The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love (3 page)

“Fuck,” Sal yelled. “Look at the ceiling.”

She tore her gaze away only to see that the stain above had thickened into a slick black ooze. It looked like an upside-down oil spill on a choppy sea. Soon it would reach the bar and the kitchen. And the stench . . . Damp and foul. Rotten eggs in a steamy soup.

The blackness began to drip, and Roxanne fought down another scream.

“Reece! Reece, get out here!” she shouted instead, just as a loud crash came from the kitchen.

“
Reece!
”

Santo turned, his gaze unerringly finding hers. The look he gave her spoke volumes, but she couldn’t understand what it meant. She couldn’t understand what was happening. The bugs had completely obscured the
windows, the live ones crawling over the splattered remains, trying to get in. She felt the blood drain from her face. Could they? Would they find a way?

It felt obscene and, at the same time, somehow biblical in a very not-okay way. Reece still hadn’t appeared, but a cry came from the kitchen, followed by a loud bang.

“That’s a gun,” Sal said, jumping.

A gun?

Roxanne shoved her fear aside and raced to the swinging door, calling out her brother’s name as she ran. She burst into the kitchen, aware of Santo a few steps behind.

What she saw brought her to a skidding stop. Santo took her hand and tried to pull her back, but when she refused to budge, he gave up and angled his body in front of hers. Even a man his size couldn’t block out the horror, though.

The oily tide coated the ceiling and lapped against the walls in the kitchen, stark against the stainless steel and new paint.

The back door stood wide open to the October night. The same back door that Reece and their older brother, Ryan, fought about constantly. Ryan insisted that it remain locked after five. Reece complained that Ryan was a control freak who needed to get a life.
“What the fuck does he care if the back door is open? For Christ sake, let the slaves have some fresh air.”

The shelving that held pots and pans had been
knocked over, its contents scattered all around it. The dishwasher was sprawled beside the sink. She could only see his legs and feet, but she recognized the rolled-up jeans, bright yellow sneakers, and hem of his too-big Iron Man T-shirt bunched around his thighs. The black ooze splattered his inert form.

Flash, flash, flash.
The images bombarded her so fast that she could barely focus on one before moving to another.

Reece stood in the doorway to the small office that was tucked between the walk-in refrigerator and the far wall, facing away from her. Through the big window that allowed an unobstructed view from the desk into the kitchen, she saw a man in front of the opened safe.

“You shot him. You fucking shot Manny,” Reece shouted.

The man glanced over his shoulder at Reece, and Roxanne felt all the air leave her lungs. He wore a ski mask pulled down to hide his features, with black paint rimming his eyes. Only the whites and the pale blue irises could be seen. He’d sewn the mouth-hole closed with fat, ugly stitches so that not even his lips showed. He glanced past Reece to where Roxanne and the others now stood. Reece turned, too, and in the dread she saw on his face, Roxanne read so much more.

Reece knew this masked man. More than that, her brother had let him in.

Disbelief pierced her as the man spoke. His words
came disembodied from behind the stitched mask and all the more terrifying for those frigid eyes in their obsidian setting.

“Trust me, Reece.”

He shot her twin brother before she could grasp what he meant to do. Roxanne screamed again, but fear had closed her throat and all that emerged was a strangled cry. The echo of the gunfire reverberated through the kitchen, and her brother fell to the hard, tiled floor, his blood spilling from a wound in his chest. Then the man with the ghastly mask spun and she looked into the pale eyes and knew that what lurked behind that frozen blue was not human.

Not human by any measure.

As if invited by the blood spurting from her brother’s chest and the black gunk pooling on the floor, others began to pour in through the back door like roaches from a drain. Others. Not people but . . . She stared numbly, trying and failing to label what she saw. Whatever
they
were, they didn’t wear masks. They didn’t need to. Their appearance was hunched and gnarled, their skin so colorless it looked like paste. And their eyes . . . white except for the pinpoints of the pupils. White lanterns in the most gruesome faces she’d ever seen.

Santo jerked her away just as the man with the mask pulled the trigger two times in rapid succession and Sal and Jim hit the floor.

“No!” she cried as a hot spray splattered her skin. Santo was dragging her through the swinging doors when something slammed into her from behind and she stumbled. Excruciating pain exploded through her, and Santo was all that kept her from falling.

He shouted something, but she couldn’t make out the words through the screeching agony. The pain became an entity that owned her.

She looked down to see that blood covered her pink Love’s T-shirt and bubbled when she tried to suck in a breath. She’d been shot. Just like Reece . . . Her thoughts blurred and her knees gave.

Santo swept her into his arms as he raced across the dining room, charging into the bug-infested night. Roxanne felt herself slipping,
hurtling
toward a black unknown that felt ominously familiar. They’d met before, Roxanne and death, and she knew that in the darkness, she’d find someone waiting. He always waited, that nameless, faceless presence that welcomed and terrified her at once.

Santo called her name, and for a moment she was back with him, looking into his eyes, trying to read what she saw there. What did he have to do with all of this? In a sliver of lucidity, her mind connected a dot she didn’t understand. Before she could decipher the hidden meaning, it was gone again.

She thought of her older brother and sister and
began to cry. Her eyes squeezed tight against the pain that throbbed from inside out.

She released one last wheezing breath.

And then, for the fourth time in her life, Roxanne Love died.

T
he reaper—
Santo
now, he reminded himself, while he remained in this world, his name was Santo Castillo—raced to the vehicle he’d taken from the human’s garage with a feeling of panic as alien as it was unwanted. From inside the bar came sounds of chaos and carnage that assaulted his new senses. He tried to reconcile the riotous impressions into some kind of order. But he couldn’t. What had just happened in there?

One of the creatures who’d spilled through the back door chased him out to the street but stopped short of crossing.

He looked over his shoulder as he ran with Roxanne’s soft, defenseless body clutched tight to his chest and caught a flash of burning white eyes and long,
curved canines. The creature snarled at him before it disappeared back into the restaurant, leaving him with the unsettling idea that he’d been spared.

He’d never seen anything like it before, couldn’t hazard a guess about what manner of beast it was. But he’d seen cunning in those lantern eyes and he couldn’t mistake the feeling burrowing deep inside him now. Fear.

Fear. In a reaper.

In his arms, Roxanne lay bloodied and completely still. Her heart had stopped beating. Her labored breath had fallen silent. Her skin had chilled.

Dead by any assessment, right on time.

Except he knew her lungs would fill again and those startling eyes would open. If he let them.

He’d come to reap her, after all.

He’d crossed from the Beyond, breaking the laws of the Otherworld to experience her death on both planes. He’d fantasized about it, waiting impatiently for the call that her time had arrived once again.

His plan had been simple. Fire for them both. End it all with flames that would destroy her human body at the same time it devoured the one he’d taken. It was easy. Clean. Irrevocable.

So why didn’t he act?

Was it because he’d seen her now with human vision that discerned detail and dimension he’d never known as a reaper? Vision that perceived nuance and
sensitivity? He’d watched the easy grace of her movements. Gazed spellbound at the way the light played off her creamy skin, glinted in the golds and rich browns of her hair. He’d caught her scent and it had twisted something inside him, making him want more.

Then she’d looked into his eyes and he’d felt . . .
alive
.

“Fuck,” he muttered, liking the vulgar way the human word rolled off his tongue.

It made no sense, the knot of rage and uncertainty lodged just beneath his breastbone. Human emotions as invasive as a strangling vine. As dreaded as a reaper at a wedding.

Carefully, he settled Roxanne in the passenger seat of the vehicle, then shrugged out of his jacket and pulled it around her. She’d be cold when she came back.

He circled Santo’s vehicle and got in on the other side. Gripping the steering wheel, he flexed his muscles, fighting the urge to strike out at something, anything. In those first few hours after he’d taken the human, he’d felt trapped by the awkward form, but now the flesh and bone he’d stolen no longer felt heavy and cumbersome. It felt strong, powerful. A finely tuned machine of muscle and will. Yet he was helpless to do anything but wait as he battled his doubt.

He curled his fist and gave in, slamming his knuckles into the dash until pain cleared his head. He started the engine, tapping as seamlessly into Santo’s driving
skills as he had the rest of the man, and pulled away from the curb, foot heavy on the gas pedal as he left behind the pandemonium and bodies inside Love’s.

Beside him, Roxanne’s head lolled to the side.

He’d come to reap her.

He meant to do it still. Even now the reaper inside him felt tight with excitement, imagining her fear, treasuring her pain. But something had soured the pleasure he’d anticipated.

No, not something. Some
one
. Santo Castillo.

Perhaps if he hadn’t taken Santo before his natural death, it would have been different. But in his effort to preserve the vessel, he’d inadvertently saved pieces of the man. And now those pieces bobbed in his bloodstream, pulsed through his heart. Sentiment. Memories. Convictions. Despair. Emotions . . . like grit beneath his skin.

And somehow that terrible miasma of emotion had mated with his own objective. Roxanne. Like a hook sunk deep in his cheek, the crippling feelings tried to steer him from his goal, the vestiges of Santo at the reins. Santo had been unable to save his wife, whose death had crippled and finally stolen his own desire to live. But this woman,
Roxanne,
he could help. This woman he thought he could save.

From Death himself.

The reaper clenched his jaw and shook his head.
No.

He had come to reap her.

She belonged to
him,
this woman who’d slipped through his grasp like a wind, who’d engaged him in a predator’s hunt, turning him into a stalking animal that needed to feed. Now was the time. Now was the chance.

And still he hesitated as Santo’s emotions whispered through his subconscious, urging him to stop. To think. Why did this female hold such power over him? Why did she defy the natural order of life and death? Why did she return to the human world when she was meant to move on?

“Why do you live, Roxanne Love?”

It astounded him that he’d never thought to ask before. He’d been so focused on
how
that he’d never considered the bigger question. He’d attributed Roxanne’s ability to escape her fate to some errant gene, some throwback trait. It happened. Some humans had special senses. Some could see the dead, some could see the future, and others still could move matter with their minds, start fires with a thought, heal sickness with a wish. No one understood why. In the grand scheme, what did
why
matter?

But once asked, he couldn’t ignore the question.

Why? Why did
this
woman cheat death?

Curiosity filled him as he glanced at her lifeless form. Who was she? Why had having her become so vital to him? Important enough to drag him from his world to hers?

And what had drawn the Others? The very underbelly of the Beyond had been at her front door. The locusts, the scavenger demon who’d shot both her and her brother, the Black Tides of Abaddon . . .

He felt a chill go through his human body. In the Beyond, identity was a luxury afforded to the very few. God, of course, stood separate from the mass of His creations. Some angels bore names and reputations—usually the wrong kind for the wrong reasons—but not all did. Entire battalions of winged entities answered to
angel,
just as thousands of faceless, nameless entities called themselves
reaper
.