Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2)

by Kory M. Shrum

  “What about them?” she asks. So I tell her what my search turned up and that Caldwell isn’t taking people with NRD, but their replacements.

  “I’ll tell him,” she says. “Get in the car and I’ll be right back.”

  “He’s going to kill her,” I whisper, thinking of his captive.

  “He’s a hot-head but he’ll get it under control.”

  “What do I do?” I ask.

  You can’t be half in. Do my attempts to protect Jesse make me “half-in”? If I really want to keep her safe do I—but how do I do that and keep her out of the way?

  Nikki thinks I’m still talking about Jeremiah and the bodies. “You had nothing to do with that.”

  No, I didn’t pull the trigger. But that doesn’t mean I’m guilt free. Am I so focused on protecting Jesse that I’m getting others killed?

  And if I am—am I okay with that?

  The little boy’s white face and pale lips says no. I’m not okay. But if it comes down to Jesse or a stranger—I don’t know.

  I don’t know what I’m willing to do.

  Jesse

  I don’t go see my boyfriend before we skip town because I know Lane will be so grumpy about all this. Instead I send him a text. Of course he doesn’t respond, even my cute heart and kiss-kiss emoticons do not move him.

  It only takes a few hours to get to Heath, a small town in Ohio and apparently Liza’s hangout. It seems this commercial strip is the big deal: a cluster of businesses, restaurants and stores crowding the four-lane highway.

  We find a nice hotel in the middle of this main drag and pull off. I check us in because Gloria isn’t great with people. They give us a room on the third floor, which we find after searching the wall-scuffed hallway the color of rotting fruit and slip my key card into C307.

  The room is a standard double suite. Two beds, a single bath. A big window against the far wall with the curtains open to let in light. A TV sits on an average-looking stand across from the beds and a set of drawers for clothing beneath it. On the opposite side of the TV is a desk, complete with a couple of monogrammed pins and some paper.

  Gloria puts her sketchbook on the desk, claiming it for herself. Only then does she toss her bag on the foot of the bed, closest to the door. “Home Sweet Home.”

  I crack a smile at her joke. It’s good to encourage her. Not that I value social skills highly myself. For the most part, people are just weird and exhausting. But I think things would be easier for Gloria if she, you know, knew how to talk to anyone.

  “It’s like we’re roomies,” I say. I curl into my bed careful not to touch the top cover too much. Ally has told me some horror stories about the top cover of hotel beds. Lots of bugs and body fluids.

  Gloria opens her sketchbook, pausing over the pencil sketches before settling on a particular sketch. Turning the book toward me, she looks up. “You need to be here around 1:00PM.”

  I recognize Liza Miller from the earlier sketches, but the area surrounding her is unclear. It looks like a shopping center. The squat bundle of stores is oddly disharmonious though uniform in appearance: a hair salon, a sandwich shop, a coffee shop, electronic store and crafts store. Liza is on the sidewalk, pinned between the parking lot and shadowed cars and storefronts. She looks about ready to step into one of the stores, but it’s unclear which one.

  “Why 1:00PM?” I know better than to question whether or not it is today. Gloria has been exactly right on the day, a million times. But I know hours are difficult to pinpoint.

  “The light,” she says. “It’s afternoon in these pictures.”

  “So what you’re really saying is I should be there by noon, and be prepared to be there all damn day.”

  She shrugs.

  “All right.” I open my backpack and fish out fresh clothes and a toothbrush. “What will you be doing?”

  “Drawing,” she says. “I’m working on what’s next.”

  “So what should I say?” I ask, turning my back to change my shirt. My jeans are okay. “Seen any good murders lately?”

  Gloria grimaces. “Just don’t use the zed word.”

  “Zed?”

  “Have you seen the movie Shaun of the Dead?” she asks.

  “Oh yeah,” I say and realize she’s making a joke. Two in one day! I’m so proud of her. “So nothing like ‘I’m a zombie. You’re a zombie! Zombie high five!”

  Gloria throws her coffee back like a shot of whiskey. Damn. “I don’t know what you should say. Be charming. You’re charming.”

  I laugh. “You’re the only one who thinks so.”

  “Just do your best,” she says.

  “Okay, Mom,” I say and close myself up in the bathroom.

  It doesn’t take me long to make myself presentable. I only washed my face, added deodorant and brushed my hair. Add a good tooth scrubbing and I’m a brand new girl.

  It isn’t quite noon when I slip from the room. Gloria is already at the desk sketching in her wide-eyed creepy remote viewer stare.

  It only takes me a few minutes to find the cluster of stores from Gloria’s picture. It helps that Heath is tiny and everything is centered on this one strip. I park across from the storefront and look up at the trio: coffee shop, sandwich shop and hair salon. The crafts store and electronics store are a little farther back. I seriously doubt Liza wants to knit herself a scarf while on the run, so my guess is she will probably go into the electronics store or coffee shop. Given my problem with electronics, I really hope she just needs some java.

  I see Liza.

  She is short like me, with crazy curls and a pale complexion. In the cool autumn sun, she looks like she’s just crawled out from under a rock and rejoined the living. Maybe it’s her super dark hair that’s doing nothing for her complexion. Who knows? I’m not a beauty consultant by any means.

  Because I don’t want to be creeper, I pretend to take a phone call. I laugh a lot. My imaginary friend is hilarious. After a particularly boisterous laugh, she glances up as she continues toward me on the sidewalk. I hold her gaze for a moment and laugh again. I’m still laughing when she enters the coffee shop.

  I wait for a few minutes, until I see Liza take a seat by the large store front window with a coffee cup in her hand. Only then, once she is snuggled up with her drink and I’m certain she won’t bolt, do I enter. I walk up to the counter, still on my phone with my imaginary friend. “Okay girl, I need some java. T-T-Y-L.”

  Then I hang up on “my friend.”

  “What will you have?” The barista has a little hook ring in his nose, enough to make me think of Ally. What would Ally do to convince this Liza girl to talk to me?

  “A small mocha, please,” I say. And then he asks for my name. Je—anna.”

  “Janna?”

  “Anna,” I say. “Just Anna.”

  He scribbles my name on the side of a cup in black sharpie. As the machines whirl and click I try to think of the best way to approach Liza. But when the barista puts the coffee in my hand, I still don’t have a solid plan.

  Well, now or never.

  I plop into the seat opposite her. “Hey, Liza. I’m Jesse.”

  The first look of panic crosses her face and I realize I’ve already killed Anna. What a short and sweet life she had. A car ride to tiny town in Ohio and a mocha. The End. But what will become of her brother and that crazy wife of his? Who knows?

  I barrel on. “I’m not here to hurt you. I’ve got NRD too. And I know Caldwell is looking for you and you aren’t safe. My AMP friend drew you dead—”

  She bolts at the word dead.

  “Awww, shit,” I say, scrambling after her. “But I’m here to prevent that from happening!”

  I drop my mocha, for which the barista yells at me, and run after her.

  It’s coming. The panic, the fear that if I don’t stop her, she’ll end up dead for sure. Not that I can replace her or anything if Caldwell showed up now, but I’m hoping I can still help. She’s Caldwell’s number 1 threat after all. And I know
exactly how Caldwell handles his threats.

  And then it happens. The electric fire rolls over my skin and booms out from me in a wave.

  The shopping center stops. One moment it is alive and the next, click, like someone threw the switch, just like when I killed my house and everything went still and silent in a heartbeat.

  A few people climb out of their cars, confused. The light at the intersection is dark and I’m pretty sure the reason the electronics guys have come out is because I’ve zapped them too.

  I’ve never covered this much distance before. I’m not sure if I should be impressed or terrified. It has to be at least fifty feet. One man lifts his car hood to check something and a few others climb out of their cars, looking back at them with puzzled expressions.

  The only good thing that happens is Liza slows down to a jog and then stops completely.

  Only a heartbeat later she turns and runs at me. For a second I just watch her come. Just a simple oh good, I won’t have to run that far crosses my mind. Then I realize she is trying to catch me.

  I turn and run away.

  “No wait. Wait!” she says.

  I don’t because my instinct is to run when being chased by someone with a crazy gleam in their eyes. Of course she catches me because I can’t run to save my life.

  She keeps pace beside me but doesn’t try to grab me or anything. “Did you do this?”

  She’s gesturing at the remains of the parking lots, the stalled cars clotting the pavement, and the colorless streetlight waving ahead at the intersection.

  “Yeah, sometimes I—It just happens.”

  She cuts me off. “You’re one of the partis.”

  “Excuse me?”

  But Liza doesn’t care what I’m saying. She looks away from me and speaks to herself. The way I do sometimes when I am thinking. “If you’re one of the partis then you aren’t lying. He wouldn’t work with you.”

  “Part piss?”

  She isn’t happy with my pronunciation. “The Par-tisss.”

  I arch an eyebrow. “What?”

  “Like, I can see through anything.” She stands beside me with no fear now. Her cheeks are still a little flushed and her chest heaved with her elevated breathing.

  “My clothes?”

  “And your skin.”

  I strike a pose. “How are my bones? Am I getting enough calcium?”

  “You’ve broken a lot.”

  “I’m a death replacement agent,” I say. “So I die a lot.”

  Sirens wail in the distance and she turns toward the sound. “We can’t stay here.”

  She’s right of course. And I know that if the others can’t get their car to work, neither will I. Well, Anna is dead anyway. Might as well abandon her car.

  “My hotel is close,” I say. “We won’t have to walk far.”

  Liza asks me a lot of questions as we walk A lot of questions about me: when did I first die? How? When did my powers show up? Why did they show up?

  By the time we finally see Gloria’s face, I’m foot sore and exhausted. My thighs are already starting to stiffen from chasing Liza. Our room is warm compared to the chill of the September afternoon. My bed in particular is soft and inviting in the lamp’s soft glow, as Gloria has the shades pulled tight.

  I quickly catch Gloria up on our meeting at the coffeehouse and the subsequent parking lot fiasco while Liza looks around our room. She is particularly interested in Gloria’s sketches, the few she’d taped to the wall above the desk while I was gone. The second Gloria sees her looking, she takes them down and stuffs them back into her sketchbook protectively.

  “Aren’t you worried about housekeeping?” Liza asks. She’s completely unfazed by the fact that some of those pictures were of her.

  “We keep the Do Not Disturb sign on the door,” I say.

  “Smart,” she says and takes a seat on the end of my bed, bouncing.

  “Liza thinks I’m part piss.”

  Liza’s ears turn red. “Partis.”

  “A part of what?” Gloria asks. When I raise an eyebrow at her recognition of the word she adds. “Partis is latin for ‘a part of’.” She turns back to Liza. “What is she ‘a part of’?”

  Liza shrugs, eyeing that sketchbook again. But Gloria has no intention of letting the girl have it. Liza looks away as if to prove she doesn’t care about the sketches.

  “Do you think that’s why we’re on Caldwell’s list?” I ask. “Because of our abilities?”

  She leans forward. “Caldwell has a list that you’ve seen? How did you manage that?”

  I don’t want to mention Brinkley just yet. “Yeah, it’s his death list, apparently. And you’re number 1 and I’m number 2. We figured you saw something in Philadelphia and that’s why you ran. We know about your handler.”

  She reddens in the cheeks to match her ears. “They found the body in the river.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I kept moving,” she says. “I was taking my time, trying to throw them off my trail, you know?”

  “Who?”

  “The ones that killed my handler,” she says.

  "The ones" is pretty vague. “Yeah, but did you get a good look at them? Anything that can help us identify them?”

  “It was dark.”

  Vague again.

  “Why do you want to go to St. Louis?” Gloria asks. I don’t point out that Liza never said St. Louis.

  She pauses. “There’s someone there that I want to meet.”

  Gloria’s eyes narrow. “So you believe only certain NRD-positives are partis?”

  “Yep.” She turns to me. “Do you know of any others with gifts?”

  Gloria is the first to speak. “2% of the population has NRD. You’re looking at 140 million potential partis.”

  “But there’s not really that many people with NRD,” I chime in. “The international branches of the Church have done a good job of implementing upon death head severance to prevent NRD in most developing countries. And with all the murders here—”

  “And it doesn’t matter if there are a billion potential people,” Liza says with an elated grin. “The few partis will gravitate toward each other like planets in a star’s pull. We are meant to come together.” She turns and flashes me a sugary smile. “Just like Jesse and me.”

  I open my mouth to tell Liza about Cindy and Rachel and Gloria grabs my wrist. Something she’s never done. It scares me, jolting my heart.

  “We can’t escape Caldwell,” Liza says. She looks crazy—her tone and wide eyes not helping. “None of the partis can escape each other. We’ll all come together sooner or later.”

  “How do you know Caldwell is partis? Have you seen him do something?”

  Gloria shoves me back. My elbow connects with the side of the TV and shivers with the electric shock of hitting one’s funny bone on anything.

  “Owww.” I yell in surprise.

  Liza speaks to Gloria. “You see it, don’t you?”

  “What—?” I start. Not only does my arm hurt, but now I am being left out of the conversation. Rude.

  “I’d hoped we’d get more time to talk,” Liza says.

  “We have plenty of time to talk,” I say. “Everyone just needs to calm down.”

  Her grin is the kind of grin you’d give an idiot. She raises her fingers and Gloria jumps forward as if to grab the girl. But before Gloria can touch her, the snap comes.

  Gloria stumbles, falls to her hands and knees. I scream, terrified.

  “What did you do?” I scream. “What did you do?”

  “This,” she says. She brings her fingers together again.

  Blackout.

  Silence.

  Like someone turned off the whole wide world.

  When I wake up, I feel fine, which is better than the last few times I’d fallen into the hands of deranged nutbags. Better yet, I can see again.

  “You’ve had an interesting life,” Liza says. She sits on the edge of the bed, flipping through Gloria’s sketchbook. Glor
ia is tied to the desk chair to my left. Liza pulls a page from the back of Gloria’s sketchbook and unfolds it for me to see. “Did this hurt?”

  “Like hell,” I say, barely glancing at the image of Eve straddling my chest, grotesquely sawing off my neck. I’m less concerned with an attack that happened a year ago, and more concerned about this attack. I’m tied with my arms pulled behind my back and knotted with something I can’t quite recognize. A bed sheet maybe? It’s uncomfortable, but doesn’t bite my wrists like a rope or handcuffs would.

  “Obviously you survived,” she says. She squats in front of me and pulls at the T-shirt around my collar. “And I don’t even see a scar.” The moment her fingertips brush my throat, I yank my leg up between her legs and connected with her vag. She yelps and falls back against the opposite double bed laughing and groaning in turn.

  “I should have known you’d fight. It’s how the partis survive.”

  “I thought you just saw through things,” I say. “What’s with the snapping?”

  Liza is holding her belly and laughing at me. “Did you think you were the only one?”

  Did I? Well, no. I had suspicions about Rachel and Cindy. I’ve thought I was a freak ever since the shocky stuff started happening. And once it evolved into the pulse, I felt even weirder. Then this girl shows up and says she can see through stuff. That isn’t weird. That’s like Gloria. But the snap thing. The snap thing—

  “You killed Jake,” Gloria says. She never took her eyes off of Liza. I might be freaking out, but Gloria is still focused. Glad one of us is.

  “Who?” I ask. And why did we switch topics?

  “She’s talking about my boyfriend,” Liza says before Gloria can speak again. “Ex, actually.”

  “Why would you kill your boyfriend?”

  “You have no idea what you are, do you?” she asks. “If you did, you wouldn’t ask me such a stupid question.”

  “What am I?” I ask. I see small movements to my left and know Gloria is working on her restraint. The second she gets it free, we’ll be in much better shape.