Call Me Grim (20 page)

Mr. Hilkrest sits in the center of the mess, rocking back and forth on the same pink couch I saw in my clock vision. The same hand clutches his chest and the same grimace distorts his face. The light of his soul is almost as dim as mine when I’m not sharing Aaron’s brightness.

Hand in hand, Aaron and I enter the room like Hansel and Gretel entering the dark, scary forest. We stop in front of Jon and block the TV, but he doesn’t care. We’re invisible to him.

A framed photo of a woman with her arms around a laughing toddler sits on the table next to him. Their eyes are identical to Jon’s, close-set and dark brown. On the table in front of the picture is a cream-colored telephone with a long, curly cord.

Jon hisses air between his teeth and rubs his chest with his closed fist. His other hand reaches for the phone, but then he stops. He eyes the phone like it’s untrustworthy and then pulls his hand back into his lap.

“Why won’t he call someone?” I ask Aaron.

“Who knows?” Aaron shrugs. “Maybe he thinks he has indigestion and it will go away.”

I want to grab the phone and dial 911 for Jon. My hand darts forward and Aaron smacks it back.

“We can’t, Libbi. Even if you could call, they wouldn’t get here in time. This death is impossible to change,” he says. “It’s scheduled. It’s his time. We have to let him go. It’s our job.”

“Ugh!” My hand flaps down to my side. “I hate this!”

“Tell me about it.”

I remember the time I called Aaron supernatural and all-powerful. He scoffed at me then, but now as we stand in front of Jon—watching him struggle, watching him die—I know why. I’ve never felt more powerless in my entire life.

“And we can’t do anything to help him?” I say.

“Well, we can do this.”

Aaron places his free hand on Jon’s arm and the man stops rubbing his chest with his fist and smiles. His shoulders sag and his eyelids droop to half-mast as he slumps in his seat like a drunken wino.

“What did you do to him?” I ask.

“I just relaxed him. You should remember. I did it to you that day in the library.” He grins over his shoulder at me. “You told me never to do it again.”

My eyes dart back and forth between Aaron and Jon. Drool stretches from Jon’s bottom lip and pools on his food-stained sweatshirt. “Oh God. I didn’t look like that, did I?”

“No. I gave him a much stronger dose than I gave you.”

Aaron takes a step away from Jon and pushes me forward. He positions me directly in front of the half-conscious man. My knees graze his knees and my heart races.

I can’t help but shiver when Aaron places my shaky hand on Jon’s shoulder. I’m touching a dying man. My stomach lurches, and I can’t tell if it’s from nerves or because I’m a little freaked out. If Aaron hadn’t have saved my life, I would have been on the receiving end of this process. Aaron would have done this to me to calm me before I died.

Aaron spends the next couple of minutes teaching me how to relax someone with my touch. Not an easy task for someone as far from relaxed as I am. That power may come in handy for Aaron, but I don’t think I’ll ever use it. It seems wrong to mess with someone like that, whether they’re about to die or not.

I know the moment Jon dies. The dim light of his soul surges for a brief moment and then it collapses in, toward the center of his body. His chest stops heaving and his head hangs limp. His soul goes dark.

The clock in my head says it’s 6:27 p.m. Right on schedule.

“It’s over,” Aaron says, rubbing his hands together. “And now it’s time for us to step in.”

“What do we do now?” I ask.

“First, we put a mirror up before we let him see us,” Aaron says. Great. There goes that mirror stuff again. I give him a “WTF?” look, and he smirks and continues. “When Jon looks at us through the mirror, he won’t see you and me. He’ll see the reflection of whomever he wants to see on the other side. We won’t know who he sees until he calls us by name, so I’d try to stay neutral.”

“More tricks?” I frown. “Why not just be honest with him?”

Aaron heaves a big sigh and returns my frown.

“When you’re a Reaper, you can do whatever you want. But I think people respond better to the shock of being dead when they’re greeted by someone they know and expect to see. The mirror does that for them. It makes it easier.” He glances at Jon’s limp body on the couch. “And there are fewer runners that way.”

“Runners?”

“A soul that tries to run away once I get them out of their body. The runners are usually people who are surprised they’re dead and aren’t ready to go, like Mr. Jon Hilkrest here.” Aaron tilts his head toward Jon. “I always catch them, but why waste time chasing after a soul when you could use something as simple as a mirror to keep them calm?”

He has a point. I had wondered why Rosie kept calling Aaron “Bruce” and me “Kate” that night. Now I know why. Aaron must have put a mirror in front of us.

“I’ll let you try to place your own mirror,” Aaron continues. “But if you take too long, I’ll have to step in. Now that Jon’s body is dead, we don’t have much time to mess around with this. We still need to remove his soul, before it gets painful for him.”

Aaron explains how to place the mirror, and after a few attempts I think I get it, but there’s no way to tell for sure. The only person the mirror will work on is the person it’s set to reflect. The real test will be when I allow Jon to see me.

But first, we need to get him out of his body. My heart and my throat switch places. This morning, Aaron said removing the soul is the most dangerous part of the job. If it’s not done right, the soul could be destroyed. Aaron made it look so simple with Rosie, but he’s been doing this forever. I doubt I can do it with even half of his grace.

“This part is so important and dangerous, I think I’ll do it myself this time,” Aaron says. My taut neck and shoulder muscles instantly loosen. “I’ll talk you through everything I do, step by step, and you can do it the next time. Okay?”

“Good! Okay,” I say with a little too much enthusiasm. I smooth my shirt down and clear my throat. “I mean, that’ll be fine.”

Aaron slides his hands around Jon’s hands without moving them and the Scythe instantly blasts to life. It throws off sparks and tendrils of smoke that wrap around Jon’s wrist.

Aaron talks me through every detail of removing a soul, from how to us the Scythe to connect to the soul, to how to separate it from the body. And as the youthful soul of Jon Hilkrest stands up out of his aged, dead body, Aaron tells me to remove my invisibility so Jon can see me.

“Mom?” Jon’s eyes fix on me. My mirror works. Okay. I can do this.

I nod slowly, fighting an inappropriate grin.

“What are you doing here?” Jon asks me. “You’re dead. Am I dreaming? What’s happening?”

I twist the hem of my shirt and bite my lower lip. I have no idea what to say to him. Anything I say could send him running.

“You’ve had a heart attack, Jon.” Aaron answers and I shoot him a grateful glance. “You’re dead now too. Just like your mother.”

“Uncle Marty? Is that you?”

Aaron doesn’t confirm or deny anything. He just stands there, all creepy, staring at Jon with his hands in his pockets. No wonder Aaron has runners. He seriously needs to work on his people skills.

“That’s right, Jon,” I say. “You’re dead, but that’s not a bad thing. It just means you get to spend time with us now.” I pat Jon’s ice-cold, glowing arm like my mom would do. He smiles and then I add, “We’ve missed you.”

Jon’s ghostly eyes shimmer with tears. He opens his arms to me, expecting a hug.

“I’ve missed you so much, Momma,” he says and I take a step back. This is getting a little too weird for me. Maybe Aaron was onto something with his standoffish approach.

“Okay, Jon.” Aaron steps between us, breaking the bizarre, fake mother/son moment. “We have to go now. We have somewhere important to be.”

I touch Aaron’s wrist so Jon can’t hear me when I ask, “Am I going with you this time?”

“Of course.” Aaron gives me a little smile. “How else will you know where the Gateway is?”

The early summer heat tackles us like a sweaty sumo wrestler as we step through the front door of the air-conditioned foyer to the steaming concrete sidewalk. Sweat instantly springs to my upper lip and armpits. It’s even hotter now than it was at Jumpers’ Bridge this morning.

Aaron hooks his arm around Jon’s elbow and his grip on my hand tightens.

“Keep up with me, Libbi,” Aaron says. “And, for the love of Pete, don’t let go this time. And don’t stop running.”

“I wo—” But before I can finish my sentence, Aaron launches us across the lawn and down the street. The houses, trees, and cars smudge into a background of unidentifiable colors and shapes as I run as fast as I can to keep up with him. Jon can’t be doing well with this. I’ve had practice and I can hardly keep up.

I lean forward to peek around Aaron and check on Jon, but he’s gone. A long sheet of rippling, brilliant fabric hangs from Aaron’s crooked elbow, billowing behind him in the wind.

“Where’s Jon?” I yell over the roar of air in my ears. “And what the heck is that thing?”

“Oh,” Aaron glances at me and then at the glowing sheet hooked around his other arm. “That’s Jon. He doesn’t have our speed,” Aaron shouts. “Whenever we move too fast for a soul to keep up, it turns into that fabric-looking thing. I don’t know why, but it sure makes things a lot easier when they decide to run or fight.”

“Do a lot of them fight?” I say, hopeful the wind drowns out the note of fear in my voice. The closest I’ve ever come to a physical fight was when Haley slapped me after I called her a bitch once. I can’t imagine actually brawling with anyone, much less the disgruntled soul of a dead man.

“Not too many. But if they are going to fight, it’s usually at the Gateway.”

“Why? What’s wrong with the Gateway?”

“You’ll see. We’re almost there.”

Aaron slows our pace and the surrounding streaks and blurs of color take on recognizable shapes again. I see the school and Haley and Kyle’s house and then my own house as we zoom by it. And I see cars…below us.

We’re flying. We are freaking flying twenty feet off the ground, directly down the center of Hell’s Highway. My feet connect with nothing, but Aaron told me to keep running, so I continue to pump my legs. I will not repeat what happened this morning.

Somehow we flew from one side of town to the opposite side in ten minutes. Probably less. I knew we could run super-fast and I saw Aaron floating when he was in his scary Grim-Reaper form, but I didn’t realize we could fly like this. It’s exhilarating.

I extend my arm out like a wing. The wind catches the cup of my palm and lifts my arm up. When I turn my hand slightly downward, my arm dips and I giggle like Max does when he does the same thing out the car window on long trips.

The wind slows to a light breeze as our feet touch the ground. We stand a few miles outside of town on the graveled shoulder of a sharp curve Mom calls Dead Man’s Bend. The dense forest casts the road in soft, green-tinted shadows. A mile north, the forest gives way to rolling hills and farmland. A mile south, the houses on the outskirts of town start to appear. But this curve of Hell’s Highway is isolated, encased in thick foliage on all sides.

“This is the northern limit of our territory.” Aaron scans the trees and road surrounding us. “This is as far out of town as we can go. And over there”—he points to a small, perfectly round clearing in the underbrush on the other side of the guardrail—“is the Gateway.”

“What’s going on?” Jon steps out from behind Aaron. Now that he can keep up with us, Jon has graduated from sheet status back to humanoid. His eyes snap back and forth between us. “What are we doing all the way out here?”

“Let’s go.” Aaron leads Jon and me to the guardrail. He swings one leg over and then the other and jumps down. Jon scrambles after him, but I decide to walk through the barrier. I could use the practice. When all three of us are on the other side, Aaron hooks Jon’s elbow, takes my hand again, and heads directly for the circular clearing. The Gateway.

We break through the thick brambles of underbrush and enter the circle. I expect Aaron to stop, or at least slow down, but he doesn’t. He barrels straight into the center of the clearing, dragging Jon and me with him. And then the forest disappears. The grass, the trees, the guardrail, the road. All gone.

Blackness surrounds us. But it’s not just dark. This blackness is tangible, like a solid wall of oil all around us, like I could scoop up a handful of it and put it in my pocket. I glance over my shoulder. A rectangular doorway floats in the blackness behind us, framing the woods and Diablo Road.

“What’s going on? Is this…H-Hell?” Jon breaks the silence. Then he points to something in the distance. “What. Is. That?” The level of awe in his voice rises with each word.

A speck of white light sparkles on the horizon far ahead of us, like a distant star. The tiny light could be hundreds of miles away, but in the almost complete darkness it’s like a beacon, guiding us forward. And I really want to go to it, run to it, but I know I can’t. Not yet.

Aaron squares his shoulders and faces Jon. He seems taller, broader, and darker, somehow, as if the darkness around us has sucked some of the light from Aaron’s soul.

“Jon Robert Hilkrest.” Aaron’s voice is as deep and official as his scrutinizing stare. “This is your judgment. If your good choices in this life outweigh your bad choices, there’s nothing to fear. But if not…”

The dark around us stirs. It bubbles and boils like the goop inside Kyle’s mark and emits the foulest odor I’ve ever smelled in my life: thick and pungent, like blood mixed with burnt bacon and the smell Lulu, my hamster, had when we found her dead under the kitchen sink.

Screaming faces with clawed hands stretch against the surface of the oily blackness, reaching. Muttering voices, all around, grow louder and louder. I struggle to understand what they’re saying, but I can’t.

Then it all stops.

The three of us stand in the perfect silence, in the dark, with the door to the real world on one side and the distant pinpoint of light on the other. Jon squeezes his eyes closed and whips his head back and forth.