My worst nightmare!
“No, you’re not dead. Yet.” Those were ominous words spoken by a man with hatred oozing from him.
“If that’s supposed to scare me then try again, pal. You can’t freak out a dying girl.”
Ha ha. My entire body shook. Why the lingering animosity? Every time I saw him, there was an air of hostility that clung to him. The anger was palpable. Whatever it was, it freaked me out!
But, my fingers twitched with a desperate desire to reach out and pull his hood back.
“Then why hasn’t your heartbeat slowed down?”
I rubbed my chest and fibbed a little. “It’s not because I’m scared. I have heart problems.”
“No kidding,” he scoffed. Two bulging forearms slipped from beneath the cloak and crossed at his chest. “Every time I’m here for you, your time changes.”
Huh? “What does that mean? Explain yourself.”
Silence.
“Don’t use that tone with me.” Something was very wrong with him. His voice altered and became something less than human. It echoed, sounding like some type of otherworldly creature.
Bad vibes. He gave me bad vibes.
“What tone?” I asked carefully.
“The one where you think you can order me around.”
I jabbed my finger at him. “You’re the one saying things I don’t understand. I’m asking you to explain.”
He stiffened. “Drop the hand.” When I didn’t right away, he counted. “One. Two.”
My pulse sped up and stabbing pain shot through my chest. What would he do once he got to three? I didn’t dare find out. Lowering my arm quickly, I said, “Okay.”
He exhaled slowly before speaking. “I have anger issues, kid. That means lose the attitude now before I send everyone within a five-mile radius to their afterlife.”
“You got issues all right,” I huffed and glanced away a second to calm my nerves. Did he just threaten me with the life of others for pointing at him? And I still had the nerve to be sassy? I must have a death wish. He was clearly dangerous, and yet my lips twitched with the need to speak again. “And I’m not a…” My tongue got a little tied as he stepped forward and pulled his hood back, revealing his face. “Kid,” I croaked.
He was crazy handsome. Old-timers would have called him a tall drink of water. I didn’t think I’d seen someone as sexy as him in person, which explained why I was suddenly star-struck. He had dark tousled hair that hung over his forehead. It didn’t hide his thick lashes, those intense black eyes, or the crinkled fury of his brows. He even had a bit of scruff shadowing his chin and clenched jaw.
He had to be close to thirty. No wonder he called me a kid. Mr. Sinister had a dominating demeanor about him from his jutted chin and sneer to his puffed-out chest. He stood there staring at me like someone used to saying and doing whatever.
I couldn’t seem to remember why it was a bad thing that he had crept into my room. I sat taller and smoothed out my pajama top before tucking my black hair behind my ears. I blinked a few times as I looked up at him. Suddenly I thought of Stanley and the fact that I watched this dude walk through a door. Thankfully, some of my stupid dissipated.
“What are you doing?” he asked warily.
Stop batting your eyes at him!
What was going on with me? My body and brain didn’t know whether to be afraid or curious about him.
“I saw you walk through a door,” I whispered. “As soon as you stepped into that patient’s room, a man named Stanley died.”
“And…?” Mr. Sexy Sinister arched a dark brow.
“What do you mean ‘and’? Did you kill him?” I asked.
“What on God’s green earth are you over there yacking about?” The old woman hollered.
I slapped a hand over my mouth.
When I didn’t answer her, she said, “Do you always talk to yourself?”
Oh, my God! She didn’t hear him. That proved he wasn’t normal, and chills crept down my spine. Was I talking to a ghost?
I twisted around on the bed and leaned toward the curtain between our beds. “Um… Do you mind if I pull the curtain between us for a sec?”
“Why?” she murmured.
“Do you hear someone else in here?” I asked as I pushed the fabric back.
The woman was lying on her side, facing me. She cracked one eye open. “No, but I heard you asking yourself things… Might as well be in Hell with the food they send us,” she muttered under her breath.
“Look!” I waved my hand and pointed at him. He sighed heavily, and I caught sight of his Adam’s apple bob.
“What am I supposed to see?” She squinted her eyes in his direction. “Is there a bug on the wall? I don’t understand you young people today.” She closed her eyes, slipping a hand beneath her pillow. “Now shut the curtain and talk quieter if you plan on continuing your conversation.”
I gulped, closing the curtain with a shaky hand.
What was going on?
Suddenly, my brain couldn’t comprehend the breathtaking man beside my bed. Bile rose in my throat. I cupped my mouth, then tried drawing in air that didn’t reach my lungs. My heart thumped erratically. I removed my hand and clutched the sheets, desperate to think.
I’d reached that moment. Terror was how I’d die.
I flinched as two large hands hovered over me. Was he about to kill me? I pushed against him, not prepared for him to be so close and not ready to die. My nails scratched his face. Immediately, he froze. His skin shimmered and revealed a skeleton. I gasped, but not because I couldn’t breathe. It was his eyes! They were glowing a horrific red. He blinked, and whatever was happening stopped. One second, his skin dissolved, and he wasn’t human. In the next, he was back to his old spooky self. Did I imagine it?
My eyes widened as he shoved the nasal cannula toward me.
I quickly hooked the tubes behind my ears and studied his angry glare.
“Pretty sure you should wear those,” he said in a cold and menacing voice.
I was still too stunned to say anything more than a quick “Yeah.”
He didn’t attack or kill me. What he did was so unexpected I could only look at him anew. He was still dangerous looking, but it was like it was in his bone marrow to be terrifying. Hatred was all I could feel from him, and yet my anxiety calmed. I noticed the red mark my nails left near his lips and across his nose. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what you were doing. Your hands came out of nowhere.” And your face disappeared.
“Shh!” The old lady snarled.
“They didn’t come out of nowhere. I’m pretty fucking sure they’re attached to my limbs.” He wiggled his arm around once. His eyebrows were still furrowed in angry slants.
We were just staring at each other. Maybe I should run away? How far would I get before I croaked over? I wasn’t supposed to be doing much of anything—the reason why I was stuck in a hospital bed instead of skating.
Then again, was I really in danger from a guy that helped me hook back up to the oxygen unit?
“So…” I spoke lower even though I was sure the old woman could still hear me if she listened closely enough. “Um… Maybe you should get to the point of why you’re here.”
“I have a million other places I need to be. So many more souls to ascend and lives to save that aren’t yours, but here I am.” He groaned. “Waiting to guide you. Before you ask, I don’t know why your death date keeps changing.”
Um, what? I pinched my lips together and tapped my fingers against the covers.
His skin seemed to pulse and shimmer for a tiny second then he closed his eyes and exhaled. “Since I’m waiting on your soul, and you can see me already, I don’t see the point in not telling you. I’m a Reaper. I guide the dead to their afterlife, be it Heaven or Hell.”
It should have scared me, or at least freaked me out, but I already knew he was different. What his words implied, however, bothered me.
I rubbed my chest. “So, I’m not getting a heart i
n time, am I?”
“No.” He didn’t even hesitate. He was so…so cold.
He loomed over me suddenly, and I jerked, pressing my back against the bed. “I mean, your time is already fucking up my schedule. I won’t protest the next time I see the tubing out. Test me. I’ll enjoy plucking you up and tossing you into the passage.”
“Passage?” I squeaked.
“Scared of where you’re going?” he asked me, a malicious smile flickered over his lips. If you’d call it that. It was unnatural and twisted to match the fury in those dark brows.
Every bad thing I’d done in my life filtered through my head. All the awful foster homes I’d been in before the Pattisons found me. The time I kept hiding Joe Allen’s beer from him because he smelled like a distillery—the entire house did. Neither he nor his wife cared much for cleaning. The Allens fostered children for the monthly checks. I was so glad when social workers finally pulled me and another girl from the home. Before I left that place, I got drunk for the first time when I was twelve.
There were so many stupid things I’d done. My track record with boys wasn’t great either. I had a fatal flaw, seeking attention in all the wrong ways. Sometimes, I felt like it limited my choices because no one truly wanted me.
Helen Pattison knew every bad thing about me. I had no idea how. Even when I acted a fool, the woman knew the way my mind worked. She scared the shit out of me with how she always seemed to know what I planned to do before I did, but I appreciated her for it.
The only thing she couldn’t seem to understand was my lack of fear about dying or wanting to live my life to the fullest.
Maybe I had nothing to worry about. What was on the other side? Maybe my skates would wait for me. Maybe there’d be nothing. I had a suspicion I’d know sooner rather than later.
“Are you really not here to kill me?” I asked again.
He pulled away. “No.”
“Then could you go?” I jerked my head toward the old woman’s bed. “She already thinks I’m crazy.”
“Until you die then,” he muttered ominously, and I twisted around on my bed, not falling prey to his bait if that was meant to get a reaction from me.
Even with all the bravado in the world, it still didn’t erase the fear I had for Mr. Sinister.
Nor did it change the fact that no one else saw him.
A Reaper, supposedly.
That night, I dreamed of him.
It hadn’t been a nightmare. Instead, he whisked me away from the hospital and took me to a place with colors like I’d never seen before. Vibrant ones that didn’t belong on trees, grass, or the land. Nothing was green. I forgot that I was dying until I awakened.
Chapter 5
Barron
“You can’t do this!” a water demon communicated telepathically.
I followed the tentacle beasts through the portal into their water domain after they tried to run. They were trying to kidnap humans, but I made sure that didn’t happen.
Materializing my scythe, it cut a rippled path as I swung it. Red waves of power sparked from the blade and blasted toward them. Wrath came easy. Killing was its forte.
The frothy sea glowed red with my essence as the demons dissolved into bubbles. Wrath crawled over my skin. That was too fucking easy. The amount of chaos was nowhere near enough of what I needed. Before I faded, I sensed a demon speeding away from me. It must have dodged my blast. Since I wasn’t a water-dweller, there was no way I could catch up to him. Smirking at the way he swam away; I closed my eyes and shifted my vision to use fate’s eyes—a handy gift passed down from Mom. Maureen and I were the only two who inherited the ability to see the lifeline flowing from anyone around us. Seeing the greenish glow of his chain floating close by, I swam forward and gripped it. With both hands, I severed the chain. His body kicked once, then he humped over and floated.
There was no escaping death or fate’s eyes.
Before I could fade, I quickly opened a passage to descend the evil souls. It only took a moment, but by then, my skull was pounding. I’d been under far too long. I was immortal, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t drown temporarily. I gulped in air the second I faded out.
What a rush. My head still throbbed, and I shook it as if that would help the pain. Just then my Reaper senses tripped with a warning. Somebody either was about to die or had already done so.
And I wasn’t surprised by who it was—Gwendolyn fucking Dolson.
The girl’s date had been bugging my senses for days. Every time I received an alert, it came in as a death call—she was supposed to be dying. When I arrived, low and behold, the time would go back to the correct one. It was driving me fucking insane.
The first time it occurred, she had a heart attack. That part of my Reaper senses had been accurate, but it was never right about her passing.
What I couldn’t understand was why a human set off my senses so easily? Everyone’s demise was determined before birth. No matter how hard people tried to prolong their lives, when it was their time to go, they went. That was why Gwendolyn’s date made my damn brain rattle. Lately, all of us had experienced strange mishaps with our Reaper powers. Maybe Gwendolyn’s changing time was part of it.
But it needed to stop. I didn’t have the patience for that shit. Whether it was a fluke, I had to go to her. There was always the chance that it wasn’t, and she needed to be ascended. If a Reaper wasn’t there to guide a ghost, they wandered and grew attached to the human world.
Between the apocalypse and the festival, I had no time for Gwendolyn’s soul. She needed to hurry up and die already. Heaven was all sunshine and stuff—better than the human world and the Underworld, supposedly. Maybe if I scared her hard enough, she’d spook and keel over.
Simmer down, Wrath.
She was young and innocent. The entire reason Reapers worked so hard was because lives like hers were on the line. We were the only barrier between the end approaching and the festival.
With a sigh, I faded to the hospital. Gwendolyn was lying on her bed when I entered her room. She hadn’t seen me yet. A male nurse was entirely too close to her as he adjusted the tubes in her nose while she pulled at the apparatus. “You’ll end up with the mask if you keep it up. I don’t think you’ll like that,” he told her with a smile.
She arched her brow and tipped her lips up, her cheeks dimpling into a flirty beam. “I bet your girlfriend adores you.”
He chuckled. “I’m afraid I don’t have one.” He swiped his fingers through his hair as he watched her.
“Then you can take me out.” She fluttered her long dark eyelashes at him.
Gwendolyn was young, but I wasn’t sure about the innocent part.
“After I get a new heart, of course,” she added.
It was a date she knew she’d never get.
He nodded. “We’ll see.” My anger flared unexpectedly. I could tell he was trying to be professional, but from the way he gazed at her as he tucked in the covers it was obvious that he was smitten.
Not surprising.
I stole a glance myself. She wore red flannel pjs. Her slightly tan skin made her green eyes stand out majestically like an exotic tiger. Then again, they also reminded me of a lime-flavored hard candy I’d eaten when I was a kid. But death couldn’t steal her beauty. Her black hair was short, straight, and framed her dimpled cheeks. She was the picture of innocence down to her dainty hands and feet. She was willowy like a dancer might be.
Even dying, there was the unmistakable glint of mischief in her eyes. It made me curious. Even when she was terrified of me last night, she’d spoken bravely.
Remembering her bold attitude and witnessing her playful demeanor made the hair on my arms stand on end.
And the topping on the shit cake? She wasn’t going anywhere that day. As I figured. She still had three measly days left.
I could go before she saw me.
I should.
I knocked her dinner tray off the stand behind the nurse instead. They both ju
mped. He turned around, slipping through me as he bent down to pick it up. “I’m sorry. Not sure how I knocked that over,” he told her. “Were you finished?”
She wasn’t paying attention to him which was satisfying. Her lime-colored eyes became as large as giant hockey pucks as she gawked at me.
The nurse tried to get her attention. “Gwendolyn?”
She took a deep breath. “Sorry. What?”
“Do you want me to bring you another plate?”
She shook her head. “Oh, naw. Helen is bringing me something to eat.”
“Okay. Hit the call button if you need me.” He strode out of the room, and she burrowed beneath the covers. The only thing visible was the top of her head.
“I don’t feel like dying today,” she whispered.
Pulling the blanket down slightly, her eyes peeked out as I took a step closer. Unease shone in her gaze as she peered at me. The previous night she was okay with me taking her life if that was what I planned to do. So indecisive.
“I thought you weren’t afraid?” I stopped at the foot of her bed.
“Would you get it right?” She huffed, and my wrath flared to life. That fucking attitude. “I know my heart’s failing. I accept that, but it doesn’t mean I want to die.”
My eye twitched as my muscles tensed. I knew it was a bad idea to stay and let her see me. I was normally good at avoiding any and everyone—even my family—to keep my wrath in check, but not at that moment. And not the last time I was there either. Everything about me—my mind, my curse, even my fucking powers—were glitching when it came to that frail human.
She talked too much and was dying too slowly. I’d rather not talk at all—in fact, I didn’t much, but found myself picking on the sick girl because just like my Reaper senses, something drew me toward her. I didn’t know any other way to speak to someone like her. And there I was again being a bully to the soul that wouldn’t let me deal with bigger problems. For some reason, I couldn’t control myself around Gwendolyn. The response differed from what my sin caused but fucking annoying all the same.
Conjuring Wrath (Seven Deadly Book 3) Page 3