And that subtle and breathy moan did me in, eliciting from my entire being something I had not experienced ever. At least not in this incarnation.
In that instant, Helena awakened a slumbering part of me, a dead corner of my former and long-forgotten humanness.
She did the impossible, the unforgivable. The undoable.
By, among so many other things, turning me the fuckon.
26HELENA
I awoke with a gasp, sitting bolt upright in my bed, my chest heaving, my heart revved to top speed, thundering like I’d just been jolted back to life with a supercharged defibrillator.
No doctors or nurse staff surrounded me, and no bright surgical lights beamed down on me. Instead, my fairy lights alone brought relief to the darkness of the night that had settled again.
While I sat there with my hand on my sternum, like that might keep my heart from winning the battering-ram battle against the bone, I waited for understanding to return.
Grim. I’d been with Grim. And everything we’d been through together must have really happened, because I still had on my Halloween earrings, my purse, my jack-o’-lantern sweater.
“Oh my God,” I said as, one after the other, I took the earrings out.
“Oh. My God,” I repeated as I laid the plastic pumpkins on my Ikea bedside table.
“Oh my God, I kissed him.” I turned this proclamation on my piles of pillows, none of which had anything to say. My heart, though, did an extra-jumpy triple step, pure terror pumping through my veins. My hand abandoned my heart to touch my lips—the same lips I’d dared to lay ontheGrim Reaper.
“Oh my God, I kissed him,” I repeated, a strange transmutation alchemizing my fear into something less mortified and more… giddy?
“Oh, wow,” I said, scooting to the edge of my bed, slinging off my purse along the way.
That kiss. I scarcely recalled it because I’d been under the influence of his spirit. That freezing essence had seized my soul, giving it an uprooting tug that hadn’t hurt at all.
On the contrary, I’d again had some trouble with sensations of the opposite sort.
Polaropposite.
He’d made me… drunk somehow. Infused me with a bliss-inducing balm I hadn’t wanted to let go of.
Did that mean I could blame what I’d done on some otherworldly version of liquid courage?
“Oh, I really did that,” I mumbled as I pushed off the bed to stand on wobbly legs.
What did he think of me? He must think I was utterly bonkers.
Then again, hehadresponded, his freezing essence pouring into mine, twisting and winding me up.
Wait a second. Had we… made out?
I’d certainly been ready to very literally jump his bones…
I still kept fingertips pressed to my lips as I marched out of my bedroom and into my disaster area of a living room.
“Oh,goodnight moon,” I growled as I spotted my flippingbrajust hanging out—flopped across the back of the couch, right where I’d thrown it the other night when the girls had needed a breather.
Heat rushed to overtake my face as I made a beeline to the garment and snatched it up, like it made any difference now.
“I can’t believe…”
What, Helena? You can’t believe what? That, while in a soul-wringing stupor, you kissed death on the teeth? Or that the sender of souls had gotten a gander at your fruit-themed underthings?Whathad I been thinking? That was just it. I hadn’t been thinking. Except… I also had.
Caution was so much easier to throw to the wind when you knew you didn’t need it—when you understood that playing it safe ultimately wouldn’t do you any good. And with my number being up, I suppose I thought I’d live a little by giving the Grim Reaper a smooch.
