Chapter 6 Helena
Oh God. Can death die?
Screams echoed around me in the main lobby, panicked voices reverberating through the cavernous space, bouncing off the cold marble floor that I struggled to rise from.
Smoke and dust plumed out of the gaping mouth of the elevator shaft while the fire alarm blared, its brash bleat pulsing at top volume while emergency lights sparked a blinding white.
Patrons rushed past me, mothers shepherding wailing kids toward the main entrance while Ben, one of our security guards, waved them out.
I shook from head to foot, my mind a scattered mess, my sense of reality numbed. But while I could forsake the flattened cupcakes, I couldn’t bring myself to join the flow of bodies now bottlenecking between the tall columns flanking the front doors.
Instead, I whirled and hurried for the stairwell. Grabbing the iron railing, I plunged downward, hurrying to the basement, barreling past the steady stream of those rushing up to get out, noses and mouths shielded by sleeves and shirt collars.
I coughed against the bitter taste of smoke and ducked toward the haze. Then, turning the corner, I sprinted in the direction of the Hideout, which the elevator opened to.
I arrived to find its exterior metal doors still closed, smoke and dust seeping from the busted seam, the bent crack showing only darkness within.
Before I could surge forward to try to wrangle those doors like I’d seen my now-two-time rescuer do, something cold and hard seized me by the upper arm.
Then a second skeletal hand went to cover my mouth before my captor drew me backward, out of the dust clouds, away from the elevator, and into the tall stacks of YA books.
This time, for whatever reason, I didn’t scream at being handled by him.
He must have feared I would bolt given the chance, because as soon as he had me between the shelves and out of sight of the figures rushing for the stairs, the bony hand on my arm tightened its grip.
Strangely, I had no urge to scream or run—not even with the outline of his bottommost ribs digging into my upper back.
Not that I wasn’t afraid. I was.
My heart scampered hard in my chest, and my breath came fast, but my curiosity, which had only been fed and stoked by the information in that book Hunter had found for me, overrode my fear.
Obviously, whoever this being truly was, killing me wasn’t in his plans.
Well, at least it wasn’t yet.
“What are you doing down here?” he asked, my whole frame going rigid as that black-as-night voice rumbled through me, officially, inexplicably, and somewhat disturbingly, well, apparently… turning me on.
“Um,” I managed when, with a click of bones—literal bones—his hand uncoiled from my mouth.
I blinked several times at that settling and now-thinning screen of dust and debris, the logic department of my brain trying to compute the question he’d asked me while the lizard portion sent a zing of interest through my limbs and, maybe, other places.
Oh, wow. This was new.
Probably just a symptom of my nearly getting squashed. Had to be, right?
Except he had also kind of just rescued me with tattooed arms?
Focus, Helena. Don’t be rude. The nice undead doom-voiced skeleton man asked you a question.
“I came… to check on you?” I whispered as, somewhere in the distance, sirens kicked up, their screams joining in with the droning blare of the fire alarm.
“What?”
The faintest of growls underscored that already-gravelly one-word question, his incredulous tone betraying just how stupid he thought my answer was.
But how was I supposed to know he was okay?
Maybe he was the Grim Reaper—the real Grim Reaper—but I didn’t know how that worked.
In my world, falling elevators smooshed their occupants, no matter who or what those passengers happened to be.
“Are you okay?” I pressed.
That hand on my arm flexed just a bit tighter, though only for a second, as if something about my question made him flinch.
He didn’t answer, but after a beat, he raised his free hand to point toward the elevator in a gesture reminiscent of Scrooge’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, tatty sleeve draping and fuming and everything. “That man. Do you see him?”
I blinked several times. Man?
There—in the clearing smoke—he materialized.
A tall figure garbed in fastidious black strode into the evacuated area. Since he faced the elevator doors, he had his back to us, his white-blond hair just a shade lighter than the haze that enshrouded him.
“I see him,” I whispered.
That skeleton hand released me, and he stepped around to my side, an action that had me flattening my spine to those of the books, hands splaying against their plastic-wrapped bindings.
Again, he swiveled that hooded gaze my way, the unfathomable darkness within funneling its full attention on me as he raised a bony finger between us.
“Do not let him see you,” that voice commanded. “Do not engage with him. And if you see him again… hide.”
Hide? Why? What in the Hades is going on?
“Wait,” I rasped as he turned away, and I actually grasped for his robes. My fingers caught only mist, which dissolved in my grip.
He strode off toward that man, who flung his arms wide. A strange poison-green glow flared along his sleeves, and the elevator’s doors tore open—all without his touching them.
While the blond man stepped forward to peer inside the mangled elevator, the Grim Reaper’s right hand shot out to the side.
Bone fingers closed around the handle of the scythe that reappeared with that motion.
The tool, or weapon—I still wasn’t sure which—unfurled out of that same undulating and soundless fog that trailed him.
I started forward, my heart thundering at speeds I’d never felt, as Reaper Man gripped the scythe between both hands, raised it, and then brought the now-glowing silver blade screaming down on the unsuspecting man.
That smile of silver soared through the man without cleaving him, ghosting through him instead, leaving no wound or mark. A gasp caught in my throat, though, when the blond man crumpled to the floor, an eerie and crackling spherical green light springing forth from his spine.
The hooded figure seized the fizzing orb in his free fist and then collapsed into the floor, vanishing in an explosion of dark miasma. Its remnants fountained upward before every trace of him, in the next instant, misted away.
“Omigod,” I said as, despite the reaper’s warning, I pushed off from the books to rush to the blond man’s side and crouch next to him.
Turning him over, I found the man—the young man—staring sightlessly upward, his too-blue-to-be-real eyes wide and unseeing.
Shouting voices drifted near, along with tromping boots.
Half a beat later, a brigade of first responders and firefighters descended upon us. One of them tugged me gently back from the man while another knelt to check his pulse and confirm what I already knew.
The man I’d just been warned to stay away from… was dead.