Chapter 25 Grim #3
He was a rat, though. And I was—and would be—the Grim Reaper for eternity.
Which meant I had to get Helena home, my fucking ducks in a row, and my skull back in the game.
“Are you ready now?” I asked her.
Again, she nodded. Then she released her stranglehold on the crossbody strap of her battered pumpkin purse before letting her arms fall to her sides. Before presenting herself like a sacrifice… “So, should I just… stand here?”
More silence passed between us. I didn’t want to tell her yes or no. In truth, she didn’t have to do a thing. But I couldn’t be cold to her in this moment, not as I had been before. Flora, perhaps, had a point about my behavior.
So I lifted a skeletal hand, beckoning Helena with a finger, keeping my voice as soft as I could make it. “Come here.”
I’d meant for her to step toward me, to deplete the distance it would take for me to reach her, to eliminate the need for me to catch and draw her to me as I’d done before like a spider callously snatching up its prey.
Instead, Helena rushed me as she had in that alley behind the library, again wrapping her arms around my shoulders, as if the impulse to embrace me was something she had, until this moment, been trying to rein in.
I swept her up into my own arms, and in the same motion, I plunged my dark, cool essence into her chest and seized that sunshine soul, wispy tendrils lashing and wrapping her pale gold essence, tongues of darkness tasting—relishing—the heat of her.
“Grim, I—”
She didn’t get a chance to finish before I shifted her soul that small degree, loosening it just a bit, just enough.
The resistance I’d expected, warned her about, didn’t occur.
She surrendered to me, body and soul. I held her just like that for a moment, overcome by a debilitating feast of foreign sensations.
Her warm body weighing hardly anything in my cold bony arms, her softness killing me by fitting itself between my ribs.
That searing liquid-gold soul molten and malleable in the desolate, ravenous grips of mine.
I could have remained with her like this forever. Lost in the scent of her skin. Beguiled and bewitched by the gentle weight of her. Drunk on her scalding spirit, the heat of which burned simultaneously too hot and not hot enough.
I’d never let another human touch me before, but I suspected no other would have made me feel the way she had. Almost as if she’d dragged life into the quiet rot where I belonged.
That was a dangerous thought, and the temptation to keep her with me—held this way, like she was mine—forever would consume me if I let it.
She was not mine to hold on to. And could not be.
I had to let her go. In every sense of the phrase. I had to.
So I forced myself through the portal, gliding into her living room, the invisible membrane separating our worlds rippling away behind us.
I had to halt when, unexpectedly, her soul grew tendrils of its own. Like new shoots on a tender vine, those wisps began to wrap and creep along the invading tentacles of mine—heightening everything.
God, this intoxicating creature.
The spiritual taste of her alone, bright and sweet, simultaneously petal soft and biting, crisp as white wine yet hot as molten honey, forbade me from releasing her.
To have her winding me like this had me again questioning the need to let her go, even though I should have released her spirit the instant I had her safely through the portal.
Instead, while I once again moved through her home, I caved to the overpowering urge to keep her in my grasp, giving in to her hold on me.
Drugged and addled, yearning for an even deeper draft of her, all but wrecked by the sensation of her gentle and curious searing spirit climbing and coiling around mine, I fought the impulse to return her wanderings.
With enormous effort, I denied this hunger, this thirst. Already, I’d done enough to disturb her peace.
Helena’s head lay on my shoulder as I carried her through her living room with its cream walls and yellow-upholstered furniture.
Unlike the last time I’d been here, clutter covered most surfaces, including the floor.
A testament, no doubt, to how out of control she must feel.
Her smiling stuffed pineapple now lay on the floor next to a fuzzy blanket she must have kicked off at some point.
Empty mugs littered the surface of her coffee table along with several books and a few food wrappers.
Stacks of novels and picture books lay strewn across the floor around the table along with a small collection of hand puppets.
A bra dotted with lemons draped the back of the couch.
Lost in the bliss of her, I only loosely took in the details of our surroundings as I turned a corner—passing photos on the walls, a pile of mail on the kitchen counter, sunflower notepads scrawled with looping, bubbly handwriting.
In moments, I was going to have to release her. Then I was going to have to leave. And not come back until this was over.
Next time I did see her, I would also have to do what I should have from the start.
My job.
Inside her bedroom, pink and purple lights hung along her walls and mapped her ceiling, casting all in a pearly, pastel glow not unlike her own. Bohemian-style pillows piled a queen-sized bed.
Gently, I laid her on the busy yellow-and-blue paisley quilt comforter.
Helena murmured, lids fluttering, her fingers curling into the fabric of my cloak, signs that told me she remained awake. Yet another surprise.
Though I extracted my arms from her, relinquishing her to the mattress, she clung to me, hands slipping to grip the collar of my robes, tendrils of her soul constricting around the dark limbs of mine.
Her essence spiked mine with more of that summer burn, thawing and searing me, like I’d frozen to death eons ago and forgotten what it was like to step into warm waters.
Fuck, she felt good—like a tropical breeze laced with pure morphine.
Heaven, if it existed, wasn’t a realm I ever planned on experiencing, but damn if this didn’t come close.
Helena.
Desperate to end this before I gave in and forked my spirit over to hers, I rasped her name with my soul, which I loosened from hers—tentatively.
My hope was that she’d show me mercy, that hers would follow suit and loosen in turn.
It did the opposite, tightening and tugging on mine, the true devourer.
Her spirit proved strong, and something akin to a gasp escaped me as I caught and braced myself above her with skeletal hands as she clung to me with both body and spirit, our souls entangled in a way that threatened to unravel me.
Then that yellow essence of hers began to heat and temper mine, bringing a fever infused with her emotions: hope, sadness, fondness, and, yes, fear.
That fear, though, it wasn’t the kind she should have been entertaining—the one surrounding the dark unknown.
Instead, as I read her spirit’s inherent nakedness with mine, unwilling to rip free of her, I identified a trepidation that fascinated me and scalded me with its potency. One surrounding her last wishes.
Sometimes, when I took souls, they echoed with their final desires—always unfulfilled.
Normally, time was out when they entered my grips.
That was not the case with Helena.
Her last wishes floated through me like gentle echoes. A day with her best friend. A visit with her parents. Strawberry shortcake.
And a kiss… with me.
The fear I’d picked up on, unfathomably, it surrounded not her death, or the thought that she wouldn’t get any of her wishes, but my reaction to them. Her last one.
She feared my rejection.
She had no way of knowing that, if I was ever granted a final wish, I’d want the same. From her.
So I did the last thing I should have done and I surrendered when, despite that inconceivable fear, one of her hands released its hold on my collar to enter the darkness of my hood.
Her palm, warm, found the cheek I did not possess while, with her other hand—still fastened tight around my collar—she drew me down to her.
Like the pull of death itself, I couldn’t have denied her even if I’d wanted to.
Still, nothing could have prepared me, either.
In kissing me, pressing her soft lips to the bare bones of my teeth, she detonated my soul, ruining it—and me—for all the rest of time.
And I let her. Welcomed the complete annihilation of the being I had been up until this point.
A compromise to what I wanted to do in return—which was to retake my human form and kiss her back, show her just how sweet death could taste.
I’d already sworn to myself I wouldn’t dare.
The repercussions from this kiss, the knowledge that there would never be another, would haunt me enough through eternity.
My now-trembling soul thudded in the simultaneously cruel and benevolent grips of hers, mimicking a phantom heartbeat, like her touch had the opposite power of mine—to restore life to the ravaged rather than to sweep up after the desolation of death.
No entity in either heaven or hell could ever have destroyed me more thoroughly.
After this latest forbidden action, the most forbidden of all I’d taken or allowed up to this point, I couldn’t see her again. Not until it was time. Or dare to do more… I would.
So I reciprocated this unearned affection, this humbling last wish, by kissing her back with my soul instead, sending nearly the whole of my essence rushing into her, my freezing spirit scouring her suddenly scorching one, enwrapping it, braiding with it, piercing it, entangling with it, clenching it tight.
With this invasion, the softest and most enticing murmur of pleasure escaped my librarian.
And that subtle and breathy moan did me in, eliciting from my entire being something I had not experienced ever. At least not in this incarnation.
In that instant, Helena awakened a slumbering part of me, a dead corner of my former and long-forgotten humanness.
She did the impossible, the unforgivable. The undoable.
By, among so many other things, turning me the fuck on.