The Dirt on Ninth Grave - Darynda Jones Page 0,110

shorts set out of what was left.

I saw her the day she was adopted. After she was tossed around a series of foster homes as an infant, her parents finally found her when she was three. She was thin and sickly and had an oxygen tube looped under her nose and around her ears, but they’d recognized her anyway. Said they’d been looking everywhere for her. Even though she was pale with blue eyes and freckles, and they were dark and tall and beautifully exotic, she recognized them, too.

I saw her in the neonatal ICU, shaking with the effects of the drugs, so weak she couldn’t breathe on her own, her heart couldn’t function on its own, so they connected her to a machine that lulled her to sleep with whirring sounds for ten days. The nurses told her to fight with everything she had, so she did.

I saw her come into the world on the filthy floor of a crack den. Her mother had OD’d and was already dead. No one noticed her at first. No one called the police. But it wasn’t their fault. She’d been born invisible. It was a miracle one of the dealers saw her. Not wanting anything to do with the cops, he wrapped her in a shirt stiff with dried blood on it and left her in front of an all-night liquor store.

She turned back to me, a Cheshire smile on her face. Only then did I notice the tattoo she had on the inside of her wrist. INVISIBLE GIRL, NOW SHOWING.

I stood in the present, still clutching the counter, shaking so hard with anger and indignation and outrage that it vibrated. Small clear drops landed on the Formica under my face. Tears had dripped off my chin. The fury inside me took on a life of its own.

“Charley.” Cookie walked slowly toward me, her hands up, her voice soft.

Reyes watched me from the kitchen entrance, his head bowed, his expression one of warning.

Too late.

I released the furious thing inside.

21

I see dead people.

No, wait. I take that back.

I see people I want dead.

—ECARD

It was like in those movies when the misunderstood girl gets so mad she suddenly develops superpowers and blows out the windows of her high school, showering all the kids who were awful to her with shattered glass without meaning to.

It was like that, only I’d meant it.

The world exploded. Everything from the plate-glass windows to the coffee cups that lined the tables splintered into a million sharp, lethal torpedoes. People flew back, their faces frozen in a variety of horrified stages when time slowed to a full stop. Cookie stood before me, reaching out, her face sad. Knowing.

Then I saw Reyes. The anger simmering beneath his steely surface went way beyond what I’d expected. He stood deathly still. His fire blazed around him, the flames reaching all the way to the ceiling and fanning out.

We both turned toward the front door. With fists clenched at my sides, I watched as the angelic being I’d seen before walked toward me. The slivers of glass that hung in the air parted slowly, moving out of his way, tinkling as they bounced off each other. It sounded like ice crackling on a winter’s day.

His wings spanned the entire width of the café before he folded them at his back.

Though Reyes was across the café, the angel addressed him first. “Rey’aziel.”

“Michael.”

The angel faced me, his movements stiff. Formal. “Elle-Ryn-Ahleethia —”

I frowned and stepped back. “Is that my name?”

“— I am sent by the Father Jehovah, the one true God of this dimension, to end your mortal life so that you may ascend to your rightful place of omniscience and duty.”

My anger dissipated, and shock took its place. “I don’t understand.”

“You are Val-Eeth. You are too powerful for this world in this condition.”

I glanced at Reyes. His flames had died down a bit, and he studied Michael with a new curiosity.

“I don’t understand even more.”

Michael eyed me, assessing me with one quick sweep. “Can you imagine what would happen if the detonator for an armed nuclear device fell into the hands of a child?”

“I’m guessing that’s bad.”

“Now imagine that same child holding the detonator for a hundred trillion of them.”

“Since I’m assuming I’m the child in this scenario and I have a detonator of some kind?”

“You are the detonator, Elle-Ryn, and the nuclear devices, all one hundred trillion of them, are inside you.”

I looked down at myself. “I have a bomb inside me,” I said,