“But I was the final straw. I’m the idiot who pressured her into going out with us for some karaoke that night,” Wanda confessed, her voice shaking, her wide eyes filling with tears. “I played on her sentimentality by reminding her how we used to karaoke all the time. So that much-needed break I hassled her into hassled her directly into a heart attack. I’d give anything to take that night back. Anything.”
The raw emotion in Wanda’s tight voice made Rocky pause. She hated this part. Hated it more than she hated almost anything else.
Nina slipped entirely off the bed and grabbed Wanda from behind, pulling her friend to her chest and squeezing her shoulders. “You do know it would have gone down anyway, right? She was gonna have a heart attack and a stroke and who knows what else whether it was at karaoke or at home or at the fucking Gucci counter at Macy’s, Wanda. Dr. Doomsday said so. Her heart wasn’t pumping properly. Her valves were all fucked up and her blood pressure was too high. It was just a matter of time. I’m just glad we were with her when it happened. I got her to the hospital a fuck of a lot faster than some damn ambulance would have.”
“I do know,” Wanda whispered, letting her chin hang to her chest. “I just wish I hadn’t been such a heartless shrew to her before she had the heart attack. I was just so annoyed that she couldn’t enjoy two seconds at girls’ night with us without checking her texts or…”
Nina squeezed her friend tighter, the memory of the night everything had happened clearly still as fresh as if it were just yesterday. “If the worst thing anyone ever called Marty was selfish, I’d worry. We call each other names all the time, Wanda. It’s what we do.”
Wanda shook her head, inhaling a ragged breath. “But it was the way I said it, Nina. It was the way I attacked. I was horrid. God. I was simply dreadful. Was it really necessary for me to scream at her about how self-absorbed I thought she was being in a bar full of people? I mean, I screamed so loud, I thought the man singing ‘Born to be Wild’ was going to faint from the blowback.” Wanda shook her head, her shoulders slumping. “That’s not me. That’s not who I am. I guess…I guess I was just missing her and it all came rushing at me and caught me off guard…”
“Your hormones were all amped the fuck up, Wanda. You can’t help that shit. You’re eighty-million months pregnant.”
Wanda shook her head furiously, swiping a thumb under her eye. “No! That’s no excuse, Nina. I’m not unkind. I’m not loud or abusive. That’s your job.”
Nina’s perfectly sculpted face took on a pained look, her lips thinning. “Yep, and don’t think for a fucking second I don’t regret razzing the shit out of her that night, either. I poked her, made fun of her, was a bitch of epic proportions because I was bent outta shape, too. And even if that’s normally who I am—even if it’s what everyone expects of me—I’d never say another shitty word to her again if it meant none of this had happened—if I knew it would have stopped this from happening. We’re both guilty, Wanda. It’s not just on you, but we didn’t do it to be mean girls. We did it because we love her and there was just no getting through to her.”
Wanda reached a slender hand up and gripped Nina’s wrist as though it was the only thing keeping her from falling down, and pressed her cheek to her friend’s hand.
“But it was my words just before she went up onstage to sing—my last words to her—that I have to live with. I called her a selfish B word. That was the last thing she heard me, or anyone for that matter, say to her, Nina. What if…what if she… And I didn’t get the chance to apologize? The chance to tell her I didn’t mean it. I swear, I didn’t mean it!” she sobbed in a raw whisper.
Nina gave her head a vehement shake, her insanely thick, shiny hair rustling along her spine. “Then I’ll go to the afterlife and hunt her ass down and bring her back. No way I’m letting that shit happen. Besides, you damn well know, she has to live so we can torture the shit out of her for having a heart attack in the middle of her all-time favorite song ‘Push It’.”
“Right in the middle of a resounding ‘push it reeeeal good’!” Wanda said on a watery laugh.
Nina grinned, turning her friend to look at her, chucking her under the chin. “She’s gonna shit a Channel bag and it’ll make all this waiting around for her to wake up worth it.”
Wanda inhaled long and slow, staring up at her friend.
“It’s going to be okay, isn’t it? No way we can lose her, Nina. There’s just no way that can happen. She has too much still to do, and then there’s little Hollis…” Wanda choked up again, jamming a finger between her teeth in an obvious effort to staunch her crying.
“My girl Hollis…” Nina muttered, her face returning to its pained expression. “Carl and Darnell and Arch have been with her almost day and night, just trying to keep her occupied. But she’s a smart little cookie, that one. She knows something’s up.”
Wanda nodded, wisps of her chestnut-brown hair falling around her face in disarray. “Keegan brings her every day, and she gets what’s going on, Nina. She knows Marty’s sick—really sick. But that child, I swear, she’s so compassionate, so much like her mother. She read Vogue to Marty the other day, for heaven’s sake. I can’t bear the thought she could lose…”
Nina visibly gripped Wanda’s shoulders tighter and gave her a small shake. “Then don’t. Don’t think it. Don’t project. Don’t put it out into the universe. For today, right at this fucking moment, everything’s okay. She’s alive. She’s breathing. I know what Dr. Doomsday said, but it’s his job to say shit like that. He has to attach all the warning labels to his bullshit diagnosis to cover his ass, that’s all.”
Rocky silently nodded in agreement as she remade the empty bed opposite Marty’s without either of the women even realizing she’d already remade it twice today alone.
Dr. Doomsday had indeed said Marty’s coma left her vulnerable and she had a fifty-fifty shot of waking up, and even if she woke up, she could have suffered brain damage due to the amount of time it had taken to revive her. Add in the fact that she’d had a stroke on top of everything else, and was on life support, and she was as close to death’s door as she could get.
Dr. Doomsday wasn’t a hopeful guy, for sure. He was older and crusty and he’d probably seen more than his fair share of cases like Marty’s, but he could at least try and have a better bedside manner. If sucking at consoling a mob of frightened paranormals were a thing, Dr. Valentine would win the trophy.
He was the best in the business. Keegan and the rest of Marty’s friends had made sure she had only top-notch specialists. Still, even after a quadruple bypass—which, due to her werewolf half, had already semi-healed—she remained in a coma, and the outlook, if you went by Dr. Valentine’s medical ruling, was bleak.
But Rocky, much like Marty’s friends themselves, clung to their hope like a life raft. There wasn’t much room for hope in her line of work. To see so many people fret over Marty, to see how many people loved her, made her too-soft heart ache.
And where she came from, having a soft heart was as unacceptable as having hope.
It’s not your job to hope, Rocky. You’ll do well to remember that.
Wanda took a step back and gazed at her friend with a mixture of sorrow and love in her eyes before tucking the blanket under Marty’s feet with gentle hands.
“You think she’ll like the nightgowns we brought from home for her? I couldn’t stand to see her in those ugly hospital gowns one more second.”
Nina’s face softened, her heartache palpable. “I’m sure of it.”
“You’re appeasing me,” she replied.
“Yep.”
“I thought…maybe if we did her hair and put her own nightwear on her…”
“It would help,” Nina finished, crossing her arms over her chest. “I get it, Wanda. I’m sure if Marty knew, if she could see what the fuck all’s been going on and how shitty her hair looks while she pulls this Sleeping Beauty act, she’d approve.”
Wanda leaned her head on Nina’s shoul
der. “Are you with me on bringing her home then?”
“All the fucking way,” Nina groused, holding her fist up to Wanda. “Now, pound it out.”
The beautifully elegant halfsie knocked her digits against the vampire’s and let loose a heavy sigh.
“Do you think Keegan will go for it?”
“We’ll make him go for it.”
“Nina, you can’t steamroll Keegan. You know that. He’s enough of a wreck as it is, and he’s trying to hold it all together for Hollis and the family. Don’t push him over the edge.”
“Swear to fucking Christ, if I have to push, I’ll push with gentle hands.”
“Then it’s settled? We talk to Keegan about it tonight? Promise?” Wanda asked, a spark of bright, desperate hope lighting her eyes.
Nina smiled, maybe for the first time since Rocky had inadvertently met her, flashing her perfectly straight teeth. “Yeah, Wanda. We’ll talk to him tonight. Promise.”
Rocky grabbed the disinfectant from her cleaning cart and sprayed the rails of the bed opposite Marty’s and scrubbed it, turning her back to them to hide her concern.
If they took Marty home, that would be great for Marty—not so great for Rocky. How could she possibly keep tabs on her if she was at her house and not the hospital?
It was easy enough to fake being part of the janitorial crew at the hospital, but there was no position she could fake to get her inside Marty’s palatial mansion.
And if she was going to protect Marty from her fate—a fate Rocky refused to believe was anything other than bogus—she needed to be nearby so she could watch her and make sure no one else—like a superior or a nosy official—showed up to do the job she was originally sent here to do.
Which was to reap Marty Andrews-Flaherty’s soul.
And she was long overdue.
As in, almost exactly one whole month overdue.
Chapter 2
So how the hell could she continue to prevent this reap if they took Marty home? This hospital housekeeping job had been an easy solution to her problem while she tried to figure out her bigger problem—which was saving Marty’s soul. No matter what anyone said—her superiors, her friends, even her overbearing father—Marty Flaherty wasn’t supposed to die.
Rocky simply wouldn’t accept that. She was an immortal, for the love of the supernatural. Immortals didn’t die. That should be their due for sacrificing their human lives—at least that’s what she’d been taught.
When she’d shown up at that karaoke bar that night, knowing nothing about the reap other than the location because she’d been late after getting caught up in a Netflix binge and hadn’t downloaded the list of souls she was due to collect, she figured she’d just wing it. It wasn’t hard to figure out whose soul she had to nab.
Souls weren’t hard to identify. They’d be the only dead person in the room. They died, she collected—easy-peasy, right? She’d done it on the fly thousands of times before.
Except, when she’d walked into the darkly lit bar, smack dab in the middle of Dr. Sexypants Kahlil saving a woman’s life in the center of the barroom floor, she’d been caught completely off guard.
Partly because she’d recognized the woman whose life was in jeopardy, and it had shocked her, but mostly due to the fact that she also knew Dr. Sexypants—or Hotty McHotshorts, as she’d secretly called him—for more centuries than she cared to admit.
All of it combined had knocked her for a serious loop. Not that she would have collected Marty’s soul at that very moment anyway, whether Hudson Khalil had been there to distract her with his deliciousness or not.
Because she was convinced this was some sort of egregious error on the part of whoever made the list of souls due for collection.
So instead of doing her stinkin’ job, Rocky had gone home to her tiny cottage on the lake and her dog, Dwayne Johnson, downloaded that stupid list of souls she’d been assigned—conveniently posted on the reaper forums online (reaping was so much easier now that everything was Internet-based)—and double checked.
In turn, as Rocky had stared at the list while picking her jaw up off the floor, her mind had raced in fearful concern.
It couldn’t be true. There had to be some mistake, and whoever was in charge of deciding whose soul was on the chopping block—especially one as valuable to the paranormal community as Marty’s—had to either have been shitfaced when they put her name on the list, or they had a death wish.
The hate mail alone wasn’t worth the reaping, not to mention she could only imagine Paranormal Twitter would be an inferno of hashtags like #FreeMarty and #Reapthis.
But #Donthatethereaperhatethegame. It wasn’t her decision who, or was that whom, was reaped. She’d never had such a highly visible soul like Marty before, and when folks got wind the cosmos had chosen one of their idols, an immortal to boot, to bite the bullet, she was in for a lot of misdirected hate.
So, because Rocky was so certain it had to be a mistake, and to get in front of the ugly fallout, she’d called headquarters to triple check the validity of the reap.
Yet, she was assured, the soul up for collection did indeed belong to the immortal Marty Andrews-Flaherty from Buffalo, New York, married to Keegan Flaherty, mother to Hollis and esteemed cofounder of OOPS.
Oh, and no one at Reaper Central gave a rat’s bee-hind that she was going to be one of the most hated reapers in the history of reapers. She’d been told, quite succinctly, her job was her job, and she could essentially suck it with her protests.
None of that mattered to Rocky, because this still felt wrong. It felt really wrong, and it wasn’t only because she was a little star struck by the women of OOPS. This reap was wrong with a capital-bad-feeling-in-her-gut kind of wrong. But she had to prove that first. And how did one go about proving a reap, and the jackhole of the cosmos who’d assigned the reap, were a steaming pile of horse pucky?
Worse, how had Marty’s name gotten on the list in the first place? Was it intentional? No one—that Rocky knew of anyway—had the kind of power it must take to change the list, and she’d been reaping for a very long time. The list was the list. End of. It cosmically appeared then you did your job and that was essentially that.
Sure, mistakes were occasionally made. From time to time there was an instance when name confusion came into play, but it was as rare as hen’s teeth, and it never happened concerning an immortal. Not where a reaper was involved anyway.
Immortals died, yes, but only by special circumstance. An unfortunate garlic incident, a stake through the chest, even werewolves died if a vital organ was hit, but they didn’t get the escort of a reaper. Reapers were for human souls.
But headquarters had confirmed it wasn’t a mistake…
Fighting a sigh of frustration, Rocky tucked the last of her cleaning supplies in her cart and slipped past the women to head outside Marty’s room in ICU, letting the dim lights and cool air of the hallway wash over her.
She was in a real pickle here, and she had no idea how much longer she could stall her superiors before they’d want to know why she wasn’t handing over Marty Flaherty’s soul.
But every time she thought about the promises she’d made to her boss after her last little incident—okay, incident was a tame word for complete fiasco—her fangirl crush on these women stopped her cold.
These women were essential, maybe even critical to the paranormal world at large. They were a force. Legend. And they probably had no idea how revered, how worshipped they were in reaper circles, but they were the Beyoncé, Cardi B, and Taylor Swift of paranormal badassery to budding reapers everywhere.
They were a threesome, and asking her to reap one of their souls was like asking her to break up the Supremes. She’d have no part of that, thank you very much. She was not going to be the lame duck at the annual Christmas reaper white elephant who had to explain why she’d broken up the band.
Nope. No thank you, ma’am. These women were the equivalent of the Charlie’s Angels of the paranormal world,
and even though everyone knew a reaper had no choice but to collect the souls they’d been assigned, misplaced resentments had a way of lingering.
For example, the reaper who’d collected the beloved Mister Rogers’s soul, old Horton Greely, still sat alone at every reaper function as though he had the plague. It wasn’t his fault he was chosen to collect Mister Rogers’s soul, but still, he’d been branded an outcast.
“Rocky? Rocky McNally?”
She froze on the outskirts of Marty’s room, her hands gripping the cleaning cart until her knuckles turned white.
Oh, that voice. That whiskey-soaked, melt-your-panties-right-off-your-damn-body, make-you-do-stupid-things voice. She’d never forget that voice. To this day, it still sent shivers up her spine.
Not the kind of shivers one experiences when they’re spooked, mind you. The kind of shivers that made your knees weak and your heart thump with wild, longing abandon.
It was the voice of the aforementioned Hudson Khalil, who wasn’t just a doctor but a sexy-smexy, bring-you-to-your-knees phoenix, complete with a fifteen-foot scarlet-and-gold wingspan, and the hottest immortal in the reincarnated crowd she’d ever encountered.
Okay, he was the only hottie who was reincarnated that she’d ever encountered, but still, there were few who compared not only physically, but intellectually.
Marty's Horrible, Terrible, Very Bad Day Page 2
