“Doctor,” I said, sitting up. My head felt like it was splitting open, as if it were a coconut with a knife stuck inside, trying to pry it open. But sitting up was getting easier and a little less painful.
The doctor stopped at the curtain and met my gaze.
“Someone came to visit me. Can you tell me who that might have been?” I remembered how the person had made me feel more than anything. Whoever it had been, it left me with a sense of peace unlike anything I’d ever felt before. I was pretty sure it was a man because he smelled of spicy cologne.
The doctor seemed confused. “I’ll ask the nursing staff, but I don’t think anyone has visited yet.”
Instead of arguing with the doctor, I simply nodded.
The doctor left, and the nurse came in with a bag full of my stuff, including my phone. I thanked him and immediately called Joel.
Joel answered on the second ring. “Dude, where’s my bike?”
Oh, shit. That was right. What the hell happened to it?
“I need you to come pick me up.”
“Where are you?” Keys clinked together, then a door shut.
“The hospital.”
Joel drew a breath. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I wrecked your bike. Sorry, Joel.”
“I’m just glad you’re not dead.”
“Not yet,” I said as a joke, but it didn’t come out that way. Instead, it came out much more dramatic.
“You shouldn’t talk like that. That’s not the kind of thing you want to manifest. Money. A hot dude willing to fuck you. Think that kind of thing into existence.” Joel was into all that woo-woo stuff. He thought he could manifest anything he wanted. He thought he was a Pied Piper. All he had to do was play the right tune.
I don’t know if I believed in any of that, but I thought sometimes a person got the exact life they lived, whether they wanted it or not. Hence, my being in debt up to my eyeballs and almost dying. “Great words of wisdom, man.”
Joel arrived in ten minutes. As soon as he saw me, he sucked in a breath. “Holy shit. You look terrible.”
I sighed. “Thanks. I feel terrible, too.”
“Let’s get you home.”
I winced. I had a shift at the restaurant I couldn’t miss, especially with a medical bill to pay. Instead of whining to Joel about my financial problems, I leaned on him and said, “I really am sorry for wrecking your bike.”
“We can fix it, right?”
I was good at fixing things. My house proved that well enough. But it wasn’t as though I had a choice but to learn. My family had never had enough money to hire someone else to do things for them. We had to learn. I could help with anything hands-on. I had an old car because it was cheaper to fix it myself than to buy a new one. And my side gig was fixing my friends’ vehicles when something broke.
“I can fix the bike. No problem.” But I couldn’t fix anything if I were dead. Joel might have a point about not joking about something that serious.
Chapter Five
Grym
Istayed up all night searching the internet and a few books I’d collected over the years. I didn’t find much, which put me in a bad mood. The lack of sleep didn’t help.
I couldn’t find much about reapers having beloveds. There didn’t seem to be any accounts of it in recent times. There was some folklore surrounding one reaper’s beloved. It was before the Bureau came into existence.
The story went that one reaper found her beloved. They bonded and had a loving relationship, but the beloved developed two abilities. One was immortality. She lived for hundreds of years, happy and healthy, never getting sick. The other was the ability to walk between realms. Donn, the god of death, didn’t like that, so the Soul Management Bureau was born and now I had a job reaping souls.
He sent a demon to murder the beloved. Instead, the demon killed the reaper as she tried to protect her beloved. The beloved cursed the Bureau, saying that when the beloveds came together, the Bureau would end. No god would be able to save the Bureau.
