Author: Kalayna Price

Crap.

I grabbed his wrist, hauling his arm off me. Then he did wake. The bed shifted as he moved, and he lifted his wrist from my hands, wrapping his arm around me once again.

His breath tickled along my jaw as he placed a kiss on the sensitive skin under my ear. “Good morning,” he whispered, his voice still rough with sleep.

My mouth went dry, my body waking to answer his in ways I really wished it wouldn’t—especially with Death still standing three feet away, watching me.

“I, uh—I have to pee.” I broke free of Falin’s arm and rolled to the edge of the bed.

As I crossed the foot of the bed, Falin flopped over onto his back. Staring at the ceiling, he bunched both his hands in his hair. “How many hours should I wait to start breakfast?”

“What? I—” Okay, so I had hid out in the bathroom the last time I woke with Falin in my bed, but this was different. “I’ll be right back.”

Death trailed me. I ignored him until I reached the bathroom—I had no intention of making him visible and encouraging a repeat of last night’s posturing. Once I closed the door, I rounded on him.

“Out. This is alone time.”

“You’re cute when you’re flustered.”

I frowned at him. “I’m being serious.”

“Then you should seriously make him leave.” He jerked his chin toward the inner wall and the one-room apartment beyond.

“He’s not here in the bathroom.”

Death gave me a look that said I knew what he meant, and I sighed.

“He’s helping me, okay?”

Death just continued to frown, and I turned my back on him. His reflection in the mirror watched as I tried to drag a brush through the snarls that my curls had turned into after they’d been slept on, and before that, hours of being tossed around in the wind while crossing over from the land of the dead.

“How do omelets sound for breakfast?” Falin’s voice called from somewhere in the kitchen, and Death’s reflection shook its head.

He muttered the word “omelets” under his breath and then focused on me again. “He has his own agenda.”

I shrugged and turned on the water. “Most people do.” I shoved the brush under the faucet, and then dragged the wet bristles through my hair to calm the frizz.

“Alex.” He stepped closer, his hands molding around my hips. “What do you really know about him?”

I twisted in his grasp, not to get away but to face him. The position was close, intimate. If I had lifted onto my toes, I could have kissed him. As it was, I was close enough to see the kaleidoscope of colors hidden in his dark hazel eyes.

“What do I know about you?” I asked, and the skin around his eyes tightened in a small flinch, as if my question could wound. I lowered my gaze.

When I was a teenager, I’d had a major crush on Death. Yeah, imagine that, a teenager with a crush on Death—it took emo to a whole new level. He’d visited me less often then, stopping by apparently at random for reasons unknown. I think, back then, my company was an amusement or maybe an interesting novelty—a mortal who could see him, interact with him. For me, he was that dreamy, dark and mysterious older guy. I guess he was still all of those things, but I’d thought I’d outgrown that teenage crush. Clearly it had just grown up with me.

I took a deep breath, relishing the thrill of his hands on me, of his touch. Of the fact that we could touch. A month ago it would have been uncomfortable, him too cold and me too hot. But now things had changed.

Looking up again, I studied his face, recognizing every line of his jaw, the curve of his eyebrows. In some ways, he was my closest friend. In others he was a complete stranger. But even with our relationship in this strange, awkward, morphing mess of, well, whatever it was, I still felt like I could talk to him. Could tell him anything, everything, even if he couldn’t do the same. After all, no one kept secrets like Death.

“You’ve always told me not to push,” I said, moving my arms to his, my hands at his elbows, my forearms on top of his. We were too close for me not to touch him without making things more awkward. “Not to push for answers you can’t give me, for secrets you can’t reveal. Well, now it’s my turn. Don’t push me for commitments I can’t make.”

He closed his eyes and then leaned forward, propping his chin on the top of my head. The movement brought me in contact with his chest, and I leaned into him as well, feeling the softness of his T-shirt against my cheek—a T-shirt that I was pretty sure didn’t exist, at least not in the terms with which I was familiar. I felt the sigh that escaped him as he wrapped his arms around me.

“Okay.” His fingers trailed over the sliver of skin exposed between my halter top and my hip-huggers. “Okay, I’ll stop pushing. But I expect you to tell him the same thing.”

“Trust me, I intend to.” Now, if Falin would listen? That would be a miracle.

As if he could hear my thoughts, Death laughed, one hard bark of air. “He’s stubborn. You know he continued to talk at me—at empty air, for all he knew—for an hour after you fell asleep.”

I hid my smile against Death’s shoulder. “Yeah, he’s stubborn.”

“You could kick him out.”

I groaned and pushed away from Death. “I told you, he’s helping me with my investigation.” I hadn’t intended to rub Death’s nose in the fact that he wasn’t the one helping me, but it was there, in his eyes. He looked away, as if he knew I could see it.

“What marks the end of life?” Death asked, hooking his thumbs in his pockets.

“What?” Where did that question come from? Death didn’t answer, or repeat himself; he just looked at me, his eyes intense, as if the words he wasn’t saying were trying to burn through his gaze.

“Philosophically, scientifically, or . . . ?” I let the question trail off and lifted my hands, palms up, as I shrugged.

Still he didn’t answer.

“Okay.” I frowned and leaned back against the sink’s counter. “Science would say life ends after the last breath leaves the body and the heart ceases to beat, or perhaps when brain activity stops. But . . .”

Death inclined his head, as if encouraging me to continue. He was a collector and I talked to the dead, so a scientific explanation probably wasn’t what he was looking for. I’d seen bodies continue to have scientific signs of life for up to a minute or two after their souls had been collected, but I knew from experience that if I raised the shade of one of them, his memory would last only until the soul left the body. I’d also seen, though thankfully not often, bodies that had lost all signs of life but retained souls—their shades remembered being dead. “Mortal life ends when the soul leaves the body.”

Death smiled, but it wasn’t exactly a happy smile. “So what is the fuel of life, and where else have you seen it?” he asked. Then he vanished.

I stared at the space where he’d been. Souls. Souls as fuel. And I knew exactly where I’d seen souls recently—the constructs.

When I left the bathroom, I found Falin poking around my fridge, wearing only a pair of jeans.

“You need to go shopping,” he said without looking up.

“Typically.”

I grabbed PC’s bag of kibble and flicked the coffeemaker on as I passed it. The coffee had only just begun brewing by the time the small dog was chomping away at his meal. I pulled a mug out of the cabinet, then jerked the pot out of the coffeemaker and held my mug directly under the steaming liquid. When I looked up I found Falin grinning at me.

“Impatient?”

“In a hurry.”

“You always need that stuff to wake you?”

No, having two of the best-looking guys I knew in my bedroom had pretty much taken care of getting my pulse moving. Not that I was going to tell either of them that. I shoved the pot back under the stream of coffee and cupped my half-full mug in my hands.

“You never answered me about the omelets,” he said, still grinning at me over the door of the fridge.

“What’s with you and cooking?”

He shrugged. “I live alone and I don’t like eating junk.”

Well, at least he didn’t say he serves the Winter Queen breakfast in bed every morning. I also lived alone—when Falin wasn’t randomly inviting himself into my house—but I’d never gotten into the cooking thing. Of course, eating junk tended to be cheaper, and that was a factor too. The only reason I had eggs in the house was because I’d had a craving for brownies last weekend and the supermarket didn’t sell just two eggs.

“So yes or no on breakfast?”

I glanced at the afternoon light streaming into the room. Not exactly breakfast time anymore. But I wasn’t going to pass up real food.

“Breakfast,” I agreed.

I walked PC and showered while Falin cooked. Then, after our afternoon breakfast, I paid a visit downstairs. Caleb was unhappy that Falin was still in the house, but he told me Holly had been released from the hospital—and then promptly reported to work. He swore he hadn’t felt any effects of the spell, but I still sensed the crystal-armored dormant spell where the ravens had scratched him. By the time Falin got out of the shower I’d brewed a second pot of coffee and was pacing around my apartment as I mulled over the case.

“I know that look,” he said as he towel-dried his hair.

“You feel like you’ve got a dozen pieces of the puzzle but not only do they not seem to fit together, they don’t even seem to reflect parts of the same picture.”

“Yeah, that sums it up.” I set my mug down on the counter. My mind kept circling back to what Death had said, or really, what he’d not said. I was sure he meant the constructs when he mentioned where else I’d seen souls, but he’d made me go through all that bit about the end of life first. Or, put another way, the cause of death. I grabbed my purse off the counter. “I’m going to head to the morgue a little early. I want to test a theory.”