Forever, Frost (Dear Death) Read online

  And guess who has to fill all the certificates out? Me.

  Well, the ones for this area, anyway. I'm pretty sure Nate has assistants elsewhere. He explained it to me once. There are souls like me working for pieces of him all over the world. So, he's never solely in one place. I just work for a fragment of him, a part of himself he split away to manage all the death in the world.

  Biting my thumbnail, I reply, thinking about the mound of unfinished certificates, "Finished them hours ago."

  "All of them?"

  "Most of them," I cave. "I couldn't finish the one with the coronary. What killed her, really?" When he doesn't answer, I turn toward him to press on. "She had a coronary, but her throat was slit and her head bashed in. What came first?"

  Nate shrugs. "Write what comes to you."

  "That's the thing, it's convoluted."

  But he doesn't seem too bothered by it. "Your senses are flawed. All humans are. Just go with the coronary."

  "But—"

  "I like this skit. It has Justin Timberlake in it."

  It's useless. He hums to himself, pulling at his stitch lips, like a kid in a candy store. In all these novels, Death is this monster everyone fears, who hides under a Halloween cloak, and carries around a big-ass scythe.

  Well, Nate has a scythe—and a cloak. They're in the closet. He doesn't use them anymore.

  "How's Jack?" I ask, flicking my eyes to him to gauge his reaction.

  He goes on as if I hadn't asked anything at all. "Justin Timberlake is an artist. Mostly perfection, I suppose. If only humans weren't so...so warm." He shivers unconsciously.

  "I wish I was warm," I mutter under my breath before repeating, "How's Jack?"

  Sighing, he shakes his head. "Just as he was the last time you asked, Estella. He is fine."

  "Does he remember me yet?"

  "No, and he will never."

  I frown. "He might!"

  He shoots me a dark look. "No, he will not. Ever. Jack is who he is now, not who he was with you."

  Scowling, I flip the station.

  He raises a tar-black eyebrow. "If you are so adamant about emotional attachment, I could use a massage."

  "Yeah, no."

  "Then could you change it back to Saturday Night Live?"

  "No."

  He yanks the remote out of my hands and returns it to SNL. "I have a job to do," he replies to my glare.

  Justin Timberlake introduces the host for the night. It's one of Hollywood's latest crazes. I don't know his name—Brad, Ron, Tom...but whatever job Nate has to do does not bode well for whoever he is. The TV audience applauds his entrance.

  I don't take my eyes off Nate. He steeples his fingers, and watches.

  A certain cold chill creeps up my spine. It's the way his stitch lips upturn into a twisted grin, the way his pitless eyes almost sparkle with vileness. Like a predator.

  "Please, don't," I find myself whispering.

  "It's my job," he replies, still so monotonous. I think that's the worst part—how apathetic he is to everything. Maybe there's another piece of him out there who is more sympathetic to death. Maybe there's a part of him in Russia or South America that doesn't enjoy his job so much.

  I wish I would've gotten that piece instead.

  "Do you have to tonight?" I argue.

  "You see the red aura around him, too. He is a ticking time bomb. He will die anyway. He deserves pomp and circumstance."

  "But what about his family? His friends?"

  "What about all of time and space riding on his death?" he replies, a gleaming feral look in his eyes. The gleam of a starved lion to a juicy gazelle, a pet snake to a lab rat, a serial killer to his latest victim. "How is he supposed to die?" he muses. "A heart attack? An aneurysm? Or... ah."

  I curl into a fetal position in the corner of the couch and bite my first so I won't scream, drawing the covers up around me like the Berlin wall. Did he look like this when I almost blew my family to smithereens?

  The hot movie star is in a cop skit now. He's such a bad actor everyone laughs just for the hell of laughing. No one notices when a shadow that doesn't belong to anyone moves behind the prop car.

  Beside me, the body of Nate flickers in and out like a bad radio reception.

  The movie star doesn't notice the shadow—the living never do—as the skit winds to a close. All of a sudden, there is a moan. It sounds like this terrible growl from a terrible steel monster—an unholy noise. The camera flickers, jumps, and just as the actor says his final lines, four thousand pounds of stage lights come crashing down on him.

  His head literally explodes.

  The camera shakes. Cuts away. Screaming. Chaos.

  Then a Viagra commercial break.

  I don't realize I'm holding my breath until my lungs begin to burn, and I let it out. There's deep indention marks in my hands where I bit the living shit out of them, but I don’t care. Those poor audience members.

  Nate breathes out a long breath through his mouth, his body solidifying again like a radio tuning to the right signal. His grin is menacing, cunning, and delightfully giddy. No one can say the Grim Reaper doesn't enjoy his job, because I can vouch otherwise.

  "That was quite arousing," he comments.

  “Damn it, Nate!” I snatch up the remote, disguising my fright, “Do you know how long it'll be until SNL is back on the air?!" With a frustrated click, I zap off the TV, throw down the remote, and storm upstairs to my room.

  “Where are you going?” he shouts up after me.

  “To sleep!”

  I wish I had controlled my temper three months ago. I wish I didn't have this time bomb inside of me, burning like a match in the dark. I wish I was normal, and I wish Jack still loved me.

  But I wish, most of all, Nate knew how it felt to lose absolutely everything to one stupid mistake.

  3. Burning Inside Out

  Sleeping dead is really ironic, when you think about it. I do everything the living does—sleep, eat, poop. But I won’t grow older. I won’t reach nineteen. And yet I still need to sleep, and I still need to eat. I guess it's Nate's way of paying homage to my human-ness.

  Around 4AM, I finally doze into a half-slumber. It's dreamless, to my relief, but just when I think I've hit a dark, floaty spot in my dreams, someone grabs my by the shoulder—a cold hand that almost burns—and shakes me awake. I roll over groggily, and look into the face of a corpse.

  “Boo,” says Nate.

  I jump despite myself, choking on a gasp.

  He throws his head back with a half-croaking laugh, his hands on his hips. "Get up, Estella."

  I fight the urge to push him out the window. "I'm going to kill you. Ever heard of knocking? I could've been naked."

  “Then I shall count my blessings that you were not,” Nate replies and wrenches off the covers.

  I lay there, bed stripped of sheets, in only a t-shirt and a neon orange thong. Oh God, it's gonna be one of those days.

  He looks me up and down with a bored expression. “Is this the style of the century now?”

  I chunk my pillow at his face and tug down my Rolling Stones t-shirt until it covers my knees. “Aren't you supposed to be reaping the living or something?”

  “Only after I torment the dead,” he says all too happily, and flings open my dark curtains. Sunlight rushes in, and lights his graying skin. He takes a deep breath. “Look at this day, Estella Rome! You do not need to be wasting it in your bedroom.”

  I blink like a deer in headlights. Could it be? “No work?”

  He takes a vanilla folder out of thin air and presents it to me. “You, my dear, need to be wasting your time in my office doing your job.”

  Groaning, I pull my spare pillow over my head. It's not as if he even has an office. It's the dining room. He has a study, but no one's ever allowed in there. "Twenty more minutes..."

  He yanks my pillow away. "Now, Estella."

  "Restless dead much?"

  He inclines a tragic black eyebrow.


  Okay, low blow. But still. "Why are you here?" I snap sourly.

  "Because the next death is not due until..." he checks his watch. It doesn't tick anymore. He doesn't need to check it. He's just an ass. "7:31:28."

  The alarm clock beside my bed stand blinks 7:31AM. "And what time is it now...?"

  He sighs. "Touché." In a wisp of black shadows, he disappears.

  "Touché," I mock in my best emotionless impersonation, and flop back onto my bare mattress, staring at the popcorn ceiling. I lay there for a while, trying to conjure constellations in the bumps and ridges, but all I can think about is how cold the house is.

  There are plenty of types of cold, but the one that gets to me the most is not the temperature, but the cold that settles in my bones when no one else is around.

  I haven't seen my family in a few weeks. They think I'm at North Carolina State, taking up odd jobs as a tech at the local bars, maybe playing a few songs at acoustic mic nights. Little do they know I'm only thirty minutes away in a condemned house on the edge of town.

  I can't even see my brother, Gage. He's the only person who so much as suspects that I'm not at college, and that's only because he's too nosy for his own good.

  "You're wasting daylight, Estella," I tell myself, and finally decide it's gotten too cold to lay around, anyway.

  When I finally wiggle into some gray sweats, Nate's back, rummaging through the refrigerator. I knock on the doorway, pulling my shock of auburn hair into a bun. "Hungry for blood?"

  "No," he mutters, looking at a three-day-old hamburger, and tosses it in the garbage. "Would you mind cleaning up after yourself on occasion?"

  "Of course not. I'm merely preoccupied with my work."

  He slides a black-eyed glare my way before pulling out a box of week-old Chinese. "I could not tell."

  I fold my arms over my chest. "Whatever. Why're you in here, anyway? You don't eat."

  He mutters something incoherently and tosses a carton of curdled milk into the garbage.

  I come up behind him. “Come again?”

  "I said" —he stands almost rabidly, this time with the plate with my leftovers from last night— "I am hungry."

  For a second, it doesn't register. “Hungry.”

  "Never you mind," he snaps and savagely unwraps the leftover chicken sandwich. He shoves past me out of the kitchen, but I quickly follow on his heels.

  "You can't be hungry. I've never seen you eat—"

  Without even warming it up, he tears into the sandwich with the gusto of a starved wild dog. I stare, disgusted, as he polishes it off as fast as my baby brother would.

  "Did you even taste that?"

  "I do not ta—" He pales, and suddenly jerks toward the bathroom with a hand over his mouth. There, he retches up my dinner. Lovely. I pour a glass of soda and take it into the bathroom after him. He sits over the toilet seat, his fingers shivering.

  "Are you..." I start, hesitant.

  "I am fine."

  I'm not reassured. I extend the glass of soda to him. "It's ginger ale."

  He barks a rueful laugh. "I don't—"

  His body jerks as if something hits him with a hammer. He shakes, and falls back against the wall, cringing. His hands ball into fists. Painfully? But he doesn't...

  “Nate?” I ask quietly. I sit the cup down on the counter and squat down beside him.

  He stares down at his hands, and slowly open them, closing them again. He looks... I'd be damned if I didn't say he looks frightened. And in turn that makes me frightened.

  “Nate, what's wrong?” I repeat.

  “I am fine.”

  "You aren't fine."

  He lifts his eyes to me again—and there's something weird about them. It's weird, like they're not...like they're...

  He quickly cuts his eyes down again.

  They don't look like glass marbles anymore.

  “This is not your business.” He stands, but I block him from leaving. If there’s one good thing to being slightly overweight, it’s that you can barricaded a rail-thin zombie into a bathroom pretty easily.

  “Estella, if you do not get out of my way...”

  "You're not fine."

  "I am better."

  "No, you're not! You need to—"

  Suddenly, he winces as if jabbed by something sharp and painful, and steadies himself on the bathroom counter. When the pain passes, he tells me in a very slow voice, "Estella, if you don't get out of my way..."

  My eyebrows rise. "You used a contraction."

  "It's nothing. It is nothing," he repeats, correcting himself. The bloody stitch on his neck is redder than usual, and he runs his finger nervously over it. I don't know what else to do, so I just drop my arms, and he moves past me into the hallway. How could I really stop the Grim Reaper, anyway?

  What's wrong with me? Being concerned for the grim reaper. He killed a freaking movie star on live television. He's killed billions of people. He's a monster, and I shouldn't be concerned. What could I do, anyway? I barely know what he is, never mind who he is.

  I follow him into the kitchen to pour out the soda, and clean out the refrigerator. He's standing by the kitchen sink, his eyes fixed on something out of the window. I pause.

  "You have paperwork to do," he says.

  "I know, I was going to clean out the refrigerator first—"

  "You have paperwork to do," he repeats. There is a rush of wind before a flurry of papers come tumbling down from the ceiling like fat snowflakes. There must be hundreds of them. In the next moment, Nate is gone in a wisp of black smoke.

  My shoulders sag as I catch one, and how Mary Ellis died comes to me like the answer to a pop quiz. Drowning.

  Can you drown in paperwork? I have to wonder as I bend down, and begin to gather the papers one by one.

  Chapter Three

  Death the Epidemic

  My family calls now and then, but mostly it's just my brother ringing to check up on me. He’s three years younger than I am and infinitely smarter. And if you give him an inch, he’ll walk all over you.

  I miss them sometimes, and I hate lying to them. I miss my friends too—okay, the one friend I had—and a normal life.

  You don’t know what you have until you lose it, you know?

  I didn’t really believe in that saying until I looked back the morning I died, and realized that I would never meet Vic at the coffee house again, and laugh over John Wayne marathons on AMC in the comfort of his attic room.

  I wish I could tell Vic the truth, but all I can do is smile and tell him how much I love college.

  The one time I tried to tell Vic the truth, Nate made it extremely clear that I couldn't tell anyone. That if I did, he'd send me straight on to wherever you go next. I want to go to Heaven or wherever the pearly gates are, but I'm not sure I will. Nate kills people, and in some twisted way, I help. That can't be a good taint on my soul.

  Then again, I don't think a halo would look good on me, anyway.

  By the time I've filed a good fifty-something death certificates, Nate appears in a wisp of smoke. He pulls his decrepit hands through chunks of greasy brackish hair and gives a long, tired sigh. It's darker than usual. Maybe it was raining wherever he went?

  “A bad one?” I ask, looking up from the certificate I'm on. Motorcycle accident.

  “They are most always bad,” is his morose reply.

  "I'm sorry."

  He shrugs it off as if it's nothing. "I am fine."

  Why does he keep saying that? It only makes me think that he is more not fine than he lets on. "How bad was it...?" I venture to ask.

  “I did not see Eshe there.”

  “Oh…” Eshe is the manifestation of Life, like Nate is Death. Two sides to the same coin or some nonsense like that.

  He nods absently and pulls out a chair on the opposite side of the table to sit. A stack of manila folders appear in front of him with a wave of his hand, and he takes the first one and begins filling it out with one of my spare pens with ease.
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  “I can do that…” I say helplessly.

  “I realize.”

  "Is this one of your Miyagi tricks? Are you subtly telling me I'm too slow?"

  The edges of his lips twitch into a grin. "Perhaps." When I chuckle, he glances up at me. "What is it?"

  "I'm just surprised you got the reference."

  He sighs haphazardly. "I am not a Neanderthal."

  "But aren't you too busy for movies?"

  "When there is more than one of you, you find time for the finer things in life," he remarks, filing another certificate away.

  I cock my head, studying him. "Like movies?"

  "Like movies."

  I smile to myself and return to work. For him being an older-than-dirt angel of death, he's quite—I don't know how to say it—modern? Hipster? So this century? I mean, if I didn't know him, I'd think he was my age, but whatever youth he might have is masked under all the stitches that run across his face and body, keeping him together from the centuries of being pulled and pushed apart. A part of me wonders what would happen if I took the grotesque black stitches out. Would he literally fall apart?

  That's kind of a funny thought.

  He flips another death certificate over and starts on his seventh. “How far have you gotten?”

  Back to business as usual. I lean against the table, scooting the stacks of paperwork aside. “You know, maybe we can catch a flick sometime.”

  "We cannot afford the time to catch a flick, as so you say. I need you caught up with the certificates as soon as possible."

  “Not even one? We don't even have to go to the movies. We can rent a Redbox or Netflix...”

  “Estella,” he warns, and focuses his coal eyes on me. He doesn't need to elaborate. I might be hardheaded, but I know when a cause is utterly defeated.

  I sniff indignantly. "Maybe if you took a vacation you wouldn't be so grumpy." When he ignores me, I push away from the table. "I’ll get them done. I’m almost done already, anyway. It wasn't very nice of you to do the whole raining paper thing." I indicated to the flurry of papers by wiggling my fingers. “Only pimps are allowed to do that. It took eons to pick up.”