Chapter Three
Grym
Iwas the cautious one among the reapers. Of all the reapers, Ossy made the stupidest choices. And Cael was the most levelheaded until someone pissed him off. Then everyone had better get out of his way or be collateral damage.
That was why, when Ossy called me to bail him out again, I called Cael. But Cael was also ferrying a soul to the afterlife, just as I was, so I had to take care of the Ossy problem myself.
The hospital was our usual haunt for obvious reasons. The doctors and nurses could do only so much. Then we took over.
I was already at the hospital when Ossy texted. SOS.
I stood in my next soul's hospital room, waiting for his final breath. His family gathered at his bedside. In a few seconds, he’d take his last breath, and when that happened, it would be my job to escort him into the afterlife.
The man had lived a good life. He’d worked hard, growing a business and taking care of his family.
He hadn’t had it very easy. He was on the lower end of middle class.
Of his three children, only his oldest son had a good life.
He was proud of his oldest son. His daughter was in prison for a crime I couldn’t see with my reaper’s knowing.
The man had blocked out the reason for his daughter’s incarceration, so I couldn’t get a read from him either.
His youngest son lived with him and his wife because he had a severe mental illness.
The illness was debilitating, leaving him without a normal life.
And the man, who wasn’t quite gone yet, had an ache in his heart for the life his youngest son would never have.
The man’s chest lifted, and then the air left his lungs in one final exhale. His soul left his body, and the man, standing in a hospital gown, met my gaze. “It’s over, yeah?”
“Yes, Frederic. This part of your life is over. Something new awaits you in the afterlife.”
“Will Carrie be with me?” Carrie was Frederic’s wife. She sat in a chair, tears streaming down her face as she clutched her husband’s hand.
“She’ll follow you. Eventually. It’s not her time yet.
Time moves differently here than it does in the afterlife.
” I wasn’t sure how I knew what time was like in the afterlife.
My job was to lead souls to the door. It wasn’t to walk through with them, so I’d never actually been on the other side of the door.
“So, it will be years before I see her again?” Frederic blinked back the tears and stood behind his wife. He leaned down and whispered in her ear. “I’ll see you again, love. We’ll have our eternity. Don’t you worry.”
And they would be together forever after a brief separation.
In their younger days, they dreamed of owning a house on the beach where they could listen to the waves in the mornings and watch the sunset every evening.
They had never been able to afford such a lavish life, but they would have it in the afterlife.
Frederic had been misguided in his life a time or two, but overall, he was a good man. Souls like his were why I took my job so seriously.
Frederic met my gaze. “My pain is gone. All except for my heart.”
“That’s just the love you feel for them.
And they feel it for you. It hurts sometimes.
” I’d ferried enough souls to know that love was painful when souls were separated.
People often thought of death as the end, which I suppose it was in some ways.
It was the end of a life in one realm, but the beginning in the next.
Souls moved on. Some got what they’d wanted in the living realm.
Some didn’t. I wasn’t sure who decided how each soul lived after I took them to the afterlife.
It must be another department in the Bureau, above my pay grade.
Perhaps it was Donn, the god who headed the Soul Management Bureau.
“Are you ready?” I smiled at Frederic, trying to ease his mind. “It’s okay to be.”
“I don’t know.” Frederic glanced at his son. “Will he be all right?”
“I’m afraid knowing that is beyond me.” That was also above my pay grade. I didn’t even know if we had a department that documented a person’s life before they’d lived it.
“And it’s my time to die?”
“No one truly dies. We simply move on to something else.”
“Something better?”
“For you? Yes. But that isn’t true for everyone.”
“Why do I get something better while others don’t?”
I didn’t have an answer for him, but I was saved from having to answer when Ossy barreled into the room.
Frederic’s eyes widened. “There are two of you?”
Ossy smiled. “Sorry to ruin your moment, Mr. Dead Dude.” Ossy met my gaze. His eyes were as wide as Frederic’s. “We’ve got a potential problem. Maybe. Pretty sure, man.”
I sighed and shut my eyes, trying to reason with myself.
The inappropriateness of the moment was off the charts.
It was doubtful that Ossy had ever even read the reaper handbook, but over the course of the last two hundred-plus years since Ossy had become a reaper, one would think he would have picked up on a few rules.
One rule was not to interrupt a soul’s ferrying moment.
Ossy opened his mouth to speak, but I held up a hand. He did that thing where he always talked whenever there was a stretch of silence—even a brief one.
“I thought you were an angel taking me to God.” Frederic had grown up believing in a higher power, so of course, he would associate me with an angel. I’d been called a demon just as often. I suppose I wasn’t either of those things, yet I was both of them at once.
Ossy tried to speak again, but I put my hand over his mouth.
“My job is to escort you to the next realm.” I smiled at him. “Shall we begin?”
Frederic darted a glance at Ossy. “Is he coming, too?”
I glared at Ossy and slowly pulled my hand away, telling myself to put it back if Ossy said a single word. “He is not. He’s going to wait for me in the hall.” I said the last part through clenched teeth.
Ossy threw up his hands. “Fine, but it’s big this time, Grym.”
“In. The. Hall,” I muttered. I sometimes wondered how Ossy hadn’t ended up in another realm simply because of his tendency to annoy. I’d wanted to send him far away many times, but I loved him too much to do anything but help him whenever he asked.
Ossy sighed, muttering about rule-followers and serious matters. What could be more serious than Frederic needing an escort to his new cottage by the sea?
The hospital room faded away and we entered the between. There was nothing but blackness for as far as the eye could see. I preferred the door to appear there rather than where the person’s body lay. “My family couldn’t see you or your friend, either. Could they?”
People talked about the oddest things as they were leaving the human realm. It amazed me how many of them wanted to know more about me. As if I were significant, which I wasn’t.
“Only you.”
“Because I’m dead?”
“Everyone sees me or one of the other reapers, eventually.”
“There aren’t immortals walking the earth?” Oh, yes, Frederic was an inquisitive man.
“Do you mean besides those like me?”
“Right. Yes. Other... creatures. Do they exist?”
“There are people who come from other realms, but none from the afterlife. That door goes only one way. But I’m told there are other realms.” In truth, I wasn’t privy to who came and went. My knowledge was limited to those I’d met throughout my life.
“Are you... alive?” That was a new one.
I rarely laughed while I was working.
Many people found change difficult. That was all death was, really—a change. “I’m a living person. I eat, breathe, and sleep. All the things people do.”
“So you’re human?”
“I used to be. A long time ago.” I still had human tendencies—more than not, at any rate.
The door always just appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Frederic’s door was sage green.
We stopped in front of it.
“I’ll see them again? My family, I mean.”
“I don’t know if you’ll see all of them, but you will spend eternity with your wife. In time.” The visions were more like knowing. I couldn’t really explain it because it was hard to grasp, even for me. It was a perk of the job. “All you have to do is walk through.”
Frederic pushed the door open. He drew a breath, then turned to me with a grin. “It’s our beachfront dream.”
I returned the smile.
“Is this heaven?”
“Perhaps it’s your version.”
“Right.” Frederic drew a deep breath. “I can smell the ocean air and the coconuts. The sun-warmed sand.”
Frederic was still talking as he walked through.
Ferrying Frederic was among the most satisfying experiences of my career.
I kept a smile on my face until I met Ossy in the hospital hallway outside Frederic’s room. His family’s cries were muffled by the closed door but still audible.
Ossy paced in the hall. He pulled his bleach-blond hair into a ponytail.
When he saw me, he looked relieved, then dissolved into a panic I’d never seen in him before.
Ossy wasn’t prone to dramatics, despite the way trouble seemed to follow him like a rabid dog.
It was something to behold. He always came to me whenever he needed to wiggle his way out from under something without HR on his ass.
“We have a serious problem.”
“By we, you mean you. Don’t hurt my chances for that promotion, Os.”
Ossy didn’t take the bait. He didn’t have his signature sheepishness, which always accompanied an explanation of the stupid shit he’d done. This time, he just shook his head and gestured for me to follow.
“What’s going on, Os?” I had two more people to usher into the afterlife. They’d arrive at the emergency room in just a few minutes.
As we moved through the hospital, Ossy stayed quiet, which only deepened the dread in my stomach.
“What are you doing here, anyway? The hospital is in my sector.”
“A soul from mine was visiting her son. She had a heart attack and died in the ER.” Ossy shook his head. “Doctors don’t diagnose heart attacks in women as often as they should.”
“Is this about the woman? Was the woman supposed to live longer?” That happened to Ossy once.
It was always the women who went too soon.
They were often targets of madmen and enslaved by a healthcare system that didn’t support them.
Whenever a reaper delivered someone too early, HR investigated.
Demon detectives asked questions that rarely had answers.
Or if they did, the reaper had no answer beyond, I was just doing my job.
“Not this time.”
We stopped outside the ER doors. Ossy turned to me. “This is much worse.”
We walked through the double doors and then to ER room thirteen. The ER room doors were made of glass, with a curtain on the inside. Room thirteen’s curtain wasn’t drawn closed all the way, so I could see the occupant.
The man’s dark hair was matted with blood on the right side of his head, and his eyes were closed.
“He’s someone special to us, right?”
I didn’t answer right away. My chest ached, and it took me a moment to figure out why. The man was supposed to be in my life and while, I had lots of questions I couldn’t answer, knowing it was pretty concrete.
“He’s very special.” Very special indeed.
We entered the room. I stood at his bedside.
“I felt it the second I saw him.” Ossy was right. There was something about Elliot Coyne, something that made him unique. “But I don’t know what makes him that way.”
I didn’t know what it was either, but I knew one thing. Elliot Coyne was scheduled for transport into the afterlife soon, but not tonight. “We don’t have a lot of time to figure it out.”
“How much time?” He wasn’t on Ossy’s transport list. He was on mine, so Ossy didn’t know when Elliot would die or even what his name was. It was close enough to his death date that I had a knowing where Elliot was concerned.
“Tomorrow night.” I ran the back of my finger down Elliot’s cheek. His skin was warm. Maybe too warm. His body was working to heal itself, so he had a slight fever—nothing the nurses wouldn’t notice and report to the doctor.
Ossy drew in a breath. “Why did you do that?”
“Do what?” I couldn’t take my eyes off Elliot.
“Touch him.” Ossy stepped back, widening his eyes. “Dude. Oh. Oh, shit. I think I know what’s going on.”
I ignored Ossy. My mind went back to his question. I didn’t know what compelled me. All I knew was that I had an instinct. I stepped back far enough to keep from giving in to the urge again.
“You’re right. Thank you for reminding me.”
“Why the fuck are you thanking me?”
“He’s unconscious, not dead. Touching him violates rule 665C.”
Ossy shook his head. “He, like, means something to you, right? Like, he’s your love or something.”
I shook my head. “We don’t get to have love, Os. That’s rule 666A.”
“That you have the handbook memorized is a little disturbing and a lot sad. Who fucking cares about the stupid handbook when he’s your beloved?”
I couldn’t wrap my head around what Ossy said. “How could that be possible?”
“I don’t fucking know. You’re the one who memorized the fucking handbook. Not me. Besides, he’s your beloved, not mine. I just know how I feel around him. Like he’s somehow important to us. He has to be fated. That’s the only reason I would feel anything.”
“Do you feel drawn to him?” I certainly did. I wanted to hold Elliot and reassure him that I was there, that he would never have to be alone again. It was all very odd to feel that way toward a stranger.
“I wouldn’t call it drawn to him. It’s more like knowing he’s family, even though I’ve never met him.”
“Could it be that he’s slated for a position in the Bureau?”
“Not with the way you look at him.” Ossy patted me on the back. “Dude, you are already gone for him. I can tell.”
I couldn’t do anything about Elliot Coyne, beloved or not. Doing so would violate so many rules. I had to ferry him into the afterlife tomorrow. Not doing so meant severe consequences.