Chapter 39 Helena #2
“You are the worst!” I screamed as, finally, the roaring train rushed by, the clatter of metal wheels on steel tracks tapering away, leaving only the clangor of those warning bells. “And I am so angry at you right now.”
“Get in the car,” he said.
“Stuff your car!” I yelled, shoving past him while also irrationally trying not to worry about hurting The Judge’s feelings. The car had been with me through some things recently when it felt like no one else—including Grim—had been there to help me cope, process, understand. Let go…
But then, The Judge had crapped out on me.
All because of fate. My fate.
Which Grim had again subverted.
In that way, hadn’t he crapped out on me, too?
“Where are you going?” Grim asked as I just kept walking.
In truth, I didn’t know the answer—which had me swinging back toward the passenger’s side of the car since I’d left my purse in the seat there.
“Helena.”
“I’m going to call an Uber!” I snapped at him.
“The hell you are,” he growled. “Get in.”
“Go away!” I railed at him as I grabbed my purse and hauled it out before slamming the door shut behind me—hard.
Grim rounded The Judge, stalking toward me, but I wasn’t having it.
“I’m taking you home,” he said, reopening the car door, but I brushed past him again.
“You’re not, actually,” I snarled over my shoulder. “Now leave me alone until you can do your job.”
I trudged on while I dug in my purse for my phone, walking toward a crosswalk, my stride still unsteady, my pulse still racing, and my mind a mess. Tears started falling, too—though for a moment, I’d half forgotten they’d been there, left waiting, like me, in the wings.
A swirl of smoke and mist appeared ahead of me, the gray-black darkness gathering itself into that hooded shape.
I had half a mind to chuck my phone at him, and maybe I would have if I didn’t need it to get myself out of here.
“You are reprehensible,” I said, stalking straight up to him again since he was going to insist on blocking my path. “You ghost me with no word, and then you show up again just to delay things over your dumb collectible survivor-condition car, which I should never have agreed to borrow!”
“My car?” he repeated.
“Your stupid car!” I yelled. “I’m sorry, I know it’s important to you, but I can’t keep doing this, okay? On that note, I thought you couldn’t, either. If for different reasons.”
Since his Reaper Man form made him invisible to any passersby or window watchers, I had to look like a lunatic out here, screaming at no one on the sidewalk in the middle of the night.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded.
“The plan!” I screeched at him. “I’m talking about the plan, Grim. The one that we all agreed to—including you!”
I poked him again in the chest, but this time, he caught me by the wrist. I tried to yank away, but the man was the hand of death, and wasn’t death known for having a grip that wouldn’t let go?
When it came to me, unfortunately, that was true for him in more ways than one.
“You selfish creature,” I growled between my teeth.
“You’re mad at me,” he said, that monster’s voice low, even, and unaffected—infuriatingly so.
“What was your first clue!”
“Because I came back,” he said, a flat statement he truly meant as a question.
“Yes!” I shouted. “No,” I amended, somehow managing to wrestle my arm free, which I cradled against me even though he hadn’t hurt me. At least not physically.
“You’re upset about the train,” he said. “I’m taking you home. I’ll put you in the car if I have to.”
“Over my supposed-to-be-dead body!” I snapped back before whirling again, walking in the other direction now. Except the sight of those train tracks, Grim’s car, and that broken gate had me halting again and once more fighting a panic attack.
I wobbled, overcome all over again. Then my knees gave out.
He caught me. Of course he caught me.
“Put me down,” I demanded, but I’d lost my ability to shout now. Grim wasn’t listening anyway and wouldn’t.
Instead, he carried me back to The Judge and placed me carefully in the front passenger’s seat.
He slammed the door, probably just as irate as I was now—or even more so.
Then he dematerialized and rematerialized in the driver’s seat.
Of course, when he turned the key, the car started.
Of. Course.
“You want to tell me why you’re mad, or what?” he asked.
I spared a dazed glance his way, lost for how he couldn’t understand why I was upset and even more confused at why he had me back in his car, and was bothering to, with those wispy tendrils, fasten my flipping seat belt.
Just like old times…
“I wouldn’t have agreed to borrow your car if I’d known,” I said.
“Known what?” He shifted The Judge into gear with one skeleton hand and started forward, down the deserted street to the next set of traffic lights, which flicked green.
“That it would stop you.”
“That what would stop me?” he growled, frustration—the first scrap of emotion—at last entering his tone. “And stop me from what?”
“From taking my soul,” I hissed.
“You’re not making any damn sense.”
“Your car,” I said. “That’s the only reason I can think of as to why you moved me out of the path of that train.”
He hit the brakes, which screeched, and we came to a jarring halt halfway down the thankfully deserted road.
That hooded head snapped my way, and in the darkness within, I glimpsed a faint impression of his face—his real one, the one without flesh, the one of bone—the one that seemed to glower at me with hatred.
But he still didn’t scare me.
Not because he wasn’t scary. Once again, he was.
It was just that I was tired of being scared.
Scared of dying. Scared of how. Scared of what came next.
Scared of what had happened to him. Of what would happen to me.
Scared most of all that he wasn’t going to come back.
And now that he had? Well, now I was scared that I loved someone who had, again, figured out too late that I was too much for them. Or not enough.
“You think,” he began, “that I came back… for the car?”
“You were supposed to let me die this time,” I said.
“You think,” he said, anger infusing his tone now, “that I got you off those tracks… to save The Judge?”
I blinked at him. “It wasn’t to save me. You weren’t supposed to do that this time. That wasn’t what we agreed on.”
He snapped his focus forward, like I’d cussed him out. Like I’d slapped him.
And we sat like that for several long moments before, wordlessly, he shifted the car into gear again and, once more, we started moving.