Eleventh Grave in Moonlight (Charley Davidson #11)(93)

The image of the little girl Eidolon had killed, so utterly terrified and unable to even move, flashed in my mind again. But Jose Cuervo came to the rescue. He was such a great guy.

I realized Reyes had been watching me spill my guts to Dr. Mayfield and get wasted at the same time from the comfort of Captain Kirk. He’d been drinking, too, but his tastes were a little more uptown. He was probably drinking scotch or bourbon or some other drink that sounded sexy when it rolled off the tongue.

I was pouting. I’d refused to take the comfort any of our furniture had to offer. Instead, we sat in a corner, Jose and I, brushing up on our bladder-capacity skills. So far, so good.

I stopped studying the pendant and studied my husband instead. Studied how he always folded his shirtsleeves in the evenings, or pushed them up, depending on the shirt, to expose his forearms. He did it on purpose. He had to know what his forearms did to me. And his biceps. And his shoulders. And pretty much every other part of him.

He sat, bathed in fire. His legs outstretched. His shirt and jeans unbuttoned. Boots thrown under the coffee table.

Just when I was going to give in, to throw in the towel and seek out the porcelain pot, Reyes spoke. “Send me.”

“Okay, but I don’t know how that’s going to help. It’s my bladder that needs emptying.”

He didn’t look at me when he said it. He was busy studying the fire while I was busy studying him. “Send me inside. I was born and raised in a hell dimension. I can go in and bring them back.”

The god glass? Was he honestly suggesting I send him into the very dimension for which the god glass had been created?

“No.” I rose and stumbled to the bathroom. Not because I was drunk but because I had a cramp in my left butt cheek. I always forgot to stay hydrated when fighting evil gods and arguing with arrogant angels.

Then again, all angels were arrogant. I was 99 percent certain.

I peed, did a drive-by in the kitchen on the way back to my corner, and sank down to curl up with a fresh bottle of my new BFF.

“Is it me, or is it harder to get drunk all of a sudden?” Normally I’d be puking my guts up after even half a bottle of Jose. But I was pretty good. Aside from that whole world-tilting-to-the-left thing, I felt great.

Reyes pushed off the captain and walked up to me. No, he swaggered up to me, a severe expression on his beautiful face, his shirt open, showing the expanse of his chest. He stopped and towered over me. “Send me.”

Now I was just getting annoyed. “No. Kuur is in there. You remember Kuur? The supernatural assassin who has killed beings from dozens of dimensions just because he can? Yeah, him. And let’s not forget the god that killed your sister.”

“You don’t think I can take them?”

“I’m not willing to risk it either way.”

“It was meant for me, anyway. I’d like to see what my Brother had in store for His sibling. What kind of god He is.”

What kind of god indeed. I wondered that, too, but I wondered it even more so about myself. Clearly, I was not the girl I thought I was. I only pretended to want peace? I was in the Peace Corps, for heaven’s sake.

He sat beside me, drink in hand. “It can be an experiment.”

“Reyes, I cannot tell you how hard of a no this is. It is not going to happen, so give it up.”

“Send me in, wait sixty, then call me back. I’ll scope out the place.”

“I may not be Miss Know-It-All when it comes to all this god stuff, but I do know that time works differently in every dimension. Sixty seconds here could be six hundred years there.”

He sank down beside me, our shoulders touching. “The time slip isn’t that much. If anything, it could be maybe a year. Or it could be the opposite and I’d come back so fast I didn’t get to see anything. At which point we can reevaluate and decide what to do next.”

“No, I think Kuur said a few seconds was years there.”

“We’ll never know until you send me in.”

I sat Jose aside. “Reyes, why? Is this some kind of quest for revenge against Mae’eldeesahn?”

His smile held about as much humor as a pit viper’s. “No.”

“And what if something goes wrong and, I don’t know, I can’t get you back?”

“The priest did it. You told me.”

“Yes, but, there are no guarantees. This information came from an evil demon assassin.”

“What part of life is guaranteed? It’s all a guessing game, including this glass. This dimension.”

“Do you resent Jehovah for it?”

“Yes. I’d like to know what I did that was so bad He had to create an entire dimension just for me.”

“I’d like to know that, too. Only I want to know why I agreed to have my memories erased. What did I do that was so bad I wanted to forget?”

He took my hand and brushed the backs of my fingers over his mouth. His eyes shimmered, and for a moment I forgot what I was going to say. I wished Shawn’d had the opportunity to get to know him better. His almost brother.

“Shawn was kind of fascinated with you. He wanted to get to know you.”

He nodded and looked down in thought. “Thirty seconds.”

I laughed. It was so like him to skip over the emotional parts of any conversation. Or any part that cast him in a positive light. “We’re negotiating now?”