“Don’t do it,” he said again.
“I won’t.”
It was a lie. I wondered if he could hear it in my voice, smell it on my skin, see it in the movement of my body.
From the sigh he let out before he fell into step beside me, the answer was yes.
~~~
One would think the advantage of living in a small town is that there is always at least one person who secretly, or not so secretly, wished you were dead and would be more than happy to make that wish a reality.
I hadn’t thought it would be hard to find someone to kill me, temporarily, but Jame telling me he wouldn’t do it sort of put a wrench in my plans.
If my friend wouldn’t kill me for revenge, I’d just have to ask an enemy to kill me for fun.
“You want me to do what?” Brown asked, his voice a little too loud. I pulled my phone away from my ear. I could either go all police chief and demanded he do this for me, or I could try to tug on his heart strings.
Who was I kidding? Elves’ hearts were little blobs of wickedness mixed with bad poetry stuffed behind their ribs. I turned my Jeep toward my house, heading up the gravel drive to the top of the hill.
“This isn’t a favor,” I said. “It’s not a request. This is an order. You need to kill me tonight.” Yeah, I’d gone with the police voice.
“I don’t know what you’re smoking, but no thank you, Chief. I’ll just continue to live my life not behind bars.”
“Do you remember that evil you felt, the…” I tried to remember what he’d called it. “The ancient horror? We have a way to kill that. It involves me being temporarily dead.”
There was a pause on the other end. I didn’t even hear him breathing.
“Temporarily,” he repeated.
“Just long enough to kill the bastard.”
“That works?”
“I have it from a reliable source.”
“And your sisters are waving the pom-poms and cheering you on?”
“No. I haven’t told them, and I’m not going to. Because it sounds…”
“Crazy? Are you listening to yourself, Delaney?”
“You can tell me no. I’ll find someone else, Brown.”
“I didn’t say no. I just don’t know why you picked me. What about me makes you think I am capable of killing anything, anyone?”
“We aren’t friends.”
“That would be my point. Why ask me?”
“Unlike my friends, you aren’t falling over yourself to protect me like I’m made of glass. You can be trusted to do a job, do it right, and step away. You have slightly shady morals. This is a job. And I’m asking you to do it. Not as a friend, but as a citizen of Ordinary who has a chance to help make this town and the people in it safe again.”
Another pause.
Brown had said elves set down roots when they found their home soil, and I knew he’d chosen Ordinary as his home. He was a locksmith and security expert, so I knew he liked keeping things safe.
This should be something he wanted to do.
I waited, the cheery bright afternoon feeling wholly wrong with so much death and pain looming on the horizon.
