I pulled him to a stop in the foyer. “Is that what you looked like in hell?” I asked Osh. “One of those things?”

“Hell no,” he said, offended. He adjusted his top hat. “I looked like me.”

“Then what were they?”

“Demons.”

“But you’re a demon.”

“Let’s just say there are as many species of demons as there are animals on Earth. Those are the lesser demons. Kind of like worker bees.”

“They were below you?” I asked. “Below the Daeva?” I didn’t want to use the word Reyes used to describe them: slaves.

He shook his head and looked away as though embarrassed. “No one was below the Daeva.”

I stepped even closer, my curiosity burning. “After they threw Reyes off that grain elevator and I kissed him —”

“You brought him back,” he assured me.

And maybe I had. He’d fallen seven stories. He’d been crushed and lay dying at the bottom. All he’d asked for was a kiss, and when I kissed him, I’d felt an electricity run from me and into him. A warmth. But it was still hard for me to believe I had such a gift. I was the grim reaper. It was my job to escort the dead to heaven. Not to bring them back to life.

“Fine. Let’s say I did, but for a few seconds afterwards, I saw something else. Something dark. Something very much like those demons. And then it was gone. Did I kill the demon inside him?”

He offered me a sad smile. “Sugar, he is the demon inside him. You cannot separate the two.” This time, he stepped closer, his expression hardening. “Make no mistake, Charley, there is a part of him that is as dark and dangerous as Lucifer himself. That part lives in all demons.”

I raised my brows in question. “Even in you?”

“Yes, even in me.” He stepped back and dropped his gaze to the floor. “Especially in me.”

“Thank you for being honest.” I looked up. “And thank you for being here, Reyes,” I whispered before we stepped out into the light. But he didn’t respond, and for the second time that day, I felt a sting, quick and brutal.

“The good news is they’re gone,” I said to Father Glenn as we walked toward him.

“What? Just like that?” he asked, straightening. “You weren’t in there five minutes.”

“We’re super-efficient. The bad news is, this family is living smack-dab on top of a gate to hell.”

He stilled, then opened a journal to jot down a note. “How do you know?”

“I saw it.”

His lids rounded into saucers. “Can you describe it?”

“I have another case to get to,” I said. “But we can talk another time, yes?”

“Yes, of course. What do I owe you?” he asked as we walked to Misery. Despite my suspicions, he didn’t seem deceptive at all. He had a burning curiosity, but who wouldn’t when told of the location of a gate to hell? I thought about the file he’d given me, the one from the Vatican. “Paid in full, Father.”

He shook my hand, then tipped an invisible hat as Osh tipped his real one and climbed into the driver’s seat.

“I think I need to know more about your world,” I said to Osh as we headed back to the office. He drove, which was probably a good thing, since I was shaking and a little light-headed from our ordeal. Being surrounded by dozens of demons in that form felt a lot like standing in the middle of a room crawling with flesh-eating spiderlike roaches. I shivered. “And the gates. What the hell are those about? And the whole marking-of-souls thing I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Okay,” he said, more compliant than I’d expected.

“And just how, exactly, do you feed off the souls of humans? Is it like a vitamin-deficiency thing?” I winced as Osh changed lanes to avoid ramming into the back of a Sunday driver. We had places to be, damn it. “And do all demons do that? Or are you like an incubus?”

He laughed. “If I were an incubus, sugar, I’d have had you in my bed weeks ago.”

“Osh,” I said, scolding him teasingly, “you really need to work on your self-confidence. Low self-esteem is such a tragedy in today’s youth.”

“Isn’t it?” he said, his mouth tilting up at one corner. His eyes were such a fantastic shade of bronze, a color I’d never seen on anyone before, and I wondered if he was lying about the incubus thing. I had a feeling he didn’t want for womanly affection.

Ubie called before we could dive deeper into the conversation. He had good news and bad news. He’d managed to get a warrant for the storage unit from the card we found in Dad’s hotel room. That was the good news. The bad news was that a woman had called the police to her house off Academy. She hadn’t heard from her son, so she went to his house that morning and found a suicide note but, of course, no son.

“I can meet you there,” I said, my phone beeping with another call. We could still save him.

“Actually, pumpkin, I’m headed over to the station. I’ll call you when I know more.”

He was acting awfully weird. “You’re acting awfully weird,” I said to him, my mouth echoing my thoughts involuntarily.

“We have a lead. I’ll get back to you.” His tone was tightly controlled. He was in full detective mode, which was fine since he was a detective and all, but I was on the case with him. Why would he keep the lead from me?