Death's Rulebook

Chapter 15: The Legendary Steve McQueen

I exhaled, my chest a hollow pit. It had been empty for quite some time now. Odd that only a couple of hours ago I wouldn't stop complaining about feeling horrible.

Now, I couldn't feel anything at all.

"So is she..."

"Yeah," Mason cut me off, taking another drag of his cigarette. It was his third one in the last hour.

"Are you sure? Maybe she got free on her own somehow and..."

"How?" He hissed, his amber eyes firmly locked on me. The fire in them was slowly dying, the embers sparking pitifully in the fog of cigarette smoke. He didn't even seem to have the strength to be angry anymore.

"I couldn't even get close to her, Violet, much less touch her. Adrianne Litchfield got pancaked by that truck without tying the knot with me," He leaned his head against the half-cracked window glass and exhaled smoke through his nostrils. "Whatever was left of her soul after she got run over, has now vanished."

Rubbing at my tired eyes, I took a lock of hair into my mouth and began chewing furiously. I swear these past couple of days were bringing out the grossest of my past habits.

"So let me get this straight. It's not that the knot wouldn't tie..."

"Ugh, I've told you already. I don't know if the knot would have tied. I didn't get close enough to find out. Deadie Asshole wouldn't let me."

"I know, I know, I just don't get it. Why would your Deadie attack you?" I wondered, still having trouble processing what he'd told me.

-Geez, you'd think that after Logan, I'd be used to crazy stuff happening.

Apparently, my threshold for weird still hadn't reached the level needed for me to take what was going on at face value. No one had ever been attacked by one of their Deadies. We were their cleanup crew, their employees, people with whom they were supposed to have a mutual understanding and a cordial, though somewhat weird partnership. For the most part, we didn't even get close to them, each of us content with doing what we were supposed to do. The only person I knew for certain interacted-if talking was the appropriate way to speak to an ethereal shadow monster-with their Deadie was Kevin. And I'd only ever heard of that happening, never actually witnessed it myself.

"Ugh, I don't know," He groaned, rubbing at his temples.

"Are you sure you didn't do anything to piss it off?"

"No! I came there, just like I was supposed to, found the lady standing near the traffic light, glowing like a Christmas tree, but before I could get close enough to sniff her, Deadie Asshole showed up."

I raised my brows expectantly. "And?"

"And nothing. The thing stared at me funny for a good minute before it went berserk and started circling Adrianne. I tried getting closer but every time I got near, it would charge at me, hissing like some freaking rabid animal."

"Seriously?" I said, my stomach queasy. "I didn't know they could hiss."

"Yeah, no kidding. God, it was the craziest shit I'd ever heard in my life. Like a cross between a lizard, a cat, and a goddamn chainsaw or something. It made me want to scream and puke my guts out. I didn't dare get close to her after that. I figured if the thing could hiss at me, then it was more than likely it could blow me to smithereens."

"Jesus," I breathed, my skull pounding. Over twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation knew how to produce one hell of a headache. "Then what happened?"

Mason scoffed, his lower lip quivering.

"What do you think? She got flattened by a semi, while she was crossing the street. I flipped of course and tried running over to what was left of her to try and draw her soul out, but Asshole still wouldn't let me get close. I hung around there for hours, until the paramedics didn't take her body to the morgue. After that, I left," He exhaled, shutting his eyes. "For the longest time, I waited for something to happen. I sat in an alley, behind a dumpster, with my head between my legs, waiting for my body to start disintegrating,"