Death Becomes Me (Call Me Grim Book 2) (27 page)

But this is not pretend, or a dream, or a fairy tale. Like it or not, this is my life now: the guilt-ridden life of a Reaper.

***

The shriek of sirens stirs me from a restless sleep. I shoot up from the ground, damp and chilled from the morning dew. My head swivels from side to side as I search for the source of the obnoxious noise.

The woods surrounding me flash—blue and then red, blue and then red—and I follow the sound and the lights to the top of the hill. A police car and an ambulance pull onto the shoulder of Hell’s Highway behind the Dennis’ white pick-up and an unfamiliar parked sedan.

Two uniformed policemen step out of the police car. A portly man stands from where he was sitting on the guardrail. He says something to the officers and juts a thick finger down to the gravel at his feet.

The weight lifts from my shoulders and I relax. Kyle’s body has been found.

Medical personnel rush from the ambulance to the place where Kyle’s body lies, but they quickly realize their services are no longer required. Kyle is way beyond the help of CPR.

But Haley is not dead, and neither is Aaron. Most of his soul might be elsewhere, but his lungs continue to circulate air in and out of his body. His heart continues to beat a steady rhythm under my hand. He’s alive. I don’t know how this whole empty body thing works, but I’m sure he needs help. They both need help. They both need to get off of the cold ground and away from the Gateway.

I jump to my feet, wishing more than ever that I could be seen and heard. And even though I know it’s pointless, I yell for help. I lift my hands and wave them back and forth, and jump up and down like an idiot.

As I expected, the people at the top of the hill don’t notice me.

But they
do
notice something.

One of the policemen shines his flashlight over the side of the guardrail. Maybe he’s looking for a clue to what happened to Kyle, or evidence of a crime. What he finds instead is a path of flattened underbrush. He moves the light along the path, down from the road to the perfect circle of grass in the middle of the woods. The glaring searchlight stops on Aaron.

“There’s someone down there.” The policeman calls over his shoulder.

“See, Aaron.” I glance down at his lifeless body. “I knew someone would find you.”

The strobing blue, red, and white lights of the emergency vehicles cast oddly moving shapes over his face. It’s so hard not to believe his eyebrow twitched in response to his name, but I know in my head, if not in my heart, that it’s my hopeful imagination mixed with a trick of the light.

Aaron is gone.

32

Mud coats the two-inch heels of my black dress shoes as my feet sink into the damp earth. It rained—no, poured—last night, and the ground on the way to Kyle’s gravesite sucks at my feet, holding me back. It’s almost as if the muck can read my mind and knows I dread going down that hill.

But I have to go. Kyle’s body is in that casket because of me. The least I can do is see him laid to rest.

I straighten my skirt and smooth my hair down over my shoulders. No one can see me, of course, but Kyle always liked when I wore my hair down. And just because I’m invisible doesn’t mean I should wear jeans and a tee-shirt to my best friend’s burial.

My shadow drifts over the granite headstones as I pass, oily and thick and twitching like it’s alive. I know it’s just my Reaper’s shadow because, like any normal shadow, it has an end. Not like the long stripe of Blackness that stretches on and on and whose purpose is to connect Abaddon to a soul he’s hijacked. That’s not a shadow. That’s a Shadow.

My eyes drift up from my silhouette on the gravestones to the bottom of the steep hill. I stop a good distance from the gravesite, worried my creepy Reaper-presence will give people a worse case of the heebie-jeebies than being in a graveyard usually does.

A lifting device holds Kyle’s casket elevated over a gaping hole in the ground. Behind the coffin, gleaming in the early morning sunlight, is his drum kit. A crossed set of drumsticks balances on the tom, as if he just set them down to get a glass of water.

I look away. I can’t cry. I might dry up and disintegrate into pile of dust if I cry anymore.

Rows of people fill the white folding chairs surrounding the coffin, and even more people file in and gather behind them. So many people. People from town. People from school. People who didn’t give one shit about Kyle, until he died. Assholes.

I scan the crowd for Haley’s curly blond locks.

Face puffy and wet with tears, Haley shifts between her parents in the front row. She looks terrible, but at least she’s awake and her soul is in her body, where it belongs. That’s a huge improvement from just three days ago.

Something bright and coppery flutters behind her and I shift my attention to over her right shoulder. Max’s hair flickers like a flame in the breeze. His bloodshot eyes are almost as red as his hair. He lifts his hand to wipe his nose on his sleeve, but Mom’s fingers close around his wrist. She gives him a stern scowl and hands him a tissue.

From what I’ve gathered hanging around the house, Mom doesn’t remember much of what happened the day Abaddon took her soul. I overheard her tell Miss Lena that all she remembers from that day was a spooky little boy flagging her down on Hell’s Highway, and then she woke up in the hospital. I’m glad that’s all she remembers.

Haley’s not so lucky. She doesn’t remember how she got to the Gateway or anything else that happened that day, but she does remember watching her brother skewer himself with the Scythe. She remembers his cries of agony, and the blood. She told the police she had a dream, a horrible nightmare where she forced Kyle to kill himself so she could live. They say she has post-traumatic stress disorder. She probably does.

No one, other than me, knows for sure what happened to Kyle. His autopsy showed he died of blood loss, though there weren’t any wounds on his body, and no blood was found at the site of his death. Their best guess is that he was hit by a car and died of internal bleeding, but even that theory has a ton of holes. I guess that’s what happens when a Reaper kills himself with a Scythe. It creates an unsolvable mystery.

But the story that has all of Carroll Falls buzzing is that of the boy they found just yards from Haley’s unconscious body. A boy who shares a striking resemblance to a Carroll Falls legend.

As soon as Sara Shepherd saw the story of the anonymous, catatonic, teenaged boy in the newspaper, she rushed to the hospital. She claimed he was her nephew, the son of the notorious town murderer, Aaron Shepherd. She said he had contacted her and was supposed to meet her at her house that day but never showed up. One quick DNA test later, and her claim was confirmed. The boy is related to her.

That news spread through town faster than a grease fire in a paper mill.

My gaze slides over the crowd gathered around Kyle’s coffin. Sara stands near the back of the crowd next to Mrs. Lutz, the woman Aaron dated forty years ago, before he became a Reaper. I wonder if Sara told Mrs. Lutz the truth, that the boy she’s caring for in her home is the same boy who asked Mrs. Lutz to help him move a body all of those years ago.

I’d like it if she knew she didn’t cause Aaron’s death. She shouldn’t have to hold onto that guilt. Nobody should. The only reason I’m not curled up in a ball somewhere, wallowing in my own pool of self-pity and guilt is because I refuse to let this be the end. With or without Nicholas’s help, I’m going to make this right. Somehow.

After what feels like a lifetime, the service ends, and I move on. A headache is just minutes from exploding behind my eyes. Someone is about to die and I have to go. I have a job to do.