The Trouble with Twelfth Grave (Charley Davidson #12)(51)

She’d been thrust back into her body when they resuscitated her. Her heartbeat stabilized, but we weren’t allowed to go back in.

“Uncle Bob, I need to get in there,” I said through gritted teeth as a very nice security guard showed us to the door.

He. She’d said he. So, it was a person? But who could do such a thing?

“Okay, I’m going to have to do this old-school.”

Cookie nodded in understanding, but Uncle Bob frowned, uncertain.

“Cover for me.” Before he could ask, I shifted onto the celestial plane and sought out my friend. A friend I’d come to adore.

I found her lying down, but in this state, on this plane, she lay on a bed of yellow grass and small white flowers. She was lovely.

I touched her shoulder and healed her most life-threatening wounds. The swelling in her brain would diminish, and any internal bleeding would stop. I didn’t want to heal her completely, not just yet, but this, I could do.

However, she remained unconscious. I let her sleep. She clearly needed it.

I materialized inside the women’s bathroom and headed out to meet Uncle Bob and Cook. After a quick nod of reassurance, I glanced at the security guard.

“Where did you go?” he asked.

“To the little se?oritas’ room. Is that a problem?”

He scowled, annoyed, then led us the rest of the way out.

*

She was on the celestial plane. At least a part of her was. Her essence, perhaps? But humans weren’t on that plane. Not entirely. Not until they passed, anyway. Maybe she’d shown up because she had been so close to death.

Or maybe there was more to it than that.

Either way, I needed to take a closer look at this case. It wasn’t Rey’azikeen. I knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt. But the deaths did coincide with the shattering of the god glass. With the opening of the gates.

When Reyes had broken out of the hell dimension, when he’d shattered the god glass to free himself, he’d also freed everything inside. The poor souls that had been trapped by the sinister priest darted straight through me, but I’d never felt or seen the priest, the evil man who’d put them all there in the first place.

A suspicion that had been simmering in the back of my mind reappeared. Being in a hell dimension for over six hundred years had to wreak havoc on one’s mental state, and his hadn’t been exactly stable to begin with. But if my suspicions were right, he hadn’t gone to hell, the hell of this dimension, as I’d suspected.

If my suspicions were right, he was still on this plane.

But his presence on this plane didn’t explain why those people had died in such a horrible way or why Nicolette was so savagely attacked.

I hurried back to the office to pore over the files for the hundredth time. I was missing something. I had to be. The connection. There had to be a connection, and I was missing it.

I grabbed the files off Cookie’s desk, put on a pot of the good stuff, double the good stuff, then sat at my own desk to study. To dissect. To search for any commonalities between the victims. I combed through their files, but all I got was the usual, so I hit their social media sites.

Out of the three deaths, one man and two women, including the woman found yesterday morning in the convenience store restroom, only one had her social profiles set to private. Cookie had a way of bypassing those kinds of nuisances. I did not.

The other two victims, a woman named Indigo Russell, who was found in her home three days ago, and a man named Don Koske, who was found in his car the day after, seemed the polar opposites of each other. Taking into account the latest victims, Patricia Yeager and Nicolette, made the differences even more glaring.

An accountant, a recording artist, a court clerk, and a nurse.

Hopefully, a search of their social media accounts would give me a broader picture of their lives and habits. Something had to connect them. But three and two-thirds cups later, I’d found nothing.

“Think about it,” Cookie said. She’d joined in the search. I now officially had a search party. She couldn’t look at the pictures of the victims’ bodies, but she was fantastic at poring over pictures on social media outlets.

“I’m thinking,” I assured her. “It’s all I’ve been doing for hours.”

“Nicolette is a very unusual girl. She has a gift. A supernatural gift. Maybe she somehow lured the entity to her. Like, maybe—”

She stopped talking when I jolted upright and gawked at her, lids wide, mouth slightly open.

“You had an epiphany,” she said, letting a grin cut across her pretty face.

“No, Cook. You did.”

I grabbed my mouse and went back to Indigo Russell’s Tumblr account. Something had caught my eye, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.

“Look,” I said, pointing.

Indigo had posted a picture about a year earlier. The image depicted a dark, leafless forest, stark and eerie, and hiding behind a tree lurked a demon with bright red eyes and sharp claws.

“It’s not just the picture,” I said, pointing to the description. “It’s what she says about it.”

“Every night,” Cookie read aloud. “This is what waits for me every night since the incident.” She looked back at me, empathy evident in the lines on her face. “Wait, what incident?”

I had gone back to staring at a picture of Indigo taken by a friend of hers on a camping trip. Ensconced in a sleeping bag, Indigo was barely awake when the culprit stole into her tent and snapped the shot. Her hair had been a mess, her face soft with the lingering remnants of sleep.