“Of course you would. My brains are delicious.”
“So what do you think? Should we watch and see how a zombie falls in love?”
“Let’s do it.”
We popped in the movie and settled back to watch it, chowing down on our food. I felt a little guilty because I had ulterior motives for choosing this movie. I wasn’t interested so much in how a zombie fell in love but rather how a girl could fall in love with a zombie. Zombies were killers.
Like Charming.
Except Charming didn’t eat brains (thank God).
Charming told me he wasn’t really living. Zombies were dead.
Maybe if I could somehow see how a girl could love a zombie, I would be able to figure out why I couldn’t get Charming out of my mind. I could understand why I didn’t run screaming in the other direction.
Because really, the only direction I seemed to be going was toward him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Booby trap - an explosive device designed to be triggered when an unsuspecting victim touches or disturbs a seemingly harmless object.”
Charming
The tricky thing about searching someone’s personal space was making it appear it hadn’t been searched at all. Just the slightest disturbance of something that seemed like it would go unnoticed is the one thing that could cause everything to blow up in my face.
“Look over there,” I said in hushed tones, pointing to the bookcases across the room from the desk.
We searched in silence, not wanting to alert any of the staff that might be in the house. It was amazing to me that the Grim Reaper was able to employ so many people and never get caught. If I were him, I would want all the privacy I could get. Hell, I wasn’t him and I still wanted that.
I started with his desk. I looked through the neat stack of papers that lay in the center, but it was all just stupid paperwork. Utility bills, invitations to events, and some spreadsheets and invoices for the legitimate business that he owned, which was luxury car sales. He had dealerships in Anchorage, Los Angeles, and New York.
I restacked the papers and moved on, looking over the surface of the desk. There wasn’t anything else to search. My eyes settled briefly on the bowl of stones that sat on the corner and then moved away. I wasn’t going to touch those things. His stones were his calling card, the only thing he left in place of a life he took. My luck, I would pick up one and alarms everywhere would start wailing.
I went through the contents of his desk drawers, looked through his calendar, his pens, and the roster of names that I knew were Death Escorts. The business was growing. He had more Escorts than I realized. Maybe that was one of the reasons he thought I was expendable. He thought he could replace me. I smirked. I wasn’t replaceable.
“There’s nothing here,” Storm complained about ten minutes into the search.
I glanced up. “Did you look in those books?”
“All one hundred of them?” He moaned. “Yeah. Nothing but a bunch of words.”
“Keep looking.”
“I’m telling you, you aren’t going to find anything.”
I reached under the desk and pressed a button. All the closet doors containing his collection of bodies opened soundlessly. They all hung there in perfect, neat rows. Not a hair was out of place on any of them.
G.R. was definitely a neat freak, which made searching a pain for many reasons. One, I had to be sure everything was back exactly the way I found it. And two, everything was so decluttered that I was starting to think Storm was right, that there wasn’t anything to find.
“We’re going to have to search his bedroom after this.”
“You wanna do what?” Storm said, disbelief crowding his tone.
I began looking through the bodies, sliding them back and forth on the rods. “I’m not leaving here until I have something I can use against him.”
Storm came over beside me, stopping and I would assume staring at me, but I ignored him. I got down and searched under the bodies’ feet, looking for anything that might be of use. But all the bottoms of the closets were completely empty. There wasn’t even a speck of dust.
I stood up and looked up, above the racks, thinking there might be shelves with boxes for storage. Nope. The only thing in these closets were bodies. Lots of them, all hanging single file.
