Somehow, the library’s gargantuan children’s bookmobile—the one with the Very Hungry Caterpillar plastered across its side—had made its way into the alley.
The flat, dark face of the enormous and rumbling bus reflected the streetlights in a way that gave the illusion of bright glowing eyes. Its engine revved and roared, and I shrank under its scrutiny, vision burned and blurred by its high beams.
I hesitated, half tempted to charge the thing just to see if I could swing my way into the driver’s seat, action-movie style. My odds of infiltrating its prone-to-sticking folding door before the beast could mow me down, though, weren’t good, so I turned to again run. But only just in time for my Beetle to appear at the far end of the alley.
“Oh, shut the front cover,” I whispered. Though maybe now was as good a time as any to start actually cursing.
With a squeal of tires, the growling bus shot forward. I screamedand charged toward my Bug even as it sped straight toward me, because what other choice did I have?
None. At least not until a tall, hooded, and black-clad figure gripping a scythe materialized before me, his dark form unfurling from plumes of smoke.
With a cry of relief, I ran at him as hard as I could—harder than I’d ever run toward anything in my life.
He stood there—reaching for me with his free arm even while my Volkswagen closed in on him from behind, its headlights outlining his phantasmal shape, their white glare all but blurring that skeleton’s hand from sight.
But he didn’t seem to care that he’d found himself in the middle of a spectral game of chicken.
He wasn’t looking. He was just waiting.
For me.
Reaching him at last, I launched myself at him, throwing both arms around his shoulders, clutching him tight, my crushing embrace finding only bones to hold, my rib cage smashed against his.
That arm closed in around me, gripping me tight in return, clamping me to him before we shot up like a rocket. His robed form carried us above the dueling vehicles and out of harm’s way an instant before they collided.
An earsplitting roar of crunching metal and shattering glass ripped through the night. My Bug’s horn blared as the bookmobile shoved the car down the alley.
We remained in the air, levitating just below the tops of the surrounding buildings where we weren’t likely to be seen.
Unable to help myself as the wind battered us from every side, I buried my face against his shoulder, fingers curling into the coarse fabric of those dark robes, gripping hard.
And then I sobbed my desperate words into his frame.
“I was starting to think… you weren’t going to come this time.”
13GRIM
With those words, the essence of my soul, still gathered in my rib cage, shattered, the darkness splintering off to shoot down the lengths of my limbs, wrapping my bones to the tips of my fingers and toes.
The flesh I didn’t currently have wanted to take a breath, to gasp and expand with the overwhelming influx of whatever sensation this was.
This mixture of emotions, never mind their inexplicable potency, made no sense to me.
Still, these…feelingsfought to take a more definite shape.
Most prominently, something that resembled guilt but wasn’t—not exactly—echoed through me. Rage toward Cedric boiled in the mix, too, but that had been there before. Now that I’d ensured her safety, my wrath slithered to the background of my being, sated if not slaked.
An unexpected possessiveness swirled in me as well, fueled by the weight of the librarian in my grasp—stoked, too, by the warmth that radiated from her, and the way she clung to me.
Mysterious pain enwrapped it all, an unfamiliar brand hammered into me by the thudding of her heart, the muscle that poundedagainst the cold bone barrier to where mine might have dwelled, as if calling—pleading—for an answer.
I needed to sever our connection, release her. That would stop this barrage. It had to.
This embrace, after all, must be the catalyst for my… discomfort.
Because I’d never held anyone before. Not that I could remember.
Maybe I had once, during the life I’d led, but I kept those memories at a greater distance than anything or anyone.
