to the door, encouraging me to get out with a light shove. Even light it was rude. “By the way, I didn’t ransack your apartment.”
Surprised, I just kind of looked at him.
“I didn’t need to,” he continued. “I could feel the dagger. Went straight to it. Your apartment was like that when I got there.”
Well, crap. I could only hope the ransackers got syphilis. I wondered if there was a hashtag for that.
13
Sometimes I write “drink coffee” on my to-do list
just to feel like I’ve accomplished something.
—STATUS UPDATE
I made it home just after sunset, holding the title to my soul in one hand and a mocha latte in the other. Surely Reyes would see the bright side of that. The soul thing. How angry could he be that I’d gone to see the Dealer? I chose not to dwell on Reyes or his anger while searching for him. After checking his place and my place and everything in between, I headed for my office and finally found him outside in the alley between the bar and the apartment building, his legs sticking out from under the front end of the sweetest black muscle car I’d ever seen. I slowed my pace to take in the work of art before me. Then I checked out the car. The emblem on the side said it was a ’Cuda. Whatever she was, she melted my knees upon impact. She was stunning, and I decided right then and there to become a lesbian.
“Is she yours?” I asked him as I walked up. He was tooling around with her engine, which was clean enough to eat off of, shiny enough to apply makeup by, and big enough to make the earth shake, I was sure.
A soft thunder rumbled in the distance. I glanced up at the clouds that had rolled in, their grayness haunting against the dark sky.
Refocusing on Mr. Angry Pants, I bent over the engine to see what he was doing. He had one of those droplights, and I could see a portion of his face as he worked under the car. He ignored me and kept ratcheting something. Something that I could only hope actually needed ratcheting, because he was really into it. His signature heat wafted up and around me. I put my elbows on a shiny part and propped my chin in my cupped hands.
“Are you going to be mad long?” I asked him.
He ratcheted again, refusing to meet my gaze, so I let it drift over the front of the car to his spread legs, lean and powerful, his slim hips crafted to perfection, and his rock-hard waist, rippled and taut. His T-shirt had ridden up to reveal several inches of deliciousness above his jeans, and my mouth watered in response.
“Which part are you mad about?” I asked, realizing he could be mad about any number of things. I tended to rack up the shit-list points.
He finally spoke, drawing my attention back to him. “You are investigating what you think was my kidnapping.”
That was what he was mad about? Wait, did he just say—? “What I think was your kidnapping? You mean, the baby that was kidnapped from the Fosters wasn’t you?”
He put down the ratchet and picked up another, equally foreboding tool. “Yes, it was me, but I was hardly kidnapped.”
I leaned closer to him, trying to see him past the engine. “What do you mean?” My thoughts staggered into each other as I reviewed the case in my mind. “I don’t understand. You weren’t kidnapped?”
“Not that time.” The car dipped with the pressure he was putting on her.
“Reyes, please explain. Were you kidnapped from the Fosters or not?”
“It doesn’t matter what I tell you. You’ll take that information and do whatever you want with it. You never think about the consequences of your actions.”
“You are so wrong.” I lowered myself onto my knees and bent to look at him under the car. His biceps strained against the thin fabric of his T-shirt as he worked. “That’s all I consider. I do what I can to help—”
“Strangers,” he said, turning the wrench so tight, the car dipped again. “People you don’t know. You don’t think about the people who are closest to you. What your actions could do to them.”
I was appalled that he would even say such a thing. “Do you think I don’t care about my family? My friends?”
“I think you care for too many. You’re spread too thin. You take on too much, risk too much, and you cannot possibly win.”
He was changing the subject on purpose, bringing up an old argument to urge me off the trail of his kidnapping. “Reyes, were you abducted from your biological family or not?”
Breathing hard, he lowered the wrench and finally looked at me, his eyes glittering in the artificial light. “Yes. I was.”
“So, the Fosters are your biological family. The family you chose to be born with on earth?”
“No.” He went back to work, and I pressed my mouth together, struggling for patience.
“So, the Fosters’ child was abducted, but he wasn’t you.”
He squinted as he struggled with the car. “Wrong. And wrong.”
I found myself mesmerized by his actions for a moment. The shadows between his muscles shifted every time he flexed. “Okay, so if this is opposite day, the Fosters’ child was not abducted and—” I strained to think about how I’d put it. “—and it was you. You were the Fosters’ kid.”
“Closer.”
I threw myself onto the pavement as dramatically as I could manage without incurring injury. “Oh, my god. I will give you a million dollars if you will just tell me.”
He examined the wrench thing he was holding. “You don’t have a million dollars.”
“Fine,” I said, rolling onto my back and patting my pockets. I brought out what I did have: three ones, some spare change, and a watermelon Jolly Rancher. “I’ll give you three dollars, fifty-two cents, and a Jolly Rancher.”
His mouth softened as he gave me his full attention. “I was going to say no, but since you threw in the Jolly Rancher.” He scooted out from under the car and stood before helping me to my feet. “If I tell you, will you give me your word on something?”
“I’ll give you a lap dance. On your lap,” I said, shaking out my hair.
“Deal. I wasn’t abducted from the Fosters.”
I swiped at my butt, but stilled when he continued.
“The Fosters were the ones who abducted me.”
As I stood gawking at him, he lifted out the droplight and closed the hood of his car. While this was nothing like the times I’d tried to get him to open up about his childhood with Earl Walker, the monster who raised him, I could tell he did not especially want to talk about this part of his life either. He wiped his hands on a rag, completely ignoring the fact that he was covered in dirt and oil. He defined the word
sexy
.
I stepped to him, put a hand on his arm to get his attention. And, well, just to touch his arm, because damn. “Can you explain? I don’t understand.”
He studied the rag as he spoke. “I’m not a reaper. I can’t remember everything from my birth on like you. But from what I’ve been able to gather, Mrs. Foster abducted me from a rest area in North Carolina.”
“North Carolina?” I asked, taken off guard.
He nodded. “I think it was a crime of opportunity. She’d just found out she couldn’t have children. She and her husband were driving home from yet another doctor’s appointment. My mother’s car overheated. She pulled off at a rest area, and since I was napping in the back, she locked the car and walked five feet to get the water hose. When she came back, she opened the door to check on me and cover me with a blanket. She forgot to lock it back. Mrs. Foster was watching the whole thing from her car as her husband used the facilities. She took it as a sign from God that I should be hers. Any mother who would leave her child alone like that … She couldn’t believe that a mother so undeserving of a child could have one while she could not. As my biological mother was behind the hood, filling the water reservoir, Mrs. Foster walked up, opened the door, and took me. It all happened so fast. My mother stepped around to check on me again, and I was gone.”
He was talking as though he’d read it from a police report. “But you know, then? You know who your biological parents were?”
“Yes. As I got older, I started remembering more and more. Most of it didn’t come to me until I was in prison, but slowly I remembered their names. That was it. That was all that came to me.”
“Then how did you put all of that together?”
“I hacked into the FBI database and read the reports.”
“You hacked the FBI from prison?” When he simply lifted an arrogant brow, I shook my head, astonished. I’d forgotten how good he was at those things. “What happened after that? If Mrs. Foster abducted you, why did she then turn around and … and, what? Have someone else abduct you back?” I struggled to understand. “That makes no sense.”
“It was one of those cases where everything just kept going wrong. After Mrs. Foster took me, she convinced her husband it was meant to be. But they could hardly just show up with a three-month-old baby. So they left the state, moved around for a bit until they ended up in Albuquerque, which was weird on a whole other level.”