Chapter Forty
“Borrow - to adopt or use as one's own.”
Frankie
I almost expected it to be the cops. That they somehow figured out I was harboring a body in my house and they had come to drag Piper and me off to jail.
I stood behind the door, wishing I had a peephole so I could at least prepare myself for whatever I was about to be accused of. I cast a glance at Piper who was standing behind me, a worried look on her face.
The person banged on the door again and I jumped. “I know you’re in there, Frankie. Open the door!”
I frowned at the unfamiliar voice calling my name.
That settled it. The only strangers that could know my name were cops. “Go hide,” I whispered to Piper.
“Yeah, ‘cause that’s not suspicious,” she retorted.
This time when he banged on the door, he didn’t stop, just kept on hammering.
I took a breath and yanked it open, trying to look surprised as to why a group of cops would be on my doorstep.
There was no group. There were no cops. Just a man, a lone man standing there with a look of impatience (and constipation?) on his face.
“Can I help you?” I asked tentatively.
“Me?” he said. “No. But I’ve come with a message from Charming. And to collect… what I left here.”
It wasn’t often someone rendered me speechless. I don’t think a complete stranger ever managed it, until now. I stood there staring at him, trying to decide the best way to answer him. He let out a sigh and walked in the apartment, his gaze going directly to Piper and holding for long moments.
“Excuse me?” I managed, drawing his attention away from her.
“You might want to shut the door,” he said, glancing at me.
I did and walked farther into the room, not once taking my eyes off of him. I searched my mind for any kind of recollection, some kind of memory of meeting him or seeing him somewhere.
He was tall, well over six feet. He was lanky, not at all that muscular, and was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. He had sneakers on his feet and sandy-colored hair. There wasn’t anything remarkable about his appearance, but the words that came out of his mouth were.
“My name is Storm. I work with Charming.”
“You’re a Death Escort?” I asked, taking in the look of pain on his face. He didn’t look like a killer. He looked like he needed to sit down.
“Sort of,” he said. “Listen, do you mind if I drop the body?”
I glanced at Piper who shrugged and then I looked back at him. “Ummm, sure?”
He let out a great sigh and then dropped his head onto his chest and closed his eyes. I was about to tell him this wasn’t the best time for yoga or meditation, but then something weird happened.
Black smoke started leaking from his ears. It puffed out, curling up around his head where it formed a dark cloud. Then it began curling out his nose, in great long tendrils that rose up to join the growing mass of black.
“What the hell?” I said, reaching for Piper and pulling her over toward me and the door. We weren’t going to be like those idiot virgins who ran farther into their house when a killer was after them. We’d be going out the door.
The black cloud kept growing, until it pretty much surrounded the body, swirling around like smoke. And then the man dropped to the floor. He fell in a heap, landing in a tangle of limbs, right there beside my couch.
Now not only was there a body in my closet, but one in my living room, right next to a black cloud thingy.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I whispered to Piper and yanked her to the door. As my hand closed around the handle, the man/cloud thingy spoke.
“Whew, thanks. That guy did not like to share.”
I glanced down at the body and then back up. “You have exactly two seconds to explain before I start screaming my head off.”
“If you were gonna scream, you would already be doing it.”
“You said you work with Charming?” I asked, not acknowledging he was right. “And how is it you can talk?”
“I’m a Ghost Escort. An Escort who doesn’t have a body. I don’t kill people. I just watch them for the Reaper. And I have no idea how my voice works. It just does.”
“You watch people,” I repeated.
“Yes. Not having a body and being black makes it easy to stick to the shadows and remain unseen.”
“But we can see you,” I pointed out.
“That’s because I’m letting you.”
“What about him?” I said, gesturing to the body. “Is he dead?”
“Nah, just out of it. We should probably put him outside. He’s probably going to wake up soon.”
“We?” I said.
“Well, I don’t exactly have arms to move him.”
“Right.” I went over and grabbed the man by his arms and dragged his body toward the front door. Piper was there to open it and then took one of his arms and helped me pull him the rest of the way out into the hall, where we left him, and went back into my apartment and closed the door.
“You’re sure he isn’t dead?” I asked again, picturing one of my neighbors coming home and screaming at his body lying there.
“Positive. Borrowing doesn’t kill people. It just makes them tired and disoriented.”
“Borrowing?” Piper asked. It was the first time she’d spoken since he walked into my place, and although I couldn’t exactly see him staring at her, I did see his cloudlike form turn toward her.
“It’s something I can do,” he replied. “Get in someone else’s body and borrow it. I don’t do it that often,” he explained. “It’s kind of painful depending on the size of the personality inside the body. That guy was bigger than most. Felt like I was a sardine jammed in one of those tiny cans.”
Piper laughed.
I looked at her like she had ten heads. “This isn’t funny,” I reminded them. “Why are you here?”
“Actually, I just came to pick up something I left here,” the cloud replied.
“You’re the one who put the body in my closet?” I asked.
“You saw that, huh?”
“Well, it’s kind of hard to miss,”
“You were supposed to be in Scotland.”
“I wasn’t about to stay there after he left me without a word,” I snapped.
“Your boyfriend didn’t leave you. He was taken. By the Reaper, who he has managed to piss off in every way possible.”
“He is not my boyfriend,” I replied automatically, but then the rest of his words caught up to me. “And isn’t the fact he pissed the Reaper off old news?”
“He pissed him off some more. In new ways.”
“The level of idiocy that man displays is beyond me,” I muttered, thinking that the next time I saw him I was going to smack him upside the head.
But then my thoughts caused everything in me to still.
I really thought I would never see him again. I really thought it was over.
But it might not be.
Amongst the stillness, the butterflies erupted.
Maybe he really hadn’t meant to leave me. I looked down at his T-shirt that I was still wearing, the T-shirt he’d put on my bed to presumably put on after he joined me in the shower. Someone who was going to leave wouldn’t have bothered to do that. Would they?
“What did he do?” Piper asked, drawing me out of my thoughts.
“The Reaper had a secret stash of bodies kept under lock and key because they were important to him.”
“Okay,” Piper said, urging him to finish.
“Charming stole them and I helped him. I put one here. One at your house,” he said, gesturing toward Piper, who made a choking sound. “And he took one out of town with him. Not sure where he left that one.”
The garment bag. The one on the plane I teased him about. It hadn’t been a suit at all. It had been a body.
I was so out of my league.
“You put a body at my house?” Piper said, her voice hollow.
“Yeah,” he answered, sheepish. “I needed somewhere the Reaper wouldn’t look.”
“How do you even know where I live?” she asked.
There was a very heavy, drawn-out pause. “I knew Dex,” he finally replied.
My eyes shot to Piper, whose face went white. “You knew Dex?”
“Um, yeah. I was assigned to watch him and sorta you too.”
“Oh,” was all she managed to say.
I gave him a dirty look for upsetting her. “The body is still where you left it.” I was hoping he would take the hint and leave.
He nodded. “I’ll get it out of here.”
“Where are you going to take it?”
“It’s needed,” was all he said. Then he turned to Piper. “I’ll get the one at your place when I leave here.”
“I’m supposed to work later.”
“You don’t need to be there. I can let myself in.”
“That’s how he’s been getting into my apartment!” I burst out. “You’ve been helping him!”
“I make a pretty good key,” he said smugly.
Escorts were weird. They bragged about being criminals.
“I’ll just get the body and get out of here.” He moved off toward the hall.
“Wait, you said you had a message from Charming?” Maybe I should have acted like I didn’t care, but I did.
“Oh yeah. He wanted me to tell you he was working on making room for the sun and he’d see you later.”
Piper looked at me with a question in her eyes, wondering if I understood what he meant.
I smiled. I knew exactly what he meant. It meant he was coming back.
“Why couldn’t he tell me that himself?” I asked.
“About that,” he explained. “The Reaper took his body away. Right now he looks like me, except he’s red.”
Awww, he thought that would be a sufficient reply.
“That’s not going to cut it. I need more info. Pronto.”
Cloud guy sighed heavily, and with his sigh some of his body (or whatever) puffed out like breath on a winter’s day.
“G.R. took away Charming’s body and locked him up at his mansion.
He can’t Recall him because the only way an Escort gets Recalled is if they don’t finish a job.
Charming still has a few months left to the job he was assigned, but the Reaper wants him gone.
So he took his body and trapped him. He’s going to keep him there until time runs out for the job and then he’ll be able to Recall him. ”
Some people might say he was getting what he deserved after all these years of killing people who didn’t deserve to die.
But somewhere along the line, I stopped thinking about him as a killer and started thinking about him as a man, a man trapped in an impossible situation.
And thinking about him being Recalled—or truly never seeing him again—made me want to go to the Reaper’s house myself and start ripping stuff apart.
“But what about the bodies he took?” Piper said. “Won’t that keep him from getting Recalled?”
“Yeah, but the Reaper already has guys searching. Eventually he’s going to find them. That’s exactly why I need to start moving everything. The more I move it, the harder it will be to find.”
“What’s your name, anyway?” I asked.
“Storm.”
Huh. It fit him perfectly. “All right, Storm, go jump in that body and let’s go.”
“Oh, uh-uh. No. You are not coming with me.”
“The hell I’m not.”
“Do you have any idea what Charming would do to me if I let you go anywhere near the Reaper’s house?”
“Do you have any idea what I will do if you don’t?” I ground out.
“Sorry, but he’s scarier than you are.”
I crossed my arms over my chest.
He sighed. “Look, I don’t have time to argue with you. Getting this body to him is already hard enough with having to worry about you two.”
“Why is it so hard?” Piper asked.
“Because the body is empty. There’s no one in it and because of that I’ll have a black cloud around me that every Escort would see. If I get caught, they’re going to know it’s me before I even say a word.”
“There was no cloud around you when you got here,” I observed.
“That’s because there was someone else in the body. Best I can figure it, their soul hides mine.”
I glanced at Piper to see if she thought this conversation was as unreal as I did. She seemed to be having about the same reaction.
“Look, I gotta go. Time is of the essence. He’s gonna flip when he finds out I hid his body here at your place.”
“What do you mean his body?”
“That’s Charming’s original body. The one he died in. He seemed pretty shocked when he saw it.”
Is that why it seemed so familiar to me? Did something inside me recognize it immediately?
I rushed toward the bedroom, wanting to look at him again.
I wanted to take in every detail about that body.
I stopped just shy of touching it. It was so different from the way he looked now…
so unpolished, so… flawed. But yet when I looked at him, at the overly long blond hair and full lips, it seemed perfect for him. For Olly.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” I told Storm.
“Some privacy might be nice,” he muttered. “Can’t a guy get dressed in peace?”
Piper giggled. What was with her? Geez, he was not funny.
I was about to point out his un-funniness when there was a noise in the living room. It sounded like the front door opening and closing.
All three of us froze, listening for more sounds.
“Honey, I’m home!” called a voice I didn’t know.
“Holy shit!” Storm whispered.
“Who is it?” I demanded.
“It’s the Reaper.”