It was clear this wasn’t heaven. But it didn’t seem like hell either.
I watched as the large leather chair behind the desk began to swivel around, slowly turning, and if I had a throat I would have swallowed thickly.
There was something ominous about the way that chair turned, something final. I knew it down to my core.
A boney man with a wide forehead and shrewd eyes appeared, steepling his fingers beneath his chin and regarding me in a way that did nothing to soothe my confusion.
“You’re dead,” the man said simply. “But you don’t have to be for very long.”
“I don’t?” I replied, surprised when my voice echoed through the room. How does one speak without a mouth?
He smiled. It was the kind of smile that I’d seen before. The kind the boxer gave me right before he killed me in that dirty fight.
“I have a proposition for you,” he began, pulling his hands down from under his chin and pushing out of the chair. “One that you won’t be able to refuse.”
And so just minutes after I lived the moment that defined my life forever… I also lived the moment that would forever define my death.
Chapter One
“Death Escort - an assassin employed by the Grim Reaper. Will kill a target by any means necessary. Including charm.”
Charming
Present day
You would think being a Death Escort—a killer by trade—would make a man above getting a lecture from his boss. Apparently when you work for the Grim Reaper, the ultimate death dealer, it doesn’t matter who you are, how many times you’ve killed, or how ruthless you might be because he is better.
After over ninety years of working for him, it’s still annoying as hell.
And so are his lectures.
The fact is it gets old working for someone who is the be-all, end-all in life and death. So when I saw the chance to allow someone to get the best of him, I took it. I mean, it isn’t every day when someone manages to get around the iron-clad rules of the Grim Reaper himself.
So yeah, I talked and wasted time. I “forgot” to mention that one of his new Escorts had figured out a way to break the call of death that was placed on a Target. Turns out in the eyes of the Reaper (who strangely looked a lot like Mr. Burns from that cartoonThe Simpsons), that made me an accessory.
And now, after weeks of delaying the inevitable, I was getting my punishment.
Goody gumdrops.
Instead of listening to what a disappointment I was, how he should just Recall me right now and let me twist away in an eternity far worse than hell, blah, blah, blah, I turned my attention instead toward the floor-to-ceiling row of closets that lined the wall behind his massive desk.
The closets where he kept his bodies.
Some people collect coins, artifacts, or tools. G.R. collects bodies.
The doors were open, making me think he was displaying his collection to me for a certain reason. Shock value maybe? Though he must know that seeing a bunch of bodies wasn’t something that would shock me. These bodies were all groomed and hanging in perfect rows. I was used to seeing bodies in… less than perfect condition.
Maybe it was to make me think that the very body I inhabited at this moment might end up back with the others and I would be nothing but the red mist that makes up my soul.
I scanned the bodies, my eyes looking for one that probably should have been familiar, but after so many years I wondered if it would be. I had done this occasionally through the years, but just like today, I didn’t see it. I wondered what had become of my original body, the one I was born in. The one I died in. I couldn’t imagine G.R. got rid of it; I mean, he was practically a body hoarder, yet in all my years of working as an escort, of rotating bodies, I hadn’t seen it.
And I wasn’t about to ask. Because asking would let him know I wondered; it would give him even more power over me… something he didn’t need more of.
“I have a new Target for you,” G.R. announced, effectively ending my thinking.
“A Target?” I asked, surprised, wondering if I somehow missed the punishment I was supposed to get.
“That is your job, is it not?” he mused, staring at me through narrowed eyes. His cheekbones jutted out and his wide forehead was further widened by the way he combed his dark hair back and away from his face. He wasn’t a big man, but I guess when the merest touch could kill, muscles didn’t really matter.
