Muse blasts from my car stereo and my seat rumbles with the beat. It’s a good song with a killer bass line, but I really shouldn’t be listening to music right now. The someone’s-about-to-die headache hasn’t started yet, but it will soon. And it’s probably a little too tongue-in-cheek for a Grim-Reaper-in-training to arrive at a death scene accompanied by a song with the lyrics “give me your heart and your soul” in it. I twist the volume knob all the way down as I turn onto Jon Hilkrest’s street.
Aaron told me to meet him outside Jon’s apartment at six o’clock. He wants to go over a few things before we go in for Jon’s heart attack. That works for me. The more we go over, the better. Aaron may have worked with me all morning and well into the afternoon, but I still feel like I know nothing.
There is so much to know. Too much.
I pull to the curb in front of the apartment building and check the dashboard clock. 5:55. No lecture from Aaron tonight. I’m five minutes early.
The tugging feeling in my head returns, urging me out of the car and into the apartment building. The headache isn’t as bad as it was that first night with Rosie. It’s more annoying than painful. For now.
I shift into park. Aaron’s face appears in the passenger’s side window and I scream. He smirks as he melts through the car door and settles his long body in the seat next to me.
“Did I scare you?” He grins like an idiot.
“You can be such a jerk sometimes.”
“Sorry,” he says through his prankster smile. “Drive around the block.”
“Why?” I shift back into drive.
“In a small town like Carroll Falls, you don’t want to be seen parked close to every death scene for a week before you disappear yourself. No matter how natural the deaths may be, people will talk.” He points to the street he wants me to turn down. Rumor Avenue. Fitting. “Believe me, you don’t want gossip like that floating around about you when you can’t defend yourself or your family.”
“Speaking of families and rumors…” I bite my lower lip. The steering wheel glides under my palms as it returns to center. “I ran into Mrs. Lutz yesterday. We had ice cream together and talked.” I glance over at him. “About you.”
His lips press together and the muscle in his temple bulges.
“And…?” His lips barely move.
“She says she knows for a fact you didn’t kill your mom and stepdad. Which is sort of funny, since you say you did.”
His fingertips dig into his jeaned thighs as he glowers out the window. “Margie’s always been a sweet person. She doesn’t like to think the worst of people.” He cocks his head to the right. “Park here, in the grocery store parking lot.”
My tires bump over the fluorescent-yellow speed humps. Aaron points to a spot near the back corner of the lot, and I head in that direction.
“Maybe. But she says she was with you all night that night.” I pull my car into the parking space nose-first and cut off the engine. “I don’t think she’s lying. I mean, what would she have to gain from that? But why would you lie and say you did something so awful if you didn’t do it? None of it makes sense.”
“I thought I told you in the library to drop this stuff, Libbi.”
“I thought I told you ‘fat chance,’ Aaron.”
Aaron snorts and shakes his head. “You really are stubborn, aren’t you?”
“The stubborn-est.”
He stares at me and I stare right back. If I look away now, I’ll lose this battle of wills, but if I hold my ground, I might actually get somewhere with him.
“Fine,” he says, after what feels like an eternity of staring into his determined eyes. “It’s really none of your business, but if it will help you focus on what’s important here, I’ll tell you why Margie thinks I’m innocent.”
“Really?” I’m not sure if I heard him correctly.
“Yeah.” He runs a palm over his face. His hand stops on his chin and he tilts his head, studying me through his bangs. “Under one condition.”
“Okay,” I say, before he can change his mind and take it back.
“You have to help me with something tomorrow. No questions asked.”
“Okay.” I suppress the smile that threatens to lift the corners of my mouth. I can’t believe I actually won the staring contest. I never win those things. Max holds the undisputed title in our family. “What can I help you with?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow.” He runs his fingers through his hair and stares out the window. I wait for him to start talking, but when a full minute passes and he stays silent, I nudge his elbow.
“Aaron, are you going to tell me why Mrs. Lutz thinks you’re innocent?”
“Yeah.” Aaron massages his temple. “She didn’t see me do it. She thinks someone else did it before we got there that night, but…” He swallows. “She’s wrong.” Aaron sits up straight and turns toward me. His thigh knocks into the gearshift, hard enough to sink into his flesh, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Now, can we drop the subject and concentrate on Jon and the job we have to do? Please?”
“Who does she think killed them?” I ask, and Aaron sighs.
“I only agreed to tell you why she thinks I’m innocent. That’s it.”
“But you didn’t tell me anything,” I say.
“No more. We have a job to do and it’s getting late.” His eyes bore into me and I can almost see the door slam shut behind them. If I couldn’t sense how hard it was for him to say what he already said, I’d feel cheated, because he’s done talking.
“Are you nervous?” he says. It’s an obvious change of subject, but I’ll play along. I’ll let him win the battle, this time.
“A little,” I say with a shrug. What I feel like saying is: Hells-to-the-yes, I’m nervous. Are you freaking kidding? But I don’t want Aaron to lose confidence in me.
“Good. You should be nervous, but not too nervous.” He winks and pats my knee. I must not look as stoic as I think I do because he says, “It’ll be okay, Libbi. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
“Yeah, of course I will.” I swallow the bucket of sand in my mouth and give him my bravest smile.
“There are a few things we need to go over before we go in. You know, rules and stuff,” he says. “First, there are a few powers that can’t be used without an actual soul to practice on, so some of this stuff will be brand new to you. And since this is your first time, I’m not going to let you try anything—not even what we practiced today—unless I’m touching you and walking you through it, step by step. Second, when I touch you, Jon will not be able to hear the conversation between the two of us. He will only hear what is said to him directly. That way I can instruct you without him hearing. Just remember, if you have anything to say that you don’t want Jon to hear, you have to touch me. Okay?”
“Okay.”
The dull, pulling headache suddenly leaps from annoying to crushing in less than ten seconds, and I squeeze my eyes closed and massage my temples.
“I think we’re running out of time, Aaron,” I say, keeping my eyes shut. “We need to get moving.” I swing my door open, jump out, and look back in the window at Aaron. He hasn’t opened his door yet. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go.”
***
I step on the jack-o’-lantern doormat in front of Jon’s apartment door, and it lets out a howl of terror. A little early for Halloween, isn’t it? Or maybe Mr. Hilkrest is a lot late bringing the mat back in. Who knows?
“Jon isn’t ready to go, like Rosie was,” Aaron whispers. “So I don’t think it would comfort him to see us, no matter who we look like.”
“How do you know he isn’t ready to go? I thought you said we can’t read minds?”
“We can’t, technically. But for about an hour before they die, we get a sense of their emotional state, if we don’t let our own emotions get in the way. It gives us a better idea of what we’re walking into. Oh, and if they think something directly at us, we can hear it as if they’re talking out loud.”
“Oh,” I say. That explains why I heard Rosie’s voice in my head that first night. “Are you going to teach me how to do that? How to sense emotions?”
“Yeah, of course. But one thing at a time.” He grabs my hand and holds it in both of his. “First, we need to become invisible to Jon. If he sees us now, he’ll panic. We don’t want him to panic.”
Aaron reviews how to become invisible to the almost-dead, and with him holding my hand, I’m able to do it. It’s a lot easier for me than it was this morning, and so is walking through the door. I don’t even hesitate when we step through the closed apartment door together. And I meet no resistance, like walking through a cool curtain of smoke.
The reek of spilled beer and stale cigarettes smacks me on the other side. Aaron leads me down a narrow hall and we pass a tiny kitchenette with dirty dishes stacked on every inch of counter space. One look around the cluttered living room—piles and piles of dirty laundry, old newspapers, all manner of holiday decorations, and empty boxes of take-out—and I can guess Jon wasn’t trying to get a head-start on Halloween this year with his doormat. That rug has probably been there for years.
Mr. Hilkrest sits in the center of the mess, rocking back and forth on the same pink couch I saw in my clock vision. The same hand clutches his chest and the same grimace distorts his face. The light of his soul is almost as dim as mine when I’m not sharing Aaron’s brightness.
Hand in hand, Aaron and I enter the room like Hansel and Gretel entering the dark, scary forest. We stop in front of Jon and block the TV, but he doesn’t care. We’re invisible to him.
A framed photo of a woman with her arms around a laughing toddler sits on the table next to him. Their eyes are identical to Jon’s, close-set and dark brown. On the table in front of the picture is a cream-colored telephone with a long, curly cord.
Jon hisses air between his teeth and rubs his chest with his closed fist. His other hand reaches for the phone, but then he stops. He eyes the phone like it’s untrustworthy and then pulls his hand back into his lap.
“Why won’t he call someone?” I ask Aaron.
“Who knows?” Aaron shrugs. “Maybe he thinks he has indigestion and it will go away.”
I want to grab the phone and dial 911 for Jon. My hand darts forward and Aaron smacks it back.
“We can’t, Libbi. Even if you could call, they wouldn’t get here in time. This death is impossible to change,” he says. “It’s scheduled. It’s his time. We have to let him go. It’s our job.”
“Ugh!” My hand flaps down to my side. “I hate this!”
“Tell me about it.”
I remember the time I called Aaron supernatural and all-powerful. He scoffed at me then, but now as we stand in front of Jon—watching him struggle, watching him die—I know why. I’ve never felt more powerless in my entire life.
“And we can’t do anything to help him?” I say.
“Well, we can do this.”
Aaron places his free hand on Jon’s arm and the man stops rubbing his chest with his fist and smiles. His shoulders sag and his eyelids droop to half-mast as he slumps in his seat like a drunken wino.
“What did you do to him?” I ask.
“I just relaxed him. You should remember. I did it to you that day in the library.” He grins over his shoulder at me. “You told me never to do it again.”
My eyes dart back and forth between Aaron and Jon. Drool stretches from Jon’s bottom lip and pools on his food-stained sweatshirt. “Oh God. I didn’t look like that, did I?”
“No. I gave him a much stronger dose than I gave you.”
Aaron takes a step away from Jon and pushes me forward. He positions me directly in front of the half-conscious man. My knees graze his knees and my heart races.
I can’t help but shiver when Aaron places my shaky hand on Jon’s shoulder. I’m touching a dying man. My stomach lurches, and I can’t tell if it’s from nerves or because I’m a little freaked out. If Aaron hadn’t have saved my life, I would have been on the receiving end of this process. Aaron would have done this to me to calm me before I died.
Aaron spends the next couple of minutes teaching me how to relax someone with my touch. Not an easy task for someone as far from relaxed as I am. That power may come in handy for Aaron, but I don’t think I’ll ever use it. It seems wrong to mess with someone like that, whether they’re about to die or not.
I know the moment Jon dies. The dim light of his soul surges for a brief moment and then it collapses in, toward the center of his body. His chest stops heaving and his head hangs limp. His soul goes dark.
The clock in my head says it’s 6:27 p.m. Right on schedule.
“It’s over,” Aaron says, rubbing his hands together. “And now it’s time for us to step in.”
“What do we do now?” I ask.
“First, we put a mirror up before we let him see us,” Aaron says. Great. There goes that mirror stuff again. I give him a “WTF?” look, and he smirks and continues. “When Jon looks at us through the mirror, he won’t see you and me. He’ll see the reflection of whomever he wants to see on the other side. We won’t know who he sees until he calls us by name, so I’d try to stay neutral.”
“More tricks?” I frown. “Why not just be honest with him?”
Aaron heaves a big sigh and returns my frown.
“When you’re a Reaper, you can do whatever you want. But I think people respond better to the shock of being dead when they’re greeted by someone they know and expect to see. The mirror does that for them. It makes it easier.” He glances at Jon’s limp body on the couch. “And there are fewer runners that way.”
“Runners?”
“A soul that tries to run away once I get them out of their body. The runners are usually people who are surprised they’re dead and aren’t ready to go, like Mr. Jon Hilkrest here.” Aaron tilts his head toward Jon. “I always catch them, but why waste time chasing after a soul when you could use something as simple as a mirror to keep them calm?”
He has a point. I had wondered why Rosie kept calling Aaron “Bruce” and me “Kate” that night. Now I know why. Aaron must have put a mirror in front of us.
“I’ll let you try to place your own mirror,” Aaron continues. “But if you take too long, I’ll have to step in. Now that Jon’s body is dead, we don’t have much time to mess around with this. We still need to remove his soul, before it gets painful for him.”
Aaron explains how to place the mirror, and after a few attempts I think I get it, but there’s no way to tell for sure. The only person the mirror will work on is the person it’s set to reflect. The real test will be when I allow Jon to see me.
But first, we need to get him out of his body. My heart and my throat switch places. This morning, Aaron said removing the soul is the most dangerous part of the job. If it’s not done right, the soul could be destroyed. Aaron made it look so simple with Rosie, but he’s been doing this forever. I doubt I can do it with even half of his grace.
“This part is so important and dangerous, I think I’ll do it myself this time,” Aaron says. My taut neck and shoulder muscles instantly loosen. “I’ll talk you through everything I do, step by step, and you can do it the next time. Okay?”
“Good! Okay,” I say with a little too much enthusiasm. I smooth my shirt down and clear my throat. “I mean, that’ll be fine.”
Aaron slides his hands around Jon’s hands without moving them and the Scythe instantly blasts to life. It throws off sparks and tendrils of smoke that wrap around Jon’s wrist.
Aaron talks me through every detail of removing a soul, from how to us the Scythe to connect to the soul, to how to separate it from the body. And as the youthful soul of Jon Hilkrest stands up out of his aged, dead body, Aaron tells me to remove my invisibility so Jon can see me.
“Mom?” Jon’s eyes fix on me. My mirror works. Okay. I can do this.
I nod slowly, fighting an inappropriate grin.
“What are you doing here?” Jon asks me. “You’re dead. Am I dreaming? What’s happening?”
I twist the hem of my shirt and bite my lower lip. I have no idea what to say to him. Anything I say could send him running.
“You’ve had a heart attack, Jon.” Aaron answers and I shoot him a grateful glance. “You’re dead now too. Just like your mother.”
“Uncle Marty? Is that you?”
Aaron doesn’t confirm or deny anything. He just stands there, all creepy, staring at Jon with his hands in his pockets. No wonder Aaron has runners. He seriously needs to work on his people skills.
“That’s right, Jon,” I say. “You’re dead, but that’s not a bad thing. It just means you get to spend time with us now.” I pat Jon’s ice-cold, glowing arm like my mom would do. He smiles and then I add, “We’ve missed you.”
Jon’s ghostly eyes shimmer with tears. He opens his arms to me, expecting a hug.
“I’ve missed you so much, Momma,” he says and I take a step back. This is getting a little too weird for me. Maybe Aaron was onto something with his standoffish approach.
“Okay, Jon.” Aaron steps between us, breaking the bizarre, fake mother/son moment. “We have to go now. We have somewhere important to be.”
I touch Aaron’s wrist so Jon can’t hear me when I ask, “Am I going with you this time?”
“Of course.” Aaron gives me a little smile. “How else will you know where the Gateway is?”