Reaper (7 page)

Knowing that he lived because I’d died—even if it was my choice—would lead to survivor’s guilt thick enough to haunt him for the rest of his life.

“Okay…” Mom said, but I knew without asking that if she thought it was in his best interest to know, she’d tell him, no matter what she’d promised me.

There was nothing more she could do for me, but he was still alive, and still her responsibility. Nash had to come first now. And I understood that.

“I’m not sure how much you know about Grim Reapers. Do you know what it takes to qualify…?” I asked, and the sudden startling comprehension in her eyes was answer enough.

“Oh Tod…”

“It’s okay, Mom. It was my choice.”

“It was supposed to be Nash?” She sounded stunned. Numb.

“Yeah.” I frowned when I could see where her thoughts were headed.

“But you’re thinking about this all wrong. As much as I’d love to be remembered as a martyr—I’m sure that’d lead to some serious play in the afterlife—that’s not how it happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wasn’t watching him that night. I left to pick up my girlfriend, and I didn’t even check on him when I got back. Or at all. I don’t even real y know when he snuck out. Then, when he called, I bitched about having to pick him up. I yelled at him on the ride home, tel ing him what a worthless pain in the ass he was.” I took a deep breath, then spit out the rest of it, to get the bitter taste off my tongue. “That’s the last thing he heard before that asshole slammed into us. The truth is that if I’d been watching him, he wouldn’t have been on that road in the first place.”

At first, she could only stare at me, trying to process everything. “So you…?”

“So when the reaper spelled it out for me, I had to do it. I couldn’t let me yel ing at him be the last thing he ever heard.”

“I can’t believe you did that.…” She scrubbed her face with both hands, and stray curls tumbled over them, effectively blocking me out. I had no idea what she was thinking or feeling.

My heart dropped into my stomach, and the tone of my entire afterlife suddenly seemed to depend on what she said next. On the judgment I would surely see in her eyes. Her hands fell from her face slowly and my mother stared at me through layers of pain and regret I couldn’t imagine. “I don’t think you even understand what you gave up for him. I don’t think you will, until we’re both long gone.”

“I don’t think
you
understand.” My own guilt was a strong, steady pressure on my chest, slowly compressing my lungs, sending an ache through my heart. “This wasn’t some noble gesture, Mom. I wouldn’t have had to save him if I hadn’t put him in the path of that car in the first place. I just needed you both to know that it wasn’t his fault. I made the call.”

Finally she nodded, though she looked like she wanted to argue. “Thank you. For al of it.”

I stood to go—I’d had all the post-death reunion I could stand for one day—and she stood with me.

“Are you going to get in trouble for this?” she asked. Translation:
Am I
going to lose you again?

“I don’t think so. My supervisor’s pretty cool, for a dead kid. He brought me here the other night, and I’m pretty sure he knows where I am now. If I get caught by someone else, he’l deny knowledge, but he’s not gonna bust me himself.”

In retrospect, I’d realized what Levi obviously understood from the start.

Watching my family mourn wouldn’t make me want to let them go. It would make me want to keep them close—and that was the only benefit worth accepting the job for.

“In that case, don’t be a stranger.” Her eyes teared up again and she sniffled, pulling me close for a hug. “It can’t be like it was before, but you’re welcome here any time.”

Relief eased some of the sting from our bittersweet reunion. That was exactly what I’d needed to hear.

“Do you want to talk to Nash?”

I shook my head firmly. “Not now. I’ll show myself eventually, but I’m not ready yet.” This soon after the accident, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep the truth from him. He’d know something was weird— something beyond his brother’s less-than-triumphant return from the grave—and I wouldn’t be able to lie convincingly enough to cover it up.

“Okay.” Mom squeezed me one more time, then let me go. “But don’t drag it out too long. The longer you wait, the more jarring it’ll be for him.”

But what she didn’t say—what we both knew—was that no matter how jarring my return was for my little brother, it couldn’t be more jarring than waking up ten days postmortem in the clothes he was buried in. Nash would never know what that felt like.

Nor would he ever know that what was supposed to be the end of his life became the beginning of my afterlife instead.

Eleven months and ten days after my first nursing home rotation, I blinked into the hospital’s ER to find Levi waiting for me, slouched in one of the lobby chairs. The sense of
déjà vu
was so strong I was actually disoriented for a moment, as I flashed back to my earliest days as a reaper—a rookie so green I couldn’t even pul off the disembodied voice trick without my entire body flashing in and out of sight like a not-so-special effect.

“Glad you could make it,” Levi said, sliding out of the chair to stand less than shoulder high on me.

“Yeah, it was tough to make time between the compulsive thumb twiddling and the lure of bingo night at Colonial Manor, but I managed to fit you in.”

His forehead furrowed. “Glad I rank as a priority.”

“You rank as accessory to the crime that is my eternal hereafter. So, why am I here? This isn’t my beat.”

“It is now.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper, and that sense of
déjà vu
became a startling certainty. “We inherited a rookie from another district, and he’ll be taking over the nursing home circuit.

Which means you’re getting a promotion.”

I huffed in amusement. “From adult diapers to bedpans? Move over, Elvis,
I’m
the afterlife of the party!”

“If you don’t think you can handle it, you can go back to rotating between rest homes…” Levi threatened, copper brows raised in challenge.

“Gimme that.” I snatched the paper and unfolded it to find a list of four names, times, and room numbers. Roughly the same workload I’d had on my old circuit, but these reapings would all take place in the same building.

Obviously consistency was a privilege of rank.

“Don’t make me regret this,” Levi warned, frowning up at me through a dead child’s eyes. “Most reapers spend nearly a decade in the rest home circuit before moving up.”

“If I weren’t already dead, I’d be alive with joy,” I said, and dimly I realized that Levi was responding. But I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying because my ears were suddenly full of something else. Music. A beautiful, eerie singing faintly echoing from beyond a closed set of doors. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear…

But then it was gone, and Levi was staring up me, his pouty child’s mouth pursed in a frown I found
really
hard to take seriously.

“What’d you say?” I asked, fighting the urge to scruff his curls. He didn’t like that. At
all
.

“I said, you’re a smartass, Hudson.”

I grinned. “I recognize no other kind of ass.” I glanced at the list one more time, then started walking backward away from him. “Now if you’l excuse me, Death waits for no man. Except me.” I shrugged, stil grinning. “It waits for you too, obviously, but ‘Death waits for no kid’ just doesn’t have quite the same ring.”

Levi rolled his eyes, then blinked out of the waiting room, leaving me to my first non-geriatric reaping, scheduled in a mere five minutes, in Triage E.

I walked through the double doors, unseen and unheard, and made my way past a nurse’s station and the first few rooms, most of which were blocked from view by curtains on steel tracks. But the third room was open.

In it, a girl lay strapped to a stretcher, arching fiercely against the restraints, throwing long brown hair with every violent toss of her head. She moaned incoherently, but something in that sound drew me closer, until I found myself in the doorway, listening, picking out low, eerie notes in the last sounds she produced before her voice gave out. She twisted toward the door then, and her medicated gaze met mine, pain and panic swirling in sluggish shades of blue in her irises.

Holy shit. A female
bean sidhe
. I’d never even seen one, other than my mom.

She went still then, her limbs lax, and for just a second, we watched each other as she blinked slowly and I was unable to blink at all.

Then a nurse walked through me and into the room, and the spel —whatever it was—was broken. And only after I’d walked away did I realize that she shouldn’t have been able to see me.
No one
could see me, unless I wanted them to….

Several steps later, I found Triage E, and with it, the man whose time on earth was over. Martin Gardner, 58, had suffered a heart attack, and the doctors had just gotten him stabilized—or so they thought.

But before I could help Mr. Gardner into the great beyond, shouting at the end of the hall drew my attention. I turned to find a man on a stretcher being wheeled toward me, his arm flapping as a nurse walked alongside him, trying to calm him down. “Drunk driver,” the EMT pushing the stretcher said to a man in scrubs, madly scribbling on a clipboard. “Cops are waiting in the lobby. The bastard killed three people, but only broke his own arm. Figures, huh?”

As they wheeled the man closer, I saw his face, and rage shot through me, hotter than a bolt of lightning. I knew that face. I’d only seen it once, but I could never forget it, even if my afterlife stretched into eternity.

The bastard who kil ed Nash
. And now he’d killed again.

Staring down at the man on the bed, I couldn’t help but suspect the coincidence. What were the chances he’d be brought in on my first day at the hospital? Levi was a shrewd little bastard, and the man on the bed—

practically gift-wrapped for me in a hospital gown, terror dancing in his eyes—was proof of that. I was no angel in life. Why should that be any different in death?

I glanced at Mr. Gardner, sleeping peacefully with his daughter at his side. Then I turned and followed the other stretcher into Triage H.

Levi wouldn’t know the difference, so long as I turned in a soul. At least, not until the exchanged death date showed up on another list, farther down the road. And if he fired me then, so what? It’d be worth it to know this asshole wouldn’t be killing anyone else behind the wheel.

When the nurse finally left the room, I stepped in, taking on just enough corporeality for the man on the bed to see me. I watched his eyes widen in terror when I appeared out of nowhere. Then I leaned over and whispered into his ear.

“Time’s up, you drunk driving piece of shit.” His hands shook on the bed rails, and the scent of urine 64 Reaper blossomed into the air. “Just FYI, in your case, I think it’s okay to fear the reaper.”