“I’m sorry, Charles,” Garrett said just as Reyes and Osh were walking in. “There’s nothing in the texts to indicate how to kill them. At least not in the texts Dr. V translated. There was a lot he had yet to get to. It would have taken him years to translate it all.”

“It’s okay. I’m going to give Sister Mary Elizabeth a call later. Maybe she found something.” Sister Mary Elizabeth could hear the angels speak. Like literally. And though she couldn’t interact with them, she did come up with some pretty good intel occasionally.

I sat on a chair and flipped through a few pages. Reyes sat beside me as Osh stood eating a BBQ sandwich. It smelled amazing and my mouth watered involuntarily.

“Food’s ready,” Reyes said as he studied me. His heat scalded my skin, and even though he was still wearing the white button-down and his hair had been neatly cut, he now wore a day’s growth along his jaw. And he looked tired. His eyes had that sleepy look and, while incredibly sexy, Reyes just didn’t get sleepy. He had infinite energy. Or that’s how I’d always thought of him.

I still couldn’t help but wonder what he had going with Angel. He recruited the departed to spy for him. Maybe he was doing something similar with Angel, but why spy on me? It wasn’t like I could go anywhere. We were all stuck.

Perhaps that was why the air fairly crackled with tension. Why he was so blisteringly hot. Reyes was unused to feeling helpless, and now he was like a cornered wolf, ready to strike at anything that moved. While he was fantastic today, his energy seemed to be ratcheted tight, like he might explode given the smallest reason.

“Anything you want to tell me?” he asked, jump-starting my heart.

Did he know about the Loehrs? Or my interrogation of Angel? Or how I was pushed? I didn’t think he’d seen me. On any of those occasions. And I wasn’t about to give him a reason to explode. Not here. Not in front of everyone. I would explain about the Loehrs later, and he could decide what to do then. Besides, he was lying to me, too, in a way. He didn’t let me in on what he and Angel were up to. He’d lied about the border, though that could have been Osh. But how was Reyes standing out in a field well beyond where Osh had marked the outskirts of the sacred ground? Was Osh in on it, too? And what was it?

“Not especially,” I said, offering him my best smile. “Just wanted to make sure the helicopter is all set.” We’d come up with a plan a few months ago. As soon as Beep was born, we were going to pile into a helicopter Reyes had chartered that was going to fly us to an island that had once been a leper colony. The entire island was consecrated, thus no hell hounds. We had no idea if it was going to work, but it was the best plan we’d come up with. And we’d come up with many.

“It’s set. It’s been set for weeks.”

“Great.” When he kept his gaze trained on me, I looked down at the documents. “What’s this?” I asked, finding some notes in Garrett’s handwriting.

“Nothing,” Garrett said. “I’ve been trying my hand at translating the texts myself.”

I was impressed, but Reyes seemed … blasé about it? It was as though he’d expected as much. Or he was still trying to figure out if I was lying.

“Is this about me or Beep?” I asked when I started to read.

“You, I think. Who the hell knows?” He strode back to the table and picked up the notepad. “From what I can tell, it’s talking about the beginning and the end of something. I just don’t know what.”

“Hopefully not the world. Can you read this out loud?” I asked him, getting a new idea.

“A little. I don’t know all the vowels, but—”

“Try it,” I said, wanting to test a theory.

He picked up one of the documents. We’d had the original texts copied and preserved. They were thousands of years old and locked safely away in storage now, so Garrett was working off copies. After noisily filling his lungs to show his frustration, he stumbled through a couple of lines.

He stopped and glanced down at me as my mind mulled over his interpretation.

“One more time,” I said. While I didn’t know how to read every language ever spoken on earth, I knew how to speak them. All of them. Every single language, dead or alive, that had ever been spoken, or signed, on earth.

He picked up the sheet again and began.

“King!” I said, gazing up at him. “It’s talking about a king.”

“No,” Reyes said, straightening in his chair. “A queen. If you take into account the first word of the sentence, it is describing a feminine subject. He’s just saying the actual word wrong. It’s queen.” He looked up at Garrett. “Keep going.”

Garrett picked up the chair he’d upended and sat down beside us to read the line yet again.

“That’s not bad,” I said. “I got it that time. The queen, though the first—”

“—will be the last,” Reyes finished. Then he looked at me.

“You. It’s talking about you, only using the word ‘queen’ instead of ‘god.’”

“It makes sense,” Osh said, joining us at the table. “He had to be careful what he wrote or be considered a heretic.”

“Or in league with the devil,” Reyes added.

Osh nodded. “Like a witch. He would have been condemned and most likely stoned to death.”

“What a horrible thought.”

“So, if you’re the queen in this passage,” Osh said. “How are you the first and the last?”

Reyes was staring at me, and I tried to ignore it at first because it wasn’t a come-hither stare but more like a you’re a freak kind of stare. Either that or I was projecting.

“What?” I asked him at last.

“It is talking about you,” he said as though astonished. “You are the first pure ghost god.”

I frowned. We’d had this conversation before. “I thought I was the thirteenth. What the heck?”

He shook his head. “You are the thirteenth god, but the first pure ghost god.”

With as much dramatic flair as I could muster, I threw myself—mostly just my head—across the table. “You never give me the entire picture of anything. I’m so confused.”

Reyes laughed softly. “Okay, here’s what I know: There were seven gods, or what we would call gods, in your dimension. They were the original gods. They created everything there, like the God of this dimension created everything here.”

I turned to him, trying to understand. “So, like another galaxy?”

“No,” Osh said. “Like another universe. This one is taken.”

“There are other universes?” Garrett asked.

“There are as many universes as there are stars in the heavens of this one.”

Garrett sat back, as impressed as I was. “Okay, so in mine, there were seven gods. Not just one.”

“Yes, for lack of a better term. They are actually very different entities, but we will go with ‘god’ for now.”

“Gotcha. Going with god. And we have seven.”

“You had seven. Eventually, through time, there were thirteen total entities, including you. But you are the only one left. The last of your kind.”

I did the dramatic thing again and Reyes laughed again.

He pushed my hair out of my face. Tucked it behind an ear. “The original seven weren’t like your god. They could procreate, but only once.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why only once?”

“Because once they created another god, what I’m calling a ghost god, they melded together and became one. They ceased to exist. Their union created another being—”

“Like Beep!”

“—like Beep, only they converged into one being, a single ghost god, with all the power of the two that merged to produce it. Therefore, the new entity is more powerful than the individual gods that created it. It’s like two stars colliding to create a single supernova, one that can live forever and has an endless supply of energy. And now, in a process that took millions of years, or even billions, all of the original gods have converged, either with each other or with another ghost god, until there is only one left. And they were magnificent. They were great celestial beings floating in space with the power of a billion suns.”