AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“For the crash course,” he declared, striding into the hall and leaving his voice to bounce eerily across the empty room around Bunny, while she worked to calm her erratic heartbeat.
* * *
When she caughtup with him, he was lingering outside of a supply closet down the hall from the nurses’ station. The irony of Death waiting for her in such a spot wasn’t lost on her. She flushed with shame as she approached, keeping her head down so that her blonde locks would cover her burning cheeks and give her time to push the memory of almost stealing drugs from the hospital out of her mind. It was a stark reminder of how easily she could have made a different choice, under previous circumstances.
Her eyes were focused on the pale-colored linoleum floor, noticing all the scuffs and joins she had never noticed before. When his boots came into view, she pulled up short. So far, she’d noticed almost everything about him except the kind of shoes he wore. Shoes were such a tell for who people really were underneath everything else—it was why she’d hated wearing the blocky heels to her mother’s funeral. Connie had been the woman in the family obsessed with shoes. Bunny’d wear decades-old Converse for the rest of her life if the hospital, or now, Arcadian Waters, she guessed, would let her get away with it.
Death’sshoes were something else entirely. If she’d been made to guess, she would have suggested highly polished black wing-tips of some description; classy, refined, dignified. Something that paired well with the mystique around actually being Death. She was more than a little surprised to find out that she couldn’t have been more wrong.
Instead of the sleek footwear she had envisioned, she was instead struck by a pair of scuffed black leather boots that looked like they hadn’t been polished since 1930. The ancient laces were frayed, the leather was scratched here and there. In fact, the only thing that made sense about his boots was the fact the soles were thick rubber, which would alleviated most, if not all, of the sound he would make while loping along.
Bunny’s gaze traveled upwards from the boots at long last, as she indulged herself in taking a proper look at him. Strong legs, clad in what she had taken for dark gray trousers but were actually black denim jeans. Though she already knew what lingered behind his black button-down shirt, her gaze caught at the strange black metallic buckle on his worn black leather belt. The black coat that hugged his broad shoulders and upper arms would have been laughably cliched, if it wasn’t for the fact that looking at him suddenly made her so damn thirsty, she almost forgot she had a sense of humor at all.
“Today’d be good,” he said impatiently, the sound of his voice pulling her focus.
“Mm?” That damn blush threatened again, but this time it was easier to push it away.
“We don’t have time for you to be watching me all doe-eyed and awestruck,” he sighed testily, as though being uncannily gorgeous was his terrible cross to bear. “You wanna learn about your mom’s secret or not?” He shuffled closer to the door of the supply closet without waiting for her.
His arrogance was more than enough to bring Bunny back to the moment.
“Nobody’s doe-eyed,” she snapped, crossing her arms over her chest. “Or awestruck, for that matter.”
He ignored her, which only served to prickle her sense of self-preservation all the more. She opened her mouth to retort until he tugged on the long silver chain at his neck to reveal his pendant. Her eyes traced the gilded edges, the outlines of the ornate swirls of clouds in the middle of the obsidian oval.
His was the darker twin to the one she was wearing, the same in every way as her mother’s pendant—except one. As the pendant Death held glinted in the fluorescent light streaming down from above them, Bunny could see that the center of the clouds on his was etched with a partially hidden crescent moon.
In her mind’s eye, she could instantly see the sun that was etched onto her mother’s. Same, same, but different.
While she took a moment to process that revelation, he opened the supply closet door and held out one pale hand, indicating that she ought to go before him. If everything hadn’t already stacked up against the better judgment of logic, she might have made a polite excuse not to go into the closet. But she was in so deep, now, so far down the proverbial rabbit hole, that she had to know what was waiting for her on the other side.
He was right behind her, closing the door.
