Chapter 35 Grim
Sorry, not fucking sorry.
Because what was any version of eternity compared with making Helena come like that?
Stalking down the ICU wing of a hospital somewhere in Idaho, concealing cloak in place and scythe in one hand, I kept my gaze forward even as images flashed in my skull like a slideshow.
My skeleton’s hand wrapped around the plush flesh of one sumptuous breast, Helena’s head thrown back that way, hair splayed around her head, my cock buried shaft deep in her, my essence scouring her, taking her soul for a ride at the same time I decimated her perfect body.
Currently, I didn’t have eyes to roll to the back of my head, but I did take a moment to pause and press a skeletal palm to one bland white wall, my other constricting around the handle of my scythe.
Because fuck. As much as I’d always tried to convince myself otherwise, possessing a body did have its perks.
Helena, Helena, Helena…
You kinky minx. You loved every fucking second, didn’t you?
Not as much as I did.
Not once during my time as this thing I’d become had I ever even thought about a woman like that. Like this. Never mind that I wasn’t supposed to. I just didn’t.
But Helena…
Those eyes. Her breath. Those lips forming my name.
Pulling those screams out of her—with my bone hands no less.
Then. When I’d been getting off on talking shit, fucking with her. And she said she loved taking my cock?
I’d almost shaken apart right then.
I hadn’t exactly been with a woman before. At least not that I could remember. And not for a very, very, very, very fucking long time.
Through some absolute miracle, I’d held it together. Somehow. But I hadn’t been okay.
Still wasn’t. Probably wasn’t ever going to be again.
Because the taste of her. Pure ambrosia.
I could dine on her, that soul, and her pleasure every day for the rest of eternity.
If only.
Fuck this job. I wanted that one.
I wanted her.
Overhead, the intercom cut on, a screech of feedback lancing through my renegade thoughts just before someone announced a code blue.
An instant later, the scrubs-clad team rushed into action, several members hurrying past me, oblivious to my presence.
Or to the fact that their efforts would be in vain, and it was already too late.
Today, I was picking up a Fated. Another Fated.
The tugging impulse had come to me while Helena slept, and I’d had to leave her there, passed out from getting fucked into oblivion—mind, body, and soul.
Maybe I should have gone easier on her. But it had been hard enough behaving myself when she’d been so absolutely soaked before I’d even touched her.
When she’d been a gasoline-drenched powder keg I’d set off with a few teases.
With my bones. Which she’d fucking loved.
Something that had sent my damn ego into the fucking stratosphere—a place I couldn’t seem to wrestle it back from.
My thoughts, too, ran rampant, wildly circling all the ways I wanted to fuck her delirious the next time.
Except there wasn’t going to be a next time. Not for me.
I was done.
Just like this poor bastard I’d come to get, whoever he was.
I stopped in front of his room, the door to which stood open.
Inside, the code blue team stood gathered around the hospital bed, a huddle of controlled chaos, their shouts along with the one-note song of the heart monitor providing a soundtrack to the drama that, like a Shakespeare tragedy—spoiler alert—ended in certain death.
Normally, I would wait outside. Give the doctors time to make the call official.
But sometimes, on rare occasions, souls abandoned their vessels on their own and went wandering. On rarer occasions, I even found them fully formed, cognizant, and… waiting.
“You’re looking for me, I think,” said the spirit who stood in the stretch of hall I’d just passed through. The old man in the hospital gown—I must have missed him because… well, because I’d been distracted.
“This way,” the bearded and gray-haired man said, turning to head down the hall, absolutely atom bombing my daydream to flaming bits with the sight of his bare and wrinkly ass, visible through the open back of the half-tied hospital gown.
My shoulders slumped.
Duty calls, I fucking guess.
And where the hell did he even think he was going?
The old man walked straight into—and through—the closed ICU door, out into the waiting area. Even souls who had managed to disengage from their physical forms early didn’t typically know they were dead and could move through walls.
This was weird.
When it came to the Fated, though, things sometimes got weird.
Case in point: Helena.
I unfurled and reemerged on the other side of the ICU door, in the waiting room populated with people waiting—fretting.
Though I expected to have to track down Old Man Bare Ass, I found him seated in one of the chairs, his back to me, though he twisted around to address me.
“Over here.”
Though it was rare for the living to see me, the dead almost always did. Ghosts at least.
Which was, technically speaking, what he currently was.
I stepped toward him, curious, because even the dead, those with enough sense to perceive me, feared me.
Unlike Flora, I didn’t exactly give off comforting vibes.
This man only smiled at me before gesturing up at the TV with one weathered hand. “Have you seen this show before?”
Internally, I scowled, only offering the screen a short glance before returning my hooded stare to him.
The flat screen portrayed some kind of sitcom with a corny laugh track.
“I’ve seen this episode before,” said the man, “but… I love it. When I was young, I wanted to be in pictures. Make people laugh like these two actors. Like them, I had a talent for it.”
“You can’t stay,” I told him, my monster’s voice rolling out of me, cold and inflectionless.
“Time to go, you mean,” said the man, even as he gripped the armrests of the chair, the first sign of his fear showing.
“I’m not trying to rush you,” I admitted. “It’s just… you have somewhere to be.”
“Somewhere to be,” he echoed, that death grip on the armrests easing a bit. “Somewhere good?” he probed, hopeful.
“We’d both know by now if it was somewhere… not good,” I allowed.
I’d meant to calm his fears but worry knit his brow as he glanced up at the TV again.
“You’re not sure,” he grunted after a beat, reading into my reply.
“Honestly,” I said, “I wish I did know.”
“Look,” he said, still not tearing his gaze away from the TV, “I know you must be busy. Probably one of the busiest beings around. But… can you just… give me a few minutes? Long enough for this episode to end? It’s almost over.”
I deliberated, my hand flexing on the scythe that I wouldn’t need in this situation. His spirit had wandered off from its vessel, his body, so like the shipwrecked souls floating in the ocean, I could just grab him.
When… he was ready.
“Why not,” I said, taking a few steps toward him before settling into the seat next to his.
“Th-thanks,” he said, like he really hadn’t expected me to agree.
Lucky for him, I had my own reasons for wanting to procrastinate.
The sooner I got done here, the sooner I had to go back to grabbing other souls.
And the sooner I got done with that, the sooner I had to return to the Hallowed Halls.
Reentering the Hallowed Halls meant facing facts.
And, like this guy, for the moment, I preferred to prolong the fantasy that, sooner or later, I wasn’t going into a Basin.
“The chemistry between these two,” he said, pointing at the TV, “is… otherworldly. Their characters—they really love each other.”
This time, I didn’t say anything but stared up at the couple arguing on the TV show, having it out with one another in the middle of a coffee shop, shouting each other down before, out of nowhere, the two rushed each other, crashing into a kiss.
Again, my mind went to Helena—the way we’d kissed in her apartment.
Moments before, out in the hall, she’d asked if we were arguing. I hadn’t thought we were.
Maybe, though, we had been.
Next to me, the old man started to stand.
“You don’t want to do that,” I told him. “Trust me.”
He didn’t say anything but settled back into his chair.
“Thought you were distracted,” he admitted.
I was.
“You’re afraid,” I guessed. “For a moment, I thought you might not be.”
“You’re carrying a scythe,” he said. “I thought that was just… something from movies and books.”
I sighed long and loud, taking on my human voice and skin again before tossing back my hood.
“Normally,” I said, shooting him a side glance as he absorbed my appearance with new shock, “pickups don’t see me.”
“Ah,” said the soul, “you’re a young man. That surprises me.”
“Older than I look,” I grunted.
“Really?” he questioned. “And how old is old?”
Here I’d been calling him the old man when, really, that descriptor applied more aptly to me…
This role. I’d been in it for eons. Longer than either Flora or Johann had occupied the Hallowed Halls.
And, in the beginning, it had just been… me.
The beginning… I didn’t want to think about that.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” I said truthfully, gesturing to the TV screen, which now displayed rolling credits.
The man fell silent again.
Then, after several long beats, he spoke. “If I could go back and do it all again,” he said, “I’d do it so much differently, you know?”
“I think everyone feels that way to a certain degree,” I observed.
“But that’s the trick, isn’t it?” he said. “No one does get to go back and do it all differently. Even if we do come back or move on to something new. There is only one Cielo Bluford—was, I guess I should say—and as much as he wanted to, he never did pictures.”
I peered his way again. “I’m sorry,” I said, shocking myself because I actually meant it.
Helena’s plight. The snipped fuse on her short life. It brought more awareness to what I did than I’d previously bothered with.
Until now, I’d just been the collector of souls. Neither good nor bad. Just, like death itself, an inescapable reality.
Death, like life, wasn’t fair, though. And maybe, for as long as I’d been… this, I’d never really appreciated that.
He shrugged. “It’s all okay, I think. Because even if it’s over, and clearly it is over, it isn’t really, is it?
Or else… you wouldn’t be here, would you?
Who knows? Maybe wherever I’m going, people make pictures there, too.
And whoever is in charge there, they’re bound to understand that circumstances arise.
Things happen. Life gets in the way.” His voice dropped, taking on an oddly knowing tone.
“Death gets in the way, too… doesn’t it? ”
I frowned, tilting my head at him. Instead of elaborating, he only offered me a weak smile.
“All right, copper.” Palms up, he extended both wrists to me. “You got me.”
My frown deepened into a scowl as I peered from his wrinkled, weathered face with its bright blue eyes and neatly trimmed white beard to the matching and liver-spotted hands he offered me.
“I promise it’s not like that, Mr. Bluford,” I said. “I’m not anything like a cop. There’s no judgment. I’m just… the middleman.”
“Please,” he said, dropping one hand in lieu of extending only the other, like a friend or even a rival offering a shake. “Call me Cielo.”
I took his hand, but instead of offering the name I didn’t have back to him, I zapped his soul into its more transportable shape—a pale pastel-blue sphere.
“Nothing personal,” I said to the soul, to Cielo. “Just… time’s up is all.”
Which was the truth. Also, caring about another Fated, at least beyond the capacity required by my station, was something I needed to avoid.
I only had a few heartstrings anyway, and Helena alone owned those.
Rising, I leaned my scythe against the desk of the nurses’ station while I worked to secure the Fated in my hourglass.
Inside me, my spirit tightened at the fate of this soul, this Fated, who never got to do what he wanted. Who had been granted more time than Helena, too.
Helena…
Was there truly nothing I could do?
After leaving the hospital, I went to pick up all the souls I’d kept waiting while I’d been playing hooky with Helena.
After that, I went to collect the fresher ones.
There’d been plenty to keep me busy until nearly five.
That was typically the time Helena went home.
It was also an hour after she said her coworker friend, Hunter, came into work.
A time frame that would allow me to talk to him without her there.
Because, until I figured out what was going on and what I needed to do, I had to stay away from her.
If for no other reason than that I wouldn’t be able to resist taking her like that again.
And right now, if I was going to save her life, preserve her soul in this world and existence—I needed to fucking focus.