Page 105 of Death is My BFF
I was a bomb about to go off.
Death must have known it too because he stepped back fast. My arms released from the wall, and I dropped clumsily to my feet.
“Your hands,” he rasped.
My fingers quivered violently, ice-blue fire licking up the lengths of them. I watched in both awe and horror as the fire lifted, twirling in my hands in spirals until the entire room was illuminated by the hue of the flames. I couldn’t control the surge. A blast shot out from my fingertips, straightening both my arms outward from the sheer thrust of the energy. As the fire abandoned my hands, it transformed into a blinding white light, which nailed the Grim Reaper in the chest. His whole body jolted, as if he’d been struck by lightning. The light climbed up the shadows of his frame, curling around his body, and unfurling around him in a brilliant aura. An aura that electrified the shadowy exoskeleton of two ginormous, once invisible limbs that protruded from his back.Black wings.
Death took a wavering stride backward and rocked on his feet.
His body tipped and the rest was left to gravity. He crashed hard into the ground with a cringe-worthy thud and clatter of metal. The floorboards shook with such force that a framed picture of my family at the beach tumbled off my nightstand and shattered.
I gaped at his unmoving frame with my mouth wide open.
“Death?” Cautiously, I maneuvered around him and gave his head a little kick. Nothing happened. I nudged his arm with my toe, then his head again. Reaching down, I lifted his gloved hand. It was a dead weight and smacked on the ground when I let go.
“Ah, shit. I killed him.” Then, panicked, as it fully hit me: “I killed the Grim Reaper!”
Pacing the floor, I swiped my thumb over my raw swollen lips and contemplated what to do next. His body blocked my way to the bedroom door. I couldn’t just leave him here with my parents in the house.
How would I explain this to them? Were my parents still
“paused” by Death’s power? Would they be stuck like that forever?
Where would I store his body? Could I go to jail for this? Was there a supernatural prison for instances like this, where I’d be locked in a cell with another mythical being, like a bloodthirsty vampire? Were vampires hot and spicy like they were in romance novels? I shook myself.
He couldn’t be dead. Cautiously, I lowered to my knees and cowered back as I reached my fingers underneath his sleeve to get to his wrist. Pressing two fingers into his skin felt like I was petting a deadly rattlesnake. I couldn’t feel a heartbeat, but his skin was scorching hot.
How the hell do I check if this dude is alive?
I took a deep breath and moved my fingers toward his shadowy neck to check his pulse again. My fingers disappeared beneath the darkness of his hood, as if I’d pressed through a thick fog, the empty black slate where a nose, eyes, and mouth should be. Curiously, I darted my hand in and out of the shadow and wiggled my invisible fingers. “Now, that is freaky . . . ”
I’ll admit my heart stuttered when my fingertips accidentally touched his cheek. Truth be told, it was a little anticlimactic. He felt . . . normal. And Death hadn’t jumped at me and ripped me apart, nor did my hand catch on fire, or rapidly dissolve away with decay like I’d imagined it would so many times.
Feeling like a madwoman, I caressed the coarse hair of short stubble on his jaw. Heat burned up my neck as I recalled the way those hairs had rubbed against my skin. Gliding to his cheekbones, I imagined the strong jaw on Alexandru, his chiseled, handsome features. I wandered to the raised skin of the scar above his right eye.
The damaged tissue was thicker toward the top, as if his eyebrow had split open from the inflicted wound.
Must have hurt.
Slowly, I skimmed over a few smaller raised areas of scar tissue scattered around his sculpted features. I reached his lips, velvety soft and a little pouty. The cold metal of the piercing in his bottom lip made my skin prickle, in response to the memory of our kiss. He had another piercing in his eyebrow, the one with the scar.
Realizing I was cradling his face, I sharply pulled back and a spell shattered.Good God, what is wrong with you?!
Sitting back on my heels, I glanced back at my empty canvas, recalling a time I’d painted him over and over again, the eyes that had marked their territory on all those off-white linen boards. I’d never forget the haunting soul engraved within them, the vicious, raging storm.
When I looked down at Death again, I noticed his cloak was not only parted, but he wasshirtlessunderneath it. His skin held a golden-bronze tan, and I could tell his lower stomach rippled with deep muscle. What shocked me the most (since I already knew he was ripped and fine as hell. Not that I thought about that often. Or that I cared.) were the black, intricate markings and symbols spreading across his exposed skin. They were exotic, mesmerizing, unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
“Don’t do it, Faith . . . ” I warned myself.
With my heart in my throat, I avoided touching his skin and parted the lapel of his cloak. I followed the visible trail of intricate tattoos up his torso to his chest, where branchy lines grouped together into a formation of foreign symbols. They told a secret story, like cryptic puzzle pieces of his past were engraved into his skin like reminders. Suddenly his large gloved hand shot out and clamped down on my wrist. I froze. Death could have snapped my arm right then and there, but he didn’t.
Instead, he vanished in an explosion of black mist, and I knew he’d been awake the entire time.
XIX
After Death evaporated, I stood alone in the dark to collect myself. Then I found my flashlight and hurried to check on my parents. They were no longer frozen in the kitchen by Death’s power and were back in bed asleep, so I gently shut their door and headed back into my bedroom.
David Star was Death. The world’s youngest, most famous multi-conglomerate business protégé was the Grim Reaper, and I’dkissedhim!