“You scared her.”
“Are you kidding? She’s scared of her own reflection. And that has nothing to do with me.”
No. But the fact that Emma’s life had been a horror movie waiting to happen these last two years had everything to do with me. I’d led a soul that hated my guts and was hell-bent on revenge right to her doorstep.
I turned my attention back to Emma. After she collected herself, she twisted her hair up into a messy ponytail and dug in her nightstand drawer for her journal.
“Dear diary…” Easton nodded at the journal. “What do you think she’s going to write?”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Not my business.”
He walked over to her bed and plopped down beside her. The mattress didn’t creak or groan under his weight. The blankets didn’t shift. He peeked over her shoulder at the book. A long tendril of honey-colored hair came loose from Emma’s ponytail and fell across her eye. She tucked it behind her ear, but Easton blew on it so that it fell right back down. She swept it out of her face, looking frustrated, and Easton chuckled.
“Will you stop?” I said, feeling uncomfortable with how close he was to her. “This is so screwed up it’s not even funny.”
He raised a dark brow. “Oh? And what you’re doing isn’t?”
We could have gone back and forth like that for hours, but the call came. It always did. It started in my bones—a cold so cutting that it sliced through me like a machete. Easton’s jaw clenched, his muscles taut and ready. He slowly closed his hand around the handle of his scythe, which burned black and softly smoked at his side. I flexed my fingers as the icy ribbons of death worked their way through each one of my limbs.
“Can you take this one for me?” I asked. “You’re already going to be there, and I just got back—”
“No,” Easton said. “Hell no. I have my own job to do. I can’t keep covering for your sorry ass.
Besides, do you have any idea how close you are to being caught? Don’t push your luck, Finn. Just keep your nose down, collect your souls, and thank the Almighty that you don’t have my job.”
“I’m taking a risk every time I leave her. You know that.”
“For the love of God. She’ll be fine, Finn. It’s just one reap.”
“How do you know she’ll be fine?”
He shrugged. “I don’t. But that’s the difference between you and me. I don’t care.”
With that, he vanished, consumed in a flash by the keening wails of the damned. The screams beckoned. Clawed at me from the inside out.
Rule One as a reaper: Death doesn’t wait for anyone.
And it sure as hell wasn’t waiting for me now.
…
By the time I seeped into form next to Easton, the pull was twining around my wrists, tugging, clouding every one of my thoughts. I shook my head and stared up at the lemon-yellow house engulfed in an angry tangle of flames that glowed in the dim predawn light. A few bikes and a shiny swing set slick with dew littered the lawn. A minivan sat devoid of life in the drive. I craned my neck to read the sticker on the bumper. My child is an honor student at Rosewood Elementary.
Seriously? Honor students and a minivan mom? I couldn’t help but wonder what tragic scenario I was going to face this time as part of Balthazar’s grand attempt to teach me a lesson.
“How many of these is he going to send me on?” I pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes and prayed for a different outcome than the one I felt hissing in my lifeless bones. “I get it, Balthazar.”
Easton grunted. “Do you really? Where’d we just come from, Finn?”
“Good morning, boys.” A voice, smooth as molasses, spoke up from behind us. We didn’t have to turn around to know it was the final part of our region’s trio. Anaya skipped over to my side.
“How many do you think are in there?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
I trailed after Anaya, Easton behind me, always the shade of gray between the dark and the light.
Anaya stepped through a curtain of flames, but I stalled in the doorway. Something in my chest tightened. My throat closed up and a memory cemented my feet to the floor.
Flames lapped at the control board. Consumed the cockpit. Licked my skin with an orange serpent tongue. Water and panic all around me, and I couldn’t drown. No. I was going to char. I was going to melt. I was going to burn.
“Let’s go.” Easton nudged me through the doorway. “I’m already getting another call, and I can’t be in two places at once.”
I forced myself to move through the house. Windows popped and shattered. The roof crackled like tinder on a campfire. Black billowing smoke consumed every inch of the 1,600-square-foot slice of soot-coated suburbia.
“Watch your step. This one’s mine.” Easton stared down at a man who had collapsed in the empty hall.
“Let me guess.” I stepped over the man in plain white boxers and looked at Easton. “He’s a liar?
Did he take something that never should have belonged to him in the first place?” I scowled at the ceiling and threw my hands up in the air. “Come on, Balthazar. Deliver your little message so I can get on with my freaking day.”
Anaya exchanged a weary glance with Easton, then stepped over the lifeless body and into a bedroom where a woman lay awaiting her reaping.
Easton knelt down and touched the man’s temple. “He had an affair.”
I stopped halfway down the hall and turned around, confused. “What?”
“He had an affair with another woman.” He stood up and looked at the ceiling, then down to the beam lying on top of the man. “He was trying to save his wife when he died. Like saving her would make up for what he did.”
Easton gave me a pointed look, and I groaned. Was this ever going to end? Was a death ever going to be just a death again? Knowing Balthazar and his obsessive need to get a damn point across, probably not.
I kept moving until a tug in my chest urged me toward a half-open bedroom door. Pink paper lanterns adorned the ceiling, waiting for the fire to consume them and turn them to ash. A little girl lay huddled under a yellow comforter waiting for me to do the same to her. A shadow lurked by her bed, waiting, hoping I’d be a no-show so the soul would go into limbo. Its smokelike fingers swirled around her tiny, trembling frame.
I glanced back at the fire creeping around the doorframe, licking at the walls, melting away the posy-pink wallpaper in an all-too-familiar dance. I couldn’t waste any more time. I slid my scythe out of its holster and speared her flesh, gifting her with the mercy of death before the flames could get to her.
I watched her twitch and jerk until her soul quietly peeled away from her skin, leaving a too-small shell behind. The shadow hissed at me and seeped between the floorboards.
“Who are you?” her shimmering soul asked. She fidgeted nervously, her huge hazel eyes confused, accusing. “Are you an angel?”
It never got easier with kids. “Sort of.”
“Where are your wings if you’re an angel?”
A paper lantern lit up just above our heads.
“I said sort of, didn’t I?” I fought past the smoke shrouding my vision to the hall where the next pull was coming from, and forced some patience into my voice. “Where’s your brother’s room?”
She trailed after me into the burning hall and I thanked the Almighty that Anaya and Easton had already finished with her parents.
“How did you know I have a brother?”
“I just know.” I pushed into a bedroom with a KEEP OUT sign tacked to the front. Flames rolled out of the doorway and the heat sealed up the words in my throat. I shoved my hand behind me.
“Stay here.”
“But—”