Chapter 1
Finn
Sometimes Emma made me feel so alive, I almost forgot I was dead.
Almost.
I sat on the floor across from her bed listening to her slow, steady breaths. I should have been more alert. I was supposed to be on watch. But it was so hard to concentrate on anything but her when I knew she was remembering.
Emma rolled over, pressing her face into the pillow. “Finn…”
I shut my eyes, trying to hold on to it. I wasn’t stupid enough to think she’d remember this when she woke up, but damn it if hearing my name slip through her lips didn’t sweep through me like wildfire. Scorching the places where blood used to run. Melting the hollow space where my heart used to beat.
I took a deep, unneeded breath and let the back of my head thump against her overstuffed bookcase. This was never going to get easier. Two years of watching her through the invisible barrier of Balthazar’s rules was really starting to suck. Especially when every time I blinked, another piece of Allison was breaking through the surface.
In the pale light of her lamp, I could see the neat row of cookbooks, nestled together like a family, holding all of the secrets Emma created in the kitchen. They smelled like flour and sugar and home. The next orderly row was packed with the worn-out novels she loved, and a new photography book her mom bought her last year. The last shelf belonged to the books her father had written, held in place by gold-framed pictures of him smiling and alive. Emma had so many words inside her. I was surprised they didn’t fall out while she was sleeping. Thousands of words about mysteries and romance and life. Things I didn’t know anything about.
Things that Allison had known everything about.
She whimpered from under the covers and I looked up. What was she remembering this time? What piece of the Inbetween and her time with me was she fighting? There was so much I didn’t want her to remember. So much I needed her to remember. But that didn’t matter. I was here to protect her. That’s where it had to end.
I closed my eyes, trying to swallow my own crap lie. She mumbled something in her sleep and began to thrash under the sheets. I groaned and pushed myself up from my safe spot on the carpet, unable to sit there listening to her suffer anymore. I stopped a foot from the bed and knelt down.
“Shh…” I touched the edge of the mattress, forcing myself not to go any closer. “It’s going to be okay.” She was only a few inches away, but it felt like miles. Miles that left me wanting in so many ways that I ached. Hopefully my presence would be enough. There were times I swore she could feel me.
“What do you think you’re doing?” a gravelly voice chided.
I looked up from the edge of Emma’s bed just as Easton melted up from the polished hardwood floor beneath the window. Like an oil slick coming to life, he unfolded his long, shadowy legs until he was just an inkblot in front of the splash of lamplight on her wall. His violet eyes pinned me like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Which I kind of was.
“Nothing,” I lied.
“Yeah, looked like nothing.” He strolled across the room accompanied by a wave of sulfur and smoke, the black serpent tattoo on his neck glinting.
“Jesus, Easton.” I scrunched up my nose and climbed to my feet. “Don’t they have a shower somewhere between here and the afterlife?”
“Screw you. You didn’t just have to tow somebody’s grandpa to Hell.” He brushed something chalky and gray off his long coat, and a shudder worked its way down my spine. God only knows what—or who—it had belonged to. “Besides, I wasn’t the one about to feel up a sleeping human.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Save it.” He waved his hand dismissively. “We have work to do. I don’t have time for your useless obsession with the human today.”
“Will you please stop calling her that?”
“What?” Easton glanced up from Emma’s vanity, where he’d been inspecting the various lotions, tubes, and bottles like he was on some alien planet. Then again, Easton had been dead for something like four hundred years and spent most of his time in Hell, so her stuff probably was sort of alien to him.
“’The human.’ You make her sound like a freak. It’s not like we’re a different species, for God’s sake. We were humans too, or don’t you remember that far back?”
“Were,” he said, scowling at me over his shoulder. “Past tense.”
Easton’s clumsy fingers knocked over the bobblehead zombie on the vanity top and we both froze. Emma shot up from beneath the covers, gasping.
“Mom?” She shoved the tangled blond hair out of her face, her eyes trained on her rumpled reflection in the vanity mirror. “Was that you?”
“Not Mom. Just one of Hell’s reapers, at your service.” Easton leaned against the bookcase and grinned. “You’re right, Finn. This is fun.”
“Are you freaking insane?” I hissed.
He rolled his eyes. “Oh calm down, drama queen. It’s not like she can hear us.”
“You scared her.”
“Are you kidding? She’s scared of her own reflection. And that has nothing to do with me.”
No. But the fact that Emma’s life had been a horror movie waiting to happen these last two years had everything to do with me. I’d led a soul that hated my guts and was hell-bent on revenge right to her doorstep.
I turned my attention back to Emma. After she collected herself, she twisted her hair up into a messy ponytail and dug in her nightstand drawer for her journal.
“Dear diary…” Easton nodded at the journal. “What do you think she’s going to write?”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Not my business.”
He walked over to her bed and plopped down beside her. The mattress didn’t creak or groan under his weight. The blankets didn’t shift. He peeked over her shoulder at the book. A long tendril of honey-colored hair came loose from Emma’s ponytail and fell across her eye. She tucked it behind her ear, but Easton blew on it so that it fell right back down. She swept it out of her face, looking frustrated, and Easton chuckled.
“Will you stop?” I said, feeling uncomfortable with how close he was to her. “This is so screwed up it’s not even funny.”
He raised a dark brow. “Oh? And what you’re doing isn’t?”
We could have gone back and forth like that for hours, but the call came. It always did. It started in my bones—a cold so cutting that it sliced through me like a machete. Easton’s jaw clenched, his muscles taut and ready. He slowly closed his hand around the handle of his scythe, which burned black and softly smoked at his side. I flexed my fingers as the icy ribbons of death worked their way through each one of my limbs.
“Can you take this one for me?” I asked. “You’re already going to be there, and I just got back—”
“No,” Easton said. “Hell no. I have my own job to do. I can’t keep covering for your sorry ass. Besides, do you have any idea how close you are to being caught? Don’t push your luck, Finn. Just keep your nose down, collect your souls, and thank the Almighty that you don’t have my job.”
“I’m taking a risk every time I leave her. You know that.”
“For the love of God. She’ll be fine, Finn. It’s just one reap.”
“How do you know she’ll be fine?”
He shrugged. “I don’t. But that’s the difference between you and me. I don’t care.”
With that, he vanished, consumed in a flash by the keening wails of the damned. The screams beckoned. Clawed at me from the inside out.
Rule One as a reaper: Death doesn’t wait for anyone.
And it sure as hell wasn’t waiting for me now.
…
By the time I seeped into form next to Easton, the pull was twining around my wrists, tugging, clouding every one of my thoughts. I shook my head and stared up at the lemon-yellow house engulfed in an angry tangle of flames that glowed in the dim predawn light. A few bikes and a shiny swing set slick with dew littered the lawn. A minivan sat devoid of life in the drive. I craned my neck to read the sticker on the bumper. My child is an honor student at Rosewood Elementary.
Seriously? Honor students and a minivan mom? I couldn’t help but wonder what tragic scenario I was going to face this time as part of Balthazar’s grand attempt to teach me a lesson.
“How many of these is he going to send me on?” I pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes and prayed for a different outcome than the one I felt hissing in my lifeless bones. “I get it, Balthazar.”
Easton grunted. “Do you really? Where’d we just come from, Finn?”
“Good morning, boys.” A voice, smooth as molasses, spoke up from behind us. We didn’t have to turn around to know it was the final part of our region’s trio. Anaya skipped over to my side.
“How many do you think are in there?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
I trailed after Anaya, Easton behind me, always the shade of gray between the dark and the light. Anaya stepped through a curtain of flames, but I stalled in the doorway. Something in my chest tightened. My throat closed up and a memory cemented my feet to the floor.
Flames lapped at the control board. Consumed the cockpit. Licked my skin with an orange serpent tongue. Water and panic all around me, and I couldn’t drown. No. I was going to char. I was going to melt. I was going to burn.
“Let’s go.” Easton nudged me through the doorway. “I’m already getting another call, and I can’t be in two places at once.”
I forced myself to move through the house. Windows popped and shattered. The roof crackled like tinder on a campfire. Black billowing smoke consumed every inch of the 1,600-square-foot slice of soot-coated suburbia.
“Watch your step. This one’s mine.” Easton stared down at a man who had collapsed in the empty hall.
“Let me guess.” I stepped over the man in plain white boxers and looked at Easton. “He’s a liar? Did he take something that never should have belonged to him in the first place?” I scowled at the ceiling and threw my hands up in the air. “Come on, Balthazar. Deliver your little message so I can get on with my freaking day.”
Anaya exchanged a weary glance with Easton, then stepped over the lifeless body and into a bedroom where a woman lay awaiting her reaping.
Easton knelt down and touched the man’s temple. “He had an affair.”
I stopped halfway down the hall and turned around, confused. “What?”
“He had an affair with another woman.” He stood up and looked at the ceiling, then down to the beam lying on top of the man. “He was trying to save his wife when he died. Like saving her would make up for what he did.”
Easton gave me a pointed look, and I groaned. Was this ever going to end? Was a death ever going to be just a death again? Knowing Balthazar and his obsessive need to get a damn point across, probably not.
I kept moving until a tug in my chest urged me toward a half-open bedroom door. Pink paper lanterns adorned the ceiling, waiting for the fire to consume them and turn them to ash. A little girl lay huddled under a yellow comforter waiting for me to do the same to her. A shadow lurked by her bed, waiting, hoping I’d be a no-show so the soul would go into limbo. Its smokelike fingers swirled around her tiny, trembling frame.
I glanced back at the fire creeping around the doorframe, licking at the walls, melting away the posy-pink wallpaper in an all-too-familiar dance. I couldn’t waste any more time. I slid my scythe out of its holster and speared her flesh, gifting her with the mercy of death before the flames could get to her.
I watched her twitch and jerk until her soul quietly peeled away from her skin, leaving a too-small shell behind. The shadow hissed at me and seeped between the floorboards.
“Who are you?” her shimmering soul asked. She fidgeted nervously, her huge hazel eyes confused, accusing. “Are you an angel?”
It never got easier with kids. “Sort of.”
“Where are your wings if you’re an angel?”
A paper lantern lit up just above our heads.
“I said sort of, didn’t I?” I fought past the smoke shrouding my vision to the hall where the next pull was coming from, and forced some patience into my voice. “Where’s your brother’s room?”
She trailed after me into the burning hall and I thanked the Almighty that Anaya and Easton had already finished with her parents.
“How did you know I have a brother?”
“I just know.” I pushed into a bedroom with a Keep Out sign tacked to the front. Flames rolled out of the doorway and the heat sealed up the words in my throat. I shoved my hand behind me.
“Stay here.”
“But—”
“I said stay here. Got it?” No way was I letting her see the charred remains of her brother. If I couldn’t give her the life she deserved, couldn’t give her Heaven, then damn it I’d at least spare her this memory.
She swallowed, not realizing the human function no longer applied to her, and nodded. When I emerged with her brother in tow, her eyes lit up. “Geez, Simon. I thought you were dead or something.”
I grabbed both of their hands. “All right, guys. Let’s go.”
The little girl pulled her hand away, folded her arms across her chest, and frowned up at me. “We’re not supposed to go with strangers.”
Ignoring the inferno around us, I crouched down and stuck my hand out, folding her tiny vapor fingers into mine. “I’m Finn. I’m eighteen”—sort of—“and I like fishing and baseball. My favorite color is blue. My mom makes, hands down, the best peach cobbler you’ve ever tasted. Oh, and I used to fly airplanes.”
She tentatively shook my hand. “What else?”
“Well…I’m afraid of spiders. Like pee-my-pants afraid of spiders. Even the little ones.”
She exchanged a look with her brother.
I groaned. “Come on, guys. Even my best friend doesn’t know some of this stuff. What else do you want here?”
“You really flew an airplane before?” the boy asked, speculative.
“Yep.”
He shrugged. “I like him.”
The little girl finally smiled. “Then I guess it’s okay.”
“Where are we going?” The little boy looked up at me with an anxious expression.
How to explain? I never knew what to say to kids to make them understand. I could have told him the truth, cold and simple like an instruction manual. They hadn’t lived long enough to become who they were meant to be. Hadn’t reached their potential. So I would take them to the Inbetween where they’d put in their time. Grow into a soul worthy of either Heaven, or a coveted second chance at life. And if they didn’t grow into either of those…
A shadow melted out of the flames, lurking in the corner of the hall. Hungry. Desperate. I slipped my arm around both of them. They were kids. They wouldn’t become one of them. I had to believe that.
I ruffled his hair and forced a smile. “How about a different question, pal.”
“Okay. Why doesn’t the fire feel hot?”
Half an hour, two souls delivered, and a gazillion unanswerable questions later, I found myself spilling onto my hands and knees on Emma’s back lawn. The grass needles didn’t bother to bend under the weight of my palms. The sunrise, just a pale echo of summer, edged over the horizon and poured through my translucent body, refusing to acknowledge my existence with a shadow. Like I needed them to remind me that I didn’t belong here.
Easton loomed over me with something resembling sympathy in his eyes. “Nice landing.”
“Shouldn’t you be in Hell?”
“I could ask you the same.”
Pushing past him, I made my way toward Emma’s house. “Not today, Easton. Seriously, man. Just…not today, all right?”
“How long are you going to keep this up?” he asked. “She’s not a kid anymore, you know.”
“I know she’s not.” God, did I know it. My fingers tested the wall, dissolving through the brick of the house. I could feel Emma’s nearness all the way down to my toes.
“You should let her go,” he said. “I could understand it a few years ago, but now? Now it’s past time for you to move on, and we both know it.”
His words burned a path of rage through me, leaving charred remnants of dead nerve endings and hollow veins. “I do that and she’s as good as dead. It won’t take Maeve a week of tormenting her before she gets bored and kills her.”
“I know.” Easton looked resigned, as if he could accept the kind of life—or death—Emma would have without me here to protect her.
Of course he could. Death was his life. He reeked of Hell. Gambled with imps for fun. And he didn’t love her. He didn’t burn for her. He didn’t break nearly every rule in the book and risk his soul for her on a daily basis.
I did.
“And if I’m sent to collect her again? What then?” I looked at him, needing him to understand. “You think I could do that again? Let her die? Rip her soul from her screaming flesh?”
“Better her than you.”
“No!” I stepped into him, fuming. “Not better her than me. It’s my fault she’s in this position. Maeve never would’ve found her if it wasn’t for me. Hell, I’m the whole reason Maeve wants to destroy her. How am I supposed to walk away and let her suffer for a mistake I made?”
“It wasn’t your fault. You thought you were helping.” He shook his head. “Hell, you were helping. She’s alive, isn’t she? Sure, she’s got problems, but what seventeen-year-old kid doesn’t? Haven’t you ever read Judy Blume?”
I looked at Easton, his spiky sable hair blotting out the warm lavender sunrise. “You’ve read Judy Blume?”
“Screw you. You’re the one haunting a high school student.”
“I’m not haunting her. I’m protecting her.”
“Look, my point is she’s going to die someday, and there will be nothing you can do to stop it,” he said. “She’ll wrap her car around tree. She’ll get cancer. If she’s lucky, she’ll grow so old her body will forget to wake up one morning.”
“I realize that,” I gritted out. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll let Maeve make her life hell until that happens, let alone be the reason she dies.” The words held so much heat I could feel them scorching my mouth.
“This is—” Easton froze, whatever lecture he’d been prepared to deliver catching in his throat as he watched the kid from next door jog across the lawn. We watched him cast a careful look around, then tuck a leather sketchbook under his arm and shove Emma’s bedroom window open.
“Looks like you’ve got competition,” Easton said, watching him climb in. His scythe began to smoke on his hip. “I’ll bet he even has one of those fancy pulses, too.”
I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t letting him get under my skin that easily. “Cash is just her friend. Besides, pulses are overrated.”
“Yeah. Keep telling yourself that.” He winked at me, then dove into the swirling black pit of screams that had opened beneath him. A Hell reaper’s work was never done. And having that much darkness on his hands day in and day out didn’t seem to bother him. Easton had been born for this job the same way Anaya and all her light had been born for hers. I couldn’t think of anyone more fitting.
My scythe pulsed cold against my hip. I glanced up at Emma’s window and frowned. Sometimes I wondered what job I was born for, because it sure as hell didn’t feel like I was born for this.