Grim Tidings

You may bury my body
Ooh, down by the highway side
So my old evil spirit
Can catch a Greyhound bus and ride

—ROBERT JOHNSON,

“Me and the Devil Blues”

M
y blood landed on the snow, each drop leaving a crimson crater in the frozen white. I coughed, and felt the drowning-on-dry-land pull of a collapsed lung. Pain shot up my forearm from a triangular slash of auto glass buried between my radius and ulna bones. Wrapping a torn piece of my jacket around my opposite hand, I grabbed the shard and yanked. The electric shock of nerve pain blurred my vision and pushed a strangled whimper from my throat. Good thing nobody was around to hear me.

A few dozen yards behind me, a black muscle car lay on its roof, mangled beyond recognition. Steam escaped from the radiator, melting snow and revealing the black rocks that had bashed
the car to scrap when we went off the highway and into a ravine. Gas dribbled from a rent in the tank, running out even faster than the torrent of dark blood from my arm.

There was too much—too much pain, too many smells, the too-loud roar of my heart beating against my eardrums, the blizzard around me, and the blood rushing through my body on its adrenaline-fueled joyride, all competing for volume.

If I'd been on my own, I would have let myself pass out. But I wasn't, so I forced myself onto two legs from a crouch, slogging through the deep snow back to the wreck. “Leo,” I croaked, staggering to the driver's side door. It was bent almost in half, like a giant child had given his toy an angry kick.

The seat was empty, but there was blood on the steering wheel. I touched it with a finger, sniffing. It was Leo's. So where the hell was he?

My head was starting to clear after the titanic jolt I'd taken when I'd been thrown from the wreck, and I started to get frantic as my thoughts sped up to their normal RPMs. “Leo!” I screamed, and a gust of wind blew snow down my throat for my trouble. It would be dark in the next half hour, and we were twenty feet below the highway, invisible to anyone who might want to help and vulnerable to anyone who didn't.

He'd be all right, right? I asked myself. It wasn't like either of us could die from something as mundane as a car crash. He'd probably just gotten his brain rattled and wandered off.

We'd been alone on the highway heading east, the pavement pure white and the landscape devoid of any other living soul. The blizzard had started soon after we'd crossed into Iowa from
Nebraska and we'd passed the orange beacon of a highway patrol sign telling us the road was closed about twenty miles back.

Leo had tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, in no particular rhythm. Nobody would stop us, if they even noticed the black car gliding through the silent storm. Human eyes had a way of sliding right over people like Leo and me, relegating us to shadows or something imagined out of the corner of their eye. Leo's fingers were tattooed, small black card suits, triangles and Cyrillic alphabet delineating each pale joint. I watched them, curled inside my coat on the passenger side, watched him. He'd traded in his black suit and white shirt for a black canvas jacket as we got deeper into the massive ice chest that is the Midwest at the onset of winter, but otherwise his face was just the same as when he'd been alive. Black hair short at the sides and longer on top, sharp cheeks and chin, deep black eyes that hadn't looked like they'd belonged in a man's face even before he'd died. More fingers of ink crawling up his neck to nearly touch behind his ear.

Finally, he turned down the scratchy God-'n'-Jesus program that was the only thing coming in on the radio and looked over at me. “What's up?”

We didn't talk much, and that was fine. I wasn't a person who needed a lot of conversation and neither was Leo. Right that second, though, I did feel like the stuff we weren't talking about was sitting between us like a third passenger.

“Just thinking about what's in Minneapolis,” I lied. Well, half-lied. It just wasn't
all
I was thinking about.

Leo's mouth twitched. “More bullshit, I imagine.” A wind gust
pushed the car into the oncoming lane and Leo righted it. This car would never go off the road, never break down, never need a fill-up. If you could get past the part where you were a slave of Hellspawn or something much worse, being resurrected as a reaper definitely had its perks.

“Hellspawn aren't good at much else,” I agreed, shifting my leg to tuck it under me. My body was complaining after hours in the car, and I was tempted to suggest we pull in somewhere and find a motel to wait out the storm. We didn't even really need a motel, I thought as I looked at Leo again. He didn't have a problem keeping me warm.

Stop that,
I told myself. Leo and I had fucked, and I wouldn't mind doing it again, but harboring fond memories of our time together wasn't going to do either of us any favors. Not now, because everything was different and one-half of a couple dying a brutal death has a way of taking the gleam off any relationship.

Silence for another ten miles. I just hoped I could get out of the car without saying something that would bring up a lot of shit neither of us wanted to deal with. How Leo had died. How he'd come back as not just a reaper, but
the
reaper—supposed head honcho of the whole soul-stealing business. How he and I were going to Minneapolis to find . . . what? Somehow I doubted the rest of the reapers would be waiting with a muffin basket and a corner office. They hadn't been under anyone's thumb in the almost hundred years since I'd joined their little pyramid scheme from Hades, and in my experience the only thing they liked more than taking human souls was dickering with each other over who got to be the boss, since all reapers were created equal. Until now.

Leo was different, supposedly. Supposedly,
I
was different now too.

I didn't feel different. I just felt tired, and wished I could let go of what was chewing on me long enough to sleep for a few dozen exits along the interstate.

The worst thing I wasn't discussing with Leo, I hadn't even told him in the first place. I hadn't told anyone, just let it keep me up at night until I was even paler than usual and the circles under my eyes could have been used as a racetrack. I let it get me jittery and paranoid, watching every time a car followed us for too long or a tall shadow followed me into a truck stop.

I hadn't felt this bad since the first few decades I was a hellhound, back when Gary, the reaper who'd found me at my most vulnerable and made me the offer I'd been too stupid to refuse, had decided to make fucking up my life his personal project. Back then I'd barely let my feet touch the ground, drifting from one whistle-stop to the next, through the Dust Bowl, up and down the west coast and across the broad face of the Rockies. I thought I could escape, that if I just ran far enough eventually a creature made to hunt people down would lose my trail.

Told you I was stupid back then.

Eventually, I got better at my job and Gary lost interest in tormenting me. Eventually, the guy who held my note now would do the same. At least I really hoped so, because unpleasant as Gary was, an angel on a power trip was a whole new level of shit.

Sure, Uriel had pretended he was making a request when he came to me with his offer, doing an exchange, putting us on the same footing. But unlike the backwoods kid who'd accepted Gary's offer in 1919, I wasn't stupid anymore. I knew I had to do what Uriel had asked of me, and that as polite as he was doing the asking, I had absolutely no free will in the matter.

Not if I wanted to keep him away from Leo.

“Getting dark.” Leo tilted his head from side to side. I watched the cords of his neck flex as his spine crackled. Even the king boss of reapers got tired of the road, I guessed.

“We could be in Minneapolis by sunup if we push through,” I said. Leo grunted, and I wondered if that wasn't the response he wanted. Was he worried about what we'd find too? The Leonid Karpov I'd met in Las Vegas, when he was a Russian mob cleaner and I was a burnt-out Hellspawn minion, didn't get worried. Not even when everything fell apart. Not even when Lilith, Gary's boss and Hell's resident bitch on wheels, stuck a knife in his heart and held it there until it stopped twitching.

If Leo was worried . . . suddenly, the hot dog I'd had a state and a half ago threatened to come up. “Pull over if you want,” I whispered, digging my fingers into the vinyl of the seat, leaving little white scratches.

“Nah,” he shrugged. “No point in putting off the ass-fucking we're probably gonna walk into, right?”

My stomach eased a little. “Right,” I agreed. “If you're into that.”

Leo turned to me, his mouth turning up a little at the corner. His face was cold—I think if I had been merely human, I'd have probably peed my pants when he came after me in Vegas—but he had a great smile. Warm, entirely human. I tried to return it, knowing I looked like a junkie on the wrong end of a three-day bender.

“It'll be okay, Ava,” he said. “You know that, right?”

I opened my mouth, and then out of the corner of my eye a black shape loomed out of the white. It stood in the center of the highway, completely still as the car bore down on it.

It looked human in the moment, but I wouldn't swear to anything.

“Leo!” I screamed, jolting upright in my seat. He didn't say anything, just jerked the wheel hard, laying on the brakes so I felt myself come off the vinyl. I had the absurd thought I should have worn a seat belt, even though nothing this side of a Hellspawn weapon could dent me for long.

For two seconds, I was weightless. Then the brakes locked up and we smashed the guardrail in a sideways drift, undoing it like a twist-tie. The car took a rock and flipped, and we made two more bone-crunching revolutions before we came to rest at the bottom of the hill.

Somewhere in there, I went through the shattered windshield and landed twenty feet away like an errant Frisbee. I blacked out for a while, and when I came too it was dim twilight, and I smelled gas. I did the basic checklist you learn when you've been beat to shit enough times—can you see, can you move your arms and legs, does your head feel like it's been cracked open? I coughed blood, tried to look for Leo, then when I couldn't find him stood in the lee of the wreck, trembling against the wind, and feeling ice chip tears scraping my cheeks.

Leo wasn't the only person here. Whoever had been in the road had seen the whole thing.

Maybe it was just a confused hitchhiker, or a drunk trying to make it home. But I doubted it. I just didn't have that kind of luck. So screaming for help was out, and nobody was coming to the rescue.

Standing there panicking was going to kill me. I had to find
Leo, be ready to protect him. And to do that, I needed to be ready to fight.

I staggered around to the broken side window, crawling back into the car. I hit at the glove compartment with my good hand until the door opened, raining the contents onto my head.

If I became the hound, I'd probably heal up, but my arm was hurt so I'd also be lame, and even running away would no longer be an option. That just left me, little Ava in her fucked-up little body. It'd have to do.

I flipped the top off the first aid kit Leo had insisted on when we got on the road. I'd thought it was dumb then, but a lifetime of never knowing when you'd get hit and bleed had turned him into a regular Boy Scout. I got the gauze roll and wrapped my arm up tight, biting it through with my teeth. The rest of my cuts weren't going to make me lose enough blood to be a problem, but my vision was starting to black out and every breath felt like I was sucking through a straw with a hole in it. Broken ribs I could handle, but if I was running on half the oxygen I needed, that wouldn't help Leo. All it'd make me was a wheezing appetizer for whoever was up there.

I fumbled in the kit again, ripping at the front of my bloody shirt so my skin was exposed down to the V of my bra. I grabbed the long syringe, meant to be loaded with adrenaline if one of our hearts stopped, and pulled out the plunger with my teeth, spitting it to the side.

“This is going to suck,” I told my fractured reflection in the side mirror, and jammed the syringe directly into the flat, square bruise the dashboard had left on me when it collapsed my lung on my way out of the car.

For a split second the world turned to fire, and then with a tiny hiss of air, I felt my lung inflate.

Tossing the syringe aside and retching from the pain, I pulled my coat back on and crawled back out into the white. Now that I could breathe again, I could smell again, and I followed the faint blood trail away from the car, losing it every so often in the wind. I came to the banks of a small lake, barely distinguishable from the snow around it, and finally got a strong enough hit to fix on a direction.

“Leo!” I screamed again, over the howling wind. No answer. I struggled through the drifts, which were well past my knees, and finally saw him. He was on his back, head turned to the side and eyes closed like he was sleeping. If it hadn't been for the great red bird's wing of arterial blood staining the snow under him, I would have believed it.

My entire body lurched, like I'd just hit a wall. “Shit . . .” I ran, falling into the snow next to him. I felt for a pulse, realizing belatedly that I wasn't even sure if he'd have one anymore. “Leo.” I shook him. “Leo!” Fast as I'd toughened up, all my steel was gone, and I started shivering again.

A perfect sliver of glass had embedded itself in Leo's neck, under his smooth jaw where the carotid artery nestled. It had neatly bisected one of his tattoos, slicing him open with the precision of an autopsy.

I put my head against his chest, listening for a heartbeat, but there was nothing but the static of the wind, just like the car's crackling radio as we finally moved out of a station's range.

“Don't do this,” I whispered against his chest, but he still didn't stir. He was cold, the only warm spot the gentle waft of steam from his cooling blood on the ground around us.