Eleventh Grave in Moonlight(45)

Around us stood a group of about fifteen people, if my leg count was correct. Mostly adult males, but a couple of women and even a teen or two. Were they watching their parents torture the Fosters’ son? Because that could not be healthy.

Mrs. Foster leaned closer. She cupped my chin in her hand and asked, “What are you?”

“Wasted. What did you give me?”

She displayed a smile that was so smug, my palm itched to slap it off her. Still, violence was never the answer.

I smiled back. I’d had just about enough of the Fosters and their personal brand of crazy. “You’re going to die soon.”

A loud slap sounded, and I lost sight of her as my head swung way too far to the side. Apparently, she didn’t get the violence-is-never-the-answer memo. The world tilted and I struggled to stay upright.

“You think we don’t know how to handle your kind? We’ve been doing it for years, sweetheart. Decades. It’s why we were put on Earth. To smite the work of the devil. To erase the abominations to God. To cleanse the Earth of your kind.”

“That shouldn’t take long. There’s only one of me.”

“Is that right?” Mr. Foster asked. I could see him more clearly now. His short brown hair wasn’t as groomed as it had been at the diner and he had a layer of scruff on his jaw. But he was still an incestuous wiener. “Well, then, this should be easy.”

“Why did you … why are you hurting your own son?”

Mr. Foster knelt before me. “You know perfectly well he’s not our son. It was only a matter of time.”

“We tried to do a good deed,” Mrs. Foster said.

As she spoke, the Diviners clapped and shouted an occasional “Hallelujah!” or “Praise be!”

“We took him in,” she continued. “Raised him. Nurtured and cared for him. He was so full of light when he was a baby, but even light can be corrupted. As you are well aware.” She tsked and walked back to Shawn. “Even the brightest of lights can be swayed. He went to you. He turned to you, a corrupted soul, to investigate us, the Divine. He knew the consequences.”

Somehow I doubted that. “He had nothing to do with my investigation.”

She whirled around and glared. “He turned to you and your evil husband.”

They knew about Reyes? “Dude, you are so much eviler than the man who’s going to snap your necks like kindling.” That came out wrong.

A surge of whispers erupted but then quieted just as quickly. “Please, Mrs. Farrow,” Mr. Foster said. “Or do you still go by Davidson like so many of the unclean in this world?”

I didn’t see the connection.

“Practically planning ahead for adultery and divorce.”

“When you put it that way.” Freaking psychos. “In my own defense, Mrs. Foster kept her maiden name as well.” I snorted until the inevitable slap put a stop to that nonsense. “Fine. Oh, my God. What?”

“Shawn’s fate was sealed the moment he sought your counsel,” he said.

Mrs. Foster walked back to us as I tried to get a better look at Shawn. Was he still alive? I couldn’t tell. I closed my eyes again and tried to summon Reyes. Angel. Osh. Anyone. The drugs were blocking me. It had happened before.

“He must be returned to the earth,” she said. “He must learn from his mistakes and be allowed to grow again.”

“You’re going to replant him?”

“And you as well.”

“Can I come back as an azalea?”

“But out of the darkness, brothers and sisters,” Mr. Foster said, his voice booming now, “comes the light.”

They shouted and clapped. A couple even fell to their knees with hands raised.

Don’t get me wrong. I was all for religion. Whatever helped you get up in the morning. And a higher power, like the one Christians referred to as the God Jehovah, was definitely real. It was religion being turned into an excuse to torture and maim and kill that I had a problem with.

Mrs. Foster raised her hands as well. “And the answer we’ve prayed for night and day has finally arrived.” She smiled down at me. “When Shawn went to you, a weak, corrupted slut—”

“Slut?”

“—we knew what we had to do.”

“I think slut is a tad strong.”

“See, you aren’t just any corrupted. You are his corrupted. His concubine. The Dark One’s. The demon from hell.”

“Promiscuous, maybe.”

She kneeled again. “We were never after you.”

“Wanton.”

“We were after the abomination,” Mr. Foster said, quite proud of himself. “We’ve been tracking him since he got out of prison. We just had no way of getting to him until now.”

When their meaning finally sank in, I focused on the crazy kids in front of me. If they thought to lure Reyes here the same way they lured me, they’d have another thing coming. Oh, they’d get him here, but he would not be in such a cooperative mood.

Whereas, I was all about cooperation. I also shared well in school.

“It’s true,” Mrs. Foster said. “If you hadn’t come to our offices, we probably never would have known about the connection between you and The Dark One.”

I fell forward in my attempt to see Shawn again. The ground kept toppling over. Thank God my hands weren’t tied. I’d be eating dirt about now.

“We figured you were onto us,” Mr. Foster continued. “That was why you showed up. But apparently we were wrong. Shawn, in his weakened state, sought you out.”

“That’s not why I went to your offices.”

“Oh?”

“Not at all. I was thinking about becoming the leader of a fanatical cult and wanted some pointers.”

Another crack echoed off the walls and, as my head whipped around, I noted the expressions of excitement on all those present. If anyone were there against his or her will, as was known to happen in cultish situations, I certainly wasn’t picking up on it.

Mrs. Foster grabbed a handful of hair. Unfortunately, it was mine. “How do we send him back?”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you abducted Reyes when he was a baby and gave him to a monster.” People never think ahead.

Mrs. Foster bent so we’d be face-to-face, her smile so congenial, it creeped me out. “Of course we gave him to a monster. He’s evil. He deserved to be raised by a man just as evil.”

It was at that moment precisely that I knew I was staring into the cold eyes of true evil. Evil hiding under the guise of righteousness. It wasn’t the first time and certainly wouldn’t be the last, but it still astonished me. How someone could do that to an infant.

Then I thought about the baby girl they murdered and pinned on the mother, albeit twenty-five years later, and could hardly believe what I was about to say. But my curiosity got the better of me. “But why give him to Earl Walker? Why didn’t you just do what you did to Baby Liana? Why didn’t you just kill him?”

Mrs. Foster was surprised I’d pieced it together. No idea why. Veronica Isom, Baby Liana’s mother, was telling anyone who would listen about the adoption agency, about what they did, but as a former prostitute and drug addict, her credibility was shot. No one believed her. Clearly, the Fosters knew that.

The smile she placed on me that time was full of sadness, as though she felt sorry for me. For my ignorance. “Oh, sweetheart, we did try to kill him. Several times. He just wouldn’t die.”

Her words hit harder than any slap could have. The air fled my lungs, and a roaring silence stretched out as the truth sank in. She said something else, but nothing could get past the shock wave pummeling my system.

They’d tried to kill him. When he was a baby, they’d tried. And I thought what he went through with Earl Walker was unfathomable. What had he gone through with the Fosters? What had they done to him? How had they tried to kill him? And what was it like for him when they failed?

I doubled over in astonishment. True evil. I was in the midst of true evil, and Reyes thought he was dark. He had nothing on the Fosters.

“The scales have been knocked off balance,” Mr. Foster said, but not to me. He was back in full preach mode. Waving his Bible. “It’s all over the news. The end of the world is nearing, so we have to kill. To rid the lands of evil so it can heal. So it can become strong again. So it can nourish us and support us. It is our sacred duty.”

He got a whole lot of amens for his effort.

Mrs. Foster let go of my hair but stayed close. She spoke to me as her nutcase brother-slash-husband spewed his sanctimonious bullshit. “We were quite surprised he survived that horrible man,” she said. “We figured he’d have killed The Dark One while he was still young.”

I was certain he’d tried.

The Diviners were praying and praising God, raising their hands in celebration, asking for His blessing on the blood sacrifice to cleanse the lands. Apparently they hadn’t moved on to the New Testament. Sacrifices were kind of old-school, but whatever floated your boat.

Still, how Jehovah could stand by and let others be killed in His name …

I tried to stop time so I could walk—or probably stumble—to Shawn and check on him. Nothing. I tried again to summon Angel. Osh. Artemis. Nothing again. What the hell had they given me?