Page 72 of The Reluctant Reaper
“What a fucking bizarre weekend.”
She shrugged as she rolled out of bed. “Ready for more? After we’ve brushed our teeth?”
“And after coffee, sure.” Gray yawned and sat up. “Our ritual humiliation aside, I slept great, so that’s something.”
She smiled. “I did, too. And I imagine Hilly will have several gallons of coffee for your slurping pleasure.”
“I’m really glad you let me come along.”
The subject change—if that’s what it was—gave her pause, and she shrugged. “Like I could have stopped you.”
“Yeah, Amara,” he replied seriously. “You could have. I think you could stop pretty much anyone you wanted. But you didn’t. You indulge me all the time, not just this weekend. I need to remember not to take that for granted.”
“Do you always get maudlin after you make out with your best friend?”
“Apparently,” he admitted, and that set her off again.
* * *
Two children. A new mother. A happily married man in his forties who wept, not for his own demise, but the family he was forced to leave behind. (“My twins graduate tomorrow.”) A teenage girl who’d gotten her driver’s license two hours earlier.
“Jesus Christ!” Gray collapsed in the passenger seat beside Amara, rubbed his eyes with his fists, glared at the roof of the Mustang. “How did your dad do this for a million centuries?”
“No idea.”
“Oh, man, the kid who went through the windshield. Can’t get her out of my head. She wasn’t even begging to live, just to talk to her mom for a second because they’d had a huge argument... fuckingbrutal.”
“It is.” Almost... too brutal?
Gray straightened in his seat and in the almost-telepathic flash shared by best friends, plucked the thought out of her brain and put it out there where it couldn’t be ignored: “It’s almost like someone is manipulating events to make a shitty job everyone knows you don’t want even harder so you’ll quit.”
That... sounds right.
Which wasn’t just insane, but impossible. The idea was so large, so bizarre, it seemed to bury her brain in dread. She had to work to keep her reply calm and even. “Itdoesseem like that.”
“Which is impossible, right?”
“I... would have thought so.” And here, the hideous irony: The one person she could have discussed this with? Was in a fucking coma.
“And also paranoid?” Gray continued. “Because Death’s whole thing is that you can’t change if someone’s gonna die, right? If they’re on the scroll or Death’s fax or app, that’s it? So shall it be forever and ever, amen. Right?”
“As good as. It’s actually more forbidden than impossible. There aren’t many who could even try it.” Amara was staring out the windshield, hands clenched at ten and two, thinking about the same girl Gray couldn’t get out of his head. How the argument with her mother made her late, how she got lost, drove too fast to make up time, panicked, skidded, over-corrected, and then got even more lost. Permanently lost.
She felt Gray’s hand cover her two o’clock hand and gently squeeze. “Shitty as this is, it’s good you feel bad.”
“Not the ‘numb is worse’ cliché.”
“Yes, the ‘numb is worse’ cliché. Don’t you think being dead on the inside is worse?”
“I’m thinking a lot of things, actually.”
“Oh ho. At least all the Reap-ees were where they were supposed to be today. Unfortunately,” he added in a mutter.
Amara mentally conceded the point, then started the car and answered Gray’s unspoken question. “I had a word with my mother before we left this morning; she’s calling a conclave on my behalf tonight.”
“You and the death gods are gonna elect a new Pope?”
“Death gods were holding conclaves long before the Catholic church muscled in on it. This one belongs to our family and Death’s colleagues.”
