“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.

But until Reyes actually saw Guerin again, we wouldn’t know if we’d only postponed the inevitable. If Guerin killing Ubie was still in the works.

Because of this, we kept up the round-the-clock surveillance on Ubie. And why I’d scolded Angel in the psychiatrist’s office. He’d been on Ubie detail for the last few days.

We thought we’d found Guerin a couple of times, but he continued to slip through our fingers. I needed to know if the threat on my uncle’s life had been neutralized or only postponed. And we wouldn’t know that until we found the little snake.

Cookie lowered her head. “I was worried that might be the case. And all I can think of is that he’s lost interest in me. How pathetic am I?”

“On a scale of one to Kanye? You don’t even register. You’re not pathetic. Trust me, I’d know.”

She sniffed. “Yeah?”

“Absolutely. Or you won’t be once you turn your blouse right side out.”

The front door to the office opened, and a tall – very tall – blond guy walked in.

I stood to welcome him to Davidson Investigations when recognition flooded my cells and rushed down my spine like a jolt of electricity.

There are moments in life that leave you stunned. Moments that take your breath away and make you forget your native tongue.

Reyes’s brother walking into the office was one such moment. Not that brother. Not the godly one. The other one. The one that could have been his brother by kidnapping had the people who kidnapped him as a child not handed him over to a monster. That was my suspicion, anyway.

I’d been investigating the Fosters before my world got turned upside down, before I’d ended up, first, living in an abandoned convent for eight months while the bun I’d popped in the oven baked to simple perfection, and after, living in upstate New York for a month under the throes of amnesia because of having to give up said perfect bun.

As far as I could tell, the Fosters panicked when their families got suspicious. That was my best guess, anyway. Why else kidnap a child and then get rid of him weeks later? So, instead of handing Reyes back to his birth family, they sold him to Earl Walker. Or just handed him over. Either way, they gave Reyes to a monster. And not in the supernatural way, either. Earl was a man so evil, so vile, it wafted off him like a toxin.