Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2)
Read Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2) Online
Authors: Kory M. Shrum
Dying
by the Hour
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 Kory M. Shrum
All rights reserved.
ISBN-10: 0-9912158-2-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-9912158-2-9
For William
Jesse
W
hen they describe female special agents in the movies, or in books, it’s always like this: a sleek, cat-like body that slithers in tight clothing, gorgeous exotic face and a sultry voice that can lure any target into submission.
And while I am a female agent, double agent even, I’m not sultry, exotic, cat-like, sleek or even remotely alluring. I’m an idiot wearing a clown suit. And I don’t mean clown suit figuratively.
I am wearing a clown suit at a birthday party.
I have the red nose, the floppy shoes and this horn around my neck that honks obnoxiously every time a grubby kid with sticky fingers runs up and gives it a squeeze.
The
double
part is more complicated. Neither my official job nor my unofficial off-the-books job requires I wear a clown suit. Yet, here I am dressed as a clown because my current client Regina Lovett begged me to.
She apparently believes a clown is less terrifying to her daughter, the person she’s hired me to protect, than just being a regular old death replacement agent. Death replacement agent is my “respectable” job—though that depends upon whom you ask. The double agent part of me is here to gather intel. This is the
only
reason I’m willing to jump through Regina’s obnoxious hoops in order to keep her business. Usually I hold all the cards in a death replacement because without me, they
die
.
I’m not even sure Julia, turning four, will agree with her mother anyway. She’s done a good job of keeping her distance from me, the red-nosed wonder, backing away slowly every time I offer her a balloon.
My floppy shoes squish against the ground saturated from six days of September rain. I rock on my heels and watch Julia twirl in her party dress, a good twenty feet away. It’s a pretty lavender color, complete with lacey ankle socks and Mary-Janes. A tiny gray peacoat protects her from the elements. She looks like any other privileged upper class kid, standing in a big beautiful yard, her thick brown locks pulled up into curling pigtails that graze the tops of her shoulders and the lacy white collar of her dress. A white painted fence establishes the boundaries around the property and along the edge of the fence stands a few large saggy trees that have seen better, dryer days.
The pool has recently been drained, a tarp stretching from one end to the other. And I can’t help but look at it and wonder if Julia will fall through and crack her head open on that poured cement or something. Or maybe the birthday candles will ignite and catch her hair on fire.
Occupational hazard, I’m afraid. I spend lots of time pondering death.
A little boy, maybe a year older than the birthday girl, tugs one of her curly pigtails. She stops twirling, squeals, and takes off chasing him through the yard. It is a shame the kid will die today being as cute as she is and on her birthday even.
Unless I can change it, of course, and that’s what Regina Lovett is paying me to do—without her husband Gerard Lovett’s knowledge, I might add. Given my real reason for being here, I am perfectly fine with this arrangement. Gerard doesn’t need to know about me. But what she said to him to keep him away from Julia’s birthday, I have no idea. And when I suggested she pick another day for the birthday party, since she knew this would be Julia’s death day, she said:
but I’ve already sent the invitations. I can’t just cancel now.
The woman has strange priorities. But it’s really her husband I have to watch out for.
Gerard Lovett, the religious freak that he is, would have never allowed me—
especially
me—to be his daughter’s death replacement agent. The Unified Church has a particular view on people like me. It doesn’t matter that I have the ability to sense death coming, the ability to see its sneaky blue fire and put the kabosh on all that. Taking help from a death replacement agent would be a sign that they didn’t have faith in their God. All high-ranking church officials like Gerard Lovett have to demonstrate the solidity of their faith at all times. I often wonder if they’d refuse blood transfusions too, having faith God would just add a few pints when he got a chance, or if it’s because I don’t go anywhere when I die that I can’t be trusted.
I turn at the sound of a sliding glass door and see Regina appear cake in hand. My personal assistant Ally is with her. She holds open the door for Regina, and then slides it closed behind them both.
“Time for cake!” Regina exclaims. The smile she’d given me when entering my office with Julia’s death report two months ago had been forced, practiced, the smile of a wife married to an important man. But her smile is softer now and Julia abandons the boy she’s been chasing for it. She runs toward her mother with renewed laughter. I look away, focusing on something mundane—Regina’s clothes. They’re some kind of modern business casual, classy and feminine. Her mousey hair is side swept and elegant, curling at the ends naturally. She’s attractive, not
gorgeous
like Ally, but she knows how to do herself up, glossing up her plainness enough without screaming
I AM TRYING, OKAY?
I notice all of this instead of looking at her and Julia together. Sometimes it hurt to look at mothers. Specifically, it hurts to look at mothers loving their daughters. Especially when my mother is dead and we weren’t speaking for years before that.
Ally leaves Regina’s trail, escaping the children gathering like rats around the Pied Piper, and comes to stand beside me. She pulls her red A-line coat tighter against the chilly air icing our cheeks and gathers her straight blond hair, the color of honey butter. I’d have helped her free it from the collar, but before I could she’d already done it, and with a single toss her locks had spilled down her back. Her nose stud looks silver in the dull overcast sky, instead of sparkling like the tiny diamond that it is. Her brown eyes are equally muted from their usual vibrant amber to an unremarkable brown. Dull light aside, she seems radiant against all this lush, landscaped green, moist with rain. And the light flush in her otherwise pale cheeks suits her.
“Are you cold?” she asks, nodding at my colorful polka dot jumper.
The answer is yes. Cold air has collected in my thighs and stomach, where the fabric of my polka dotted jumper feels thinnest. “I’m wearing layers,” I insist. Ally can be quite the mother hen, and I know myself well enough to admit I can’t be alert and babied at the same time.
“Are we good?” she asks.
She’s asking if I sense Julia’s death coming. Not yet. “For now.”
We watch Regina arrange the cake table, and launch the birthday song. It isn’t until I start singing that Ally nudges me.
“Quit that,” she says.
“What?” I play coy.
“I hear what you’re saying,” she accuses. “You’re replacing
birth
day with
death
day.”
“It
is
her death day.”
“You are so morbid,” she murmurs, but she’s smiling.
Happy Death Day, Little Julia.
“What does morbid mean?” a kid asks. This kid is pudgy, as tall as he is round and apparently uninterested in singing to the birthday girl. Also, his face is an unnatural green color from eating something made mostly of food coloring.
“Weird,” Ally says. I am not sure if she is defining morbid or if she is as surprised by the ninja appearance of this kid as I am.
“Clowns are weird,” the kid says, sucking on his sticky fingers.
“
You’re
weird,” I say. Ally nudges me with an elbow, but it’s unneeded. This kid is too young to recognize an insult or he is just impervious beneath all that fat.
“I want a balloon,” he demands.
I offer the big black trash bag to him, filled with animal balloons of every shape and color. When I took this job, I knew better than to improvise a skill I didn’t have. So
voilà!
—a big bag of balloon animals.
“I want to see you make one,” the kid groans.
“I want to see you leave,” I say and stick the bag in his face.
Ally intervenes. “She can’t make them because she has a bad wrist.”
“Really?” the kid asks. He warms to her the way everyone warms to Ally.
I tell the kid, my cover story. “Yeah carpel tunnel from all that juggling, camel riding, and whatever the hell clowns do.”
“You said a bad word.”
“I’m going to call you a bad word if you don’t go away.”
Ally is doing a decent job of keeping a straight face. She is also doing a great job of being pretty and convinces the little fatty to take a yellow “lion” and go get some cake. The words
before it’s all gone
seem to work.
“You promised not to make the children cry,” Ally says. She’s not kidding.
“Sorry,” I grumble. “I’m in a piss poor mood today.”
“It’s the first kid since Nessa.”
And that’s why Ally is my best friend. She knows what bothers me before I do. I let out a big exhale and the breathing hole in my red nose whistles, dramatizing my despair.
Nessa
.
I’ve thought a lot about Nessa this past year, especially in the past month leading up to Julia’s replacement. It was this time last year that I’d failed to save her. Granted, I hadn’t been her death replacement agent, so technically my perfect record is still intact. But she’d also been just a little girl and I’d promised her mother I would save her from some bad people. And when you have this ability to save people, and a perfect track record of doing so—when you screw up—
Yeah, I’m a sore loser.
“Nessa Hildebrand. Our first casualty of war,” I whisper. An ache fills my chest and I look away from the kids.
“Are we calling it war now?” Ally asks. She let her own breath out slow, weary.
“Two sides. Good versus evil. Only one can win. That’s war, isn’t it?”
“Evil hasn’t made a move in over a year,” Ally whispers. “Openly anyway.”
“Oh they’ve made moves, I’m sure,” I say. “Just not that we can see.”
“That’s a good sign though, right?”
Oh Ally, my ever optimistic companion. Just because someone hasn’t stabbed her in a year, she thinks we’re safe. But I know better. I can feel them sliding through the dark around us, large and scaly, looking for the right moment to spit acid venom in our faces.