“I said stay here. Got it?” No way was I letting her see the charred remains of her brother. If I couldn’t give her the life she deserved, couldn’t give her Heaven, then damn it I’d at least spare her this memory.
She swallowed, not realizing the human function no longer applied to her, and nodded. When I emerged with her brother in tow, her eyes lit up. “Geez, Simon. I thought you were dead or something.”
I grabbed both of their hands. “All right, guys. Let’s go.”
The little girl pulled her hand away, folded her arms across her chest, and frowned up at me. “We’re not supposed to go with strangers.”
Ignoring the inferno around us, I crouched down and stuck my hand out, folding her tiny vapor fingers into mine. “I’m Finn. I’m eighteen”—sort of—“and I like fishing and baseball. My favorite color is blue. My mom makes, hands down, the best peach cobbler you’ve ever tasted. Oh, and I used to fly airplanes.”
She tentatively shook my hand. “What else?”
“Well…I’m afraid of spiders. Like pee-my-pants afraid of spiders. Even the little ones.”
She exchanged a look with her brother.
I groaned. “Come on, guys. Even my best friend doesn’t know some of this stuff. What else do you want here?”
“You really flew an airplane before?” the boy asked, speculative.
“Yep.”
He shrugged. “I like him.”
The little girl finally smiled. “Then I guess it’s okay.”
“Where are we going?” The little boy looked up at me with an anxious expression.
How to explain? I never knew what to say to kids to make them understand. I could have told him the truth, cold and simple like an instruction manual. They hadn’t lived long enough to become who they were meant to be. Hadn’t reached their potential. So I would take them to the Inbetween where they’d put in their time. Grow into a soul worthy of either Heaven, or a coveted second chance at life.
And if they didn’t grow into either of those…
A shadow melted out of the flames, lurking in the corner of the hall. Hungry. Desperate. I slipped my arm around both of them. They were kids. They wouldn’t become one of them. I had to believe that.
I ruffled his hair and forced a smile. “How about a different question, pal.”
“Okay. Why doesn’t the fire feel hot?”
Half an hour, two souls delivered, and a gazillion unanswerable questions later, I found myself spilling onto my hands and knees on Emma’s back lawn. The grass needles didn’t bother to bend under the weight of my palms. The sunrise, just a pale echo of summer, edged over the horizon and poured through my translucent body, refusing to acknowledge my existence with a shadow. Like I needed them to remind me that I didn’t belong here.
Easton loomed over me with something resembling sympathy in his eyes. “Nice landing.”
“Shouldn’t you be in Hell?”
“I could ask you the same.”
Pushing past him, I made my way toward Emma’s house. “Not today, Easton. Seriously, man.
Just…not today, all right?”
“How long are you going to keep this up?” he asked. “She’s not a kid anymore, you know.”
“I know she’s not.” God, did I know it. My fingers tested the wall, dissolving through the brick of the house. I could feel Emma’s nearness all the way down to my toes.
“You should let her go,” he said. “I could understand it a few years ago, but now? Now it’s past time for you to move on, and we both know it.”
His words burned a path of rage through me, leaving charred remnants of dead nerve endings and hollow veins. “I do that and she’s as good as dead. It won’t take Maeve a week of tormenting her before she gets bored and kills her.”
“I know.” Easton looked resigned, as if he could accept the kind of life—or death—Emma would have without me here to protect her.
Of course he could. Death was his life. He reeked of Hell. Gambled with imps for fun. And he didn’t love her. He didn’t burn for her. He didn’t break nearly every rule in the book and risk his soul for her on a daily basis.
I did.
“And if I’m sent to collect her again? What then?” I looked at him, needing him to understand.
“You think I could do that again? Let her die? Rip her soul from her screaming flesh?”
“Better her than you.”
“No!” I stepped into him, fuming. “Not better her than me. It’s my fault she’s in this position.
Maeve never would’ve found her if it wasn’t for me. Hell, I’m the whole reason Maeve wants to destroy her. How am I supposed to walk away and let her suffer for a mistake I made?”
“It wasn’t your fault. You thought you were helping.” He shook his head. “Hell, you were helping.
She’s alive, isn’t she? Sure, she’s got problems, but what seventeen-year-old kid doesn’t? Haven’t you ever read Judy Blume?”
I looked at Easton, his spiky sable hair blotting out the warm lavender sunrise. “You’ve read Judy Blume?”
“Screw you. You’re the one haunting a high school student.”
“I’m not haunting her. I’m protecting her.”
“Look, my point is she’s going to die someday, and there will be nothing you can do to stop it,” he said. “She’ll wrap her car around tree. She’ll get cancer. If she’s lucky, she’ll grow so old her body will forget to wake up one morning.”
“I realize that,” I gritted out. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll let Maeve make her life hell until that happens, let alone be the reason she dies.” The words held so much heat I could feel them scorching my mouth.
“This is—” Easton froze, whatever lecture he’d been prepared to deliver catching in his throat as he watched the kid from next door jog across the lawn. We watched him cast a careful look around, then tuck a leather sketchbook under his arm and shove Emma’s bedroom window open.
“Looks like you’ve got competition,” Easton said, watching him climb in. His scythe began to smoke on his hip. “I’ll bet he even has one of those fancy pulses, too.”
I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t letting him get under my skin that easily. “Cash is just her friend.
Besides, pulses are overrated.”
“Yeah. Keep telling yourself that.” He winked at me, then dove into the swirling black pit of screams that had opened beneath him. A Hell reaper’s work was never done. And having that much darkness on his hands day in and day out didn’t seem to bother him. Easton had been born for this job the same way Anaya and all her light had been born for hers. I couldn’t think of anyone more fitting.
My scythe pulsed cold against my hip. I glanced up at Emma’s window and frowned. Sometimes I wondered what job I was born for, because it sure as hell didn’t feel like I was born for this.
Chapter 2
Emma It was happening again. The dreams. The nightmares that felt more like memories than figments of my imagination. I pressed the pen to my journal and concentrated, trying to remember the fragments left behind. Flashes of a boy with soft green eyes. His lips in my hair. His hands on my waist. Panic and desire dueling in my veins like fire and ice. I’d been up for an hour already, and I could still hear his voice.
Please forgive me for this, pretty girl.
“Knock, knock.”
Cash’s voice wafted in with the breeze, stirring the sheer ivory curtains that hung over my blinds. I looked up from my journal to watch him climb through my window, his familiar sketchpad stashed under his arm. I snapped a mental picture and added it to the collage of memories that made up Cash and me.
“Please tell me your mom’s already gone,” he grumbled as he pulled a chair up next to my bed.