“Aw, that’s so sweet.”
“Actually, I think his exact words were, ‘If you ever come crawling back to me like the ungrateful bitch you are.’”
“Well, still, it’s the thought that counts.”
“Right?”
“So?” she asked.
“So?” I asked back.
“How’d it go?”
“Not horridly, if that’s what you’re implying. But I didn’t get to say good-bye to Alexander Skarsgård.”
“Don’t tell me. A chair?”
“No.”
“An end table?”
“No.”
“A floor lamp with really nice curves?”
“A couch.”
“Ah.”
“Seriously, Cook, if stealing weren’t illegal, I would’ve taken him home with me. And slept on him. And possibly licked him.” Parting was such sweet sorrow.
“Well, you’ve licked worse.”
“Why? What have you heard?”
3
Talking to yourself is okay. Answering back is risky.
—BRIAN SPELLMAN
I parked in front of our office building, partly because I worked there and partly because there was an actual space open. On Central. In the middle of the day. That rarely happened. Of course, I usually parked at the apartments behind our building. Partly because I had my own parking space with a sign that warned any would-be trespassers of car booting and disembowelment should they even think about parking there, and partly because I lived there. Mostly because I lived there.
But, hey! Free space!
Just kidding. There was a meter.
I fed it a few quarters, ignored yet another angel watching me from the building top next to ours, and took the outside stairs to our second-floor offices. Mr. Farrow, my slightly sexier half, would be at work in the café below, and I wasn’t sure what all he’d wanted to talk about. Thus, I decided to avoid him at all costs.
Cookie was at her desk, looking rather perky in a hot-pink, frilly thing. I could totally use that in my streetwalking gig. It would be a tad big, but that’s what bondage straps were for.
“Hey, Cook,” I said, hanging up my jacket.
“Hey back.”
Uh-oh. Doldrums. I could feel them coming off her in waves and hoped it wasn’t contagious. I was already depressed. I’d recently found out that, as a god, I couldn’t die except at the hands of another god. What if I became suicidal? What would I do? The fact that I couldn’t die would make me even more depressed, and there wouldn’t be a damned thing I could do about it.
Oh, well. Best cross that bridge when I got to it.
“What did you do last night?” she asked, her gaze glued to her computer screen, her voice listless, which was completely at odds with the searing pink she was wearing and the spiky black hair that framed her round face and cerulean eyes.
I sat in the chair across from her, the one I’d secretly named the Winter Soldier. It had a mysterious vibe with a murky, possibly sordid past. “I went onto the dark web. I thought it might be a chat room for demons. Figured I could get some inside info.”
“And how’d that turn out?”
“Bad. Very bad. Hey, is it inside-out day again? I used to love that in, like, the third grade.”
She looked down at her blouse, then pulled it out at the neck, and either searched her seams for a clue or checked out her girls. “Damn it. It is inside out.” She let out a lengthy sigh, stood, and headed for the restroom.
“Hey, you okay?” I asked, noticing the matching earrings and pink bracelet.
“Sure.”
“Cookie?” I said, drawing out the vowels in my best I-know-you’re-a-lying-skank voice. Only without the skank. Cookie was as much of a skank as I was a saint. “What’s going on? You’ve never been into color coordination before.”
She pursed her lips and sat back down. “I don’t know. I feel like something is wrong.”
“It’s the chafing. Once you turn it the right way—”
“No, not with the blouse.”
“Of course.”
“I was trying to be sexy. He didn’t even notice.”
“Our Lord and Savior?”
“Robert.”
“Oh, yeah, that makes more sense.”
Every time I spoke with Sister Mary Elizabeth, my thoughts tended to lean toward Catholicism for a few days. She and my uncle Bob had gotten hitched a while back—Cookie, not Sister Mary Elizabeth—so it made sense that she would try to be sexy for him.
I leaned closer and put on my best sympathy face. “Cook, what’s up?”
“I think I’m losing him.”
“Oh, please. You couldn’t lose him if you were seventeen, on a date with Thor, and he was your virginity. The man is so into you, Cook.”
She filled her lungs. “Maybe at one time. I think he’s having an affair.”
If I’d been drinking coffee, I would’ve spit it out in a fit of coughs. Thank God for small miracles. “Oh, hon, you know that’s impossible, right? He has ED.”
She gaped at me. “He most certainly—” When she realized I was teasing, she stopped gaping and glared instead.
She was right. ED was no joking matter. “Okay, he doesn’t have erectile dysfunction, but it’s fun to say out loud, and the thought of Ubie having an affair is hilarious either way.”
“Why? Because he loves me so much?”
“No. Well, yes. But seriously. There’s just no way. That man is head over heels, and he would never do anything to hurt you like that.”
“I don’t know.” She punched a few keys on her keyboard. “He hasn’t touched me in three days.”
It was my turn to gape. For a solid minute.
“What?”
“Three days?”
“Yes.”
“You’re ready to call it quits after three days in desert conditions? The key is hydration. And possibly a vibrator.”
“What? No, I’m not ready to call it quits. I’m just worried is all.”
“Oh, good, ’cause I ain’t taking him back. He’s yours now. You signed all the appropriate documents. In triplicate. I witnessed, remember?”
“I know. He’s just been so preoccupied.”
“Well, he is a detective for the Albuquerque Police Department. That comes with a certain amount of stress, hon.”
She shook her head. “No, there’s something else. Something’s bothering him. I just can’t put my finger on it. It’s like, I don’t know, like he’s in another world all the time. And he’s had—” She caught herself. Cleared her throat. Shook her head. “Never mind. You’re right. I’m just being silly.”
“Oh, no, you don’t. He’s had what?” No way could she leave me hanging now.
“I don’t want to worry you.”
“Cook.”
“He’s had a bit of a temper.”
This time, I was stunned. Uncle Bob? He’d always had a bit of a temper, but never with Cookie. “What happened?”
“It’s nothing. Really.”
“Cookie Kowalski Davidson.” If he did anything to hurt my best friend or her daughter, blood be damned.
“He burned a roast last night.”
“Oh, well, I guess that could be considered abusive. For the roast, anyway.”
“When he pulled the pan out of the oven, he cursed and threw it across the kitchen and into the sink.”
“He threw it?”
“Hard. It actually scared Amber. Then he stalked off to our bedroom and refused to come out even after I’d heated up some leftovers for dinner.”
My blood came to a slow simmer. It didn’t reach a full boil. I understood frustration as well as the next girl. But that whole macho temper tantrum bullshit didn’t fly with me. “I get your point, but that’s not affair behavior. That’s something else. Something is eating at him.”
Did he know?
One of the cool—or not-so-cool, depending on one’s perspective—things about my husband being born in hell was that he could see when a person was slated for his homeland and what he or she did to get the short end of the stick.
I’d found out only days ago that my uncle Bob was slated for that very destination because of something he did for me. Something he did to save me from a Colombian drug baron who believed that cannibalizing people with any kind of supernatural ability would transfer that ability on to him.
He was wrong, of course, but he believed it, and there was no telling how many people died as a result of his obsession.
When some of his henchmen found out about me and my connection to the supernatural realm, they’d planned on gifting me to him to slither into his good graces. But Ubie had found out, somehow, and from what Reyes told me, he’d killed them all in a shoot-out before they could inform the baron about me.
That was a few years ago. The reason it came up at all was because, unbeknownst to me, Uncle Bob was scheduled to die at the hands of a low-level thug named Grant Guerin. In fact, he was destined to die two days ago, but we’d thwarted the attempt.
Thanks to my husband’s keen powers of perception and the fact that killing my uncle was how Guerin had been slated for hell himself, we’d known exactly where and when Ubie was to die at his hands.
We’d staked out the place, but he must’ve spotted our guy there and taken off. Thus, when Ubie showed up, Guerin wasn’t there. Ubie was saved. Kudos for us.