by Vi Lily
Her eyes stay on me as she stage whispers to Ali. “Chloe’s outfit doesn’t exactly scream ‘Sexy siren’, does it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Ali says as his eyes twinkle at me, “I think she looks like one of my wet dreams.”
Of course, that makes Samuel growl again. He really doesn’t like Ali, for some reason. I don’t get it. I think the guy is nice. Flirty maybe, but nice.
Ali’s response was obviously not what Tabby wanted to hear. She sticks her bottom lip out then in a pretend pout.
“Well, you can never help what you dream about.” She turns back to me.
“Poor baby,” she coos, “maybe you’ll get really smart in school, so you’ll have that going for you at least.”
Okay, so I’m really starting to wonder how in the hell I’ve been friends with such a bitch for so long. I never realized just how awful she is until this moment in time. It’s like it took death to wake my dumb butt up.
I must channel Samuel then as a growl escapes me. I take a threatening step toward her. I’d grab her by the clothes, if she were wearing any. I’m afraid if I sneeze too close to her, the outfit is going to disintegrate.
“Look, you—”
Tabby’s ovaries are saved then when another door opens then, and the other girls skip out into the hall. It figures that they’d be in the same room. Maddie and Addison are like fried dill pickles and ranch dressing; they just go together. They’re dressed just like Tabby, only Maddie’s in dark blue and Addison in red.
“Ooh, Chloe!” Maddie gushes as she looks me over. “I love your outfit! It’s so cute! You’re like a super sexy Scottish lass!” That comment makes me want to preen, seeing as how Samuel is Scottish and all.
And this is why I adore Maddie. She comes out of a room wearing nothing more than a slingshot, looking like every man’s not-so-secret fantasy, and she goes on about how cute I look.
She’s such a sweetie.
I notice Tabby roll her eyes at Maddie’s comment. It makes me want to add a titty twister to her ovary punching. Somehow, I manage to refrain from the violence that’s boiling in my stomach.
Stomach. Oh yeah. “Hey, can we get something to eat?” I ask Samuel, totally forgetting that I’m not talking to him thanks to the growls coming from down yonder.
“Maybe you should skip a meal or two… dozen,” Tabby tells me with a sneer as her eyes move down my body again.
Instantly, Maddie’s little blue bird of happiness compliment has been shot like it’s open season, only to be replaced by a murder of crows pecking at my curves.
Tabby is so good at making me feel lower than a snake’s belly.
It’s been an ongoing argument for years; she’s always given me a hard time about my weight. She thinks anything over a size one is obese.
Before I can retort, Addison jumps to my rescue. That’s always been the group dynamic — Maddie is the sweet one who wants everyone to be happy, Tabby is the instigator and crap stirrer and Addison is the peacekeeper. Me? I’m the voice of reason. Unless Boones Farm is involved anyway.
“I think Chloe is just perfect,” she tells Tabby with a chin lift. Tabby’s eyes roll again.
“Keep rolling those eyes,” I snarl at her, “and maybe you’ll find a brain back there.”
“Ladies,” Samuel interrupts just as Tabby takes a step toward me, “we need to get moving. And yes,” he says to me, “our next stop is the cafeteria. Reanimation always causes a big appetite.”
Tabby snorts. “I’m not hungry,” she says and then runs her hands down her body, “I like to keep my figure trim.” Of course, she throws another hateful look my way at that.
“Well, personally I could eat a goat’s butt through a picket fence,” Maddie says as she hooks her arm with Addison’s.
Samuel looks like he’s going to toss cookies at that Texanism. If I weren’t still pissed at him, I’d laugh.
Chapter 5
A FTER WE EAT the best meal I’ve ever had — Samuel told us that everything is enhanced in the afterlife, which meant Tabby had to go off on how she couldn’t imagine sex could possibly be better, and it was pretty obvious that she was trying to get Samuel to say “challenge accepted” — Samuel takes us to the Depot.
The Depot is apparently the transport station for the afterlife peeps. It’s set up like a big train station, but instead of trains or buses or whatever, there are tubes that you get into and then you get shot off like the canister at a bank’s drive-thru. It’s kind of cool and actually looks fun.
Samuel walks up to a window and tells the man there that he needs three transports to “the Isle of Tilos.” I have no idea where that is, but he gets these token things from the clerk, hands one to each of the girls and that is when I realize that my besties and I are parting ways.
Who knows when we’ll see each other again. Or even if we will.
Unfortunately, we can cry in our new and improved bodies, and soon we’re all bawling and snotting all over each other. Even Tabby and I. Knowing that I may not see her again has sent all thoughts of beaten ovaries and abused nipples off into the cosmos like one of those shooting tubes.
They’re the only link I have to my former life.
Samuel is forced to pull us apart and he has to physically push the girls to the platform where the tubes are. After he gives them some instructions about how to use the tokens, and tells them that the siren principal will meet them on the other side, we wave one more time and then…
…they’re gone.
I’m still a blubbering idiot, even more so after the tubes shoot my friends off to God knows where. I mean, where is this Tilos? I’ve never even heard of it. What if they’re attacked there, like by a kraken or something? I never would have thought such a thing existed, but after finding out that there really are such things as trolls, anything’s possible.
Not like I could do anything to stop a kraken attack, but hey, at least we’d all get eaten together.
Now I’m alone. All alone, facing an unknown and pretty scary future.
Samuel walks back to me and for once, he’s not scowling. In fact, he looks worried. Or, more likely, he’s embarrassed. I’m so hysterical that other travelers are staring at me. Like, they’ve stopped what they were doing and are just standing there watching me like I’m a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
The big guy does something then that shocks me — he opens his arms for me to step into. I don’t think twice. I mean, when a girl is sobbing, she needs comforting, even if she is ticked off at the no-account fella doing the offering.
Up close and personal, Samuel smells good. Too good. Like, I kinda wanna lick his chest good. Who woulda thought that a Grim Reaper would smell like leather and cinnamon?
He holds me for a long time, rubbing soft circles on my back until my hiccups stop and I’m left with just tiny sniffles. I covertly wipe my nose on his shirt and then pull back.
“Do I have makeup all over my face?” I ask him, embarrassed as I swipe at my cheeks.
He cocks his head. “Makeup? You aren’t wearing any.” My wet eyes widen at that.
Ohmygawd… Since I was thirteen years old, I have not left the house without makeup on. And for some reason, I remember that fact. I couldn’t tell you what the house looked like, where it was, or who lived there, but I know that I never left the place without at least mascara and lip gloss on.
Samuel sees the look of horror on my face and he smirks. “You don’t need any—” he starts, but I interrupt.
“The hell I don’t!” I squawk like a pissed parrot. “That’s just something people say to make us girls feel better. ‘You don’t need makeup; you’re pretty without it’,” I say with a high voice and hand planted on my hip.
I point my finger at him. “I call bull. My eyelashes are nonexistent without at least two layers of mascara and my lips are too pale pink to even be seen. And don’t even get me started on contouring this moon pie face.”
He’d crossed his arms over his chest during my
tirade and now he cocks an eyebrow at me. “Are you done?”
I wrinkle my nose at him and curl my lip. That’s the only answer he’s getting from me.
“What I was going to say is that you don’t need makeup because in the afterlife everything is enhanced, including your facial features. I know you don’t believe me, lass,but I’ll show you when we find a mirror. Think about how your friends looked. They weren’t wearing makeup either.” He turns then and starts to walk away.
I think about that. The girls did look really good, better than they normally do all dolled up. Huh. Maybe I should put the hissy fit on hold for now, at least until I can find a mirror.
“Where are we going?” I ask as I hurry to follow. I assumed he was going to stick me in one of those tubes too. I think he’s heading for some glass doors across the Depot, which would be cool, since I haven’t seen the outside yet. I wonder how different it looks here in the afterlife.
“The Academy,” he answers without looking back.
I startle at that. “You’re going to the Academy with me?” I figured he would have stuck me in one of the tubes and shot my butt to who knows where.
“Yeah,” Samuel tells me over his shoulder. “I live there.”
I trip over my new feet and grab the back of his shirt for balance. His pretty blue eyes glance down at me.
“You live there? How's that possible? You're not a student, are you?”
Samuel pauses at the glass doors and gives me a look I can’t interpret. “Well, no,” he says with a hesitation that makes me nervous.
“I'm a teacher.” He drops that bomb on me as he pushes the door open and steps outside.
What? Ohmygawd… “A teacher?” I squeak as I rush to keep up with him. I’m so focused on our conversation that I barely glance around at our surroundings, other than being startled that it’s daytime. It makes me wonder just how long we were in that assessment hearing.
“How the hell is that possible? Aren't you a Reaper?”
Samuel stops and turns back to me, then runs a hand over his face. “I'm not just a Reaper. I'm not just a teacher. I'm actually...” he drops his hand and sighs, “the dean of the Reaper School.”
Well, hell’s bells. That’s like a principal, isn’t it? If so, that really sucks.
But wait… that means it was the freaking dean of the Reaper school who was hitting up on me before. So, we can’t date, right? I mean, if he's a dean and all. I don't know how it works in the afterlife.
A really dim lightbulb goes off then in my brain. I mean, it’s like a flickering porch light of a thought that the moths are barely circling due to lack of interest, but I cling to it like a baby possum to its mama: Maybe that's why Samuel argued with that Eminence dude about my sentence. It’s possible that the guy really is interested in me, does want to date me, and that's why he was arguing against me going to the school.
Hmm… I think I need a plan.
Samuel leads me to an area that has these things that sort of look like a Prius and a Hummer had some kinky sex and made a real hideous baby SUV. And they’re all alike, all a sort of gray color. I wonder how people tell their vehicles apart, like do they hang fuzzy dice on the rearview or something?
He opens the driver’s door of the closest one and motions for me to go around to the passenger side. I snort; chivalry is apparently dead in the afterlife. Dead, in the afterlife.
I snort; that’s funny right there.
As I climb in, I see Samuel toss those damned granny shoes into the back seat. I didn’t even know he had them, where he had them, and how he got them. It’s like they just materialized to haunt me. Ugh.
Once I’m seated, I reach for a seatbelt that apparently doesn’t exist. Samuel snorts. I give him a look with a raised brow.
He laughs, then starts pushing buttons on a keyboard thing. “There aren’t any seatbelts. You're already dead. You don't really need one, do you?”
Samuel glances at me and I feel myself blush, then I curse the fact that I can blush. I kind of hoped that my new body wouldn’t do that, especially since I embarrass myself a lot. A lot a lot.
“Besides, these transports can’t crash.”
I don’t respond, but I’m thinking it would have been nice to have such a vehicle back when I was alive and could die. Now I’m dead, can’t die, and in a vehicle that can’t crash.
This is irony at its finest.
We pull out of the parking lot, but I notice that Samuel isn’t actually driving. Whatever this thing is, it’s driving itself. That’s pretty cool and would be danged handy on party nights. No need for a DD.
I cringe at that thought, remembering that I was the DD the night we all died. Stone cold sober, and I still managed to wreck.
“You have a nice… car,” I say lamely, trying to make conversation to take my mind off the guilt nagging at me. He just laughs.
“It’s not mine. It doesn’t belong to anyone. The transports are available for anyone to use at any time. You just have to program in your destination and it automatically drives you there.”
Huh. That’s weird, but cool. It would have been nice to have something like that back in the old life. Wouldn’t have to worry about your car getting jacked and taken to some chop shop in Mexico at least.
I watch the scenery as it goes by. It looks pretty much the same as it did on earth… or wherever. That reminds me though.
“Hey, you said something earlier about ‘back on earth’. Are we not on that planet anymore?”
The corner of his mouth hitches. “We’re still on earth, just on a different facet. The afters can interact with the preds, but not vice versa. Not usually, anyway. There are some who are more aware of the spiritual facet and they sometimes sense us.”
“‘Afters’? I’m assuming that means us — I mean, those who are in the afterlife?”
He nods, then stretches back, folds his arms behind his head and closes his eyes. It’s shocking to see the person sitting in the “driver’s seat” doing that.
“Yeah, and preds are ‘pre-deaths.’ Those who haven’t died yet.”
Guess that makes sense. “You said we’re on a different… facet?” I ask and he nods.
“Aye. The universe’s worlds are like gems; each world has many different layers, or facets. Where we are now is just another of those facets. All of those facets combine to make the world and can interact with one another, but most do not, or at least not in a way that the other facets are aware of.”
Okay, that was way more complicated than I thought it was going to be. I try to wrap my brain around the facet thing and try to picture the earth as a big diamond, or I guess a sapphire would be more accurate. After living a life thinking we’re the only beings, especially on earth, it’s really hard to grasp what he’s telling me.
“So, nothing has really changed for us then?” I ask. “I mean, we can still see the living, and… interact with them?” I wonder if that means that I can go back to my old life, my old school, and maybe figure out who my family was.
Samuel opens an eye and turns his head toward me. “Don’t get any ideas about going back,” he warns, seeming to read my mind yet again. “You can’t do that. In fact, you’ll never be assigned to reap an area where you’ve been before.” He closes his eye again and turns his head back.
Well, damn. “So, you reap Texas?” He nods.
“Occasionally, when the need arises. I’m assigned to part of the southeast corner of Texas.”
“And where y’all from?”
He grins without opening his eyes. “Gotta love that Texas accent,” he murmurs to himself. His comment makes me grin, even though he doesn’t see it.
“I’m from a little village in the Highlands of Scotland that no longer exists. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”
Well, that isn’t surprising, considering I catch hints of that delicious accent every once in a while.
“How long have you been a Reaper?”
He sighs then and sits back up. I would
apologize for keeping him from his nap, but I want information bad enough to be rude.
“Two hundred thirty-six years.”
I startle at that. “I thought we just had to do service for an additional two hundred years.”
Samuel nods. “You do, but that’s in addition to your allotted time that’s added on.”
Oh yeah. I forgot about that part. I tilt my head. “How old are you?”
He smirks at me. “Two hundred fifty-six years.”
My eyebrow raises at his smart comment. I actually have to pause to do the math. “So that means you were… twenty when you died?”
He nods. “Almost twenty-one. Thought I was tougher than I was when I singlehandedly took on a Sassenach scouting patrol.” He snorts. “I lost, obviously.”
I think about that. “That means you’re like from the, uh, eighteen hundreds?”
“Latter part of the seventeen hundreds.” Samuel’s eyebrow raises and the corner of his lip curls up into a smirk.
“I take it mathematics isn’t your strong suit?”
I reach over and whack him in the arm with my hand. “Shut up, smartass,” I huff, even though it’s totally true. I suck at math. He just laughs.
“I’m just trying to figure all this stuff out,” I pout as I cross my arms over my chest, like I’m all indignant or whatever.
“So, that means you were in Scotland at the time of The Clearances?”
He looks a little shocked by my question. “How do you know about The Clearances?”
I shrug. “I’ve always been interested in Scotland. Scottish history too.”
I laugh, embarrassed. “I, uh, also have always had a thing for, umm, Scottish romances.” Especially those that involve a sexy blue-eyed blond Scotsman who has the hots for the American teenage girl.
Cough cough.
Samuel gives me a look I can’t interpret. “I suppose you mean those romantic novels that so many of you females seem to love? Those with a bare chested man with more muscles than are natural, wearing a kilt?”