The Trouble with Twelfth Grave (Charley Davidson #12)(3)

The storm shifted. Smoke, thick and black and alive, pooled around me. I’d looked up, tried to focus, but just as I was able to take in air, a dozen souls desperate for escape rushed through me, into my light and, in turn, heaven.

Their stories flashed before my eyes. The souls’. Innocent. Condemned for centuries by a madman.

A priest who’d somehow come into the possession of the pendant was using it for evil. He’d sent soul after soul inside. A widow who’d spurned his advances. A man who’d refused to sign over part of his land to the church. A young boy who’d seen the priest in a compromising position. And on and on. More than a dozen lives destroyed by one man.

The priest had been locked inside as well by a group of monks who took him to task for his evil deeds, but I didn’t feel him cross. Then again, he would’ve gone to hell. This dimension’s hell. Perhaps he already had.

After the souls crossed through me, all from the same time period, the 1400s, I waited. Three more beings were inside the god glass. A demon assassin named Kuur. A malevolent deity named Mae’eldeesahn. And my husband.

I would never forget the vision before me as I waited. The smoke had filled the room and churned like a supercell lit by occasional flashes of lightning.

And then Reyes walked out of it, the billowing smoke falling from his wide shoulders and settling at his feet.

Elation shot through me as I scrambled to my feet and started toward him. But I stopped short almost immediately. Something was wrong. The man before me was not my husband. Not entirely.

Smoke and lightning curled around him. It caressed him like a lover. Obeyed him like a slave. If he shifted, it shifted. If he breathed, it breathed. It flowed and ebbed at his will, the lightning flitting over his skin.

He wasn’t in the storm. He was the storm.

I stood astounded as he walked toward me, taking five ground-eating steps.

I stumbled back, then caught myself before whispering his name.

“Reyes?”

He narrowed his eyes as though he didn’t recognize me.

I reached up to touch his face. It was the wrong thing to do.

He shoved me against the wall and held me there as his gaze ran down the length of my body. His hand curled around my throat, then my jaw, his fingers cruel.

I wrapped my hands around his and pushed, but he didn’t budge. If anything, he squeezed tighter, so I relaxed. Or tried to.

When he spoke, his voice was low and husky and resolved. “Elle-Ryn-Ahleethia.”

That was my celestial name. My godly one. Why would he use it here? Now?

He seemed surprised to find me there. Astonished. Then he gave me another once-over. His expression filled with a disturbing mix of lust and contempt.

It sparked a memory. Kuur, an evil supernatural assassin I’d banished into the very same hell dimension, told me that when Reyes had been a deity himself, he’d had only contempt for humans. The same humans his godly Brother—yes, that godly Brother—loved so much.

And I was human. At least a part of me was.

I studied Reyes as he studied me, wondering what came out of the god glass. It may have looked like my husband. It may have smelled like him and felt like him and sounded like him, but the sentient being standing in a pool of billowing black smoke in front of me was not the man I married.

Was I meeting the god Rey’azikeen at last?

And, more important, had I just unleashed hell on earth?

“Will he ever be your husband again?” Charisma asked, snapping me back to the present.

I released the air from my lungs slowly. “I wish I knew.”

She sucked on the straw again, siphoning every last drop.

I did the same, upending my coffee cup and letting the last precious molecules slide onto my tongue.

Then I returned to her. “He’s very powerful, and I don’t know what that hell dimension did to him. How much of him is still my husband and how much is ‘angry god guy.’ I mean, he could destroy the world if he put his mind to it. That would suck.”

The girl’s gaze slid past me, her mind clearly pondering everything I’d just told her. Good and evil. Dark and light. It was a lot to take in.

“I’m not allowed to say hell.”

Or not.

“That’s probably best. Stay as far away from that place as you can. Don’t even think about it.”

“Or damn.”

A part of me did wonder if I should be telling such a young child about hell dimensions and demons and world-destroying gods. At least I didn’t tell her about the little girl who was killed by one such god just the other day. Surely my omitting that part of the story would warrant a checkmark in the “pro” column.

“Or butt crack.”

“I think I hear something,” Mrs. Blomme said.

“So, anyway,” I continued, “that was three days ago, and I haven’t seen my husband since.”

“He just disappeared?”

“Literally.”

And he had. He’d kept one powerful hand locked around my throat and jaw, his other hand braced on the wall behind me, and the fire that perpetually consumed him licked over his skin when he stepped closer. When he pressed into me.

I lowered a hand to his rib cage, encouraging him to close the distance between us. Praying he’d remember.

“Reyes?” I whispered, testing.

Then he did close the distance. He bent his head, buried his face in my hair, and brushed his sensual mouth across my ear. When he spoke, his voice was thick and breathy. “Reyes has left the building,” he said, a microsecond before shoving off me and vanishing into a sea of roiling smoke and crackling lightning.