The other friend stood shell-shocked nearby, a look of terror on her face. I sighed at the figure standing beside the frozen girl, and walked over.
“It’s time for you to go now.”
The girl with the pixie cut looked away from her dead body lying helplessly on the ground and slowly turned to me, eyes wide. “I don’t understand.”
I stared back at her solemnly. “You were alive … now you’re dead.” I pointed at the body. “That was your body.” Then at her. “This is your soul. You need to leave this plane now.”
“No.”
I looked back at her in surprise. I wasn’t expecting that. “No?”
It wasn’t as easy as it had been with Dante.
She shook her head firmly. “No,” she said again. She turned to her frozen friend standing by her dead feet. “Paula, let’s go, I need to get away from this freak. Grab Sasha and let’s get the hell out of here before we miss the opening credits.” She tried grabbing her friend but her hand went right through her.
Amber startled, staring down at her hand like it was a foreign object.
“What?”
I touched her not so gently on the shoulder. Freak, huh? She turned to my hand on her, and then stared straight at me.
“We have to go, Amber. They can’t see us.”
“No!” she said, violently moving away from me and then crashing to the floor, her face inches away from a bawling friend still holding a dead girl’s head.
“Sasha, listen to me! I’m right here,” she gushed, tears streaming down her own face. “I wanna get out of here! I wanna go home!”
She continued to cry on the floor while I looked at her and sighed. I looked around the area, through the crowds of people, and heard the distant sound of sirens approaching. My eyes stopped their scan when I saw a familiar face.
Ethan looked over at me and winked. “Hey, Kitty Cat.”
“What are you doing here?” I didn’t expect to see him so soon. Just hours before he had been doing naughty things to me with those strong, capable hands of his. And now we stood like strangers. “I thought we did reaps alone?”
He walked over to me, a tall, familiar-looking blonde by his side. “We do. I have my own reap,” he supplied, pointing to his docile companion who looked pathetically up at Ethan like she was in love.
I pouted, then glanced down at my reap still crying over her dead body. “So I get the annoying brat and you get the celebrity? So not fair.”
I heard a cry to my left and saw the teen I had been sitting next to earlier sobbing uncontrollably, pointing to the ground. I looked to see what, or rather whom, she was pointing at, and then sighed, eyeing Ethan’s companion.
“Nice to meet you, Monique. Sorry it’s under this circumstance.”
Monique looked at me as if noticing me for the first time. “Are you his Grim Reaper partner?” she asked, gazing back at Ethan. “You gonna fly me to Heaven?”
“Aren’t you going to…” Ethan ignored Monique’s eyelash batting and motioned toward the sobbing heap of Amber on the floor. “Deal with your reap? I’ll wait for you.”
I shook my head. “No, you go on.” I looked back at Monique and pointed a finger at her. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.”
He smirked. “I’ll see you in a bit, Kitty Cat.”
In the blink of an eye, Ethan and Monique were gone and I frowned. It made me wonder why I didn’t get to guide Dante to the other side. Then I realized I hadn’t had to since his reap had been my test to see my worth as a Grim. He was a straight reap, a direct ticket to the pearly gates for being a true soul. Not everyone was so lucky.
Take Amber, for example, whose soul was slightly soured by her less than perfect personality. She wasn’t evil, but she wasn’t necessarily a ball of sunshine either.
That I could see really early on.
I sighed, walked over to Amber, who was still trying to cling to her friend to no avail, and grabbed her by the arm. Drawing her to her feet, I grabbed on to her shoulders and gave her a few sturdy shakes.
“Scream,” I demanded. “Scream as loud as you can and no one will hear you but me.”
Her eyes widened, her body shaking like the feathers of a duster, teeth chattering like she were stuck in an igloo. She remained quiet.
“I am your reaper,” I resumed more quietly. “I am your Grim. Please, just let me do my job. Okay?”
She seemed to respond better to questions and she nodded faintly. I smiled. “Good. Let’s go.”
“Go where?” she asked timidly. I saw her look back at her body now being put on a stretcher, and she quickly looked away.
I ignored the tears in her eyes and studied her before making my final decision.
“The in-between.”
As we left this earthly plane, I thought today’s events were very bleak, and definitely woke me up from the dream I’d been living with Ethan. I wasn’t alive, and neither were the two innocent bystanders who were now nothing but reaps. Shot because of a purse thief who’d barely got a flesh wound in the shoulder, and lived to see another day. Wasn’t life ironic?
Or was it death?
CHAPTER TWENTY
I REMEMBERED MY time in the in-between. Vaguely. I think I tried to block it out since the in-between had been nothing but silence and loneliness for me. A waiting game, really.
Ethan had it better than me since he’d had my company. I refused to let go of him, so Ethan’s in-between had been an ocean view, crashing waves, and me by his side. I still missed it, being with him in that plane. It was beautiful and surreal and I’d wanted to never leave.
I wondered if Ethan still missed it and if everyone’s in-between was different. If Ethan’s had been a private beach with an amazing view, maybe Monique’s was a movie gala, and Amber’s a shopping mall. We Grim weren’t privy to see a reap’s in-between, we just ushered them over like a taxicab. Dotted the i’s, crossed the t’s. If we all experienced something different, I had to ask myself why my in-between was void, unlike everyone else’s. But I never asked Ethan about Grim-related procedures, not really wanting to know the answer.
As they said, ignorance was bliss.
There had been many reaps since Dante and Amber. The next one had been Ella. Seventeen and her soul pure. The first day I spent with her, I knew it. A “chance meeting” on a subway platform.
A man had pushed her in front of an oncoming train.
Then there was Rebecca, or Becca as she’d wanted me to call her. Early thirties, an avid runner, we met every day for a week before I decided she was one of the good ones. She was tricky. There was a certain coldness to her, but that had more to do with her poor upbringing, I gathered.
She was a survivor. Or at least, had been a survivor. The ex-boyfriend she had thought she had left behind, and had a tendency of hitting pretty hard, finally caught up to her.
I didn’t choose how they died. Fate decided their paths. I didn’t choose how long I stayed with them. It could be mere minutes of watching from afar, like Amber, or weeks living in close quarters, like Dante.
I just happened to be along for the ride.
I wondered if my fate had already been orchestrated, that my deal with the faceless female voice had nothing to do with my current vocation as Grim. It made me feel slightly better at the notion that this was just fate, and Ethan and I couldn’t have prevented this.
Slightly better.
Ethan and I were assigned different reaps, our assignments usually done alone. There were regions, of a sort, a handful of Grims assigned to each one. I’d never met any of the other Grims, and I didn’t know if I wanted to. Ethan usually took on that task, attending the necessary meetings to ensure everything was in order. In each meeting, our next reaps were assigned to us and they’d discuss any issues that may develop after a reap, which was as boring as it sounded.
I made sure I had no issues to report.
The afterlife seemed to have more order than the human world, as if one misstep would comple
tely demolish everything they knew to be. Guardians, Abiders, and Muses were good and did good things, and Grims were just … grim.
Chaos could not be an option, although that chaos was so tangible in the depths of my soul.
Yes, I liked to think I still had a soul.
I flicked the lighter on and off in my hand, staring at the golden flames, waiting. I finally heard the door open and close, Ethan making his presence known. He had just come back from his latest meeting regarding our next assignments. I savored in the feel of the heat against my skin as I silently watched him approach, the flames licking my fingers playfully.
Ethan crossed the small living room in two steps and took the lighter from my grasp. I felt his eyes on me, but I didn’t look away from the lighter now in his hand, missing the simple action. I watched as he took a packet of smokes from his jacket pocket, took a cigarette out and lit it, dragging in as if he were starving for air or dying to breathe. He knelt by my foot, rubbing his thumb along the length of my naked thigh below the hem of my shorts.
I finally looked into his face as he exhaled, letting the smoke touch my face. I slowly breathed in, then got comfortable as I sat up and wrapped my legs around his body, trapping him in place. He settled his chin against my thigh as I gently stroked his hair, breathing in the intoxicating fumes of the cigarette and his natural scent.
My version of Heaven.
“Who’s my next reap?”
He took another drag of the cigarette and exhaled slowly as I waited for his answer. I watched his actions carefully, a small smile on his face. Ethan had never smoked when he was alive, and now that he was dead, besides my lips, it was the only thing he seemed to enjoy having against his mouth. “I have a very addicting personality,” he had murmured with that familiar glint in his eyes.
I knew it wasn’t the cigarettes he was referring to.
“Carter Johnson,” Ethan stated, and I stumbled out from my daydream.
I continued playing with his hair. “What’s the intel?” A male reap? I was surprised. Ethan usually took on those. I think he wanted me to heal, my dear Ethan. He must have thought the notion of reaping another male so soon A.D. (after Dante) would put me into a tizzy.
Ethan started to recite the information given to him. “Carter Johnson, aka CJ. Big man on campus at the local university. Plays football, basketball, and soccer, always with a scout or two at a game. GPA at 3.0, very popular with the ladies, although I wouldn’t be surprised if people secretly wanted to kill him.”
I made a face. “He’s that guy.” Assholes that probably dated girls like my former tenants.
Ethan chuckled, like he knew what I was thinking. “Yeah … that guy. He’s a certified douche, yet not a complete idiot. He only dates cheerleaders, feels that anyone else is beneath him. Just got out of a semi-serious relationship, a Jeannette Law.”
“Let me guess, Jeannette’s the head cheerleader.”
“Bingo,” Ethan stated. “She’s also my next reap.”
My eyes widened. “Really?” This was getting interesting. Normally our reaps weren’t so closely related. The last time had been six months ago with Amber and Monique, and they hadn’t even known each other. “Are we tag-teaming this one, babe?”
“It seems so. You’re looking at the new running back.” He paused, gauging my reaction.
“Running back…” I mused. Suddenly it dawned on me and my hand stilled in his hair. In fact, my fingers tightened on the strands. “If you’re on the football team, then … then…”
Ethan winced slightly at my tight grip but didn’t mention his discomfort. “That would make you my new cheerleader, Kitty Cat.”
“I have to be a cheerleader!” I cried. I untangled my legs from around him and pushed him back with my feet against his chest. “Ethan!”
“Hey…” He rubbed his head as he looked up at me, managing not to drop his cigarette as he gave another puff. “I don’t make the decisions, babe. And you always said you wanted to go to university or college,” he ended with a chuckle.
I narrowed my eyes at him, knowing the next few weeks would suck. I hoped to God it would only be days. “This is my never-ending Hell, isn’t it?”
He raised a brow. “Well, at least I’m here by your side.”
We ended up playing chess a few hours later on the kitchen table. My mind was on the reap I would be handling in the not so distant future. My head pounded, all my past demons screaming inside my head as their names danced around my mind.
“It doesn’t get any easier.”
Ethan looked up from the chessboard he had been staring at intently before I’d interrupted the silence. I calmly moved a rook, capturing his knight, then settled back in the chair and waited for his next move.
He chose to answer my question instead. “What doesn’t get easier?”
“The reaping. The taking of the souls. We’ve been at this for quite some time, Ethan. It’s still hard, like the first time...”
“With Dante.”
“Yes,” I murmured. I chewed on my bottom lip, my forehead furrowed.
He touched my knee underneath the table. “We’ll get through this.”
“But an eternity of reaping?”
He sighed, reaching for his remaining knight and swiping one of my own. “We’ll get through this together.”
“I wish we could go back to the ocean. I wish I could close my eyes and just go back to when it was just you and me.”
“You know we can’t do that.”
“Why not?” I challenged. “I mean, can’t we just run away?”
He grabbed one of my hands on the table and squeezed gently. “Kitty Cat, our souls no longer belong to us—our souls belongs to the Grim. There’s nowhere we could go where they wouldn’t be able to find us.”
I grimaced. “How creepy.”
He chuckled. “Well, I have to play the part, don’t I?”
I blew out a puff of air, staring up at the ceiling. “I’m envious of Guardians.”
Ethan glanced up at the mention of another sector other than Grims. “Why?”
“They get the luxury of forgetting, while we remember everything. Sometimes I wish I were back to being Mia. Death was … simpler.”
His eyes dimmed. “The Guardians have it more difficult than we do. We take lives, they have to protect them. They have to mold and guide Beacons into defeating Phantoms so no harm can come to humans and destroy mankind as we know it.”
Beacons were special types of humans that carried a type of power inside of them that was necessary to defeat Phantoms. Phantoms were something that Ethan only talked about in passing, something as ominous as the Delphian because that was precisely where they originated from. Phantoms were big and scary creatures of Hell with red eyes and glowing tattoos that ran all over their bodies, their sole purpose to destroy. The pure essence of a Phantom was pure evil.
They were also her pets.
I breathed slowly, trying not to emit the anger that wanted to rise from me when I thought of her and focused on Ethan’s actions. He moved the chessboard away from us, and bent closer, elbows resting on the table. “And how would you feel, the two of us as Guardians, working together yet not remembering our past?”
As Ethan waited for my answer, I tried picturing an existence with no memory of Ethan. The way he smelled, the way he looked at me, his touch. All of it. Gone.
“I’d hate it,” I finally admitted. “Every second of it.”
“Like I said…” Ethan sat back. “Being Grim isn’t perfect, but at least we’re together. We’ll get through this.”
I said nothing, letting his words mull in my mind.
For some reason, my mind drifted to Alex. She wasn’t my favorite person but she meant something to Ethan.
“Do you miss her?” I asked suddenly. “Your sister?”
I wondered what she had thought of the letter I had mailed to her prior to my demise.
Must have been a treat for her to find out I’d offed myself.
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“Every day.”
I sighed. “We have these … gifts that have been given to us as Grim. Do you think of sometimes just forgetting to be what you are for a day and just go back home?”
“It would be so simple, wouldn’t it? To just pretend, for only a little while.” He snubbed the cigarette out, leaving it in the ashtray on the table. He smiled suddenly, but it quickly disappeared. “We can’t have everything, Kitty Cat. This world survives on a balance. There’s no going back.”
I thought back to what I had left behind, which was so much less than Ethan who still had his family. Liam’s brown eyes floated across my mind. I knew that eventually I’d have to find him. “Only moving forward.”
I just didn’t know what Ethan would think about that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I LEARNED UNIVERSITY wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Carter Johnson, aka CJ, was an asshole. Certified Grade A asshole. If I knew he wasn’t about to die soon, I’d have killed him myself. But does being an asshole warrant an eternal life sentence in Hell?
That was for me to find out.
I’d always thought reapers were just takers of souls, but we were so much more than that. I’d liken it to a scout, or head hunter. Like a job application. As reapers, we had to get to know the true soul of a reap, decide whether they should end up through the pearly gates or the pits of Hell. Or if we weren’t quite sure, end up in the in-between, like Amber.
If they were really unlucky, they’d end up like Ethan and me.
So here I was, the rejected angel, dressed in a cheerleader outfit, standing on the sidelines of a football game as I cheered on the South Ridge Lions.
I glanced down at my burgundy, white, and black cheer uniform and grimaced. Staring toward the field, I saw Ethan dressed in his football uniform, and that frown instantly changed to a grin while I checked out my man. They did a bunch of plays that I had no idea about, and all of a sudden it was halftime. Ethan walked over and lifted his helmet off to kiss me.
Never Letting Go (Delphian Book 1) Page 11
