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Hell, Bunny thought. Maybe in his world, it was.
“You thought I knew about…”
About what? About why—or how—her mom had died? About whatever it was that she had been hiding from their family?
“Everything?” he supplied succinctly, cutting short the rampaging questions inside of her mind. “Yes.” His mouth twitched with the barest hint of the smirk he had shown her before. “But you’re a surprisingly fast runner.”
Was that a joke?
“Yeah, well,” Bunny replied loftily, brushing off any reaction she might have been able to conjure other than sass. “Atlanta is like a damned wildlife documentary. Survival of the fittest.”
A silence stretched between them, like gum on the bottom of a sneaker. Bunny shifted uncomfortably as his dark eyes continued to drink her in, seeming even darker thanks to the shadows in the room.
“So… are you saying that you don’t?”
“Don’t what?” Bunny asked, before answering the question herself. “Know what happened to her?”
He nodded. Twice. A controlled action that was for clarification, not conversation. The more she interacted with him, the more she was struck by how distinctly unhuman some of his responses were.
“No. I don’t.” This time Bunny pressed her lips together in a way she knew from experience wouldn’t do the fine lines on her face any good, and then released it. How ridiculous was it that she was worried about looking younger around a being that was supposedly immortal, yet looked young enough to be her much, much younger brother?
“The doctor said it was a heart attack,” she added, determined to push past her insecurities. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, looking to delve deeper into the current line of questioning. “How did you know her?”
It was a loaded question. Her whole life suddenly seemed like a lie, in the face of the fact that her mother had actually known Death. Why had she never said anything? Why did he think Connie would have? She fixed her eyes on his, using them as a central point for her focus. If she looked away he might disappear on her again, and she needed answers.
He seemed to sense that the time had come for a hearty dash of truth. His dark eyes narrowed for a split-second, like he was trying to judge whether or not Bunny was ready for the truth.
“She was my coworker,” he admitted eventually.
Bunny frowned, grimaced, and then processed the statement.
“Coworker,” she repeated, leaning back into the slightly musty-smelling armchair she had adopted upon their entry to the rec room. “My mother—a normal, Southern midwife—was Death’s coworker?” She shook her head, an incredulous laugh escaping her before she had the chance to stop it. “What the hell—was she an angel?”
Bunny laughed again. The whole idea was ludicrous. Her mom had worked at the nearest hospital to Mosswood in Rome, Georgia, her whole life. Bunny had visited her there on numerous occasions, had seen the countless babies she had helped bring into the world. It was too much to even fathom that her regular mom, who had made her warm milk and tucked her into bed at night, could be anything other than the firm matriarch Bunny held in her mind.
“An angel?” Death snorted. His face relaxed, losing a little of its stony resolve. When he wasn’t scowling, his classical Roman features left him looking more like an Abercrombie model than a harbinger of doom. “Connie was no angel, that’s for sure. They’re self-serving bastards. Most of them, anyway.” He paused, taking a moment to consider his response. “Very few exceptions,” he added begrudgingly.
“You’re for real telling me angels are a thing?” Bunny asked, feeling a little lightheaded again. Angels. Death. Possessed geriatrics who smelled like month-old sewage. And Julian had thought that this job would be less stressful than her continuing to work in the ER?
Death seemed to weigh which words he would offer her next. “I’m telling you that there’re other realms you clearly don’t know anything about,” he said, tilting his head back. He looked down the length of his nose at Bunny, and she got the distinct impression he was making a bet with himself on how long it would take before she cracked under all this new pressure. “But you better wise up, fast. You’ve got a job to do, and it’s not gonna get any easier just because you didn’t get a crash course from Mommy dearest.”
Bunny’s brows skipped right up to the top of her head at his audacity. His officious tone instantly pushed her to the edge of ‘oh no the hell you didn’t’ territory. A less stressed, more confident version of herself might have thought to tread lightly, given she was having a conversation with a cosmic force. But patience had never been her strong point to begin with and was pretty much nonexistent right now.
“Look,” Bunny shot back, unwilling to concede any of the ground she’d gained. “We’ve established that you’re… you,” she added, refusing to call him Death because it just seemed purely ridiculous. “And that there’s some Big Bad Secret my mom didn’t tell me before she died. But you being all smug about it isn’t going to help me. So either tell me what I need to know, or kindly fuck off so I can finish my shift in peace.”
He watched her closely for a moment, his obsidian gaze studying the angles of her face. She was just starting to think she might blink and find herself sitting in an empty room, when a small smile tugged at the corner of his lips. It was only there for a split-second and when she really did blink, it had vanished entirely.
“You’re a firecracker,” he said, dipping his head to the side as though acknowledging he wouldn’t win this particular battle. He sat back in the chair, letting his head rest against it as he studied her. “You get it from her.”
His tone was soft, wistful even. A frown flickered across Bunny’s brow as she waited to see if he would volunteer any more information. When he didn’t, she lifted her chin in a subtle display of defiance. “I know.”
One of his sleek dark brows jumped with amusement that he failed to restrain. A heartbeat later, he pushed himself up out of the armchair. “Come with me.”
Panic flushed through her like a valve in her brain had opened up to release the excess pressure. It sounded as though he might be intending to take her somewhere she didn’t want to go.
Was he saying that it was her time? There was still so much she had to do, so much she had to say to her dad, and to Ben. And she wouldn’t have minded giving asshole Julian a piece of her mind, either. Her mouth was dry so she swallowed, but it was a futile effort. She might as well have swallowed a mouthful of sawdust.
“Where?” she managed to croak, watching him has he made for the door to the rec room, not bothering to glance over his shoulder to see if she was keeping up or not.
