And Mistress Mari was really helpful. She had a list of demon-detecting tricks, from throwing salt in their eyes—which firstly required my seeing them and secondly held the faintest hint of lawsuit when I inevitably blinded some poor schmuck I thought was possessed—to keeping a careful eye on plants when a questionable individual walked into a room. Apparently, a demon’s presence would wilt the poor suckers before they knew what hit them. I glanced around my apartment. Damn my love of fake dying plants. Maybe I could get a cactus.

The one thing M&M didn’t talk about was the fact that no one could actually see demons. In the end, she was about as much help as a BB gun in armed combat.

Just as I went to exit out of the site, two words caught my attention. There, in the middle of a mundane paragraph about a demon’s supposed allergy to fabric softener, was a highlighted link that said grim reaper. Me! Well, this was exciting. I clicked on the link. The page that popped up had only one sentence just above an Under Construction warning, but it was an interesting sentence.

If you are the grim reaper, please contact me immediately.

Okay. That was new.

Chapter Eight

IS IT SEXY IN HERE OR IS IT JUST ME?

—T-SHIRT

I woke up at four thirty the next morning—also known as five minutes past ungodly—and lay in bed, wondering why in the name of Saint Francis I’d woken up at four thirty in the morning. There were no dead people hovering over me, no global catastrophes looming near or clothes being thrown at my face, yet my reaper senses told me something was wrong.

I listened for the phone. If anyone had the cojones to call me before seven, it was Uncle Bob. But no one was calling. Not even nature.

With a sigh, I turned onto my back and stared up into the darkness. With both Janelle York and Tommy Zapata dead, I got the feeling whoever was behind the murders wasn’t looking for information. In fact, if I had to take a slightly educated guess, I would say information was exactly what the killer wanted suppressed.

Something happened at Ruiz High twenty years ago, something other than underage drinking. And at least one person wanted it kept quiet. So much so, he was willing to murder to keep it that way.

Reyes was consuming a good portion of my random access memory as well. Could he really be the Antichrist? ’Cause that would just suck. Maybe he was right. Maybe everyone had it wrong. Admittedly, it was a tad hard to get past the fact that he was the son of the most evil being ever to exist. But that didn’t make him evil. Right? Would he really lose his humanity if his corporeal body died? Nobody said he had to follow in his dad’s footsteps. But the thought of him dying, now, after all this time.

At some point, I had to stop and ask myself why I was so intent on finding his body, and the answer was ridiculously simple. I didn’t want to lose him. I didn’t want to lose any chance of having a life with him, which was rather moot, since he’d have to go back to prison and all. But there it was in all its glory. The truth. In many ways, I was as callous and self-serving as my stepmother.

Wow. The truth really did hurt.

Regardless, I had to find a new pool of resources. My dead friends were not really helping. He did have a sister, sort of. And he had a very good friend. If anyone knew where Reyes would stash his body, surely it would be one of them.

I decided to give up on the lure of a decent night’s sleep, get some coffee, and contemplate what to do next in my unending quest for the god Reyes. Mayhap I would query Mistress Marigold, ask her WTF?

Having been born a grim reaper, I was quite used to the departed popping in and out of my life at any given moment. I’d grown rather accustomed to the momentary jolt of adrenaline their sudden presence elicited, especially when a fifty-foot-drop-to-solid-concrete popped in for marital advice. But for the most part, my fight-or-flight response tended to hang back, blend into the background, and let me decide for myself if I should resort to fisticuffs or run screaming. So when I dragged my half-asleep body out of bed to seek the elixir of life often referred to as java, the fact that two men were lounging in my living room barely registered on my Richter scale.

I did pause, however, giving them a once-over, then a twice-over—mostly because they weren’t dead—before heading for the coffeepot. I definitely needed a kick start before dealing with two men I highly suspected of breaking and entering. A third guy who resembled André the Giant stood barricading the front door. If my best friend Cookie came barreling through it anytime soon, he was going to have one hell of a headache.

I turned on one of the low-wattage lights under my counter so as not to blind myself—thus giving my adversaries an unfair advantage—and headed for my date with Mr. Coffee. André was staring at my derriere. Probably because I was wearing boxers that had JUICY written across the ass. I could have thrown something on, but it was my apartment. If they wanted to enter uninvited, they’d have to deal, same as everyone else who entered my little slice of heaven uninvited.

I scooped coffee into the filter as my guests watched, pushed the ON button, then waited. My new maker brewed much faster than my old one, but it would still be an awkward three minutes. I rested my elbows on the snack bar to study my visitors.

One of the men—I assumed he was the higher-up—sat on my club chair, his jacket off, gun in plain sight. He looked about fiftyish with graying brown hair, a crisp cut neatly combed, and dark eyes to match. He was busy studying me with a genuine curiosity lining his face.

The man beside him, however, the dangerous one, didn’t seem to have a curious bone in his body. He was about my height with black hair and the youthful, sand-colored skin of his Asian ancestry. He stood on guard, almost at attention, his muscles taut, ready to strike should the need arise. I couldn’t tell if he was a colleague or a bodyguard. He wore no shoulder holster like his friend, which meant he didn’t need a gun to protect himself or his colleagues. A fact I found oddly disturbing.