Seventh Grave and No Body - Darynda Jones Page 0,2
if I didn’t cooperate fully. Like I wouldn’t have cooperated without her threats. Besides that one tiny incident – and maybe two more where I’d thought she was going to either shoot me in the face or drop-kick me to China – she was full of marshmallowy goodness. And Reyes seemed to be the campfire that melted her creamy center. She was warm. Really warm. And her warmth was making me warm. Like a lot. I couldn’t be 100 percent, but I was pretty sure we were in the midst of a ménage.
“As if” – Jessica the departed banshee said from the backseat – “that weren’t bad enough, I will never get married. Never! Do you know what that feels like?” Her long red hair shook almost as bad as my hands. Caffeine withdrawal sucked, as evidenced by the quivering of my limbs. But she was vibrating with anger. A vindictive, spiteful kind of rage that turned her hazel irises to a bright shade of green.
Jessica and I had been besties in high school until I made the mistake of telling her not only what I could do – see dead people – but also what I was – the grim reaper. I’d learned that last bit myself only when a robed figure, an incorporeal being I used to call the Big Bad, approached me in the girls’ restroom and told me. That robed figure turned out to be Reyes, I found out a decade later. I had yet to confront him on that. What was he doing in the girls’ restroom in the first place? The perv.
Jessica didn’t handle my admission well. I’d thought her made of kindness and strength before the day she turned on me. Fear transformed her into something I didn’t recognize. Her vehemence, her wrath and betrayal, stole my breath. I cried for days – not in front of her, of course; never in front of her – and sank into a deep depression that took me months to recover from.
When she started showing up at Reyes’s bar and grill, I hadn’t seen her since high school. Lots of women started showing up at the bar and grill when Reyes bought it from my dad. Sadly, Jessica hadn’t changed. She still hated me and took every opportunity to be spiteful and manipulative in front of her friends. When a notorious crime lord mistook her for a close friend of mine and abducted her, holding her hostage to force me to do a job for him, events had not ended well. And I thought she’d hated me before!
So, in a vehicle with four people, three of us were angry. I felt like breaking into a chorus of “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Other),” but I doubted anyone but me would get it, especially since Agent Carson didn’t know the truth about me. And she had no idea there was a departed crazy woman hitching a ride with us before her inevitable trip to hell. Surely she was going to hell. Jessica had not been a nice person. There must be a special, less volcanic portion of hell that was partitioned off and set aside for people who weren’t all bad, just a little vindictive. They could call it the drama queen ward. It would be a huge hit.
Listening to Jessica’s rant about how she was going to be a spinster forever – did people still use that word? – I decided to text my sulking affianced:
Can you do something about this?
He dug his phone out of his pocket, an act that was so bizarrely sexy, it mesmerized me for a solid three seconds, then read my missive. His face remained impassive as he typed.
A second later, my phone chimed.
Why would I do that? It’s getting you hot.
What? I turned and stabbed him with an appalled expression, then typed back, my fingers flying over the keyboard:
Wrong kind of hot, mister. This kind of hot leaves bodies in its wake. It takes no prisoners. It’s very… testy.
“The minute you try to get married,” Jessica continued, her rant a never-ending drone of threats and complaints, kind of like I imagined the life of an IRS agent might be, “I will rip your dress to shreds the night before your wedding day and, and —”
Reyes was apparently getting hot as well. He offered me a quick wink, his ridiculously long lashes making his mocha eyes sparkle in the early morning sun, then tossed a deadly glare over