Page 40 of Grim

I arch a brow, and she shrugs. I don’t tell her what I don’t want her to know. “We’ve only got eight days, so we may as well make the most of it.”

My mind wanders to the feel of her fingers on my flesh, the impossible memory of physical, human connection. I do not like the feeling this realization gives me, so I decide to distract myself immediately. Now is not the time to explore that dark, dangerous alleyway, so I opt for a redirection.

My gaze slides over to her bookshelf. Her quotidian taste in literature sets my blood boiling.

I stand, striding toward it, plucking a particularly offensive title from the shelf. “So, Mayday, I knew you had questionable taste in people, but now I see you also have questionable taste in books.”

Rue’s head snaps up. “Excuse me?”

I hold up the book like evidence in a murder trial. “Collected Worksof Edgar Allan Poe. Oh, of course.”

Her gasp is so loud and so full of betrayal that I suspect she may be about to challenge me to a duel.

“Put that down,” she hisses, “if you don’t plan on treating it with the respect it deserves.”

I flip through the pages carelessly. “Poe? Really? You fancy yourself a tragic, brooding figure, so naturally, you latch on to the king of tragic, brooding figures?”

“King is exactly right.” She stands, full of righteous indignation. “Poe is one of the greatest writers of all time.”

I snort. “Oh, yes, the great Edgar Allan Poe. A drunk, a debt-ridden disaster, a man who had one good poem and coasted on it like a Victorian-era one-hit wonder.”

She gasps again, clutching her nonexistent pearls. “You. Take. That. Back.”

I smirk. “Make me.”

Her eyes narrow, a dangerous glint in them.

And for some strange, inexplicable reason, I think I might actually be enjoying this.

“Oh, please.” I chuckle. “His entire shtick wasmelodrama.Oh no, my wife died; let me weep forlornly into my whiskey and write about birds and death!He’s the literary equivalent of an emo band lead singer who won’t stop writing songs about his high school ex.”

She gasps again, but this time, it’s a different kind of gasp—horrified and deeply personal.

“Kane”—her voice is hushed—“I need you to know that I have never wanted to commit actual homicide before this moment.”

I smirk, reveling in her distress. “Oh? Am I ruining the fantasy?”

“You are desecrating the sacred.” Rue snatches the book from my hands and holds it protectively against her chest. “Poe is the father of gothic literature, the architect of psychological horror. Without him, there is no H.P. Lovecraft, no Shirley Jackson, no Stephen King!”

“Yes, yes, without Poe, we’d have no obsessive freaks writing about ghosts and madness. Truly a loss to society,” I say dryly. “Tell me, Rue, do you also keep a quill on hand so you can write wistful odes to your own untimely demise?”

“Not all of us are dead inside, Kane,” she fires back.

I tilt my head, intrigued. “Aren’t you though?”

She stills, the sharp retort dying on her lips.

For a moment, neither of us speaks. The weight of what I just said settles between us like dust on an old book—quiet but unshakable.

Then Rue does something that surprises me.

She laughs.

A soft, bitter chuckle, as if my words amused in the most tragic way possible.

“You know what’s funny?” she muses, sitting back down on the couch, hugging her Poe collection like a security blanket. “You’re not wrong. I mean, if you think about it, I have been living like I was already dead. Watching the world move around me. Waiting for the moment when my body finally decided to stop.”

I study her carefully.