Dangerous Lovers

by Becca Vincenza

  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 spoken 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.

  “It’s something I can do,” he replied. “Get in someone else’s body and borrow it. I don’t do it that often,” he explained. “It’s kind of painful depending on the size of the personality inside the body. That guy was bigger than most. Felt like I was a sardine jammed in one of those tiny cans.”

  Piper laughed.

  I looked at her like she had ten heads. “This isn’t funny,” I reminded them. “Why are you here?”

  “Actually, I just came to pick up something I left here,” the cloud replied.

  “You’re the one who put the body in my closet?” I asked.

  “You saw that, huh?”

  “Well, it’s kind of hard to miss,”

  “You were supposed to be in Scotland.”

  “I wasn’t about to stay there after he left me without a word,” I snapped.

  “Your boyfriend didn’t leave you. He was taken. By the Reaper, who he has managed to piss off in every way possible.”

  “He is not my boyfriend,” I replied automatically, but then the rest of his words caught up to me. “And isn’t the fact he pissed the Reaper off old news?”

  “He pissed him off some more. In new ways.”

  “The level of idiocy that man displays is beyond me,” I muttered, thinking that the next time I saw him I was going to smack him upside the head.

  But then my thoughts caused everything in me to still.

  I really thought I would never see him again. I really thought it was over.

  But it might not be.

  Amongst the stillness, the butterflies erupted.

  Maybe he really hadn’t meant to leave me. I looked down at his T-shirt that I was still wearing, the T-shirt he’d put on my bed to presumably put on after he joined me in the shower. Someone who was going to leave wouldn’t have bothered to do that. Would they?

  “What did he do?” Piper asked, drawing me out of my thoughts.

  “The Reaper had a secret stash of bodies kept under lock and key because they were important to him.”

  “Okay,” Piper said, urging him to finish.

  “Charming stole them and I helped him. I put one here. One at your house,” he said, gesturing toward Piper, who made a choking sound. “And he took one out of town with him. Not sure where he left that one.”

  The garment bag. The one on the plane I teased him about. It hadn’t been a suit at all. It had been a body.

  I was so out of my league.

  “You put a body at my house?” Piper said, her voice hollow.

  “Yeah,” he answered, sheepish. “I needed somewhere the Reaper wouldn’t look.”

  “How do you even know where I live?” she asked.

  There was a very heavy, drawn-out pause. “I knew Dex,” he finally replied.

  My eyes shot to Piper, whose face went white. “You knew Dex?”

  “Um, yeah. I was assigned to watch him and sorta you too.”

  “Oh,” was all she managed to say.

  I gave him a dirty look for upsetting her. “The body is still where you left it.” I was hoping he would take the hint and leave.

  He nodded. “I’ll get it out of here.”

  “Where are you going to take it?”

  “It’s needed,” was all he said. Then he turned to Piper. “I’ll get the one at your place when I leave here.”

  “I’m supposed to work later.”

  “You don’t need to be there. I can let myself in.”

  “That’s how he’s been getting into my apartment!” I burst out. “You’ve been helping him!”

  “I make a pretty good key,” he said smugly.

  Escorts were weird. They bragged about being criminals.

  “I’ll just get the body and get out of here.” He moved off toward the hall.

  “Wait, you said you had a message from Charming?” Maybe I should have acted like I didn’t care, but I did.

  “Oh yeah. He wanted me to tell you he was working on making room for the sun and he’d see you later.”

  Piper looked at me with a question in her eyes, wondering if I understood what he meant.

  I smiled. I knew exactly what he meant. It meant he was coming back.

  “Why couldn’t he tell me that himself?” I asked.

  “About that,” he explained. “The Reaper took his body away. Right now he looks like me, except he’s red.”

  Awww, he thought that would be a sufficient reply.

  “That’s not going to cut it. I need more info. Pronto.”

  Cloud guy sighed heavily, and with his sigh some of his body (or whatever) puffed out like breath on a winter’s day. “G.R. took away Charming’s body and locked him up at his mansion. He can’t Recall him because the only way an Escort gets Recalled is if they don’t finish a job. Charming still has a few months left to the job he was assigned, but the Reaper wants him gone. So he took his body and trapped him. He’s going to keep him there until time runs out fo
r the job and then he’ll be able to Recall him.”

  Some people might say he was getting what he deserved after all these years of killing people who didn’t deserve to die. But somewhere along the line, I stopped thinking about him as a killer and started thinking about him as a man, a man trapped in an impossible situation. And thinking about him being Recalled—or truly never seeing him again—made me want to go to the Reaper’s house myself and start ripping stuff apart.

  “But what about the bodies he took?” Piper said. “Won’t that keep him from getting Recalled?”

  “Yeah, but the Reaper already has guys searching. Eventually he’s going to find them. That’s exactly why I need to start moving everything. The more I move it, the harder it will be to find.”

  “What’s your name, anyway?” I asked.

  “Storm.”

  Huh. It fit him perfectly. “All right, Storm, go jump in that body and let’s go.”

  “Oh, uh-uh. No. You are not coming with me.”

  “The hell I’m not.”

  “Do you have any idea what Charming would do to me if I let you go anywhere near the Reaper’s house?”

  “Do you have any idea what I will do if you don’t?” I ground out.

  “Sorry, but he’s scarier than you are.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest.

  He sighed. “Look, I don’t have time to argue with you. Getting this body to him is already hard enough with having to worry about you two.”

  “Why is it so hard?” Piper asked.

  “Because the body is empty. There’s no one in it and because of that I’ll have a black cloud around me that every Escort would see. If I get caught, they’re going to know it’s me before I even say a word.”

  “There was no cloud around you when you got here,” I observed.

  “That’s because there was someone else in the body. Best I can figure it, their soul hides mine.”

  I glanced at Piper to see if she thought this conversation was as unreal as I did. She seemed to be having about the same reaction.