Page 3 of The Grim, Me, and The Reaper Makes Three

Shifted wasn’t the right word. It was like each particle around them froze and became more…transparent? Words failed to accurately describe the scene that unfolded around them.

For one, the bustle of the street that Tati remembered was back, but it was like she was viewing the scene through a grainy lens. People moved around them –throughthem – like slow-moving shadows. But Tati’s gaze was drawn to the crumpled figure that lay sprawled and broken at her feet.

It was her.

Those were her exposed dimpled thighs, her tanned legs, one of which bent out at a nauseating angle. Her dark hair strewn over her face, wet and sticky with…fuck, was that blood?

Subconsciously she reached a hand up to touch her own head. Dry. Whole. Unbroken.

Sounds filtered through the mirage: the wail of sirens, the shouts of people as they surrounded her broken corpse. Tati watched, detached, as paramedics ran to the scene, shoving people back as they bent over the body.

A paramedic placed her fingers on the side of Tati’s neck. Tati could do nothing but stare, frozen in place, as the blurry figure began to pump her hands over her chest in a frantic attempt to revive her.

“I’m fucking dead!”Tati wanted to scream.“I’m already gone!”Because she truly was gone. How could she be here with these messengers of Death in a place that defied reason, while clinging to the notion that she was still alive? How could she look at her broken body and not know that she was, actually, super duper dead?

It went on for too long. Finally, they moved away from her body, and she watched as they wheeled over a stretcher.There I go, Tati thought, watching four of them lift her limp and lifeless body.

As quickly as the scene of her death had appeared it faded, the images dissolving until nothing was left but the mist and the silence. Tati was left disconcerted, thrown off by the distinct lack of feeling, as though whatever tether tied her to the physical body she inhabited threatened to loosen.

Before she could stop herself, she reached out and placed a hand on the dog-man’s cheek, needing to know if all sensation had abandoned her in death.

No. No it hadn’t. His skin was warm, the hair of his beard surprisingly soft against her palm. She pressed, and maybe she imagined it, but she thought that maybe he leaned into her touch.

“Oh,” she whispered faintly. “So I’m really dead?”

The other man cleared his throat, and Tati dropped her hand and stepped away.

“Very dead,” the cloak-man said, his voice soft.

Tati wasn’t sure what she was expecting to feel in the wake of learning that her life was over. Anger, sadness, or maybe pain. But all that she felt was disappointment, a disappointment that plummeted through her like a stone sinking to the bottom of a pond.

She was dead, completely and utterly dead, only one day after she’d decided to finally live. Her bank account had finally hit the magic number that would allow her to buy the space for her bakery. The one she’d waited years for.

“I am sorry, you know.” Again, the cloak-man’s voice was more gentle than it had any right to be. “About your death.”

She tried for a smile, but the way she hovered precariously on the edge of crying likely betrayed her. “I, well,” she sniffed. “It was just finally supposed to get better, you know?”

This time it was the dog-man who nodded like he understood.

“We should really get going,” the cloak-man said, and she thought she caught a hint of regret in his tone. One of his elegant hands extended towards her, fingers long and almost translucent in the dim light. “You will need to hold on to us for this next part,” he murmured.

Tati hesitated. “So this is it, then?”

He nodded. She felt the air shift behind her as the dog-man came to stand at her other side. Without asking, he threaded his calloused, rough fingers between hers, his grip on her solid, somehow reassuring.

There was no getting out of whatever was coming. That realization had settled over her the minute the image of her broken, bloody body had faded from view. She reached her free hand forward, taking the cloak-man’s hand in hers. His skin was smooth, almost cold to the touch, and a shiver traveled up the surface of her skin.

“Where, exactly, are we going?”

The cloak-man’s mouth curved up into something that might have been a smile. “We are going to the Afterworld.”

2

TATIANA

There was a sharp tug that she felt through her entire body, a rush of air that blurred her vision and roared in her ears, and then Tati found herself standing in what looked like a corner office in a high-rise. Floor to ceiling windows revealed an endless urban sprawl of buildings, towers, and lights.

“Welcome to the Afterworld,” the cloak-man was saying, although he was currently in the process of removing said cloak, revealing a tall, slender body dressed in a finely made charcoal gray suit over a black turtleneck. He was the refined kind of beautiful that made Tati think of a melancholy, aloof, Oxford scholar shut away with his books. Everything about him was graceful — his long fingers, the way he moved like a dancer, even the swoop of his impossibly black hair.

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