This wasn’t as bad as I thought. This was worse. Much, much worse. It was like someone had suddenly turned over an hourglass of invisible sand to count down to my inevitable death. And those things were waiting for the last bit of sand to run out. “So they’re hanging around, waiting on my ass to die so they can have a freaking dinner party. Please tell me you’re joking.”
“You’re not going to go through this alone,” she whispered. “I won’t let anything like that happen to you.”
I grabbed my bag off the floor and slung it across my shoulder. “No. You’re just going to wait for me to die.”
She pressed her soft pink lips together and the light in her eyes dimmed. We stared at each other, my lungs eating up the air between us.
“You know what?” I pointed a shaky finger at the girl, all five foot four of otherworldly perfection, standing in front of me. “Stay the hell away from me.”
The way she made me feel was too confusing. No good could come from wanting to have my hands on a chick who wasn’t even alive. I took off down the aisle but I could still hear her voice as I walked away.
“That’s not an option, Cash,” she shouted. “I’m sorry.”
What wasn’t an option? Her staying away, or me not dying? As I pushed out of the glass doors and stepped into the sun, I couldn’t help but think she meant both.
Chapter 6
Cash gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles looked as white as paper. His jaw was clenched, anger radiating from him like steam. I sat in the passenger seat of his Bronco and stared at the road stretching between the towering mountains as daylight turned to dusk. When I let myself look at him, my eyes insisted on focusing on ridiculous things. Like the way his paint-splattered red T-shirt clung to his biceps. Or the flicker of silver that appeared on his tongue every time he licked his lips.
Yes. The road was definitely a safer view. Cash slammed his fist into the radio to shut it off and I flinched.
“You realize this is seriously creepy,” he finally said. “Stalking me like this.”
I shut my eyes, letting gravity take hold of me. When I opened them again, Cash was staring at me.
“You should watch the road.” I pointed to the windshield, anything to keep his eyes off of me. I had completely underestimated this boy. Even in a fit of rage, the way he looked at me made me feel stripped down to my insides. No one looked at me like that anymore.
Cash shook his head and returned his attention to the highway.
“Death is giving me safe driving tips,” he muttered. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“How do you do that?”
“What?”
“How do you know when I’m here? You shouldn’t be able to do that.”
Cash shrugged and kept his intense gaze focused on the road. “I don’t know. I…feel you, I guess.
Everything gets warm and smells like it does right after a thunderstorm,” he said. “You’ve never met anyone else who can do that? Sense you?”
I crossed my arms over my chest watching him. “Not in a thousand years.” Unless you counted
Finn, but Finn wasn’t exactly normal.
“Guess I’m just special then.”
I’d never seen Balthazar care about the fate of a human. Especially one like Cash. Yes, he was definitely special. I just didn’t know why yet.
“Where are you going?” I asked, watching all signs of civilization zip past us, only to be replaced by open highway and hills. Most humans were predictable, but I still couldn’t figure this one out.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Anywhere away from you would have been good. But I can see that’s not going to happen.”
“You don’t have to be so rude,” I said. “I’m just doing my job.”
“Bullshit.” Cash flipped on his headlights and passed a sign that said he was leaving Lone Pine city limits. “Your job is taking souls and I’m still here.”
“Are you forgetting you
“How many times did you beg me to show myself? And now I’m here with answers, and all you can do is yell at me.”
Cash glanced at me from the corner of his eye and made a huffing sound.
“Don’t you have questions?”
He tapped on the steering wheel with his thumb as an oncoming car’s headlights splashed light over his features. “Can they hurt me? The shadows?”
“No.” Some of the tension melted away from his frame and the needle on the speedometer dropped a few numbers. I bit my lip to keep the guilt inside where it belonged. The truth was, I didn’t know. I didn’t know
“When you said if you had taken me I’d have gone to Heaven…” His gazed darted to me and back to the road. “Is that the only place you take souls?”
I touched my blade and thought of how many souls it had brought peace to over the years. Too many to count. I wished I could tell him yes, but it wouldn’t have been true. There was far more bad than good out there. It’s one of the reasons Easton stayed so busy.
“No,” I finally said. “There are other places. Each reaper has a territory. I am assigned to the
Heaven-bound.”
Cash smirked. “Let me guess. Finn was assigned to Hell. He had to be.”
The venom in his voice took me by surprise. I couldn’t understand where it was coming from. Finn may have made a lot of mistakes in his afterlife, but to his core he was good. “No, actually he collected for the Inbetween.” When he raised a brow I went on. “You might think of it as a sort of purgatory. A type of limbo for souls who don’t quite belong in Heaven or Hell yet.”
Headlights passed us, splashing light over Cash’s confused expression. “How did he get to be alive again? Did he just quit? Cash in his human card?”
I pulled my bottom lip between my teeth and stared out the windshield. “It’s not that easy. What happened with Finn…it’s unheard of. He had to have struck quite a bargain with Balthazar to get this.”
I was afraid to find out what he’d sacrificed. Knowing Finn, he would have given anything to be with Emma.
“Balthazar?” Cash said. “Is that your boss? Is he the one stringing me along?”
“Yes.”
Cash nodded and pulled off the road onto a scenic overlook. Outside the windshield, daylight was dying. The sun dipped low in the sky, setting the mountains on fire with color. The valley below was a sea of black, seemingly bottomless in the night. Cash leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “This is so screwed up.”
I focused on his chest. The rise and fall of his lungs, something so foreign to me it was almost too painful to watch. “I know it is.”
“Do you really?” His head rolled to the side and his eyes looked like caves staring back at me in the dim cab of the Bronco. “This is the kind of shit you deal with every day. It must be normal for you.”
I thought of the eyes of the souls I carried over every day. Full of wonder and light and hope. Even the memory of them dimmed in the darkness that surrounded Cash and his uncertain future. And I thought about the
