Page 11 of Grim

“Well, in this case, baby twin, it’s everything,” Time singsongs while twirling a strand of her blonde braid. “One minute in the universe longer. A lifetime of lording my wisdom and experience over you. A lot can change in a minute, can’t it, Kane?” she says hypnotically, her eyes fixed on me.

I can feel her taking over my mind, forcing memories I long buried to the surface. The pain of regret and remembrance pinches my head like a vise.

My brother’s betrayal. My wife’s screams. Her blood on my hands. My scalpel against my throat.

I stagger, clutching my temples. “Stop that!” I scream, but her attention is drawn to her taunting sister.

“Yet all you have to show for it is the ability to keep a calendar,” Fate sneers. “I, on the other hand, weave the tales,” she continues, glowing with righteous fury. “You know what it takes to write a mortal life from birth to breathless end?”

Time shrugs. “Not when I choose to intervene. Nothing like a little plot twist to spice up a story.”

“How many times do I have to tell you not to mess with my weavings? They are perfect.”

“Perfect is boring; spontaneity is fun. Deal with it.”

“So, you altered this mortal’s timeline, took days away from her physical life—those precious moments we can never appreciate until they’re gone—to piss off your sister?” My voice rises to a high pitch at the incredulity of their pettiness.

“That’s cruel,” I conclude, and Big D sucks air in between his teeth .

“You must be an only child,” Time deadpans.

Fate’s eyes spark, and she hovers closer to me, quickly coming to her sister’s defense.

“What is cruel, soul snatcher, is that you, in your infinite stupidity, managed to reveal her official crossover date. Now she’s a mortal who knows the unknowable, and that makes her unpredictable, Kane.

Her concept of free will has shattered. Now she feels like she has nothing to lose. ”

“And people with nothing to lose,” Time chimes in.

“Are dangerous, Kane,” Fate finishes.

“Very dangerous.” Time punctuates her sister’s sentiment.

Fate continues, “You’ve told the girl her fate. And you know what people do when they know their ending, Kane?”

Fate stops speaking, and silence fills the cavernous office.

Big D fills in with a long, “Ooh. He thought it was a rhetorical question.” He lets out a low whistle as he leans back, eyes glittering.

I clench my jaw. “I do not know. I have never done anything like this in all the centuries I have been a reaper.”

“Oh, congratulations!” Fate snipes. “Does the dog want a treat for good behavior? Shut up and listen.”

“They try to rewrite it. I am an excellent writer, Kane. And I don’t like anyone fucking with my stories!”

“So, change her timeline,” I offer. “Make a new painting or weave some new thread—whatever. Just mix it up, and she won’t know.”

Fate and Time stare at each other for a moment before they both turn back toward me, saying at the same time, “No.”

“Why not?”

Fate shrugs. “Because.”

“Because what? What kind of answer is because?”

Time flashes me a smile that sends shivers down my spine. “Because we can.”

“Because we feel like it,” Fate adds.

“She’s your problem now, Kane,” Big D adds with annoying finality .

“But Time is the one who messed with the story,” I protest. “Why can’t she fix it?”

“She’s family. You’re nobody. Family first, Kane,” Fate says.

“Thanks, sis,” Time chirps with too much enthusiasm.

“Don’t start, you meddlesome brat.”

“You don’t mean that, baby sister,” Time coos at her sister.

“You know I do. I never say what I don’t mean.”

“That is true,” D confirms before whispering to me, “She’ll calm down. Eventually. It just takes …”

“Time—yeah, I got it,” I cut D off, feeling all-around fucked.

“You are a quick study, Kane.” Time slaps my shoulder.

“You’re gonna do great.” Fate pinches my cheek before slapping it.

“We believe in you,” they sing in unison.

The Sisters rattle off in quick succession. I take a moment to collect my thoughts, knowing that one false word could bring a swift end to any comfort I’ve enjoyed in my position in the hierarchy of the AfterLife Processing machine.

Cautiously, I remind the entities in this room of one glaring problem. “I have a full caseload. Souls to shepherd. Spirits to cross over. I cannot babysit some mortal for days on end.”

“You can,” says Fate.

“And you will,” finishes Time.

“Big D can be very flexible …” Fate leaves the last word hanging as she glances lasciviously toward Big D.

He glowers in her direction, his eyes lighting with barely suppressed rage.

Time finishes her sister’s thought, but not before the innuendo has been given plenty of room to breathe. “With your schedule.”

Big D clears his throat, then speaks. “Yes. You’ve been taken down to your core workload, key reaps only, and in the interim, you will be tasked with soul supervision of one ‘Rue Chamberlain’ until such time as her slated crossover commences. ”

“There you are.” Fate smiles.

“Perfect.” Time punctuates.

“Now then,” Fate continues as her voice pitches down an octave and she gets extremely close to my face, “do not fuck this up, Kane.”

“Or do,” Time bubbles. “It will be fun for us either way.”

Fate laughs so low that I can hardly hear it. “But if your second-chance mortal messes with my tapestry, it won’t be fun for you.”

“Oh, no, it definitely won’t,” Time confirms. “But that will still be fun for us. So, good luck, reaper.”

On a symphony of cackling laughs, the Sisters’ voices reverberate throughout the office, and then they vanish instantly, and the room falls deathly silent.

Big D appraises me, then smiles. “Any questions?”

My mind races and reels until it lands on the one question he still has not answered. The entire reason I came into this office in the first place.

“She can touch me, D. How can she touch me?”

His grin widens slowly. “Ah, yes,” he begins, leaning back in his large leather chair. “She is an anomaly now, Kane. A rare return trip. She crossed over for two minutes and forty-nine seconds, if my records are correct.”

“They always are,” I drone as he speaks over me. “And they always are. Damn it, Kane. I was going to say that. Stop interrupting me.”

“Okay. Go on. She was dead for almost three minutes. And?”

“And … when she returned to the living, she brought her OtherWorld perceptions back with her. She met the Spirit Realm ever so briefly, and, well, it seems she cannot be un-introduced.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means she sees and feels the world the way we do now.”

“So, she can touch me and see me? Even now? For the rest of her Earth days?”

My mind races back to that last moment on Earth with Rue. I hadn’t felt the touch of warm human flesh in centuries. I had buried the strength of the sensation, but it all came rushing back in an instant. A chill drips down my spine at the recent memory.

“She can see all of them. All those lost souls still loitering in the physical realm. Beings too tied to their insignificant earthly lives to begin their transition. All those cases, we—well, you and your fellow reapers anyway—failed to coax to the OtherWorld. She became a spirit, and her connection to our realm fused too tightly. So, now she is both. Vibrating between the realms. Teetering.”

None of what D describes sounds good, but surely, a being of his power can do something.

“Okay, so just undo it, yeah? Snap your fingers? Set her straight until her scheduled passing.”

He leans forward, resting his chin on his hands, a slow grin spreading across his face. “See, this is why I like you, Kane. You always bring the perfect balance of insubordination and stupidity to my day.”

“I do what I can. So, fix this and let’s move on. Come on, D. We have history.”

Big D chuckles, shaking his head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. You brought her back, Kane. You introduced her to our realm. You gave her our frequency. She tuned in, and now she’s riding that wavelength. And that can be a bumpy ride if someone doesn’t ensure she’s strapped in.”

I run a hand over my face. My fingers tugging on my hair momentarily. “Okay. Whatever. She’ll be fine then, I guess. I’ve got her flagged. I’ll check in periodically throughout the nine days.”

D snorts and shakes his head. “Check in? No. I’m afraid that’s not good enough, Kane. You see, Rue was already in a heightened state. Her physical form is fragile right now. Living with ARVD, then struck suddenly by an acute attack of takotsubo.”

“Takotsubo,” I whisper, the medical clinician in me piqued at the mention of the rare disease. “So, she did die of a broken heart. How did you know that’s what—”

He cuts me off, “Kane, please. That’s what I do. I know things. I collect hobbies, and I know things. And I also know this: you gave her information that most mortals would not be able to handle.”

“I just didn’t want to see another life ended from a broken heart,” I mumble pathetically .

“The heart betrays them all, Kane. Live long enough, and the heart will break. Metaphorically, perhaps. Literally, quite surely. They all bend to Time in the end.”

I do not have a pithy comeback to that.

Big D continues, “And in this particular case, Kane, how do you think her renewed heart will fare? She now carries our infinite energy within her. How do you think she’ll handle all of that with her—quote—‘pesky’ heart condition?”

The reality of the rest of Rue’s mortal days slowly begins to dawn on me. The potential to spiral, for her body to give out again. The impulse to do something rash or to do nothing at all. All those possibilities flash before my mind in progressively more depressing images.

“You intervened. Now there is no backing out. You wrote yourself into her story, fool. Now you have to make it to the epilogue. She’s your case. You gave her that time; now you get to guard it.”

“She’s not a case; she’s more like a problem,” I mutter.

“Call her whatever you want. Just don’t call her to the OtherWorld early.”

“You have got to be joking,” I say more to myself than to the boss.

D leans back, completely unbothered. “Did you hear a knock, knock before I said it?”

“No.”

“Did anyone walk into a bar?”

“No.”

“Did I preface by saying, Have you heard this one before? ”

“D, in the name of all the spirits in the OtherWorld, I know you weren’t joking. It was a figure of speech. How can you have been around for millennia and still be so dense?”

“It’s a gift.” His deep voice rattles my bones and grates on my nerves in equal measure.

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I feel a very human urge to hyperventilate wash over me. “How? Just how?” I ask weakly.

“Frankly, my Kane, I don’t give a single, solitary fuck. But you’ve managed to snag the attention of the Sisters, and if you think what I have in store for you is bad—”

“What do you have in store for me?”

“If this mortal affects the natural order of life and death for others? If she manages to sculpt an image outside of Fate’s design?

Clerical, Kane. You’ll be seeing your way to half a millennium in Clerical.

So many crossovers. So much paperwork. So little—oh wait, all the time in the world.

” He laughs, the sound pressing on my last nerve.

“And that’s to say nothing of what the girls have planned.

They can be quite”—he pauses, searching his mind for the right word—“creative.”

My stomach turns at the alarming infusion of danger and sensuality in his voice.

“What am I supposed to do with her? What am I supposed to do on Earth for nine days?”

D tilts his head, his smirk sharpening. “Knock, knock.”

I take a deep breath, preparing to indulge him. “Who’s there?”

“Not my fucking problem,” he bites and snaps his fingers.

Instantly, I’m ripped through the OtherWorld and dropped back into the damp, moss-smothered silence of Rue’s family cemetery.

Of course, it’s raining again.

Of course.