For the Birds Page 19

  We stood there for a few moments, drinking our coffee in silence as we gazed out at the mountains behind his manor. Then Bub turned to me. Our eyes met, and a little unspoken dare passed between us. We forgot our coffee and leapt for the dock, stumbling over each other as we raced into the desert.

  On land, Tartarus was like the inside of an oven. There was a little wind, but it was too dry and hot to really count for anything. It did feel nice though, pushing along my skin as we ran across the desert floor, barefoot and panting, giggling at the absurdness and rightness of it all.

  The ground wasn’t as rough as it looked, and the run wasn’t as exhausting as it had been the first time Bub led me to the mountaintop, where he had laid a forbidden kiss on me as fast and hard as a piano dropped from a second story window. It hurt resisting him. I didn’t have to anymore, and my skin puckered at the thought, breaking out in gooseflesh right in the middle of the desert.

  The day felt stolen, like it almost shouldn’t exist, like I had cheated fate. It made everything brighter and sweeter and sharper. I wanted to drink the neon sky. I wanted to rub the red sand into my skin until it was raw and bruised in a mad attempt to hide in the moment. I wanted time to overlook me and leave me here to bake in the sun until all that was left was a memory of my beating heart and my aching smile, floating in the sky like the remains of a mad Cheshire cat.

  Bub called out my name in the middle of a breathless laugh. He was trailing behind me. I turned around, slowing down as I skipped backwards. My lungs burned like hot air balloons ready to lift me right off the ground and carry me over the mountains. Bub sprinted to catch up to me, not slowing once he did. He scooped me into his arms with a joyous howl, sending a dusty sand cloud up around our feet.

  I leaned down for a salty kiss before pushing away from him and taking off up our mountain trail.

  We ran for hours, stopping every mile or so to pounce on each other for a kiss or to laugh like loons at nothing in particular. When we reached the top of the mountain, we collapsed together on the ledge overlooking the plateau that stretched between the range and Bub’s manor. It didn’t seem possible, but we had enough energy leftover to make love on the hot, rocky ground, right in the blazing light of day.

  Bub rolled onto his back next to me, breathing hard from our tireless play. “If only I knew your mind the way I know your body,” he laughed.

  “What makes you think that you don’t,” I laughed back at him.

  Bub’s laughter trailed off and turned his head to me. “Come now, pet. I’m a demon. I know a thing or two about secrets, and any fool can tell you’ve got enough to fund your own trade.”

  I pulled away from his knowing eyes and looked to the sky. “My secrets aren’t so glamorous.”

  We caught our breaths and Bub stood, helping me to my feet. He reached out and tugged at one of my curls, wiping the sand from my hair.

  “Don’t you trust me?” he asked, looking wounded again, fragile and uncertain. A few months ago he would have asked the question in jest, not caring what the true answer might be.

  A simple yes wouldn’t do. I leaned into him, running my hands over his shoulders and up his neck, tangling them in his sweaty hair. Then I pressed my mouth up to his neck, just below his ear. “Catch me,” I whispered.

  I tore away from him, sprinting to the edge of the cliff. It was a tremendous drop. It had taken us half the day just to get up there. I didn’t think long on it. I would have lost my nerve if I had. I just leapt. I threw myself to the open air and let the rush of the fall dry the sweat to my skin. I didn’t even close my eyes. Halfway down, I twisted around to look up at the pink streaked sky. Then I heard the buzz of thousands of tiny wings surround me. Bub’s arms followed, wrapping slowly around my middle. One of his legs nudged between mine.

  The fall slowed, but it didn’t stop until we had made it back to the foot of the mountain. When the deafening buzz of flies faded back into nothingness, Beelzebub turned me around in his arms. He crushed me to his chest. I could hear his racing pulse beating in time with my own as it thrummed through my head and chest, echoing out in an adrenaline infused wave to the rest of my limbs.

  “You’ve lost your mind, you realize?” Bub finally said, leaning back to grin down at me.

  I answered him with panting laughter. Maybe I had lost my mind. It felt too good to get overly concerned about it though.

  When we arrived back at the manor, Jack had lunch waiting for us on the back patio. He didn’t comment on our nakedness, but he did bring out a pair of khaki shorts for Bub and a blue sundress for me, that we gleefully ignored while we snacked on tea sandwiches and grapes and more wine than we should have been allowed to.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden of horrors behind the manor. Every plant had come from the human realm, which was really hard to believe, considering the fact that they all looked perfectly suited for hell. There was bleeding fungus and white baneberries that looked like clusters of doll eyes clinging to bloody stems. Porcupine tomato and devil’s claw thistle circled a clearing in the center of the garden, with voodoo lilies and Venus flytraps rising up behind them in all their traumatic beauty.

  There was no straying from the path here. A foul step wouldn’t be easily corrected. It made me feel all the more naked. Bub and I sat together on the black iron bench that rested in the center of the clearing while he told the story of each plant and how he happened to come by it. It made me wish I had spent more time exploring in the human realm.

  As night fell, I struggled to stay in high spirits. The thought of returning to the city and to work was an annoying little distraction encroaching on the ease my mind had settled into.

  Bub and I humored Jack and put on some clothes, after we showered to wash away the sand and sweat from our baked flesh. Jack left some ointment and bandages in Bub’s dressing room for me to touch up my battle wounds. I was healing up nicely. Anymore, I wasn’t sure if it was from Meng’s tea or if it was because I was a more potent kind of immortal than my fellow reapers. It made me suspicious of my own skin.

  Jack hadn’t been kidding about the feast of all feasts. Since it was just Bub and me, he had prepared the smaller, more intimate dining room, situated just off the kitchen in a little windowed alcove. The spread between us was better than anything the Hearth could have dreamed up. Fancy deviled eggs, stuffed potato skins, caviar, French bread, and a dozen other tasty side dishes lay in a spiral pattern around the table, circling up to the main course, a roasted duck. Jack brought out an exceptional red wine that he had made himself, over three hundred years before.

  We were so full after dinner that we couldn’t even bear to look at the dessert spread jack had prepared and had to promise to sample it for breakfast before departing for work.

  Bub and I wobbled on our way back to his bedroom, the wine and food making us slow and lazy. We collapsed on his bed, and though it was only eight in the evening, we were out in no time.

  I woke before Bub and lay in bed, watching him sleep and thinking about the retirement plan Jenni had signed me up for earlier in the year. She hadn’t mentioned much about the retirement investments since being made Grim’s new second-in-command. It was just as well. The minimum timeframe for most of the plans was five hundred years. Even just daydreaming about it felt premature.

  I had signed up for one that would allow a fifty year hiatus after six hundred years, but that was before I had been made captain of the Posy Unit. I was seriously thinking about renegotiating my contract with her and setting up something in the way of an indefinite hiatus after five hundred years. It was still a long ways off to be thinking about, but it was the only thought that made getting out of bed and getting ready for work even remotely tolerable.

  Bub finally woke, and we had coffee and leftover crème brûlée and chocolate mousse before he walked me out past the front patio where coin travel was active. He looked almost as disappointed as I felt about our time together coming to an end.

  “When
can I see you again?” he asked as I pulled away from our goodbye kiss.

  “Maybe Friday? I’ll call you,” I said, leaning in to brush my lips against his once more.

  I took one last look across the desert and up at the mountains in the distance, over the Styx and down by the dock where the houseboat rocked gently in the water. Then I looked back to Bub’s face, full of longing.

  “Let’s do this again soon,” I said, grinning at his overly eager nod.

  I rolled my coin and stepped out of the travel booth across the street from Reapers Inc. The sidewalks were full and angry horns chimed over the congested morning traffic.

  “Watch it!” a pair of Greek nymphs bumped past me.

  I tucked my duffle bag under my arm and hurried across the street.

  Chapter 27

  “Dying is easy.

  It’s living that scares me to death.”

  -Annie Lennox

  There were directories inside the elevators at Reapers Inc. They detailed what could be found on various floors of the skyscraper. In three hundred years, I had never really paid attention to the list. Floors thirty-five through thirty-nine were labeled as under construction. The letters were yellowed and a few had been replaced over the years.

  I punched the button for the thirty-seventh floor, like Ellen had directed me to, in order to meet with Grim before beginning the day’s harvest.

  Like most of the floors at Reapers Inc., the thirty-seventh was unfamiliar to me. The elevator opened into the shell of a lobby, with an unfinished receptionist desk and dusty plastic painting tarps hanging from the ceiling. A saw squealed to life in the background, and I had a comical vision of Grim in a pair of overalls, doing a little renovation in his spare time. What I hadn’t expected to find when I circled the walled off lobby area was Loki.

  The trickster god was tied to a metal autopsy table. Grim had it tilted up on its side and propped against a taped off sheetrock wall.

  Loki was a mess. The ropes splaying him open dug into his flesh, leaving purple burn marks in their wake. His chest and abdomen were raw and raised and looked more like hamburger than flesh. A sloppy pile of skin lay on the work bench next to him. He noticed my horror and smiled at me. Half his teeth were missing, replaced by gaping, bloody pits in his gums. One of his eyes was swollen shut, but the intent in the other was more than enough to make a statement. If he survived this, I was history.

  “Captain Harvey,” Grim greeted me without turning around. He wore a black, leather butcher’s apron, and his focus was narrowed on a table laid out behind him.

  Loki’s long, bug-eyed face shifted into Grim’s, and he sing-song mocked him. “Captain Harvey.”

  “Keep it up,” Grim said softly to him.

  Loki shifted again, this time into Coreen, Grim’s late lover and former second-in-command. “Keep it up,” Loki purred, panting erotically.

  I was entirely unnerved, but Grim didn’t even flinch. He turned around with a serrated knife in one hand and pair of needle-nose pliers in the other. His eyes were black holes, distant and unmoved by the horrors of the room. Dark, tarry blood dotted his brow. He very deliberately and slowly ran the blade down the length of Loki’s arm, and then quickly stabbed the pliers into the bend of his elbow with the intensity of a cobra’s strike.

  That got a jolt out of the trickster. The resentment immediately soaked into his expression. He slowly faded from Coreen into Jenni. “Looks like we’ll be working late again tonight, boss,” he said in a girlish voice far more flirty than my roommate’s.

  Grim’s stony expression didn’t change. Instead, he retrieved a jar of squirming scarabs from the work bench. He unscrewed the jar and pulled out a handful of the fat green and black beetles. A few wiggled free from between his fingers as he crammed them in Loki’s mouth. “Lend me hand, would you, Harvey? Tear off a piece of that duct tape on the table there.”

  I swallowed and walked around the outer edge of the room to the opposite side of the table from Grim, dutifully tearing off a piece of tape without a word. Grim took it from me with a nod of thanks and slapped it over Loki’s mouth.

  Loki tried to look unmoved, but after a few more seconds, the beetles began to feast on him from the inside. The sneering grin left his eye as it rolled back in his head and he gargled his annoyed discomfort.

  Grim turned to face me. “There, that’s better. Now we can talk in peace.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say to him.

  I’d never seen Grim with blood on his hands before. I’d never seen him with a look of such cold darkness before either. I didn’t know if it was a ruse to spoil Loki’s fun, or if he found the trickster so disheartening that he had shut off any semblance of humanity he might have possessed.

  “You can keep the leftover coin Ellen gave you for the mission on Monday. Do you find that payment to be sufficient?” he said in a dry, even tone.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  I hadn’t really expected anything additional. Just having Jenni back was good enough for me. Besides, I wasn’t about to argue with him while he was covered in blood and looking about as sane and emotionless as a serial killer.

  “The Fates have their souls. Hades has his helm, and Ammit has her headdress. My second-in-command is back to work. No one important died,” he said.

  “I killed Tisiphone.”

  Loki’s eye focused back on me for a second before rolling away again in agony.

  Grim shrugged. “Like I said, no one important. This one I would have been disappointed to lose.” He tapped his blade against the trickster’s shoulder. “He made a mockery of me. Prancing around in another’s skin. Lying through another’s teeth. I don’t have the time or patience for deceit. Of course, it’s to be expected from his kind. Imagine my disappoint if the deceit had come from one of my own,” he said, flashing his dead eyes on me.

  I didn’t say anything as he turned back to Loki and ripped away the duct tape. Loki choked out an alien scream, and the scarabs swarmed from his mouth, scrambling over his face and down his chest. He quickly regained his arrogant sneer and shifted into Tisiphone. “Perhaps you’d like to try again, little reaper,” his hissed at me.

  My throat went dry as I stood there, unable to blink, frozen by the demented anguish in his imitated smile.

  “You can go now,” Grim said with his back to me.

  I hurried away from the nightmarish scene, only briefly turning back to catch one last look at what it meant to be on Grim’s shit list. Loki caught my eye. He smiled, shifting into a perfect image of me, just as Grim buried the serrated knife in his gut, and the screaming began.

  I pushed through the hanging plastic tarps and pressed the elevator button with trembling fingers. The ride down in the elevator took entirely too long.

  I didn’t want to think about why Grim had felt the need to show me what he had done to Loki, but I couldn’t help but do anything else. Even though the secrets I kept from him weren’t intended to usurp his authority, they were still heavy with deceit and tinged with white lies. He knew it, too. The little torture show had been a warning, but it was a warning I wasn’t sure I could heed even if I wanted to.

  I could understand Grim’s desire to keep the throne a secret. I could understand that it was for the good of all, and I could even understand his goal of reigning supreme. What I didn’t get was how he could be so afraid of losing his position of power or of the threat of war, that he was willing to ignore the dangers of having a weak soul on the throne until it was too late.

  That’s why I had been made in the first place. And while I had initially resisted the responsibility, it was now becoming quickly engrained in my consciousness. This was what I was meant to do. Before harvesting, before being a captain of a specialty unit, my purpose was to make sure that the right soul was on the throne. I couldn’t let things like death threats from Grim set me back, because if I did, the rebels had more than mere threats in store.

  I left Reapers Inc. in a hurry, wanting to
put more distance between myself and the thirty-seventh floor that the city would allow for. I didn’t stop shaking until I reached the harbor.

  I was early, so I closed myself into the captain’s cabin and spent the next ten minutes hunched over the small toilet in the adjoining bathroom, dry heaving in a sorry attempt to keep my breakfast down. I couldn’t decide if it had been more Loki or Grim that had done it for me, but I wouldn’t be forgetting either of their faces anytime soon.

  I thought of Craig Hogan again, and I wondered if Loki’s fate would be the same as his. If Khadija had given me all of the same powers as Grim, did that mean he could reach his hands inside Loki and pull him right out of space and time, making it appear as though he had never existed at all? I didn’t really remember seeing anything about that particular gift in my history books, but I wasn’t a prize pupil by any means. Maybe I had missed that part. It didn’t seem like something I was likely to forget if I had learned about it.

  Josie and Kevin had been managing the harvest dockets for the past few days, and I felt like letting them handle it again. But since I was the one making the big coin, I decided I should man up and resume my responsibilities.

  Kate Evans was waiting for me when I found my way back to the main deck. I was surprised to see her without her better half, but maybe she had decided to distance herself, seeing as how Kate was bent on pushing her luck.

  She was wearing a light blouse and a silk scarf, much like the one I had worn to work the week before. On anyone else, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but on her, I could tell it was a pathetic attempt at mockery.

  She tossed her bangs back and looked down at her nails. “You think I could cut out a little early today? I’ve got a hot date at the Hearth, but I need to go stick my nose in the council’s business first,” she said with a grin.

  “By all means. In fact, feel free to take the whole day off. I think we can handle the day’s harvests without you. I’m feeling rather limber.”