He’d get no argument from me there. But…“What if Meredith wasn’t supposed to die? What if it wasn’t her time?”
“It was. That’s how it works.” Nash’s voice held the conviction of a child professing belief in Santa Claus. He was a little too sure, as if the strength of his assertion could make up for some secret doubt.
“How do you know?”
“Because there are schedules. Official lists. There are people who make sure death is carried out the way it’s supposed to be.”
I blinked at him, eyes narrowed in surprise. “Are you serious?”
“Unfortunately.” A breeze of bitterness swept across his face, but it was gone before I was even sure it was there in the first place.
“That sounds so…bureaucratic.”
He shrugged. “It’s a very well-organized system.”
“Every system has flaws, Nash.” He started to disagree, but I rushed on. “Think about it. Three girls have died in the same area in the past three days, each with no known cause. They all just fell over dead. That’s not the natural order of things. It’s the very definition of ‘unnatural.’ Or at least ‘suspicious.’”
“It’s definitely unusual,” he admitted. Nash rubbed his temples again and suddenly sounded very tired. “But even if they weren’t supposed to die, there’s nothing we can do about it without getting someone else killed.”
“Okay…” I couldn’t argue with that logic. “But if someone isn’t meant to die, does the penalty for saving him still apply?”
Nash looked shocked suddenly, as if that possibility had never occurred to him. “I don’t know. But I know someone who might.”
10
“SO WHO’S THIS TOD?” I slurped the last of my soda, watching as passing headlights briefly illuminated his features, then abandoned him to short stretches of shadow. It was like rediscovering him with each beam of light that found his face, and I couldn’t stop watching.
“He works second shift at the hospital.” Nash flicked his blinker on as he made a left-hand turn.
“Doing what?”
“Tod’s…an intern.” He took another left, and Arlington Memorial lay before us on the right, the mirrored windows of the new surgical tower reflecting the streetlights back at us.
I gathered the wrappers from our meal and shoved them into the paper sack on the floorboard between my feet. “I didn’t know interns had set schedules.”
Nash turned into the dimly lit parking garage and glanced in both directions, looking for an empty spot near the entrance. But he was also obviously avoiding my eyes. “He’s not exactly a medical intern.”
“What is he, then? Exactly.”
An empty space appeared at the end of the first level, and he pulled into it, taking more care with Carter’s car than he had with his mother’s. Then he shifted into Park and killed the engine before turning to face me fully. “Kaylee, Tod isn’t human either. And he’s not exactly a friend, so he may not be eager to answer our questions.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to look irritated, which wasn’t easy, considering that every time he looked at me like that, like there was nothing else in the world worth looking at, my heart beat harder and my breath caught in my throat. “A non-human non-friend? Who works at the hospital as a non-medical intern?” At least it wasn’t another football player. “Now that we’re clear on what he’s not, care to tell me what he is?”
Nash sighed, and I knew from the sound that I wasn’t going to like whatever he had to say. “He’s a grim reaper.”
“He’s a what?” Surely I’d heard him wrong. “Did you just say Tod’s the Grim Reaper?”
Nash shook his head slowly, and I exhaled in relief. Bean sidhes were one thing—we could actually help people—but I was not ready to face the walking, talking personification of Death. Much less ask him questions.
“He’s not the Grim Reaper,” Nash said, watching me closely. “He’s only a reaper. One of thousands. It’s just a job.”
“Just a job? Death is just a job! Wait…” I sucked in a deep breath and closed my eyes. Then I counted to ten. When that wasn’t enough, I counted to thirty. Then I met Nash’s gaze, hoping panic didn’t show in the probably swirling depths of mine. “So…when you said you can’t stop death, what you really meant is that you can’t stop Tod?”
“Not him specifically, but yes, that’s the general idea. Reapers have a job to do, just like everyone else. And as a whole, they’re not very fond of bean sidhes.”
“Do I even want to know why not?”
Nash smiled sympathetically and took my hand, and my pulse jumped at even such small contact. Crap. I could already see that any future anger at him was going to be very hard to sustain. “Most reapers don’t like us because we have the potential to seriously screw up their workday. Even if we don’t actually restore a person’s soul, a reaper can’t touch it so long as you hold it. So every second you spend singing means a one-second delay in the delivery of that soul. In a busy district, that could throw him disastrously behind schedule. Also, it just plain pisses them off. Reapers don’t like anyone else playing with their toys.”
Great. “So not only am I not-human, but Death is my arch foe?” Who, me? Panic? “Anything else you want to tell me, while we’re confessing?”
Nash tried to stifle a chuckle, but failed. “Reapers aren’t our enemies, Kaylee. They just don’t particularly enjoy our company.”
Something told me the feeling would be mutual. I gave him a shaky nod, and Nash opened the driver’s side door and stepped into the dark parking garage. I got out on the other side, and as I closed the door, he clicked a button on Carter’s key chain to lock the car. Both sounds reverberated around us, and by all appearances, we were alone in the garage. Which was good, considering the discussion we were in the middle of.
“So what does Tod look like? Whitewashed skeleton skulking around in a black cape and hood? Carrying a scythe? ’Cause I’m thinking that would cause mass panic in the hospital.”
He took my hand as we made our way down the aisle toward the garage entrance, footsteps echoing eerily. “Do you chase after funeral processions in a long, dirty dress, hair trailing behind you in the wind?”
I shot him a mock frown. “Have you been following me again?”
Nash rolled his eyes. “He looks normal—not that it matters. You can’t see a reaper unless he wants to be seen.”
A warm, late-September wind blew through the garage entrance, fluttering flyers stuck to windshields and fast-food wrappers scattered across the concrete. “Will Tod want us to see him?”
“Depends on what kind of mood he’s in.” Nash walked past the huge revolving door in favor of the heavy glass pane, which he pulled open for me to pass through into the tiny vestibule. I held the next door for him, and we stepped into a small, quiet lobby lined with empty, uncomfortable-looking armchairs. The warmth of the building was a relief, and my goose bumps faded with each step we took away from the door.
Nash ignored the volunteer at the help desk—not that it mattered; she was asleep at her post—and guided me toward a bank of elevators at the end of the hall.
My shoes squeaked on the polished floor, and each breath brought with it a whiff of antiseptic and pine-scented air freshener. Either would have been bad enough on its own, and together they threatened to overwhelm both my nose and my lungs. Fortunately the elevator on the left stood empty and open.
Inside, Nash pushed the button for the third floor. When the doors closed, the “welcome” scent faded, replaced immediately by the generic hospital smell, a combination of stale air, cafeteria meat loaf, and bleach.
“Tod works on the third level?” I asked as gears grinded overhead and the elevator began to rise.
“He works all over the hospital, but Intensive Care is on three, and that’s where we’re most likely to find him. Assuming he wants to be found.”
A new chill went through me as his statement sank in. We were most likely to find
Tod in Intensive Care—where people were most likely to be dying.
My palms began to sweat, and my heart pounded so hard I was sure Nash could hear it echo in the elevator. What were the chances I’d make it through the ICU without finding a soul to sing for?
Slim to none, I was betting. And since we were already in the hospital, if I freaked out this time, they’d probably put me on the express gurney to the mental-health ward. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.
I was not going back there.
My hand clenched Nash’s, and he stroked my fingers with his thumb. “If you feel it starting, just squeeze my hand and I’ll get you out.” I started to shake my head, and he ran the fingers of his free hand down the side of my face, staring into my eyes. “I promise.”
I sighed. “Okay.” He’d already helped me through two panic attacks—I couldn’t stop thinking of them as such—and I had no doubt he could do it again. And, anyway, I didn’t really have any choice. I couldn’t help the next victim of an untimely death without finding Tod-the-reaper, and I couldn’t find Tod without checking all his favorite haunts.
The elevator dinged, and the door slid open with a soft shhh sound. I glanced at Nash, bolstering my courage as I straightened my spine. “Let’s get this over with.”
The third floor stretched out to either side of us, and one long, sterile white hall opened up directly across from the elevator doors, where a man and a woman in matching blue scrubs sat behind a big circular nurses’ station. The man looked up when my shoes squeaked on the floor, but the woman didn’t notice us.
Nash nodded toward the left-hand hallway, and we headed that way, walking slowly, pretending to read the names written on disposable nameplates outside each door. We were just two kids hoping to pay respects to our grandfather one last time. Except that we didn’t “find” him on the chosen hallway, or anywhere else on the third floor, which was almost a letdown after my initial fear of entering the ICU. Fortunately, Arlington wasn’t that big of a town, and only three of the beds in Intensive Care were actually occupied. And none of those occupants was in any immediate danger of meeting a reaper.
Tod was also absent from the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors, at least as far as we could tell. The only places left to look were the surgical tower, the emergency room on the first floor, and the maternity ward, on two.
I did not want to find a grim reaper—even if he didn’t carry a scythe—in the maternity ward, and we would definitely be noticed in the surgical tower. So we checked the ER first.
During my one previous trip to Arlington Memorial, my aunt and uncle had called ahead, and the mental-health ward had been expecting us, which meant we didn’t have to stop in the ER. So I’d never seen one in person until Nash and I crossed the front lobby and pushed through the double doors into the emergency waiting area. I have, however, spent plenty of time in the psychiatric unit, which is no trip to Disneyland. It’s populated with nurses who look at you with either pity or contempt, and patients in slippers who either won’t meet your eyes or won’t look away. But the ER holds its own special brand of misery.
Far from the energetic rush of adrenaline I’d expected based on certain television hospital dramas, the actual emergency room was quiet and somber. Patients waited in thinly cushioned chairs lining the walls and grouped in the middle of the long room, their faces twisted into grimaces of pain, fear, or impatience.
One old woman languished in a wheelchair beneath a threadbare blanket, and several feverish children shivered in their mothers’ arms. Men in work clothes pressed crusted gauze bandages to wounds seeping blood, or ice packs to purple lumps on their heads. At the far end of the room near the triage desk, a teenager moaned and clutched one arm to her chest as her mother thumbed through an old tabloid, blatantly ignoring her.
Every few minutes, employees in scrubs entered through one end of the room, crossed the faded, dingy vinyl tile, and pushed through a set of double doors on the other end. Those alone read from charts or stared straight ahead, while those in pairs broke the grim near-silence with incongruous snatches of casual conversation. Regardless, the employees went out of their way to avoid eye contact with the people waiting, while the patients eyed them in hope so transparent it was uncomfortable for me to watch.
“Do you see him?” I whispered to Nash, skipping over the sick women and children to scan the faces of the men.
“No, and we won’t until he’s ready to be seen.”
I stuffed my hands in my pockets, physically resisting the urge to take his hand for comfort, just because the ER creeped me out. If I couldn’t handle the huddled masses staring into space like zombies, how could I hope to face the Grim Reaper? Or even a grim reaper? “So how are we supposed to find him?”
“The plan was for him to find us,” he whispered back. “Two bean sidhes walking around while he’s trying to work should have drawn him out pretty quickly, if for no other reason than to run us off.”
“Then I’m guessing he’s decided not to show.”
“Looks that way.” Nash’s gaze settled on a sign on the wall, which pointed the way to the gift shop, the cafeteria, and the radiology lab. “You thirsty?”
“Not really.” I’d polished off a thirty-two-ounce soda in the car, and would have to find a bathroom soon as it was.
“Then come sit with me. If we make it clear we have all night to wait, he’ll probably show up to hurry us along.”
“But we don’t have all—”
“Shh.” Smiling, he slid one arm around my waist and whispered into my ear. “Don’t tip our hand.” Pleasant chills rushed down my neck and throughout my body, originating where his breath brushed my earlobe.
We followed the signs down the hall, around the corner, and into the cafeteria, which was still serving dinner at seven-thirty in the evening. Nash bought a huge slice of chocolate cake and a school-size carton of milk. I got a Coke. Then we chose a small square table in one corner of the nearly empty room.
Nash sat with his back to the wall, eating as if nothing were wrong. As if he went looking for an agent of death every evening. But I couldn’t sit still. My gaze roamed the room, skimming over a custodian emptying a trash can and a woman in a hairnet inspecting the salad bar for wilted lettuce. My feet bounced on the floor, my knees hitting the underside of the table over and over. Nash’s milk sloshed with each impact, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He was halfway through his cake—minus the bite or two I’d found room for—when a shadow fell across our table. I looked up to find a young man standing in front of the empty chair on my right. He wore faded, baggy jeans and a short-sleeved white tee with no sign of a coat, in spite of the temperature outside. And his fierce expression did nothing to harden cherubic lips and bright blue eyes, crowned by a mop of blond curls.
Nash didn’t even look up.
I glanced at the blond guy, then followed his gaze to the disposable salt-and-pepper shakers in the center of the table. Assuming he wanted to borrow them, I was reaching for the salt when he pulled the empty chair out and dropped into it, crossing bare forearms on the table in front of him.
“What do you want?” he growled in a pitch so low and gravelly I would have sworn it could never have come from such an angelic face.
Nash took his time chewing, then finally swallowed and pushed his plate back. “Answers.”
I frowned, gaping at the blond in disbelief. “You’re the grim reaper?”
Tod glanced at me for the first time, his frown practically etched into place. “You were expecting someone older? Taller? Maybe kind of gaunt and skeletal?” Contempt dripped from his words like acid, and his focus snapped back to Nash in annoyance. “See? That’s the problem with the old title. I should start calling myself a ‘collections agent’ or something like that.”
“Then they’d just make you wear a suit and tie,” I said, amused by the mental image.
The corner of Nash’s mouth twitched.
“Who’s the sidekick
?” Tod tossed his head my way, but his attention—and irritation—remained focused on Nash.
“We need to know about the exchange rate,” Nash said, cutting me off before I could introduce myself.
Tod’s brows gathered low over shadowed blue eyes, and in the gleam from the fluorescent bulbs overhead, I noticed a short, pale goatee on the end of his strong, square chin. “Do I look like the information desk to you?”
“You look…bored.” A mischievous look spread over Nash’s face as Tod’s scowl deepened, and I wondered what I was missing. “The hospital not keeping you busy? Hey, I hear there’s an opening at Colonial Manor. You liked it there, didn’t you?”
“The nursing home?” I asked, but neither of them even glanced at me; they were too busy glaring at each other. “Why would a nursing home hire someone to kill its patients? For that matter, why would a hospital?”
Nash chuckled and ran one hand through his head full of messy brown spikes, but Tod’s eyes flicked my way, and his jaw tightened. “Does she come with a mute button?”
“He doesn’t work for the hospital,” Nash said, ignoring the reaper’s hopefully rhetorical question. “He works in the hospital. And at this rate, he’ll be stuck here for the next century, at least. Right, Tod?”
The reaper didn’t answer, but I could hear his teeth grinding.
“You know, if you keep bottling up your anger like that, you’re not going to be anywhere a century from now, much less still working full-time.” Wait, was I needling an agent of death? Probably not the best idea, Kaylee…
“Reapers don’t age,” Tod snapped at me, while still glaring at Nash. “It’s one of the fringe benefits.”
“Like us, right?” I glanced at Nash just in time to see him flinch, and knew I’d said something wrong. And when I looked at Tod again, I found him staring at me in surprise, an impish grin highlighting his angelic features like light from above.