“What are you doing?” I shrieked.
He didn’t answer but vanished, unfurling into wisps of smoke, leaving me barreling down the highway on my own, presumably so he could go do something about Gus the Bus.
“I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die!” I squealed as I did my best to guide the steering wheel to keep us, or rather me, hurtling on our side of the dotted white line, off the shoulder, and zooming straight on till morning.
Tires squealed behind, the bus’s and those of a few cars. The horn of a semi blared, and I joined in with a scream of my own.
Then, just when I had my belt unbuckled and my knee halfway onto the driver’s seat, my hooded chauffeur rematerialized in a swirl of smoke, his hands taking over the wheel while misty tendrils nudged me back into my seat before rebuckling my belt.
“Right,” I whimpered, “seat belt.”
“I took care of it,” he grunted.
Oh. My God.
I shouldnotstart panting.
I swallowed hard, forcing my eyes away from him to the dark, whirring road. “What happened?” I spared a glance behind at the bus he’d somehow managed to pull off to the side, halt, and, apparently, disable.
“Hit the brakes, threw the emergency lever, disconnected the battery. There’s books everywhere.”
“So, it lives another day,” I murmured, not certain how I felt about that. I had good memories with Gus, even if the librarydidneed to replace him. But how could I possibly forgive him for killing Daisy, my Beetle?
God. That was right. I didn’t have a car anymore. And after its run-in with the Very Hungry Bookmobile, my Bughadto be totaled.
But then, I currently had bigger problems than a busted Beetle, didn’t I?
“Who was that back there?” I asked him. “The blond man. He came back, but I saw you kill him.”
“He can’t die.”
Wait, what?“So he’s a zombie?”
“Something like that.”
An infuriating response that gave me zero insight into this reoccurring nightmare that had, since meeting him, taken over my life. My potentially fleeting life…
“What does that have to do with me?” I asked, bristling, my nerves finally catching up with me, panic over my fate sinking in at last. “What doesanyof this have to do with me?”
“Oh, come the fuck on,” he grumbled, but before I could open my mouth and chastise him for his rudeness, the swirl of red and blue lights and the wail of a siren corrected the thought he’d been responding tome.
Though I braced myself for another high-speed chase, he actually started to slow down.
“You’re pulling over?” I asked. Because how wasthatgoing to work?
“Let me do the talking,” he said, like he’d been in this situation before and knew the ropes. Like he wasn’t a literal walking, talking skeleton wrapped in vaporous death robes.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I checked the rear windshield again, squinting against the spinning blue and red lights of the cruiser that pulled us over.
“Not a word,” Reaper Man said as he threw the car into park, switched off the ignition, and cranked down his window.
15HELENA
“Sir.” The gum-chomping officer, a thirtysomething man with close-cropped dark hair and the barest dusting of a five-o’clock shadow, leaned down to scrutinize us through the driver’s-side window, his flashlight raised in one fist. When he aimed it at us—at Reaper Man—I said a silent prayer for the officer’s soul. “Could you remove your hood for me, please?”
My eyes bugged at this request, and Ialmosttold the officer to run, but then Reaper Man lifted hands—real flesh-and-blood hands covered once more in those black tattoos—to either side of his hood. Like if, instead of snatching the man’s soul out of his chest before leaving him lifeless on the side of the interstate, he was actually going to do what the officer told him to.
Which, to my utter shock, he did.
