“But Nick—”
“There is no but.” Nick knew he had to stop her before she got into full flow. As it had been when they were children so, too, was it now. “I don’t need this sort of advice. I’m happy as I am.”
“You’re not happy. You haven’t been happy since that night.”
“You find that surprising?”
She sniffed. “No. I find it sad and heartbreaking and a million other things. But surprising? No.”
“Then what is this about?”
Mary stood up, eyed the sagging couch, and took a deep breath. “It’s about you realizing that Katie is dead. It’s time to move on.”
A spike of pain shot up Nick’s head, gripping hard around his temples and squeezing. He took a shaky breath and tried to steady himself. “I’m well aware that Katie’s dead.”
Mary sighed and reached out. “But are you aware that you’re not?”
Chapter Five
The scream almost pierced Ripley’s ears, and she was grateful for the heavy robes that covered them. Fashionable or not, they were handy for some things. “Everything is okay, just calm down,” she soothed.
The soul of the dead man shuddered within his rapidly cooling body. “You’re him. You’ve come for me.”
So she sounded like a man, did she? Ripley sighed. She had to make allowances she supposed, after all the chap had just died. “Everything is fine.”
“Please. I don’t want to go. Don’t make me go. Please.” The soul writhed in the confines of the flesh, and Ripley could tell that he was not going to come out easily. Too entrenched in what had been his body he did not want to leave. Damn it, she did not have time for this!
Being quite stealthily about it, she surveyed the room and then the dead body. A watch hung askew on the mottling wrist. A quick mental calculation and Ripley calculated that she had seven minutes at most. She was sixty-nine souls into her Christmas collections, and so far, she’d only just stuck to her self-imposed schedule. Still, it wouldn’t take much to de-rail it, and that was unthinkable. Nothing could hold her up. Nothing. Nick was waiting for her. Nick….
“My wife,” the soul said, writhing again. “Don’t take me away from her. She’s ill. She needs me to care for her. Please don’t make me go.”
“Your time has come,” Ripley said softly.
“I’m dead?”
Ripley nodded, wishing the poor man could see her face and be reassured by the sympathy and compassion in it. Though in truth, right about now, she was more likely to look panicked. Five minutes left. “Yes. You are.”
“How?”
They always wanted to know how, few remembered the actual moment of death. Most times, they simply blanked out and awoke in their body, just not in it. “You had a heart attack. Your body can’t be saved.”
“What am I then? If I’m dead? What am I?”
“You’re still you. Just different.” How many times over the past three years had Ripley tried to explain the mechanics of death to the poor souls she collected? They never really took it in, unless they were religious in life. But even then, they expected something a little different to a black-robed being holding a scythe. Where are the angels they asked? Where is my family? Ripley had no answers to give. She’d never made it past the pearly gates. Reaperdom had come calling long before that, and she, like a fool, had let it.
“You’re going to take me?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
Where indeed. “Above.”
The soul’s eyes widened, and he shrank back into his body. “I don’t want to go.”
Ripley’s eyes flashed to the watch again. Four and a half minutes. “You do not have a choice.”
He started crying, and Ripley felt like crying with him. In frustration, in anger, in plain old sadness—she didn’t know which.
“Please, please, please. My wife, my wife,” he chanted.
Unbidden, Ripley’s mind flashed to their house. Nick was waiting there, damn it. Soon he would die. Soon his soul would be waiting for her, and if she didn’t get there in time. She swallowed. It didn’t bear thinking about.
“Please,” the soul begged.
Selfish though Ripley knew it was, she didn’t have time to comfort the soul, not if she was going to get to Nick in time. Unfortunately, he was just going to have yark it up. Scythe in one hand, Ripley reached with her other into the body. She made a sort of scooping motion until she found the connection between the soul and the heart.
The soul screamed.
Ripley clenched her fist around the connection. It felt strange in her hand, almost like a tentacle, and she shivered.
The soul screamed again.
She sympathized, damn she did. It was an awful experience. Ripley remembered it well. The last link to the human flesh didn’t want to let go, and the result of making it was extreme pain.
“Please don’t….”
Another scream and Ripley took a deep breath and pulled. The connection shuddered in her hand, wanting to stay in one piece but helpless against the force of her pull. Ripley pulled again, harder, and with one final scream, the soul tumbled out of the body.
He landed on his hands and knees right in-between her and the flesh. He peered across at his body, eyes wide and started crying again. “No, no, no,’” he sobbed. “Please….”
Ripley gritted her teeth, stood up, and in one swift movement swung the scythe. The scythe severed the remaining connection between the flesh and the soul. Freeing them both.
The soul screamed.
Ripley ignored him, snuck one last glance at the watch and felt panic slither up her spine. Two minutes left, the poor man was going to have a quick ride up above.
“Come,” she said. “There is nothing for you here now.”
“But my wife.”
Ripley closed her eyes. “We leave all earthly thoughts behind.”
And she knew that was true but then there was Nick, and really, what good was it for her to give out advice that she’d never been able to follow herself?
Chapter Six
The doctor’s office did not answer on his first call or his second but then at this hour of the night on Christmas proper, why was Nick surprised? The automated voice on the machine read out a number for him to call, and Nick struggled against his blurred vision to write it down. He gave up halfway through and sat down on the couch, trying in vain to find a position that eased the blinding pain in his head. Because it was blinding. Somehow, over the course of the evening, the pain had gone from a squeeze to a throb to a vise.
Nick thought of calling someone other than the Doctors but wasn’t sure who. His family would all be at Mary’s dinner party, and he didn’t want to interrupt them. They’d come and fuss and nag, and he simply was not able to deal with it. Maybe he should just try to sleep? Maybe it would all be fine when he awoke?
For one brief moment, part of him almost wished he’d taken Mary up on her offer, at least then there would have been someone around to call the Doctor for him or grab him some more pain killers—he was fresh out. But as soon as he thought it, he knew he’d been right to stay away. The idea of having to be sociable and talk to another woman made his head ache even more.
He lay down on the couch, grimacing slightly at the piles of unwashed clothes over the chairs and dirty coffee mugs littering the side tables. Understanding at last why Mary had turned her nose up and implored him to “sort this crap out.” He would. He’d clean soon he promised himself, as soon as the damn ache eased.
Nick pulled the comforter off the back of the couch, the one Katie had crocheted from scratch, and wrapped it around his body. The effort that took seemed out of proportion to the action, and he released a shaky breath. He could feel sweat beading across his head and neck and shivered under the thin blanket. There was no doubt about the fever. He could almost feel the heat burning on his skin, and he knew he should be doing something about it, but couldn’t think what.
The ease of which sleep came should have concerned him but Nick was so grateful of the reprieve he didn’t even think of what it might mean. Almost immediately, he fell into a dream, and predictably, it was the same dream that had haunted him for the past three years.
“We don’t need any cream. Stay in bed.”
Katie giggled and wriggled out from under him. “We need cream for the strawberries. You know I can’t eat them just plain.”
“The last time we had strawberries in bed with us, they tasted just fine,” he insisted.
She laughed and ran a finger down his chest. “Well we were kinda creative with them though weren’t we?”
“Mmm, strawberries and Katie. There is no better combination in the world.”
“I’ll be five minutes at the very most. Just a quick drive to the mart.”
“You know what I’ll be doing with the cream don’t you?”
“The same thing you’ll be doing with the strawberries.”
“Exactly.”
He pulled her back into his arms, delighted as always by the feel of her flesh against his. She squeaked, and he laughed as he trailed tiny kisses down her neck all the way to her breasts.
“The cream….”
Her words halted as he latched his mouth around one pert nipple. It hardened against his tongue, and he groaned. “Katie.”