Chapter 7
I scaled the steps up to the second-floor suite two at a time, only to realize when I reached the door that I didn’t have the key. I banged, open palmed, and a split moment later, Chloe answered. The other girls were already awake, bleary eyed but tense.
“Is it him?” she asked, as if she’d been expecting some unwanted company.
“I—I don’t know. There’s a man down by the quarry…Shiloh called him a guest—”
That was all it took. The girls were on their feet, getting dressed, stumbling over each other.
Iona stubbed her toe on the corner of the wardrobe and yelped. “Shit!”
I didn’t understand their panic, and when I asked, no one answered me, but not because they were trying to ignore me.
In fact, I’m not even sure that they heard.
Panicked and confused in equal part, I peered out the window, but I couldn’t see Shiloh or the man she had referred to as her guest. I began to panic.
What if he had hurt her? Or was hurting her?
Shiloh was alone down there; what if we were too late to save her?
What if she ended up like Adeline, young and dead and alone in the dark?
The thought was unbearable, and I felt sick with guilt for leaving her to fend for herself.
No one said anything as we took the elevator down to the first floor of the motel. When its doors parted, I turned to look for the motel clerk, but he was gone. The screen of his monitor flashed a series of windows and glitching warning messages before finally shutting off.
Seated comfortably in the empty lobby on a plastic chair near the vending machine was the same man I’d seen from across the quarry.
He wore a well-tailored suit, and his shirt was fitted with a priest’s collar, although nothing in his demeanor was reminiscent of a clergyman.
He sat with one leg crossed over the other, and when he bobbed his foot, his shiny shoes caught the light of the flickering fluorescent bulbs and gleamed brilliantly. Shiloh stood beside him, tense.
“Good evening, girls,” said the man.
“Good evening,” said the girls in answer, shuffling toward him like a flock of ducklings. I had never seen them look so small. In the wake of this man, they seemed to have lost all their bravado and verve.
I looked to the man again, trying to decide whether he was handsome.
He had peculiar features, a prominent nose, skin almost paper pale and so thin you could see the veins beneath it.
His hair fell across his furrowed brow in a black slick.
No matter how intently I studied him, I couldn’t place his age.
He almost seemed too young to be called a man, but his demeanor dispelled any notion of boyhood.
And there was something decidedly familiar about him, like I might’ve seen him before, perhaps at Adeline’s funeral, seated in one of the pews toward the back, or maybe he was one of the priests at the church, which would have explained his collar.
But what really disturbed me were his eyes.
They were large and gray, and as I met his gaze, as I forced myself to hold it, I was reminded of the serial-killer documentaries that Adeline had sometimes made me watch.
The men in those films—who beheaded their own mothers and killed cats and stuffed dead girls into the trunks of their cars—had the same flat affect that this man did.
The look of someone who had killed once, or maybe many times, and would again.
It was less malicious than detached, but I found it more frightening than malice ever could be.
“I’m going to let you begin,” said the man, gazing at all of us girls with the look of a father who was less angry than disappointed. He raised an eyebrow. “Well?”
There was a beat of silence, and then all the girls began talking at once, over and under each other.
There was a lot of stuttering and hand-waving and ranting, everyone interrupting each other in their haste to plead their case.
I heard my name mentioned several times and Adeline’s just once, but with everyone talking all at the same time, I couldn’t grasp the context or understand what exactly the girls were trying to say.
The man pinched the bridge of his nose, exasperated, and the girls went quiet. “What I’m hearing,” he said, “is that you’ve stepped outside your jurisdiction. Is that so?”
Skye bobbed her head, but Naomi, who was standing just in front of her as if shielding the girl with her own body, didn’t move.
“She’s one of us,” said Shiloh, her voice steady and low. She was the only girl who didn’t look scared. “Or at least she can be.”
“I’m afraid that isn’t possible for her.”
“Why?”
“Because Roslyn here doesn’t particularly want to live.” The man turned to look at me. “Isn’t that right, Roslyn?”
My mouth felt so dry I was surprised that I was still able to speak. “Who are you, and how do you know my name?”
“You didn’t tell her?” he asked the other girls with mock hurt. “I’m wounded.”
Naomi stepped forward, looking sick and drawn and wholly unlike herself. “We thought it would be best to give her time.”
“And to let you make your own introductions,” said Shiloh.
“Well, I’ll get to it, then.” He clasped his hands, a gesture that seemed almost professional, like he was about to gesture to a PowerPoint he’d prepared for the occasion. He fixed his gaze on me. “I’m Death.”
I looked to the other girls, confused, trying to figure out if I was meant to take this seriously. They met my gaze with blank stares or, in the case of Riley and Iona, didn’t look at me at all. I turned back to the man. “Did your parents name you that?”
He laughed aloud, but he was the only one. The other girls, apart from Shiloh, seemed too terrified to speak. “This one has teeth. That’s a good quality in a girl.”
I stared at him blankly, waiting for him to answer my question—a tactic I’d picked up from Conny during my time at the diner when I was still learning how to handle the difficult customers. There’s power in silence if you can stomach it, she’d once said to me.
When the man realized I wasn’t going to speak, he answered. “I don’t have any parents or much by way of family. The body you’re seeing now is…shall we call it rented? Something I wear when the occasion demands it, like a good suit.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, let me put it this way: When your aunt Veronica died of lung cancer, I was there in the room with her. When your classmate Joel died on his motorcycle, crushed beneath the belly of a semi, I was there with him. And, of course, when our dear Adeline…”
I froze at the mention of my sister. “You knew Adeline?”
He nodded. “Quite well, and if you’re wondering, then yes, I was there with her at the end. She wasn’t alone. No one ever is. Not really.”
“So you know what happened to her.”
“I am what happened to her,” he said, and for some reason, it was here that I began to understand. The man before me wasn’t a man at all. He was a concept. A great and terrible inevitability bound to a body. He was death.
“What did you do to her?” I asked, my knees going soft beneath me.
When I swayed, it was Iona who sprang forward to steady me with a firm hand at my elbow, whispering nothings into my ear that people usually reserve for the worst of occasions. “Be strong. You can get through this. I know you can.”
“I’m afraid I don’t give away anything for free,” said Death. “All that I offer is earned.”
I knew it was bait, but I was desperate to take it anyway. I needed to know. I needed the truth. “How do I earn it?”
“We kill for him,” said Skye. “All of us here, that’s what we do. What your sister did when traveling with us.”
I froze, my mind scrambling to make sense of what she’d just said. My sister killing. My sister a killer. These girls all killers.
Skye’s voice softened and quieted. “We were all supposed to die young, but he intervened.”
This made no sense to me. The girls were more alive than anyone I had ever known.
They were puffy eyes and scraped knees, thin clove cigarettes and morning breath and swallowed apologies and run-on sentences pierced with unnecessary interjections of like and um and sorry.
They were bitten nails and super tampons passed under the walls of bathroom stalls.
They were more alive than anyone I had ever known before, with all the time in the world to do anything they wanted to do, become whoever they wanted to be.
Or so I thought.
Another idea occurred to me then: If Death only recruited girls who were destined to die, and if these girls worked on his behalf killing people…is that why they’d first come to me? Had they come to kill me?
“It’s not what you think,” said Shiloh, doing that thing again, like she was reading my mind. “I wouldn’t have hurt you. It was the opposite, actually. We came to Michigan to check on you. We were passing through Ohio when I made the call, decided to take a short detour up north, to you.”
“Why?” My voice cracked. “Why would you drag me into this?”
“Adeline asked us to,” said Shiloh. “She wanted us to make sure you were okay, and…you clearly weren’t. If you were, if you had accepted what happened, processed a bit, you wouldn’t have left your life behind so quickly. Wouldn’t have dropped everything just to chase the ghost of her.”
Shiloh was right, and I hated that she knew, on first meeting, that I was nothing more than a vessel of grief.
I’d wanted to believe that there was something more that she was drawn to, a vestige of the girl that I used to be.
But that was me deluding myself. Shiloh was making good on a promise to Adeline, taking care of her weak little sister who floundered, helpless, without her.
I turned back to Death. “Did you make her kill for you?”
“I don’t make anyone do anything,” said Death. “I give these girls a choice. Everyone here was destined to die young. They would have, if not for my interference. I offered them a deal. If they kill on my behalf, their lives are spared.”