Chapter 14 Helena
He smelled of wood fire, oakmoss, and vetiver—an ethereal yet earthy essence that evoked visions of long-neglected cemeteries, old tomes, apothecaries, and bonfires.
Though he took that otherworldly aroma with him the moment he departed from me, the impression of those ribs digging into mine and that bone arm cinching me to him remained.
Bereft of that scent that, like his presence, I shouldn’t have found comforting, I wrapped my arms around my shuddering body.
A Supra at the end of the alley revved, ready to mow me down.
Just when I feared Reaper Man would vanish as quickly as he’d appeared, he pointed a bone finger at a second car—one that materialized from nothing. The car’s sleek and shining contours emerged from the gray-and-black fog he could apparently conjure things from as well as dispel them into.
As obsidian as everything else about him, the vintage vehicle roared to life, its grumbly voice not too dissimilar to that of the being who had commanded it forth.
Did the Grim Reaper seriously drive a muscle car?
Correction: Did he seriously drive?
“Get in,” Reaper Man growled in that dreaded demon’s voice that never, no matter the circumstances, failed to… do things to me.
Having learned my lesson about deliberating on his commands, I scuttled to obey.
Reaper Man followed after to shut my door the moment I fell into the bucket seat.
Lightning fast, he dematerialized in a swirl of more black smoke before rematerializing next to me in the driver’s seat amid more plumes.
Tires squealed behind us. They screamed beneath us, too, and I slammed backward against the black leather upholstery as we went careening down the alley.
“Seat belt,” he barked.
“S-seat belt,” I agreed. Because wow we were going fast.
My heart racing, my gaze flitting between the whirring alley walls and the rear window, I groped near the shoulder of my seat for the belt, but then, as we catapulted out onto Third Street, straight into oncoming traffic that he swerved to avoid, those smoky tendrils that fumed around him swept in to buckle the lap seat belt for me—because, oh yeah, vintage car.
“Oh,” I said, looking down at my lap. “Nice… trick.”
What else could his misty essence do besides open elevator doors and buckle seat belts? Throttle enemies?
Potentially… entertain… not enemies?
Really, Helena. Is this the time?
Jerked back into the moment when, lucky for us, the tailing Supra got taken out by an SUV with another teeth-jarring smash of glass and metal, I cringed. Still, we barreled on, ripping down the road, the angry snarl of this grumpy entity’s grumpy beast of a car reverberating through me.
The world outside blurred on either side of us, becoming a smear of night streaked through with lights. The numbness of shock settled in, too, as my gaze fell to the skeleton’s hand maneuvering the stick shift.
“Wh-where’s yours?” I asked him.
And how wrong was it that, in this moment of being both chased and rescued by death, I was still stuck on his misty powers and the lingering sensation of those featherlight smoke twists as they’d swept in to buckle me?
“My what?”
“S-seat belt,” I said. “Everyone needs a seat belt.”
“I don’t.”
“Because you’ve got… smoke skills.” I wiggled my fingers at him.
I should shut up.
Maui had been right. I was obsessing.
“That thing,” said Reaper Man, his head swiveling away from the rearview mirror, his focus returning to the road. “How fast can it go?”
Thing? What thing?
I twisted in my seat, craning my neck to peer again out the rear window.
Oh. That thing.
“That’s… the children’s bookmobile,” I said, pointing at the colossal flat-faced bus that had drifted out of nowhere to chase us.
“No shit,” he replied, gunning the gas. “I’m more concerned with the fact that it happens to be gaining on us.”
He had a point. The bus loomed so close its windshield reflected the muscle car’s slim spoiler. The engine rumbled, reverberated just loud enough to be heard over Reaper Man’s growling hot rod.
Already, we had to be doing fifty.
“It never needs to go fast,” I said as the monstrous bus edged even closer, riding our rear as we shot through a red light. “I hate taking it on the expressway and don’t if I can avoid it.”
“You drive that eyesore?”
I blinked at him. “I’m the children’s librarian.”
“How fast can it fucking go, Helena?”
Oh, wow. He said my name. With that voice.
And he had a potty mouth.
The way I felt about that was… interesting.
“Um,” I said, glancing back down at his bone hand, wringing the strap of my purse with both of my own while I squished my knees together, “the speedometer goes up to a hundred?”
“Fuck.”
I frowned. “We… can’t outrun it?”
It did seem odd to me that, so far, he’d avoided weaving in and out of traffic, choosing instead to take turns and blow through lights, switching lanes only when the bus had enough room to do so, too. He wasn’t trying to lose this thing. Instead, he seemed to just want to stay ahead of it.
“I’m not worried about us,” he said. “If I don’t get it off the side streets, that motherfucker is going to kill everyone, and right now, I’ve got enough to do.”
He swerved again, right onto a curving on-ramp, and I yelped, the centrifugal force sending me leaning his way, far enough that I again caught a whiff of that oaken, earthy, yet otherworldly scent.
The bookmobile thundered after us, its massive dark, blank, and driverless face somehow seeming to scowl. Still, even as we shot onto the expressway, seamlessly merging with traffic, the behemoth gained on us—its lumbering mass integrating with the flow of cars less seamlessly.
Horns again blared as unsuspecting drivers swerved to make way.
“How is this better?” I asked as he shifted us into a higher gear, his foot slamming the gas. As we rocketed forward, I blasted back in my seat, the vibrating sides of which I clenched, fingernails digging in.
“I’m open to constructive criticism,” he snarled between his teeth as we revved on, bordering on entering hyperspace.
“There was an overpass back on Wimberly it can’t fit under.”
“Now you tell me!”
“Well… do you have anything like… a rocket launcher?”
“I’m not Batman,” he snapped.
“There are some similarities,” I observed.
He aimed a skeletal thumb toward the back window. “Isn’t that thing for the kids?”
“The admins really need to purchase a new one,” I said, speaking loudly to be heard over the ripping engine as we veered into the fast lane, “but they’re not listening.
Even on its best behavior, that thing is a death trap.
Also, it’s a total beater and older than the pyramids.
” I pried my hands up from the seat to start ticking off shaking fingers.
“No heat, no air, and I took the stairs off last summer when I made too sharp a turn. Believe it or not, I was the one who got written up for that even though it was Trevor who forgot to fold them in.”
“Your point?” he demanded as the bus’s lights blazed once more into being behind us, washing all in its eye-searing white light.
“Point is, at this stage, that monster needs to be put down.”
“What?”
I huffed a sigh.
“They keep telling me a new bus isn’t in the budget, but then they go and buy a bunch of telescopes for the new branch out in the ritzy east end, so I know it’s a lie.
The kids deserve so much better, and I’m just saying that if you torched that one, I bet you anything we would get a new one in time for summer reading.
I wouldn’t be sad, either. Or mad. If… you had a rocket launcher.
But you don’t. So, the subject is moot.”
He got quiet and, for a long moment, just roared on down the interstate, like I hadn’t said anything helpful at all. And maybe I hadn’t since he wasn’t, like he’d said, Batman.
“It does have an emergency break,” I offered.
“Where?”
“Um. There’s a handbrake lever between the driver’s and front passenger seats—mounted on the floor. You just pull up on it. But engaging it would require someone to—”
He grabbed my left hand in his skeletal grip, then positioned it on the steering wheel.
“What are you doing?” I shrieked.
He didn’t answer but vanished, unfurling into wisps of smoke, leaving me barreling down the highway on my own, presumably so he could go do something about Gus the Bus.
“I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die!” I squealed as I did my best to guide the steering wheel to keep us, or rather me, hurtling on our side of the dotted white line, off the shoulder, and zooming straight on till morning.
Tires squealed behind, the bus’s and those of a few cars. The horn of a semi blared, and I joined in with a scream of my own.
Then, just when I had my belt unbuckled and my knee halfway onto the driver’s seat, my hooded chauffeur rematerialized in a swirl of smoke, his hands taking over the wheel while misty tendrils nudged me back into my seat before rebuckling my belt.
“Right,” I whimpered, “seat belt.”
“I took care of it,” he grunted.
Oh. My God.
I should not start panting.
I swallowed hard, forcing my eyes away from him to the dark, whirring road. “What happened?” I spared a glance behind at the bus he’d somehow managed to pull off to the side, halt, and, apparently, disable.
“Hit the brakes, threw the emergency lever, disconnected the battery. There’s books everywhere.”
“So, it lives another day,” I murmured, not certain how I felt about that. I had good memories with Gus, even if the library did need to replace him. But how could I possibly forgive him for killing Daisy, my Beetle?
God. That was right. I didn’t have a car anymore. And after its run-in with the Very Hungry Bookmobile, my Bug had to be totaled.
But then, I currently had bigger problems than a busted Beetle, didn’t I?
“Who was that back there?” I asked him. “The blond man. He came back, but I saw you kill him.”
“He can’t die.”
Wait, what? “So he’s a zombie?”
“Something like that.”
An infuriating response that gave me zero insight into this reoccurring nightmare that had, since meeting him, taken over my life. My potentially fleeting life…
“What does that have to do with me?” I asked, bristling, my nerves finally catching up with me, panic over my fate sinking in at last. “What does any of this have to do with me?”
“Oh, come the fuck on,” he grumbled, but before I could open my mouth and chastise him for his rudeness, the swirl of red and blue lights and the wail of a siren corrected the thought he’d been responding to me.
Though I braced myself for another high-speed chase, he actually started to slow down.
“You’re pulling over?” I asked. Because how was that going to work?
“Let me do the talking,” he said, like he’d been in this situation before and knew the ropes. Like he wasn’t a literal walking, talking skeleton wrapped in vaporous death robes.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I checked the rear windshield again, squinting against the spinning blue and red lights of the cruiser that pulled us over.
“Not a word,” Reaper Man said as he threw the car into park, switched off the ignition, and cranked down his window.