I’d certainly never held another soul like this since my rebirth as the usher of the dead.
The moment I let her go, these feelingswoulddie, allowing me to once more be what I was: the impartial hand of death.
Having won the battle against Helena’s Beetle, the bus shoved the car out into traffic before swerving off somewhere. More horns blared and shouts rose on the chilled wind that assailed us, sending the tattered hems of my garments into a dance around both our legs.
Shivering from the cold, fear, or both, Helena kept her face buried against my shoulder as if the world had become too much for her. No doubt, with Cedric’s macabre interference, it had.
I sank slowly to the asphalt, all too cognizant that the danger for the librarian had not passed. Yet I couldn’t transport Helena elsewhere with my powers, not so long as her spirit remained attached to her body.
But then… there were other, more worldly means of transportation at my disposal.
The soles of my boots rejoined the pavement half a beat before Helena’s feet reconnected, and the instant she had the earth beneath her again, I released her.
She unwound herself from me with a reluctance I was sure I imagined, and freed, I brushed past her.
While I waited for—and willed—the mire of emotions her touch had inflicted upon me to depart, the infection remained. Worse, with every step I took away from her, the madness—I didn’t know whatelse to call it—intensified. As if our embrace, born out of necessity alone, had branded me.
Only now it was theabsenceof her heat that blazed even hotter.
Which wasn’t fucking good.
Somewhere in the distance but growing nearer, an engine growled. Then, at the far end of the alley, a sports car appeared, its high beams slicing their way through the night to bathe us both in their eye-searing light.
“Please,” Helena called after me, her voice shaky and desperate. “Where are you going?”
Did she think I would leave her here to deal with this mess on her own?Mymess?
Why did that thought piss me off?
I tossed my scythe aside, sending it unfurling into the Netherworld ether that remained ever at my command. With my other hand, I summoned forth the means of our extraction from Cedric’s cat-and-mouse shit show game.
My car.
14HELENA
He smelled of wood fire, oakmoss, and vetiver—an ethereal yet earthy essence that evoked visions of long-neglected cemeteries, old tomes, apothecaries, and bonfires.
Though he took that otherworldly aroma with him the moment he departed from me, the impression of those ribs digging into mine and that bone arm cinching me to him remained.
Bereft of that scent that, like his presence, I shouldn’t have found comforting, I wrapped my arms around my shuddering body.
A Supra at the end of the alley revved, ready to mow me down.
Just when I feared Reaper Man would vanish as quickly as he’d appeared, he pointed a bone finger at a second car—one that materialized from nothing. The car’s sleek and shining contours emerged from the gray-and-black fog he could apparently conjure things from as well as dispel them into.
As obsidian as everything else about him, the vintage vehicle roared to life, its grumbly voice not too dissimilar to that of the being who had commanded it forth.
Did the Grim Reaper seriously drive a muscle car?
Correction: Did he seriouslydrive?
“Get in,” Reaper Man growled in that dreaded demon’s voice that never, no matter the circumstances, failed to…dothings to me.
Having learned my lesson about deliberating on his commands, I scuttled to obey.
Reaper Man followed after to shut my door the moment I fell into the bucket seat.
Lightning fast, he dematerialized in a swirl of more black smoke beforerematerializing next to me in the driver’s seat amid more plumes.
