Chapter 16 Grim
She insisted on going in. Inside the restaurant.
The eye-searingly bright and blasphemously well-lit McDonald’s restaurant.
And “insisted” as in the moment I parked, she said, “Thank God, I’m starving,” got out of The Judge, shut the door behind her, and, without a backward glance, walked toward the garish, french fry–scented electric bonfire of glowing yellow and red.
I gritted my teeth, mentally berating myself for letting her talk me into bringing her here when I really should have taken her home. Except she’d made a point.
If Cedric could find her at the library, he could find her in her apartment. I had no doubt he already knew where she lived. Maybe he was even there now, waiting for her.
Unless he’d followed us…
Muttering a curse under my breath, I got out of the car, slamming the door shut behind me.
“Wait,” I called to her from across the parking lot as she grabbed the door handle.
Helena turned to me, arching a questioning brow as, still garbed in my sweeping black robes, I cut across the asphalt to the sidewalk.
Taking my human form contained my soul, so its smoky essence no longer tailed me or wafted around my frame. Assuming my human form brought complications, too.
Maybe, if I was lucky, this pit stop would be a quick one.
Though I admittedly didn’t know where to go from here. Where to take her…
“A-are you hungry?” she asked when I stopped beside her. She tried to open the door, but I shoved—and held—it shut, peering in through the window, searching for any evidence of Cedric or his wizard’s work.
Most of the booths and tables sat empty. The place had just a couple of diners—a beefy guy in a ball cap chowing down on a burger and an elderly couple eating soft serve. Quiet pop music played muffled through the glass.
No sign of Cedric. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t lurking about.
Maybe I shouldn’t have hacked his soul off like that when he’d come snooping around the library. Just something about his wanting to get into that elevator, confirm Helena’s death, had… triggered me.
Apparently into a murderous rage.
Maybe I was cracking up. Finally cracking up.
I’d been at this game long enough…
I couldn’t deny, though, how that event—scything Cedric—and my knee-jerk need to retaliate had led to tonight’s debacle. Which I still couldn’t be sure was over.
“I can get you something,” Helena said as I opened the door for her, surveying the parking lot next. “Goodness knows it’s the least I can do.”
I peered back down to her. What was she saying to me now? Half of what came out of her mouth struck me as absurd. Not so much the things she said, but more so that she said them… to me.
“You know,” she elaborated, “for saving me? That’s three times now. I’d say you deserve a treat for that.”
She slipped into the restaurant while I gave the parking lot one final sweep before backing in after her.
Blinking against the glaring fluorescents that seared my retinas, burned my brain, and scorched my nocturnal, light-averse, subterranean-dwelling soul, I followed on her heels as she made a beeline for the counter, behind which stood a kid, his curly hair cinched under the band of his visor.
“Cool costumes,” said the teen as he assessed us. “Bryce,” his name tag read.
“Oh, I’m not—” Helena caught herself. She gave my black-clad form a once-over and then cleared her throat. “I mean, thanks.” She issued the tiniest of curtsies before aiming a thumb at me. “He’s the Grim Reaper, and I’m a children’s librarian.”
Helena gave a nervous, high-pitched titter, sharing the inside joke with herself alone.
Bryce nodded appreciatively. “Talk about the ultimate power couple.”
Power couple?
I shot him a glare, and he gulped.
“Yeah, so, wh-what can I get you?” he asked, retraining his focus on his computer screen.
Helena sized me up with an admonishing frown, then turned to Bryce—whose hand shook as it hovered over the touchscreen.
“Chicken nugget Happy Mean—I mean Meal,” Helena said. “Meal, not Mean. Happy Meal. Not Mean Meal.” She popped her pumpkin-shaped purse onto the counter. “With a chocolate milkshake. And…” She gestured to me. “Whatever my… date wants.”
I glowered down at her while Bryce arched both brows at me.
Like he was silently asking himself—and me—how I’d gotten to be such a lucky bastard.
But she was just trying to make us seem more natural. Like I’d done with the cop.
Also, did she seriously just order herself a kid’s meal? And just a second ago, was that a Freudian slip? Did she really think I was mean?
I wasn’t being mean to the kid. Then again, maybe I could be nicer.
But if we were supposed to be on a date—fake or otherwise—why the hell was she digging in her purse?
“Small coffee,” I told the kid. “Black.”
“That’s not a treat,” muttered Helena, sounding disappointed as, with trembling fingers, she unearthed her wallet.
My scowl, which I kept aimed at Helena, deepened as I extracted my billfold and then a twenty, which I handed to Bryce before Helena could wrestle free a ten.
“Keep the change,” I told the kid as he rang in the cash.
“Seriously?” asked Bryce, brightening.
I shifted my glare to him, and he ducked his head, eyes vanishing behind the visor of his hat, his smile falling as he worked to break the bill.
“Very seriously,” he murmured under his breath.
And here it was—one of the too-numerous-to-count reasons I never took my human form. I didn’t fit in. I couldn’t. And trying always made everyone, including me, uncomfortable as fuck.
“Thank you,” Helena whispered my way as she slid down to where another staff member deposited an honest-to-God plastic jack-o’-lantern bucket and the paper cup with her milkshake.
My coffee followed. “You didn’t have to do that.
I would have bought your coffee, but sidenote, that twenty you gave him totally looked like it came from the nineties. ”
Because it probably did since that was likely the last time I’d taken this form and, consequently, needed cash for anything.
“Does that mean you come from old money?” she asked, then laughed up at me, her smile—unexpected as it came—shattering something within me.
I looked away because, deprived of the obscuring sanctity of my hood, I couldn’t just stand there staring at that smile like I had when she’d flashed it my way the first time. The last time…
We’d been on that balcony then—the site of her demise. The death that had never occurred because I hadn’t let it. Because I’d stopped it.
That smile. It had done something to me then, and it was doing something to me now.
Except that wasn’t supposed to happen. I certainly wasn’t supposed to let it.
“S-sorry,” Helena said before brushing past me, “I make jokes like that when I’m nervous. And… when I’m not. I’ll… just grab us a table. Look, there’s one that lights up.”
Great. More lights. Just what I needed.
I grabbed my coffee and followed Helena to the long flat white table, which indeed displayed a grid of circular lights that changed colors and shifted patterns.
Because of course it did.
Helena, who’d slid into the booth, had already set up camp by extracting everything within the little plastic bucket, so I took the seat across from her, the one that gave me a clear view of the door we’d entered through.
I set my coffee down—dealing with the distracting light show in between monitoring the door behind her and the one behind me.
Sitting between two public entrances at a light-up table in the middle of a fast-food restaurant?
Why don’t I just send up a flare for Cedric while I’m at it?
“They respond to touch,” said Helena, poking at the circular lights with one hand while, in the other, she held aloft a golden, roughly boot-shaped chicken nugget. “That’s too neat. I wonder who makes these. This would be so much fun in the activity area of the children’s department.”
“You’re not okay,” I said. “Are you.”
“No,” she said, a tear falling out of nowhere, “I’m not. But… that’s okay.”
She crunched into the nugget and chewed while tapping the table, the lights of which flashed yellow.
Everything I’d put her through—it wasn’t okay. Nothing about this situation—our situation—was. A long beat elapsed in which I tried to figure out what to say—where to begin with how we’d gotten here. Did I even know myself?
Helena stole a sip of her milkshake and resumed poking at the table, her touch shifting the yellow lights to blue. “It’s just that… I don’t really want to die.”
No one ever does.
“But I’m starting to think I’m going to anyway.”
I come for everyone eventually.
“But I’m confused, too.”
You’re not the only one.
“Because you’re supposed to reap souls.”
I’m supposed to.
“Not save lives. And yet… you keep saving mine. Why?”
She wiped away that lone tear with the cuff of the sleeve of her jack-o’-lantern sweatshirt, then she popped the rest of the half-eaten nugget into her mouth and chewed.
I shifted, sitting back in the booth, glaring at the coffee.
Owning up to this being all my fault wasn’t the most comfortable place to start, but all things considered, it was probably as good a place as any.
“I fucked up,” I told her after a beat.
“With my life,” she said after swallowing.
“With your death,” I corrected.
Those eyes flashed up to me again, terrified—and tired. An odd and haunted hollowness emanated from them. She’d been through so much. And not just tonight. I’d brought it all down upon her. She’d asked me why, but even I wasn’t sure.
“You were there to get me that night,” she guessed. “At the party. Is… that what happened?”
“Normally people don’t see me,” I said. “You did, though. And that… complicated things.”
“You’re saying this is all my fault?” she asked, aiming a fry at herself.
I scowled at her. Because where had she gotten that? “Of course it’s not your fault. I just told you I fucked up.”
“By saving me.” She popped the fry into her mouth.
“Yes.”
Helena’s scowl deepened to a glower as she chewed. Then she aimed another fry at me. “You are not good at answering questions, are you?”
“I’m not used to needing to.”
She threw up her hands like I’d just proved her point. And… perhaps I had.
I never talked to anyone. I tried not to. I was better off keeping my own counsel. That way, I never got fucked. Until that plan backfired and, apparently, I did.
“Look,” I said, because maybe it was best to just lay it all out. “I was supposed to collect your soul. I didn’t. So I came up short with my delivery.”
“Delivery,” she repeated in a deadpan voice.
“Somebody important noticed there was a soul missing,” I said. “They don’t know it was yours. Not yet at least. But just because your arrival was delayed, that doesn’t stop fate.”
“Hold it right there,” she said, flashing a palm. “You said ‘arrival.’ Arrival where exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” she asked, her chin jutting forward, her tone incredulous. “You’re the Grim Reaper! How do you not know where my soul’s supposed to go?”
I sent a paranoid glance around the dining area. The beefy guy had left, but the elderly couple gave us frightened looks.
“Above my pay grade,” I snarled through gritted teeth.
“Unreal,” she said, grabbing her milkshake and thudding back in her seat, her stare going glassy as she trained it on the table, the lights of which flashed red.
“ ‘Fate,’ you said. Meaning I’m doomed. Is that what happened today, though?
The balcony and the elevator, yeah. But today didn’t feel like ‘fate.’ ”
“There are some… office politics at play,” I said, which earned me a bug-eyed stare, but that was the only way I knew how to put it.
“Politics,” she echoed. “At the office. Meaning the Grim Reaper has… an office. Does that mean that’s a company car out there?” She aimed a thumb toward the parking lot.
“The Judge is mine,” I informed her.
“You named your car?”
“That’s the model,” I corrected. “1969 Pontiac GTO Judge, Starlight Black. Limited production and that one’s in survivor condition. Unrestored with factory paint, interior, and components still intact. Rare and collectible.”
“You named your car,” she concluded.
“Tell me you didn’t name yours,” I shot back.
“I’m not death personified!”
I clenched my jaw, holding my silence.
“Back to these ‘office politics,’ ” she said. “Please tell me corporate gives you guys Tombstone pizza parties.”
Now I leveled her with a baleful glare.
“Is there a customer service department?” she asked. “I have some feedback. Then again, maybe I should just go straight to Yelp.” She waved her milkshake in the air between us. “ ‘Doom can be hard, but these guys make it harder.’ ”
“That man who attacked you is named Cedric,” I said. “He hates me, and the feeling is mutual. He also wants my job.”
“Let me guess. The benefits are to die for.”
“Is everything a joke to you?” I snipped.
“Why?” she asked, slamming her shake down. “Should I panic instead?”
“You haven’t yet,” I said, my tone quiet, calm, because I hadn’t realized until now that she’d been using humor to cope. To deal with the sand in the hourglass that she’d already guessed was, for her, quickly running out. Though I guess it could be said she was borrowing time now. We both were.
Did she deserve to know why? Yeah.
Did I want to tell her? Fuck no.
“Why did you save me, Grim?” she asked.
“Because Cedric was trying to collect your soul, and if he does—”
“The first time,” she said, cutting me off.
I went silent, snapping my mouth shut, my jaw hardening—ticking. “I don’t know.”
Those eyes, green as sunlit summer grass, flicked up to me. “You were going to take me home just now. Does that mean fate is not coming for me tonight?”
“I… don’t know,” I repeated before hurrying to add, “but I’ll feel it if it does.”
Like that was supposed to comfort her. But then… why did I want it to?
“Did you feel it tonight?” she asked.
“No,” I admitted. “That’s why I was… late. Cedric was trying to murder you so he could hand deliver your soul himself. Something that would implicate me and… get me fired.”
“Sooo,” Helena ventured, her words inflecting down, “you’ve been saving me to keep from getting fired.”
“Essentially,” I admitted, my eyes cutting away, toward the street and the switching stoplights, the lazy traffic that eased by. “Yes.”
“I see.”
I scowled at this response, that rush of guilt that had assailed me in the alley returning to flog me again.
“When fate is… activated and you do feel it,” she said, “then what? You’ll just come save me again?”
“Depends.”
“Depends,” she echoed, the softest catch in her voice. “On what exactly?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer her.
Because just then, Cedric walked in.