by Tara Fuller
“What…what are you?” I stopped and inhaled as big a breath as my lungs could hold. They ached and protested before forcing me to cough it all back up.
She cocked her head to the side, studying me, as if she were trying to decide what to say. “I’m a reaper,” she finally admitted. “You should be familiar with that term by now.”
I swallowed, pressing back until the shelf dug into my back. “Like Finn.”
She simply nodded, so eerily calm, it made my skin crawl. How could she be so calm? I felt like my brain was about to explode, questions filling up my head so fast they pressed against my skull. “Are you here to take me?”
Anaya stood up, but she wouldn’t look at me. Instead she focused those amazing starlit eyes on the floor. “No. Not yet.”
“Yet? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She said it like there would be a later.
“I’m here to watch over you, Cash,” she said, exasperated. “No need to look at me like I’m some kind of villain. I think we both know there are things much worse than me out there to fear.”
“You mean them.” I pushed myself up to stand, nodding to the book. “The shadow demons?”
Anaya raised a brow and walked a circle around the books I’d discarded on the floor. “Maybe those books had some answers after all.”
“I had to look somewhere. It’s not like anybody else will give me answers.” I tried to concentrate on breathing. It was hard not to feel dizzy in the presence of her warmth. It made part of me long for her to come closer. The other, more sane, part of me screamed for her to stay the hell away. “Why are these things following me? What do they want?”
“I’m not exactly sure, but I imagine it has something to do with the fact that you’re in an expired body,” she said.
“Expired?”
“You’re not dead, but you’re not exactly alive right now, either. You’re balancing on this tightrope between life and death, a side effect of putting you back in your body at the fire. These shadows are attracted to the scent of death and the emotions that accompany it. The closer you get to death, the more appealing you seem. It’s the only reason I can come up with. I’ve never seen them go after one of the living this way.”
Thoughts spun around in my head fast enough to make me dizzy, or maybe that was just the fact that
I was breathing too fast. I grabbed the shelf beside me for support and felt my brows pull together.
“Wait a second…what do you mean the closer I get to death?”
At that moment the pain in my chest spread and burned through me. I pushed against the spot with my fingers. No. That was from the fire. Right? I just needed my inhaler.
A sad look passed over Anaya’s face as she watched me collapse on the inside. “You’re dying, Cash.
Can’t you feel it?”
My fingers hovered over my heart, feeling it pound against my ribs with fear. She was lying. She had to be. I mean, yeah, I knew I was fucked up, but dying? I wasn’t even eighteen yet. I hadn’t even graduated. I couldn’t be dying. I retreated until my back slammed into the stacks, knocking a few books onto the floor.
“You’re lying,” I whispered, wishing it were true.
“I’m not.” She took a step closer. “I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”
I forced my gaze to meet hers and swallowed. God, she was pretty. I should have realized that somebody that pretty was dangerous. She was like a freaking walking Venus flytrap. “Why? Why am I dying now? They released me from the hospital. I could go back—”
“It won’t matter.” She cut me off. “You were meant to die in that fire,” she admitted. “You were on my list. I was supposed to take you and I didn’t. I let you stay.”
“What do you mean you let me stay?” I asked. “Like you saved me?”
Anaya laughed, bitterly, and pushed herself away from the book stack. “Saving you would have been taking you to Heaven where you belonged. No, Cash. I didn’t save you. I think we both know that.”
I barked out a laugh. “Heaven? Me? Now I know you’re full of shit.”
Anaya tossed a tired expression my way and stepped into a dusty stripe of sunlight. If it was possible, she looked even more beautiful. Wait…beautiful? I shook my head, hoping the thought would bounce right out of my ears. She was Death. A walking nightmare. No way did that word belong anywhere near this girl.
“The second I pushed you back into that body, it began to expire,” she said. “It won’t last. It will deteriorate. This is just a waiting game now.”
Deteriorating? As much as I wanted to deny it, I knew it was true, because it’s exactly how I felt inside. I was dying. Fuck. I didn’t want to die. Not yet. I wanted to go to art school. I wanted to get away from my dad and prove him wrong. And Em… Damn it, I couldn’t leave Em.
Her molten eyes slipped over me, filled with something dark. Guilt, maybe? Pity? Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. She finally straightened her back and looked away. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” I balked. “You tell me I’m dying and that’s all you can say?”
“Look, I know this isn’t fair to you,” she said. “And I’m not cruel. I’m just doing my job, following orders. If I’d had any idea that this would happen…” She shut her eyes and shook her head, causing a few silky braids to tumble over her shoulder. “I’m going to try to make this whole thing as easy as possible on you. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. You deserve that much.”
At a loss, I just stared at her. Words. I still knew how to form words, right? It was like this chick sucked every ounce of sense right out of my brain.
“Why didn’t you just take me at the fire?” I whispered, knowing that if I could have this one question answered, maybe I could deal with the rest. But the not knowing was killing me. “Why put me through this?”
Anaya’s light dimmed and she frowned. “It wasn’t my choice.”
“Then whose choice was it?”
“Someone much more powerful than you and I combined.”
“Stop being so fucking vague, Anaya,” I growled. “Who? Your boss? God?”
She flinched at my tone, but I didn’t care. I was so sick and tired of all of this.
“Not God, but yes. I work for him,” she admitted.
“And why the hell would he want me to stay like this?”
“I don’t know. I’d tell you if I did. All I know is there must be something terribly special about your soul for you to attract his attention.”
She didn’t know? How the hell could she not know? If she didn’t, did anybody? Was I going to live the rest of my short life like this? Stalked. Terrified. Never knowing why. Or was the rug about to ripped out from under me? From now on, I’d wonder every second if the breath passing through my lips would be my last. My fingers started to shake along with the rest of me and I curled them into fists that I ground into the floor. My throat was closing up. I couldn’t seem to remember how to breathe.
“You need to calm down,” Anaya whispered, her warmth suddenly right there, forcing my throat open to let the air pass through. The prickling pain had flared back to life, but Anaya’s warmth seemed to keep it tolerable. She didn’t touch me, though she was close enough that her words cascaded like honey over my skin. “These shadows are drawn in by emotions that accompany death. Fear, anxiety, even anger. You need to learn some control. I can’t be here all the time to ward them off. Breathe, Cash. Just breathe.”
I took a couple of deep, calming breaths, and Anaya looked down at my trembling hands.
She gave me a sad smile and her fingers brushed my arm. “Much better.”
I shook off the overwhelming urge to touch her back. To close the space between us. No way should
I want that. What the hell was wrong with me? I glanced over her shoulder at a lone shadow demon weaving its way in and out of the books, its cold battling with her warmth. “You said the closer I get the more appealing I seem,” I said, brokenly. “Why? What do they want?”
She ran a fingertip along one of the books and left a trail of gold sparks in its wake. “They feed off of souls. Usually ones fresh from the body. If they think you’re close…”
I stared at her incredulously, tying to comprehend what she was telling me. They wanted to eat my soul? This wasn’t as bad as I thought. This was worse. Much, much worse. It was like someone had suddenly turned over an hourglass of invisible sand to count down to my inevitable death. And those things were waiting for the last bit of sand to run out. “So they’re hanging around, waiting on my ass to die so they can have a freaking dinner party. Please tell me you’re joking.”
“You’re not going to go through this alone,” she whispered. “I won’t let anything like that happen to you.”
I grabbed my bag off the floor and slung it across my shoulder. “No. You’re just going to wait for me to die.”
She pressed her soft pink lips together and the light in her eyes dimmed. We stared at each other, my lungs eating up the air between us.
“You know what?” I pointed a shaky finger at the girl, all five foot four of otherworldly perfection, standing in front of me. “Stay the hell away from me.”
The way she made me feel was too confusing. No good could come from wanting to have my hands on a chick who wasn’t even alive. I took off down the aisle but I could still hear her voice as I walked away.
“That’s not an option, Cash,” she shouted. “I’m sorry.”
What wasn’t an option? Her staying away, or me not dying? As I pushed out of the glass doors and stepped into the sun, I couldn’t help but think she meant both.
Chapter 6
Anaya
Cash gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles looked as white as paper. His jaw was clenched, anger radiating from him like steam. I sat in the passenger seat of his Bronco and stared at the road stretching between the towering mountains as daylight turned to dusk. When I let myself look at him, my eyes insisted on focusing on ridiculous things. Like the way his paint-splattered red T-shirt clung to his biceps. Or the flicker of silver that appeared on his tongue every time he licked his lips.
Yes. The road was definitely a safer view. Cash slammed his fist into the radio to shut it off and I flinched.
“You realize this is seriously creepy,” he finally said. “Stalking me like this.”
I shut my eyes, letting gravity take hold of me. When I opened them again, Cash was staring at me.
“You should watch the road.” I pointed to the windshield, anything to keep his eyes off of me. I had completely underestimated this boy. Even in a fit of rage, the way he looked at me made me feel stripped down to my insides. No one looked at me like that anymore.
Cash shook his head and returned his attention to the highway.
“Death is giving me safe driving tips,” he muttered. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“How do you do that?”
“What?”
“How do you know when I’m here? You shouldn’t be able to do that.”
Cash shrugged and kept his intense gaze focused on the road. “I don’t know. I…feel you, I guess.
Everything gets warm and smells like it does right after a thunderstorm,” he said. “You’ve never met anyone else who can do that? Sense you?”
I crossed my arms over my chest watching him. “Not in a thousand years.” Unless you counted
Finn, but Finn wasn’t exactly normal.
“Guess I’m just special then.”
I’d never seen Balthazar care about the fate of a human. Especially one like Cash. Yes, he was definitely special. I just didn’t know why yet.
“Where are you going?” I asked, watching all signs of civilization zip past us, only to be replaced by open highway and hills. Most humans were predictable, but I still couldn’t figure this one out.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Anywhere away from you would have been good. But I can see that’s not going to happen.”
“You don’t have to be so rude,” I said. “I’m just doing my job.”
“Bullshit.” Cash flipped on his headlights and passed a sign that said he was leaving Lone Pine city limits. “Your job is taking souls and I’m still here.”
“Are you forgetting you asked me for this?” I reined in the anger that simmered beneath my voice.
“How many times did you beg me to show myself? And now I’m here with answers, and all you can do is yell at me.”
Cash glanced at me from the corner of his eye and made a huffing sound.
“Don’t you have questions?”
He tapped on the steering wheel with his thumb as an oncoming car’s headlights splashed light over his features. “Can they hurt me? The shadows?”
“No.” Some of the tension melted away from his frame and the needle on the speedometer dropped a few numbers. I bit my lip to keep the guilt inside where it belonged. The truth was, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what Cash was and that meant I didn’t know what dangers our world held for him. I had never in a thousand years seen these shadows go after someone so aggressively, but he didn’t need to know that. “They feed off of souls. You’re still alive, so for the time being they should be nothing more than an annoyance. It’s when you die that you have to worry about them.”
“When you said if you had taken me I’d have gone to Heaven…” His gazed darted to me and back to the road. “Is that the only place you take souls?”
I touched my blade and thought of how many souls it had brought peace to over the years. Too many to count. I wished I could tell him yes, but it wouldn’t have been true. There was far more bad than good out there. It’s one of the reasons Easton stayed so busy.
“No,” I finally said. “There are other places. Each reaper has a territory. I am assigned to the
Heaven-bound.”
Cash smirked. “Let me guess. Finn was assigned to Hell. He had to be.”
The venom in his voice took me by surprise. I couldn’t understand where it was coming from. Finn may have made a lot of mistakes in his afterlife, but to his core he was good. “No, actually he collected for the Inbetween.” When he raised a brow I went on. “You might think of it as a sort of purgatory. A type of limbo for souls who don’t quite belong in Heaven or Hell yet.”
Headlights passed us, splashing light over Cash’s confused expression. “How did he get to be alive again? Did he just quit? Cash in his human card?”
I pulled my bottom lip between my teeth and stared out the windshield. “It’s not that easy. What happened with Finn…it’s unheard of. He had to have struck quite a bargain with Balthazar to get this.”
I was afraid to find out what he’d sacrificed. Knowing Finn, he would have given anything to be with Emma.
“Balthazar?” Cash said. “Is that your boss? Is he the one stringing me along?”
“Yes.”
Cash nodded and pulled off the road onto a scenic overlook. Outside the windshield, daylight was dying. The sun dipped low in the sky, setting the mountains on fire with color. The valley below was a sea of black, seemingly bottomless in the night. Cash leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “This is so screwed up.”
I focused on his chest. The rise and fall of his lungs, something so foreign to me it was almost too painful to watch. “I know it is.”
“Do you really?” His head rolled to the side and his eyes looked like caves staring back at me in the dim cab of the Bronco. “This is the kind of shit you deal with every day. It must be normal for you.”
I thought of the eyes of the souls I carried over every day. Full of wonder and light and hope. Even the memory of them dimmed in the darkness that surrounded Cash and his uncertain future. And I thought about the warm, unsteady feeling Cash left blooming in my chest every time I looked at him.
The way, even now, my fingers ached to close the small space between our hands.
“No,” I said. “This isn’t normal for me.”
We st
ared at each other for an immeasurable moment. It felt like we’d been here before. Looking at each other from inches away. The phone in the cup holder between us vibrated and Cash broke eye contact to grab it. He looked at the message on the display and tossed it back without answering it.
“Emma?”
He stared at the phone in the cup holder. “Yeah.”
“Why are you blaming her for this?”
Cash opened his mouth, and then closed it again. He finally shook his head, staring at the steering wheel. “Because I don’t know what else to do.”
I pulled my legs up underneath me and the golden light from my eyes spilled across the vinyl seat between us. “You know this isn’t her fault. Even if you hadn’t decided to go into that fire, fate would have found another way. I still would have been sent to stop it.”
When he didn’t say anything, I went on. “She would have chosen to burn in that house rather than get you involved if she’d been given the choice. You know that, right?”
Cash looked out his window and drew lazy circles on the glass with his fingertip. “I know that.”
I watched him carve shapes in the foggy window until he rested his forehead against the glass and exhaled.
“You love her.” It wasn’t a question. It was clear. And for reasons I couldn’t place, my chest twisted in discomfort as I admitted it out loud for both of us.
“Of course I love her. But…” He paused and sat back in his seat. “She’s my best friend.”
“It’s more than that.”
He sighed and ran his palms in circles over the steering wheel. “You don’t get it. Nobody does.”
“Then help me understand.”
“She saves me,” he said, quietly.
I cocked my head to the side, trying to figure out what the look on his face meant. “From what?”
He laughed, bitterly. “Myself. Half the time, I feel like I’m drowning. Even before this. Like I’m in a room full of people screaming my lungs out and none of them can hear me. But Emma…she always hears me. She never lets me sink. She never lets me go, even when I know damn good and well it would be easier for her if she did.” His hands dropped into his lap and he finally gave in and met my gaze again. “But she can’t save me from this.”