by Liliana Hart
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she whispered. And then she wondered why she was whispering. “Because I’m losing my mind.”
She’d seen the van coming straight toward her with her own eyes. They were around here somewhere, and they couldn’t hide from her forever. She wanted explanations.
Tess moved quickly through the kitchen and into the long hallway that led to the embalming room and attached garage. Those rooms hadn’t been part of the original structure and had a much more modern and clinical feel to them.
The hall floors were tile, and she’d once had hall runners put down, but the gurneys got snagged on them when she tried to wheel a body from the garage to the embalming room. It had only taken once for a body to almost tip over before she’d rolled the rugs back up and shoved them in a closet.
If people knew some of the things that happened behind closed doors at a funeral home, they’d more than likely opt to give their loved one a Viking funeral complete with flaming arrows. She’d heard some doozies of stories when she’d gone to a mortician’s convention, and she prayed she never had to explain to a family why their loved one had accidentally been cremated or why the wrong body was in the coffin.
The embalming room always stayed locked since there were thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment inside—not to mention a body—but she checked the doorknob anyway just to make sure.
Locked.
She wiped her sweaty palm on her jeans and moved across to the door that led into the garage. She fully expected to find the transport van inside, along with whoever had taken it out for a spin. But when she opened the door, the space where the van should’ve been was empty.
The garage was oversized so they could maneuver bodies between the vehicles, and her voice echoed as she shone the flashlight into the cavernous space and said, “Hello?”
Nothing but silence answered her back.
The black Suburban she used for funerals was parked in the middle space, and the twelve-year-old Corolla that only started if she put a screwdriver in the ignition was in the far space. But the transport van was gone.
She pointed the flashlight over the concrete and noticed the floor was wet with shoe prints, tire tracks, and mud.
“See, Tess? Not crazy,” she said, feeling vindicated.
So now what? She’d proven they’d been out with the van. And obviously they’d come back, at least for a short time. But why would they leave again? She looked at the time on her cell phone and saw it was just after six in the morning. None of it made any sense.
Eve Winter might own the place, but Eve wasn’t here, and Tess had only seen her the one time in two years. Tess was the funeral home director. Everything that happened within those walls was her responsibility, including the employees. And employees didn’t have carte blanche to use the funeral home’s equipment at their whim.
The hum of electricity filled the room just before the lights flickered back on. She blinked a couple of times and then turned off the flashlight. When she looked at the shoe prints a little closer, she realized they led right to where she was standing. At least a couple of the guys had come inside. But she hadn’t seen any sign of them.
Tess turned back inside the house to follow the prints, but the tile floor had been wiped clean. She could practically feel the electricity crackling around her. She wasn’t sure if it was because of the storm or her temper. Either way, her hair felt as if it were standing on end, and every time she touched something she got a quick jolt.
She closed the door to the garage and dug her keys out of her jeans pocket as she went to the embalming room door. Since no one was in the house, and she didn’t feel like going out in the rain to bang on their door to ask about the missing transport van, she decided to get to work. They’d have to bring it back at some point, and when they did, she’d be ready to pounce.
Mrs. Schriever needed to be bathed and made as presentable as a ninety-year-old woman could be made before Theodora showed up to do her hair. That’s if she remembered to show up. Theodora played bingo on Wednesday nights, so she wasn’t always in top form on Thursday mornings.
“Don’t worry about things you can’t control,” she whispered, feeling the familiar knot form in her stomach like it did whenever she thought of her mother and responsibilities in the same sentence.
A cold blast of air hit her as she opened the embalming room door. It was temperature-controlled to make working with the bodies easier when they were pulled from the refrigeration unit. The pungent smell of chemicals greeted her, and she knew the smell would permeate her clothes in the next couple of hours. In all honesty, she wondered if she ever really got rid of the smell or if she was just so used to it she no longer noticed.
Her hand fumbled for the light switch, and then she stood blinking as the fluorescent lights came on one by one. There was nothing old or antique about this room. It was white and sterile, and the light was painfully bright. It helped when mixing the embalming chemicals and getting just the right amount of color under the skin to make the person look alive. The fluorescent light was unforgiving, so it helped when reconstructive work needed to be done—from skin problems to autopsy sutures—a lot could be done with makeup and putty.
People wanted to remember their loved ones as they were when they were living, so she worked from photographs and anything else she could find to help make it easier on the families. It was easy enough to add the dye to the embalming solution so the skin took on a lifelike glow instead of the gray pallor of death.
The room was a large rectangle. The wall closest to the door on the right had cabinets and a granite countertop with a large farmhouse sink in the center. The wall directly across from the door was floor-to-ceiling sturdy metal shelves that held every piece of equipment imaginable. Sometimes mortuary work required being creative, depending on how a person had died.
The far wall was where the walk-in refrigeration unit was. The industrial door was large and stainless steel, and it locked from the outside with a lever. It could hold several bodies comfortably, though she’d never had occasion to use it that way. The wall to her left had more shelves and hanging racks, for the deceased’s personal belongings. But it was the center of the room that held her attention.
There were moments in time when what the eye saw didn’t necessarily compute with the brain. She’d taken three steps into the room before she really grasped what the body on the embalming table meant. Especially since it wasn’t Delores Schriever, who was supposed to be the only body in the room.
It looked like she’d solved the mystery of why they’d taken her transport van.
But who was the man laying on her table?
CHAPTER THREE
Tess had worked with the dead for a lot of years, so nothing much surprised her. She’d once had a man’s hand jerk up and hit her in the side of the face just as she was about to embalm him. It had certainly gotten her blood pumping a little faster, but dead bodies did weird things sometimes.
What they didn’t do was appear out of nowhere and end up on her embalming table.
“Think this through, Tess,” she said out loud, creeping closer to the body.
Her grandmother had always told her she needed to be more Russian. Logic always trumped emotion.
“Obviously they took the van to make a pickup. The question is, why didn’t they tell me? And where did the body come from?”
There was no paperwork that she could see. And paperwork was absolutely a necessity. There had been more than one occasion when the hospital had tried to give her the wrong body. And without paperwork, she couldn’t legally take the body into possession.
“Idiots,” she muttered.
There was still no sign of anyone else—at least anyone living—in the house. Maybe they’d just crossed paths while she was looking through the house. It was a big house. Maybe right at this very moment one of them was knocking on her bedroom door—preferably Deacon, because good God those shoulders—letting her know they’d picked up a dead bod
y and he had all the correctly signed paperwork right in his hand.
“Because they’re super-thoughtful like that,” she said, blowing out a breath.
And now she was thinking of Deacon’s shoulders. And the rest of him. Which was about the most horrible thing she could do because on a scale of one to ten, he was a twenty-two, and she had the feeling he had the ability to make all her Russian logic fly right out the window.
She sighed and put Deacon out of her mind, and then she peeked out the door and down the hallway again to make sure she was alone. What if they hadn’t brought the dead guy into the house at all? What if it was just a terrible coincidence and she’d been caught in the middle of some kind of horrible crime?
Her palms were damp with nerves and she again wiped them on her jeans, debating whether or not to close the door. Of course, then she wouldn’t have an escape if the body turned out to be a zombie and tried to eat her face off.
“I should probably cut back on the caffeine,” she muttered. “Though I haven’t had any coffee this morning, so maybe I need to increase the caffeine.”
She left the door open and headed back to the body, determined not to let her imagination get the best of her.
“No need to complicate matters. I’m sure I’m completely safe and that there’s a reasonable explanation for this.”
The body on the table didn’t seem to have an opinion one way or the other, but she liked to think he’d agree with her.
“This is what I do,” she explained to the corpse apologetically. “I reason things out. I’m all about the logic. Why can’t I fantasize about Deacon without wondering if he is a criminal? Why won’t my subconscious let me be wild and crazy? It’s damned irritating if you ask me. Being responsible is for the birds.”
She sighed and then pursed her lips together. “And I don’t need your silent judgment either. I know that one of the reasons Henry broke up with me is because I talk to dead people.” She bit her lip and moved closer to the table. “Of course, Henry was the type of man who made lists of my faults, so Henry can suck it. There’s nothing wrong with talking to the dead. Unless they start talking back. Don’t do that, okay?”
The silver necklace around the man’s neck immediately caught her attention. Not because the Star of David was unusual, but because the hospital always removed all personal belongings from the body and gave them to the immediate family. And if there was no immediate family to sign the paperwork for the body, they sent personal items along with the body in a labeled plastic bag.
It wasn’t just the jewelry—where the hospital normally removed the corpse’s clothing, this one was wearing what looked like a flight suit in dark gray. One of the sleeves had been rolled up and the front zipper had been pulled down to his navel, showing a patch of dark chest hair. There was a needle mark in the arm with the rolled-up sleeve.
“So weird,” she whispered.
He didn’t look like the normal bodies she worked on. This man was massive in size, but not with fat. The flight suit strained over muscular thighs and broad shoulders. He barely fit on the metal embalming table. He looked like one of . . . them. Except dead. His skin was cold to the touch, and though he looked to be Hispanic or Middle Eastern, he had the grayish hue of the recently deceased.
He had a puckered scar on his chest that was no doubt from a bullet, and she pressed her lips together tightly, thinking this was a man who’d cheated death on more than one occasion and now it had caught up with him. He was too young to be on her table. That was for damned sure. He looked to be in his mid- to late thirties, though death often made people look older than they were.
She spread the flight suit a little farther apart to get a better look at the scar on his chest, and maybe see whether cause of death was visible. The unease in the pit of her stomach had only intensified. Dead men without paperwork were nothing but trouble. She didn’t know that from experience, but common sense told her that was the case. She bent over to get a closer look, but there were no recent wounds that she could see.
Tess rose again and moved to zip the flight suit back up, but as soon as she tugged at the zipper the man on the table gave a great gasping wheeze and his hand clamped around her wrist. The force of his grip brought her to her knees, and terror clawed at her as his body went into a seizure, his legs jerking uncontrollably as his grip on her wrist grew tighter. It wouldn’t take much more to break it.
And then he did the unthinkable. Something none of her dead bodies had ever done before.
He sat up and stared at her out of eyes that were very much alive and very, very angry, his grip so strong she bit her lip to keep from crying out.
“You ever heard the saying about curiosity killing the cat?” a graveled voice asked from the doorway.
Her eyes wheeled around and she stared incredulously at Deacon from her crouched position on the floor. “Seriously? That’s what you’re going to say?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” He came toward her, and she felt the space close in with every step he took. Maybe she was the one who was dead and she’d been transported to Valhalla. It would certainly explain why she was surrounded by giant men who looked like gods.
“A good idea?” she repeated. “Maybe next time try ‘Hey, Tess, let me help you with the giant dead man trying to kill you.’ ”
“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but he’s not dead. Thank God,” Deacon said calmly. “We thought he was, which is why we put him here. And he’s not trying to kill you. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s just the body’s natural reaction.”
He’d said more to her in the last thirty seconds than he had in the last couple of years, and the closer he came the more worried she got. He didn’t look like her savior. He looked more like the Angel of Death. His dark hair was pulled back into a stubby tail at the base of his neck and his eyes were the iciest of blues. His skin was bronzed due to the fact he spent a great deal of time outdoors. He was built like a laborer instead of someone who spent all his time in a gym, though she knew he did that too. But when she looked at him, all she saw was . . . man. His jaw was angular and his lips—sweet Jesus—his lips were the kind that could tempt anyone to stray from well-laid plans.
She wasn’t sure which man she should be dodging, but it seemed like a good sign that Deacon was removing the hand from her wrist instead of trying to strangle her. She cradled her wrist as soon as it was free, and flexed her fingers. Nothing was broken, but she was going to be sore and bruised for a few days.
“Thanks,” she said and watched as Deacon pushed the man back down on the table. He took a syringe from his pocket and tossed the cap aside before sliding it beneath the man’s skin and pressing down the plunger.
“Umm . . . what the hell is going on here? Do you always carry syringes in your pocket? That seems dangerous.”
She was babbling, but that’s what she did when she was nervous. It didn’t seem to matter though, because Deacon’s full attention was on the man on her table. Almost immediately, the seizure stopped and the man’s body went slack. He no longer had the grayish hue of the dead.
Deacon put two fingers at the man’s neck and felt for a pulse. Tess was guessing he must’ve found one, because he dropped his hand and nodded with satisfaction.
“Now that you know your boy is alive, can you answer my questions?” she asked.
He looked at her, his eyes piercing, but he didn’t answer.
“Hello?” she said. “I’m talking to you, Valhalla,” she said, cradling her wrist as she rose slowly to her feet.
“You need to get some ice on that,” he said.
“No shit. A dead guy just latched onto me like I was his last meal.”
“You’re being dramatic. It’s not like he was trying to eat you. It was just an automatic reflex. It happens.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she said incredulously. “And I should know because I see some pretty strange stuff.” She took a couple of steps toward him and his eyes widened the cl
oser she got. “Do dead guys in your world normally sit up and start breathing again too?”
He shrugged and looked down at his watch, as if he’d already given her too much of his time. “It can happen.”
“No!” She seethed. “When someone dies, they usually stay dead. I’ve had it with you people. I want to know what the hell is going on around here. You guys swoop in like Satan’s army and make camp in Last Stop like it makes sense, when it doesn’t make any sense at all. A funeral home of this size doesn’t need five full-time employees. It’s ridiculous. You’d be of better use figuring out why the pipes rattle in my bathroom or whether or not the floor is rotting in front of my fireplace.” She paused to take a breath, but not for long. “I have nightmares about falling straight through to the bottom floor.”
“I can fix your floor,” he offered. “And the pipes.”
“Really?” she asked, losing her train of thought. “Because that would be great. I didn’t get upgraded like the rest of the place. I’m in steerage.”
His lips quirked and she felt a small victory. She could count the number of times she’d seen him smile on one hand.
“Anyway, thanks for the flooring offer. I’ll take you up on it. But that’s not my point. My point is random dead guys don’t just show up out of the middle of nowhere. And people don’t just bring them back to life.”
“Isn’t that what doctors do?” he asked.
She narrowed her eyes and put fists at her hips. “Don’t be deliberately obtuse. And you’re not a doctor.”
“How do you know?” he asked. “You don’t know anything about me.”
She stared at him blankly for a second and realized he was right. “Are you a doctor?”
“No, but I could be.”
She growled and he full-out grinned this time. Apparently her temper was entertaining.
