“Wait,” I rasped as he turned away, and I actually grasped for his robes. My fingers caught only mist, which dissolved in my grip.
He strode off toward that man, who flung his arms wide. A strange poison-green glow flared along his sleeves, and the elevator’s doors tore open—all without his touching them.
While the blond man stepped forward to peer inside the mangled elevator, the Grim Reaper’s right hand shot out to the side. Bone fingers closed around the handle of the scythe that reappeared with that motion. The tool, or weapon—I still wasn’t sure which—unfurled out of that same undulating and soundless fog that trailed him.
I started forward, my heart thundering at speeds I’d never felt, as Reaper Man gripped the scythe between both hands, raised it, and then brought the now-glowing silver blade screaming down on the unsuspecting man.
That smile of silver soared through the man without cleaving him, ghosting through him instead, leaving no wound or mark. A gasp caught in my throat, though, when the blond man crumpled to the floor, an eerie and crackling spherical green light springing forth from his spine.
The hooded figure seized the fizzing orb in his free fist and then collapsed into the floor, vanishing in an explosion of dark miasma. Its remnants fountained upward before every trace of him, in the next instant, misted away.
“Omigod,” I said as, despite the reaper’s warning, I pushed off from the books to rush to the blond man’s side and crouch next to him.
Turning him over, I found the man—the young man—staring sightlessly upward, his too-blue-to-be-real eyes wide and unseeing.
Shouting voices drifted near, along with tromping boots.
Half a beat later, a brigade of first responders and firefighters descended upon us. One of them tugged me gently back from the man while another knelt to check his pulse and confirm what I already knew.
The man I’d just been warned to stay away from… was dead.
7GRIM
Unfettered rage coursed through me as I stormed down the entrance corridor of the Hallowed Halls, Cedric’s sputtering, fritzing, and bucking soul clenched in my grip.
On either side of me, the Soul Flames snuffed themselves as I passed, as if wanting to avoid catching my eye and thus my ire.
I’d never minded the dark, though. And Cedric’s smarmy soul, kicking and screaming as it sizzled and sparked in my fist, provided enough pale green light to illuminate the grim trek to the Basins anyway.
I’d warned him, hadn’t I? I’d told him to stay out of my business.
And what had he been doing at the library anyway if he hadn’t somehow followed me there?
I wasn’t naive enough to buy for one second that asking him would get me any truthful answer. Aside from that, he was beyond the point of interrogating now, wasn’t he? At least for the time being.
If I released my hold on his soul, he’d fly straight back to his useless carcass, which would reanimate and do more stupid shit to piss me off.
“Grim?” Johann asked as I thundered into the Basins. Glancing up from his scribbling, he lowered his spectacles to take in my state, no doubt also noting the unwieldy soul I carted.
Pluto gave a hoarse caw and took flight from his perch on theledge of the Black Basin, which he sometimes stared into for hours. He circled above us, frightened—marking my volcanic mood even before Johann.
“Grim Grim! Watch out for him!”
Normally, I stored souls in my hourglass as I collected them. I had no need to stow this one. Aside from having zero intention of hoarding it foranylength of time, my plans for it amounted to the immediate sort.
“Grim,” Johann tried again, a note of alarm rising in his aged voice as he set down his quill, eyes widening on me when I approached the Black Basin. “What are you doing? What—whois that?”
I didn’t answer the old man. I didn’t have to. This was none of his business.
Above us, Pluto continued to caw as he flew panicked laps around the room.
“Grim, stop!” Johann commanded as he scuttled down from his scribe’s desk, the yellow beret Flora had brought him from Paris tumbling to the floor in his haste.
Again, I ignored the doctor, making a beeline for that onyx vat that I would, despite the sour-lime hue of Cedric’s serpent’s soul,forcehim into.
But then, moving with far more speed than I would have thought him capable of, Johann slid to a halt in front of me, spreading his arms wide like some deranged referee calling a foul.
“Is that Cedric?” he demanded, and I gritted my teeth. The soul—it must have spoken its name to him. Something I couldn’t have prevented even if Ihadbesmirched my hourglass by stuffing the oily son of a bitch inside.
