Charmed (Death Escorts)

by Cambria Hebert

  I tried to rush him again. This time I flew backward, hitting the wall with a poof.

  He laughed and shut the door.

  I didn’t think it was funny.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “Doorbell - a bell, chime, or buzzer outside a door that is rung to announce the presence of a visitor or caller.”

  Frankie

  What does one do when they find a body hanging in their closet? Scream? Run? Try it on?

  I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I walked out of the bedroom and directly into the living room where I grabbed a Cherry Coke, popped the top, and took a huge drink. Piper watched me with an amused expression on her face.

  Finally, I pulled the can away from my lips. “There’s a body hanging in my closet.”

  Her mouth opened and closed. I walked back into my room and she followed and we both stood there just staring at it. It was on a hanger, like a dress or a nice shirt. It was a guy who had shaggy blond hair that fell well over his forehead. He was dressed in a pair khakis, a white button-down shirt, and an ass-ugly sweater vest. His chin lay against his chest and his eyes were closed. The body itself was flat and lifeless.

  It didn’t move.

  It didn’t jump out and yell, “Boo!”

  It might have been less creepy if it had.

  “Where did it come from?” Piper asked.

  “Is there a body store in Alaska I didn’t know about?” I quipped.

  She took the can out of my hand and gulped a long drink. “It isn’t a coincidence that your boyfriend works for the Grim Reaper and now you have a body in your closet.”

  “Charming isn’t my boyfriend,” I argued. Though she was right about one thing. This was not a coincidence. But after what happened, I couldn’t exactly call him up and say, “Did you happen to leave something at my house?” Charming slept with me and then disappeared. He left me. I wasn’t going to call him for help the first minute a body turned up.

  “Why is it here?” Piper asked.

  I shrugged. Then I leaned forward and poked it. The hanger swung back and forth on the rod. Piper smacked me in the arm. “Don’t poke it!”

  I couldn’t stop staring at it. But not because it was morbid. Because there was something familiar about it. I’d never seen this person (or whatever you wanted to call it), but there was still something about it that felt recognizable. “He’s actually not bad looking.”

  Piper gasped. “First you poke it and now you’re hitting on it!”

  “I am not hitting on it,” I grumbled. “Give me my soda.” I snatched the can back and drained it. “It seems to me that we should be much more traumatized about finding a body in my closet.”

  “Well, we already decided we needed therapy.”

  “What should we do with it?”

  “Guess we can’t call the cops.”

  “Not without looking like we put it there.”

  “You could call—”

  “No.” I interjected. “I am not calling him. He made his choice.”

  “So it’s over between you two?” She seemed a little sad at the thought.

  The pain that sliced through me was swift and strong. But I didn’t flinch; I might as well get used to it. “Yeah, it’s over.”

  And then the doorbell rang.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Message - a usually short communication transmitted by words, signals, or other means from one person, station, or group to another.”

  Charming

  I wished the Reaper’s last words didn’t bother me. But they did.

  I wasn’t used to worrying about someone. I wasn’t used to caring. But I did.

  All I could think about was Frankie. What if he wasn’t just making idle threats? What if he really did go after her? What if he touched her? My God, would she feel the pain that I felt when my body was killed while I was in it? Would that searing pain seize her veins and bloom outward until it stopped the beating of her heart?

  The questions were relentless. The worry was indescribable. And what made it worse was that I had no body to expel the extra energy. I couldn’t do pushups or punch a wall; I literally just had to hang there and do nothing but hope she was safe.

  I wasn’t good at doing nothing. I needed a plan, a way out of here. If I had to kill that Target without a body, then I was going to figure out a way to do it.

  I hadn’t lost yet. I was still in the game.

  A game that now involved Frankie.

  I wanted her safe more than I wanted anything, including not being Recalled. A memory flashed over me from the day Dex lost it in G.R.’s office and threw a couple well-placed punches to my face. I’d taunted him about Piper, about trying to save her, about being weak and caring about someone else over himself.

  Is this how he felt that day? Desperate and willing to do anything to save the woman he loved? I couldn’t understand it then, but now… now I understood all too well. I was wrong to think of him as weak because it seemed to me that putting someone else above myself was the strongest thing I could do.

  Well played, Dex. Well played.

  “Dude, I saw your body. Did that hurt?” said a voice from behind me.

  I turned, red scattering everywhere, and faced at a cloud that looked just like me, only this one was black. “Storm! How the hell did you get in here?”

  “Dude, you don’t have a body. You can go right through the wall. You’ve seen me do it more than once. Why are you still here?”

  “Are you serious?” Sure, I’d seen Storm go through walls and borrow bodies, but I thought those were abilities unique to him. It never occurred to me that I might be able to do those things too.

  He snickered low and I watched as he pushed half his form through the wall and then pulled it back in.

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” I muttered, feeling like a complete idiot for the little bit of panic I felt when he locked me in here and threw away the key.

  “Because up until now you’ve spent maybe an hour out of your body in your entire life,” Storm suggested. “And because G.R. doesn’t want you to know that stuff. He wants you to think you’re stuck here.”

  But Storm spent most of his life as a ghost and unbeknownst to G.R., he used a lot of that time to learn to do things he wasn’t supposed to be able to do.

  “So I can just walk, or whatever it is souls do, right out of here?” Excited, I looked at the wall and moved toward it, thinking I would go right through like the ghosts I’d seen on TV.

  I went sideways instead of forward, but I was heading toward a wall so I went with it. Only I didn’t go through. Once my form touched the wall, it puffed out like I was a chalkboard eraser being banged against the side of a building. “Uh, I’m thinking not all souls can go through walls.”

  “Operating as a ghost isn’t as easy as I make it look,” Storm replied smugly.

  “What?”

  “You’re going to have some control issues. Operating a soul isn’t like operating a body. Your body has weight. It obeys the laws of gravity. A soul doesn’t.”

  “Shit,” I muttered. Then I thought of something. “How is it you aren’t completely ghost anymore, yet you’re still able to get through a wall?”

  “It ain’t easy. Sometimes I get stuck. That’s a real pain. Half in and half out of a wall? I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Then why do you keep doing it?”

  “Because it’s convenient. Because if I didn’t, you would still think you were trapped here. And because it’s cool.”

  Yeah, okay. It was cool.

  “C’mon, I’ll show you what to do,” Storm said.

  “How long is that going to take?”

  “Don’t know. Depends on you I guess.”

  Judging from the way I’d been moving around so far, it wasn’t going to be something I got the hang of in five minutes.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Not quite a full day, but a while. I waited until G.R. left to come in.” />
  That long? Why is it time always passed so quickly whenever you really wanted it to slow down, yet when you wanted something over and done with, it seemed to take forever?

  “Do you know where Frankie is?”

  “She’s here, at her apartment.”

  “Did you see her? How did she look?”

  “I didn’t really notice. I was just there to, uh… make sure her and her apartment was secure.”

  That was kind of an odd response for someone whose life was spent observing the details about other people. But I didn’t have time to ask him about his weirdness. I had enough to worry about.

  “G.R. is on the hunt for the bodies. You need to move the two you hid. Put them in separate places. Make sure they’re where no one would think to look,” I stressed. I left the female body in L.A. and hid the soul in Scotland. I was hoping the fact they weren’t here in Alaska would buy me a little bit of time to get there and move them before they realized the bodies might not be here.

  “Well, let’s get you out of here so I can do that.”

  “No. There isn’t enough time,” I said. “Go move the bodies first. And check on Frankie. Make sure she’s safe. Tell her…” My voice trailed away. There was so much I wanted to say to her. So many things I wanted to apologize for. But those were all things I needed to tell her myself.

  “What about you?” Storm asked.

  “After you move the bodies and check on Frankie come back, that should buy us some time for you to show me how to get out of here.” I thought about telling him to warn Frankie about the Reaper and possibly tell her to get out of town. But I didn’t want to scare her. And I really didn’t think her leaving town would protect her. The Reaper would find her. Besides, I was hoping G.R. would be too busy searching to bother with her. The safest place for her was with me; I would keep her safe. “I need to get out of here,” I whispered to myself.

  “I’ll hurry,” Storm promised as he moved toward a wall. I was envious at how easy he made it look. So envious that I tried to follow him, trying again to have some control. I ended up floating upward and getting stuck against the ceiling. I felt like a stupid balloon.

  “Keep practicing,” Storm said, watching me. “Concentrate on giving yourself the feeling of weight.”

  “Give Frankie a message for me,” I called as he slid halfway through the wall. The words rushed out of me quickly and then he was completely gone. I didn’t know if he heard what I said, but I hoped he did and I hoped she understood the message when she heard it.

  Don’t give up on me yet, I thought.

  Then I started concentrating.

  Chapter Forty

  “Borrow - to adopt or use as one's own.”

  Frankie

  I almost expected it to be the cops. That they somehow figured out I was harboring a body in my house and they had come to drag Piper and me off to jail.

  I stood behind the door, wishing I had a peephole so I could at least prepare myself for whatever I was about to be accused of. I cast a glance at Piper who was standing behind me, a worried look on her face.

  The person banged on the door again and I jumped. “I know you’re in there, Frankie. Open the door!”

  I frowned at the unfamiliar voice calling my name.

  That settled it. The only strangers that could know my name were cops. “Go hide,” I whispered to Piper.

  “Yeah, ‘cause that’s not suspicious,” she retorted.

  This time when he banged on the door, he didn’t stop, just kept on hammering.

  I took a breath and yanked it open, trying to look surprised as to why a group of cops would be on my doorstep.

  There was no group. There were no cops. Just a man, a lone man standing there with a look of impatience (and constipation?) on his face.

  “Can I help you?” I asked tentatively.

  “Me?” he said. “No. But I’ve come with a message from Charming. And to collect… what I left here.”

  It wasn’t often someone rendered me speechless. I don’t think a complete stranger ever managed it, until now. I stood there staring at him, trying to decide the best way to answer him. He let out a sigh and walked in the apartment, his gaze going directly to Piper and holding for long moments.

  “Excuse me?” I managed, drawing his attention away from her.

  “You might want to shut the door,” he said, glancing at me.

  I did and walked farther into the room, not once taking my eyes off of him. I searched my mind for any kind of recollection, some kind of memory of meeting him or seeing him somewhere.

  He was tall, well over six feet. He was lanky, not at all that muscular, and was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. He had sneakers on his feet and sandy-colored hair. There wasn’t anything remarkable about his appearance, but the words that came out of his mouth were.

  “My name is Storm. I work with Charming.”

  “You’re a Death Escort?” I asked, taking in the look of pain on his face. He didn’t look like a killer. He looked like he needed to sit down.

  “Sort of,” he said. “Listen, do you mind if I drop the body?”

  I glanced at Piper who shrugged and then I looked back at him. “Ummm, sure?”

  He let out a great sigh and then dropped his head onto his chest and closed his eyes. I was about to tell him this wasn’t the best time for yoga or meditation, but then something weird happened.

  Black smoke started leaking from his ears. It puffed out, curling up around his head where it formed a dark cloud. Then it began curling out his nose, in great long tendrils that rose up to join the growing mass of black.

  “What the hell?” I said, reaching for Piper and pulling her over toward me and the door. We weren’t going to be like those idiot virgins who ran farther into their house when a killer was after them. We’d be going out the door.

  The black cloud kept growing, until it pretty much surrounded the body, swirling around like smoke. And then the man dropped to the floor. He fell in a heap, landing in a tangle of limbs, right there beside my couch.

  Now not only was there a body in my closet, but one in my living room, right next to a black cloud thingy.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I whispered to Piper and yanked her to the door. As my hand closed around the handle, the man/cloud thingy spoke.

  “Whew, thanks. That guy did not like to share.”

  I glanced down at the body and then back up. “You have exactly two seconds to explain before I start screaming my head off.”

  “If you were gonna scream, you would already be doing it.”

  “You said you work with Charming?” I asked, not acknowledging he was right. “And how is it you can talk?”

  “I’m a Ghost Escort. An Escort who doesn’t have a body. I don’t kill people. I just watch them for the Reaper. And I have no idea how my voice works. It just does.”

  “You watch people,” I repeated.

  “Yes. Not having a body and being black makes it easy to stick to the shadows and remain unseen.”

  “But we can see you,” I pointed out.

  “That’s because I’m letting you.”

  “What about him?” I said, gesturing to the body. “Is he dead?”

  “Nah, just out of it. We should probably put him outside. He’s probably going to wake up soon.”

  “We?” I said.

  “Well, I don’t exactly have arms to move him.”

  “Right.” I went over and grabbed the man by his arms and dragged his body toward the front door. Piper was there to open it and then took one of his arms and helped me pull him the rest of the way out into the hall, where we left him, and went back into my apartment and closed the door.

  “You’re sure he isn’t dead?” I asked again, picturing one of my neighbors coming home and screaming at his body lying there.

  “Positive. Borrowing doesn’t kill people. It just makes them tired and disoriented.”

  “Borrowing?” Piper asked. It was the first time she’d s
poken since he walked into my place, and although I couldn’t exactly see him staring at her, I did see his cloudlike form turn toward her.