Charmed (Death Escorts) (30 page)

Score for the Reaper.

“Tell me, do souls need air to breathe?”

“No.”

“Oh well, that’s good, because I forgot to poke holes in the lid of the jar I stuffed your soul in.”

“
You did what?”

“I know,” I said. “I was surprised she wasn’t willing to go with me either. I mean you would think any woman would choose me over you. When she refused to come along, I had to take matters into my own hands.”

“Do you think I won’t find her? Find the bodies?”

“That’s another thing… What was my body doing in your secret stash? You haven’t been using it, have you?”

“You don’t have a body. Not anymore.”

“Well, if you want your thirty million dollars, you’re going to have to give me one.”

“I thought we already determined that I never really cared about the money.” There was a gleam in his eye that I wasn’t liking.

“So?”

“So, I think I have better things to do than spend my day arguing with you.”

He raised his hand and pushed me backward toward the opening in the wall. I tried to steer away, to wiggle from the control he seemed to have over my soul.

He laughed—a happy and joyous sound. “Fight all you want, but I am the Grim Reaper. I own your soul. I control it.”

I was pushed through the tiny hallway, past the closet where the bodies once hung, and right into the small secret apartment. He appeared in the doorway, blocking the only exit.

“Let me tell you how this is going to go,” he said smoothly, happily. He actually kind of reminded me of the Grinch after the green guy stole all the gifts from the town and he was so jolly and thrilled.

“On my word, I cannot Recall you until you fail to kill the Target. So you will remain here, in this makeshift prison, without a body, without contact to the outside world. When the six-month time limit I gave you is up, I will let you out. And then I will Recall you.”

“And what about the bodies I took. The soul I stuffed into a jar? Do they mean nothing to you?”

“On the contrary. But while you whittle away your last few months on Earth here, alone, no doubt replaying everything you did that brought you to this unfortunate end over and over again…”

Was it just me or was he a bit dramatic?

“I will be searching. And you should know by now, I always get what I want. So when I at long last open that door to send you off into the void for your final exile, you will not only see me, but the possessions that you dared to steal.”

“I’ll be looking forward to that day.” I quipped.

“You joke. You’re funny.”

The joke was on him if he thought I was just going to sit in here and wait for my punishment.

He began to pull the door closed behind him. I rushed forward, thinking I could at least try to slip by except my soul didn’t move the way I wanted it to. Instead, it moved sideways.

“Oh, and might I suggest while you are in here that you think about your weaknesses. The things you’re leaving behind.”

“You already played that card. You can’t use my sister against me anymore.”

“Actually, I can,” he corrected. “However, I have discovered that your sister is not your only weakness.”

Everything in me stilled.

He smiled.

“I was always partial to blondes, too.”

“Don’t you go near her,” I growled.

“Perhaps it’s time I started adding some of the female variety to my collection,” he said, his voice turning thoughtful and mean.

I tried to rush him again. This time I flew backward, hitting the wall with a poof.

He laughed and shut the door.

I didn’t think it was funny.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“Doorbell -
a bell, chime, or buzzer outside a door that is rung to announce the presence of a visitor or caller.”

Frankie

What does one do when they find a body hanging in their closet? Scream? Run? Try it on?

I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I walked out of the bedroom and directly into the living room where I grabbed a Cherry Coke, popped the top, and took a huge drink. Piper watched me with an amused expression on her face.

Finally, I pulled the can away from my lips. “There’s a body hanging in my closet.”

Her mouth opened and closed. I walked back into my room and she followed and we both stood there just staring at it. It was on a hanger, like a dress or a nice shirt. It was a guy who had shaggy blond hair that fell well over his forehead. He was dressed in a pair khakis, a white button-down shirt, and an ass-ugly sweater vest. His chin lay against his chest and his eyes were closed. The body itself was flat and lifeless.

It didn’t move.

It didn’t jump out and yell, “Boo!”

It might have been less creepy if it had.

“Where did it come from?” Piper asked.

“Is there a body store in Alaska I didn’t know about?” I quipped.

She took the can out of my hand and gulped a long drink. “It isn’t a coincidence that your boyfriend works for the Grim Reaper and now you have a body in your closet.”

“Charming isn’t my boyfriend,” I argued. Though she was right about one thing. This was not a coincidence. But after what happened, I couldn’t exactly call him up and say, “Did you happen to leave something at my house?” Charming slept with me and then disappeared. He left me. I wasn’t going to call him for help the first minute a body turned up.

“Why is it here?” Piper asked.

I shrugged. Then I leaned forward and poked it. The hanger swung back and forth on the rod. Piper smacked me in the arm. “Don’t poke it!”

I couldn’t stop staring at it. But not because it was morbid. Because there was something familiar about it. I’d never seen this person (or whatever you wanted to call it), but there was still something about it that felt recognizable. “He’s actually not bad looking.”

Piper gasped. “First you poke it and now you’re hitting on it!”

“I am not hitting on it,” I grumbled. “Give me my soda.” I snatched the can back and drained it. “It seems to me that we should be much more traumatized about finding a body in my closet.”

“Well, we already decided we needed therapy.”

“What should we do with it?”

“Guess we can’t call the cops.”

“Not without looking like we put it there.”

“You could call—”

“No.” I interjected. “I am not calling him. He made his choice.”

“So it’s over between you two?” She seemed a little sad at the thought.

The pain that sliced through me was swift and strong. But I didn’t flinch; I might as well get used to it. “Yeah, it’s over.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Message -
a usually short communication transmitted by words, signals, or other means from one person, station, or group to another.”

Charming

I wished the Reaper’s last words didn’t bother me. But they did.

I wasn’t used to worrying about someone. I wasn’t used to caring. But I did.

All I could think about was Frankie. What if he wasn’t just making idle threats? What if he really did go after her? What if he touched her? My God, would she feel the pain that I felt when my body was killed while I was in it? Would that searing pain seize her veins and bloom outward until it stopped the beating of her heart?

The questions were relentless. The worry was indescribable. And what made it worse was that I had no body to expel the extra energy. I couldn’t do pushups or punch a wall; I literally just had to hang there and do nothing but hope she was safe.

I wasn’t good at doing nothing. I needed a plan, a way out of here. If I had to kill that Target without a body, then I was going to figure out a way to do it.

I hadn’t lost yet. I was still in the game.

A game that now involved Frankie.

I wanted her safe more than I wanted anything, including not being Recalled. A memory flashed over me from the day Dex lost it in G.R.’s office and threw a couple well-placed punches to my face. I’d taunted him about Piper, about trying to save her, about being weak and caring about someone else over himself.

Is this how he felt that day? Desperate and willing to do anything to save the woman he loved? I couldn’t understand it then, but now… now I understood all too well. I was wrong to think of him as weak because it seemed to me that putting someone else above myself was the strongest thing I could do.

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.