“I’m sorry,” he said, brows pulled together as he watched me squirm. “I just…I didn’t know I could touch you. I didn’t know you’d feel so…real.”
I smoothed my hands over my dress and dropped my gaze to my lap. “Neither did I.”
When I met his unwavering gaze, the heat there caused the invisible strings between us to pull tighter. He’d touched me. And he looked like he wanted to do it again. He shouldn’t want that, and neither should I.
A slow heat started to burn at my hip, rivaling the heat throbbing in my chest, under every inch of my skin. The way he was looking at me made me feel like I was on fire with no way to extinguish the flames. I rubbed my thumb over the pearl handle of my scythe, thankful for the interruption. Not the dead. This was Balthazar.
“I have to go, but I’ll be back.”
Cash blinked as if he were coming out of a daze. His gaze cut away from mine and he slid back across the seat, putting safe distance between us. He gripped the steering wheel and stared at his hands. After what felt like forever, he leaned over to flip on the music and cranked it up until my ears throbbed. I’m not even sure if he heard it when I said, “Stay safe.”
Chapter 7
Cash
They were out there. Shadows. I hadn’t left the porch light on, so it was too dark to see them, but they were there. I could feel them, cold and consuming, waiting for me. Knowing they couldn’t hurt me as long as I was alive should have made a difference, but it didn’t. Instead, it left me wondering—if they wanted me dead so badly, how long would it take before they took some kind of action that gave them what they wanted?
I exhaled and squeezed the steering wheel, wishing I hadn’t touched her. That was such a stupid thing to do. But it had been the first time in weeks I’d actually wanted to touch a girl, and I never went that long without touching a girl, let alone wanting to. I told myself it was just curiosity. A sick fascination. But even I knew I was lying to myself. I hadn’t been able to stop myself. Even now, I wanted to do it again. She’d felt warm and deceptively real, her skin so unbelievably right under mine compared to the cheap, empty feeling that went hand in hand with my usual hookups. I’d felt so completely connected to her. Like we’d been there before. It had been enough to put me completely off-balance.
For a moment, I’d let myself forget what she was. I couldn’t let that happen again. She wasn’t some girl who was going to end up in the back of my Bronco or my heart. She wasn’t even a girl as far as I was concerned. She was the reason I was here, living in the ninth circle of Hell on Earth. Right? I shook my head trying to sort out the emotions running through me. Shadows dripped down the windshield, changing shape as they pooled along the wiper blades. A reaper would have come in handy right about now.
Screw it. I had to get in this house. I couldn’t sleep in my truck all night. I flipped on the headlights just to make sure my path from the driveway to the front door was clear, and stopped cold. Two beams of light spilled across the concrete drive and landed on…a guy. He stood, arms folded across his chest, caught between the two beams of light. He wore a gray wool coat with the collar turned up and had ash-blond hair that brushed the space just below his eyebrows. His eyes were gray, a shade lighter than his coat, and what looked like a spiderweb of black tattooed lines crept up his neck. Shadows curled around his ankles, giving him the illusion of floating on smoke.
It was him. The guy from school and the library. I pushed open the door to my Bronco and hopped out onto the driveway, heart racing.
His gaze shifted from me to a car rolling past the driveway, the neighbors’ noses all but pressed up against the glass. He frowned, watching them until they were over the hill, and muttered, “God, I hate small towns.”
“You,” I said, approaching him cautiously. “I saw you at the school.”
The guy looked me up and down with cold, calculating eyes and nodded. “I’m Noah.”
Thrown by his introduction, I tried to get my bearings. I don’t know what I expected from him, but it sure as hell wasn’t his name. “And I’m Cash, but something tells me you knew that.”
Noah chuckled and flicked his fingers, shooing the shadows away. To my amazement, they obeyed, scattering to the edges of the driveway, creating a tight circle of darkness around us. “Well, now that the introductions are out of the way, I believe you wanted to talk.”
“Are you a reaper, too?”
“No.” A grin curled Noah’s lips. “I’m better. They get an afterlife of slavery with no reward. Do you want to know what I get, Cash?”
I took a step closer, knowing I shouldn’t, watching Noah pull an apple out of his pocket. He took a bite and tossed it into the yard as he swallowed. He swiped the back of his wrist across his mouth and smiled. “I get to live.”
“Slavery?” I asked. “Who are they slaves to? Balthazar?”
Noah sneered the second the name passed through my lips. “Yeah. That’s him. He’s got them all on strings. Like freaking puppets.”
“And what about you?” I shoved my hands in my pockets, trying to snuff out the sparks going off beneath my skin, setting my veins on fire. “What are you?”
Noah walked a slow circle around me and the shadows mimicked his movement, creating what looked like a cyclone of black oil around us. They slipped through and over each other so quickly, they started to look like a single slithering entity instead of a horde.
“I’m like you,” he said, effectively stopping my train of thought. “We’re two of a kind, Cash. And believe me when I say we’re a rare kind. You, my friend, are in high demand.”
I swallowed, watching a shadow slip away from the circling mass and mold itself around one of my boots. Noah’s eyes narrowed into slits and he knelt down in front of me, eyeing the demon. He wrapped his fingers around the shadow’s neck, watching it writhe and hiss under his grip, then tossed it back into the group, where it faded into blackness.
My breathing calmed as I counted backward from ten under my breath. Anaya said to keep my emotions under control, but that was easier said than done. Noah stood up and looked me over.
“How…how did you do that?” I asked, feeling something like adrenaline surge through my insides.
I flexed my fingers, the skin around them feeling tight and electric. “Why do they listen to you?”
“You feel it, don’t you?” Excitement lit up his dim features. The black lines stretching up his neck like burned branches pulsed with something dark. “The power. It’s dying to get free from that shell you keep it in.”
I went stone-still as Noah approached me and turned my hand over. We both stared down at my wrist where the veins had darkened to a deep purple, throbbing as if the liquid inside wanted to burst through the skin. The shadows around us went into a frenzy, hissing, closing the space between us an inch at a time.
“You’re closer than I thought,” he said. “I would have come sooner, but your reaper girlfriend is always around.”
I would have corrected him about her being my girlfriend, but it felt ridiculous to clarify it. She was dead, for Christ’s sake. Which left me wondering…
“You said you’re like me.” I crossed my arms over my chest and Noah’s gaze flicked down to the paint splattered across my arms. “What did you mean by that? Are you dead?”
Noah groaned and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Labels are only going to confuse you right now.
Dead. Alive. None of it applies to you and me. What I can tell you is, there is no one out there that’s going to understand what you’re going through like I do.”