Charmed (Death Escorts)

by Cambria Hebert

  “So tell them you’re on vacation.”

  “It’s too risky. A borrowed body covers up my spirit.”

  “How?”

  “Best I can figure is that their spirit cancels mine out.”

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “Like everything else. Practice.”

  “And you’re the only Ghost Escort that can do that?”

  “As far as I know.”

  I finished searching through the length of closets, patting down pockets and peering under feet, looking for anything I could use.

  But I found absolutely nothing.

  After rechecking that all the bodies were hung exactly as they had been, I pressed the button and closed the doors. I sat down in G.R.’s leather desk chair and let out a sigh.

  “There’s nothing here. Let’s go to his room.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  I wasn’t crazy, but I was starting to feel a little desperate. Both my hands gripped the seat of the chair, my fingers curling underneath it and squeezing the leather. I was so sure that I would find something. So sure he would be hiding some sort of secret.

  I went to push myself up, but when I dragged my hand along the bottom of the chair, I felt something. Some sort of small round knob on the bottom of the seat. I ran my finger over it several times. It felt like a button. I pressed it.

  There was a soft sound across the room. Both Storm and I whipped around, thinking we were somehow caught. But we weren’t. The sound came from a secret door. A secret sliding door in the bookcase. It opened, the doorway wide enough for a man to fit through.

  Excitement pounded through me. Got you, I thought.

  I glanced at Storm. “I thought you searched over there.”

  “Shit, you expected me to find some kind of secret door? It’s probably a booby trap that’s going to suck us into the depths of hell.”

  “I’ll say hello to the devil for you,” I said, returning G.R’s chair to the exact place it had been in and going over to the entrance and peering inside.

  “Well?” Storm asked from close behind.

  “No trips to hell today. It’s just more closets.” Three doors all in a row.

  “What could he possibly keep in there?”

  I wasn’t about to wait to find out. When I stepped into the narrow hallway, I half expected an alarm to go off, but nothing happened so I took another small step and then another.

  My heart was pounding in my ears, drowning out the quiet and making me more nervous. I told myself to calm down, that it was stupid to get this nervous. I mean, I didn’t even act like this when I killed people. Guess my body was more afraid of the Reaper than my brain realized.

  But fear of the Reaper was why I had to keep going. Being scared of him was unacceptable. I stopped in front of the first door I came to, staring at its cherry finish.

  I was surprised when I opened the door.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. Something sinister and twisted.

  I was a little let down when all I saw was more bodies. “It’s just bodies,” I said, irritation lining my tone.

  Storm finally got over his fear this was a portal to hell and came inside. “What’s so special about these bodies?”

  What, indeed?

  I looked closer, having to squint a little because the lighting in here was so dim. My eyes first went to a contrast in the dark. A body with blond hair. Overly long, messy blond hair.

  I grabbed the body, gripping its shoulder and yanking it out so I could see it.

  Like a freight train, recognition slammed into me.

  It was me.

  Memories of looking in the mirror when I was alive crashed over me. Wave after wave of broken clips of memories… of me brushing my teeth, combing my hair, studying a black eye or a busted lip.

  This was the body I was born in. The body that carried me through my life. The body that used to laugh and eat cookies. The body that used to hug… them.

  “Uh, Charming?”

  I shook myself but still kept hold of my body. Of my past. “It’s me,” I said, then cleared my throat. “This is my body.”

  He let out a low whistle. “Why’s it in here?”

  I shook my head and carefully put it back where it was. Then I looked at the one beside it. It was a man I’d never seen before. He had dark hair parted on the side and combed over. It was an old hairstyle from a very long time ago. There wasn’t anything remarkable or special about him so I moved on to the next body.

  It was a woman.

  I reached out and pulled her out for Storm to see. “Check her out.”

  She was wearing a long gown made of rich woven fabric. I couldn’t tell exactly, but her hair looked like it was a shade of red and it was done up in a style of many curls all piled on her head. She had pale skin and what appeared to be freckles splattered across her cheeks. She was pretty attractive, if you liked redheads.

  “When’s the last time you saw a girl in G.R.’s closet?” I asked Storm, not taking my eyes off her.

  “Um, never?”

  “Exactly. He doesn’t use women as Escorts. He thinks they’re too soft to kill.”

  “Well, he hasn’t met my ex,” Storm quipped.

  It was something I didn’t agree with the Reaper about, though I never said anything. Who he chose to make an Escort wasn’t something I cared about. I wasn’t going to make friends with them and I worked alone so it didn’t matter in terms of my job either. But if you asked me, a woman had the potential to be the perfect Escort. Because of a woman’s softness, their girly-like qualities, they were often underestimated. They were too often thought of as innocent. Many Targets wouldn’t see their death coming until it was already delivered.

  “What’s in the next one?” Storm asked.

  It took me a second to close the door of the closet I was standing in front of. It was surprisingly hard to shut away the body I’d just found.

  But I did. Because I knew I wasn’t going to leave it there.

  I pulled open the next door.

  There was a single body.

  I sucked in a breath.

  It was her. My sister.

  Sadness overcame me. Sadness for her… about a life cut way too short. A life lost that was all my fault. And now there she was, hanging in a secret, dark closet like she was someone’s shirt. Like she wasn’t once brimming with life with her own set of dreams and wants. She had been a person… a beautiful and innocent person. And now she was here. Held hostage by a man who shouldn’t even have her. I should have known she was here. I should have done something.

  Her light hair was around her shoulders and she was dressed in the same clothes she was wearing the last time I saw her.

  “Another woman?” Storm said. “She’s hot.”

  I spun around and snarled. “Watch your mouth.”

  “Whoa. I didn’t mean nothing.” He backtracked. After a short pause, he said, “I take it you know this one too?”

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice hoarse. “Yeah, I do.”

  But really, there wasn’t anything here to know. Yes, I recognized the body, but it was merely a shell of the person who lived inside. It was she who I missed. I didn’t think she was here. I would have known. After all these years of working for the Reaper, of butting heads with him, there was no way he could have kept the fact that my sister was still alive a secret.

  Besides. I knew she was dead.

  I was the one who killed her.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt your… uh, reunion,” Storm said over my shoulder. “But we need to hurry.”

  He was right.

  There was still one more closet to look in. Gently, I closed the closet containing my sister and faced the final door.

  “If there isn’t something besides bodies in that one, I’m going to be very disappointed,” Storm told me. “I mean, really, what kind of Grim Reaper doesn’t have at least one sinister thing in his secret stash?”

  I was ready to go. For some re
ason I felt like I’d been in a ten-round boxing match and my body took most the hits.

  I opened the door.

  There was no body hanging inside. It wasn’t a closet.

  It was a room.

  “It’s a secret lair,” Storm whispered.

  I rolled my eyes and walked forward into the room. It looked like a mini apartment. The room was a large rectangle and off to the right was a couch, two upholstered chairs, and a round coffee table. On the wall was the hugest flat-screen TV I’d ever seen.

  Off to the left was a small kitchenette, but it looked like it was never used. Everything was brand new and looked untouched.

  But it wasn’t dusty.

  If this was a place he never used, then it would be dusty; it would smell stale and vacant.

  It didn’t.

  “Ugh, Charming, You might want to look at this.”

  There was a small door leading out of the space. Presumably to a bedroom. But I wasn’t concerned with how the room was used or decorated, but rather what was coming out of it.

  It was a soul.

  It looked just like Storm. Except it was bright pink.

  The soul stopped just inside the room—just hovering there like it was shocked to see us.

  Hell, it couldn’t have been as shocked as we were.

  Now this was interesting. In all my years, this was the first time I ever saw a soul wandering around—besides a Ghost Escort.

  “Is it a Ghost Escort?” I asked Storm.

  “Couldn’t be. All of us are black and that is clearly not black.”

  “You’re just like me,” the soul said, floating a little closer to Storm. It had the voice of a woman. She seemed surprised to see someone like her.

  Clearly she could talk. I guess that wasn’t a surprise, considering the rest of us could talk when we weren’t inside a body.

  “No body here either,” Storm agreed.

  “Are you here to bring me a body?”

  I glanced at Storm. She was waiting for a body?

  “Uh,” I began, for once not being able to come up with a rapid reply.

  “Not that it matters,” she said. “I probably won’t be able to get inside that one either.”

  This just kept getting better and better.

  The Grim Reaper was harboring the soul of a woman who, of her own admission, couldn’t manage to get into a body.

  “You can’t get into a body?” Storm said, intrigued. “That’s like G.R.’s specialty. He can take souls in and out of bodies in his sleep.”

  “Who are you?” she asked, suddenly realizing maybe she should be suspicious.

  “We work with G.R.,” I told her. “Why are you in here? Who are you to him?”

  “This room was secret. How did you find it?” As she spoke she went backward, moving away from us.

  “G.R. told us about it,” I said, taking a step closer.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  And then she started to scream.

  “Shhh!” Storm and I both exclaimed, looking back the way we came. Her screams weren’t that loud. I guess she couldn’t project her sound, but I knew if she yelled long enough, someone would hear and then shit would hit the fan.

  “Shut her up!” I growled at Storm while I ran into the kitchenette to see if there was anything I could use to make her be quiet. But there are no real weapons you can use against someone that doesn’t have a body.

  Except another soul.

  Storm tackled her, the black cloud that made up his form wrapping around her pink form, and the two colors began mixing together. A burst of pink would explode from the center of the black and Storm would make a grunting sound, but then the black would cover up the pink once more and he would swirl around her like an angry thundercloud just waiting to unleash its wrath. Her screams turned to strangled sounds and then died off completely.

  “A little help here,” Storm called as he struggled.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked, wondering if he was somehow killing her.

  “Find something to put her in!”

  That I could do. I reached into the cabinet where I saw a jar earlier and grabbed it, rushing across the room while I unscrewed the lid and held it out. Storm started circling her, like a spinning cyclone. Round and round he went, whipping up the air around us and creating what could only be described as a tornado inside the tiny apartment.

  “Hold it steady,” he called, and then like a baseball bat, he smacked the pink soul into the jar.

  I stood there stunned that he actually made the shot on the first try. Pink funneled out around the jar and floated around my hand. I waited for it all to gather in on itself and follow the rest of the soul into the jar, praying it hurried up before she came to and tried to get out.

  She didn’t. Whatever Storm did seemed to put her down for the count. When all the pink went inside the jar, I jammed the lid on and screwed it shut, tight.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked Storm.

  “Spending time with the other Ghost Escorts can get a little… irritating. Sometimes we wrestle.”

  “That was wrestling?”

  “Soul style.”

  Soul-style wrestling? Okay, then.

  “We gotta get out of here,” I said, glancing through the door. We were lucky no one heard her and came running.

  “I can’t believe he has a soul,” Storm said. “What’s he going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know, but I know what I’m going to do with it.”

  “Tell me you aren’t,” Storm said, his voice flat.

  “You don’t actually think I would leave this here? A soul in a jar?”

  He let out a few more of those really artful swear words.

  “It won’t be easy to get out of here,” I said thoughtfully. “The bodies are going to be more of a challenge.”

  “You’re taking the bodies too?”

  “Why do you keep acting so surprised?” I asked, irritated. “This is what we came for.”

  He mumbled something I didn’t hear.

  “Are you in or are you out?” I said coldly. I didn’t have time for his pansy-ass ways. I had bodies and a soul to steal.

  “I’m in,” he said, not even stopping to think about it. Good thing too because I was starting to think he was turning into a woman, what with all his questions, incessant chattering, and gasping about my nefarious plans. Geez, next time I went on a mission I would just hire Barbie. She’d be easier to work with.

  “Good. Let’s get to it,” I said, stuffing the jar containing the soul inside my jacket. “We have some bodies to steal.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Vacation - a period of time devoted to pleasure, rest, or relaxation, especially one with pay granted to an employee.”

  Frankie

  I was pretty sure Mondays were invented to remind the poor schmucks who had to work for a living at jobs they hated that the weekend had been nothing but a tease and now they had five long days of torture to look forward to.

  Although really, my weekend hadn’t been all puppies and rainbows anyway. Today the torture was just being moved to another place: the DMV. Although at least here at work, I could get a break from my personal life. I snorted inwardly. The day I started looking at my job as a vacation from life, I had a problem.

  Between lunch with Rosalyn and Charming, him showing up at my apartment wanting to talk and falling asleep on the couch only to disappear the next morning, to being interrogated by Piper on Sunday, I guess I could understand why I wanted to escape.

  It was just too bad my escape had to be screening old people’s eyes for driver’s license renewal and listening to Hagatha tell me I was the worst employee ever, but she wasn’t going to bother to fire me because that would mean she would actually have to work and train someone new.

  Ahhh, to be on a tropical beach somewhere.

  I threw myself into my work all day and ignored my thoughts and the scathing remarks from the witch. I even stayed late to
enter some data into the computer that one of the other girls forgot to do. By the time I left, it was almost six and everyone but me and my boss was gone. She was shut into her office and I wasn’t about to go pretend I liked her and say good-bye. Who knows what I would catch her doing in there anyway. Likely sharpening her claws on a dagger.