Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dying

  by the Hour

  Kory M. Shrum

  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

  When 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 brow
n. 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 birthday with deathday.”

  “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.

  “Sure. That’s a great sign,” I say. But I don’t believe what I’m saying and she knows I don’t believe it. But sometimes you say things to be kind to the people you love. It wouldn’t comfort her to hear We’re all going to die, Ally. They came for us once and they’ll come again. Harder and harder until they win, and God help us, I can’t imagine anything worse than what we’ve already been through—No.

  Some things you don’t say to people you love.

  Besides the word war suggests a fighting chance. War means a prolonged battle where either side could come out on top. This isn’t war. This is a death sentence.

  Ally gives my hand a quick squeeze, bringing me back to the present moment, to a moment when I am just a clown at a little girl’s birthday party.

  “Go on,” she says. “Get what you came for.”

  I cast a last look at Regina, Julia, and the others, then hand Ally the balloon bag.

  “If they ask, I went to pee.”

  She gives a cute salute and I slip away. I take my huge floppy shoes off by the back door and creep inside, careful to slide the door closed behind me.

  The kitchen welcomes me, a large island off the right, granite counter tops and behind that, mahogany cabinets and a stainless steel fridge. The place looks like an ad in Better Homes, with only a few stray coats from guests and the occasional toy forgotten in a corner. Otherwise—pristine.

  I turn on the bathroom light and shut the door, hoping to give the occupado impression should someone wonder where I am. Cover story secure, I creep down the hallway. My ears strain for any people noises—voices, footsteps, maniacal whistling, for anyone who might wonder why a girl wearing a rainbow wig is creeping around up here.

  But I hear nothing. See no one.

  I place my hand on the door handle of Mr. Lovett’s office and find it locked. Then I do what I’ve been taught to do. I pull two pins from my thick rainbow wig and slip them into the lock. I push against the bearing—turn, and pop.

  It sounds easy, sure, but I’ve practiced a million times on a variety of locks purchased from hardware stores. A box of locks in the corner of a living room is a great conversation starter, by the way, and a lovely way to spend a Friday night alone.

  Gerard Lovett’s office is large. The desk lay in the middle of the room, directly opposite the door. The desk itself is immaculate, nothing like mine, which has piles of paperwork, junk mail, and bills needing attention. Behind his neat desk is a regal black chair, with a high back and wheels. The desk and chair itself are perched on top of a red and gold rug matching the red and gold drapes on either side of the fireplace behind the desk. One side of the room has a massive book case. The spines look unbroken, unread, and I’m not surprised to think of Mr. Lovett as a man who likes the appearance of being erudite rather than the actual reading. The remaining side of the room has a wooden chess set on a table between two more regal chairs, this time made of red leather.

  Before entering the room I look around. I’m glad I do. Because up above me, sitting on a ledge above the chess set, is a camera. It isn’t trained on the whole room, just the desk and the wall behind it, so if I’m lucky, I’m still invisible.

  I admit I’m pretty freaked about the camera. I’m staring at its little black eye, trying to determine my next move, how to keep it from seeing me when—

  POP.

  I jump. My heart explodes in my chest, taking off like a rabbit fleeing a fox and I am about to run like hellfire back down the stairs and out the door. Then I hear a child crying. I swear, steady myself against the door frame, breath caught in my throat
like a cotton ball and cross to the window to see what made the sound.

  A balloon had popped. And a child, devastated, is

  crying against Ally’s leg while she searches the bag for one in a similar shape and color. She finds one and the girl brings her weeping to a raggedy, shuddering stop. Her face brightens. The smile still tight, turns into a half-hearted, lopsided grin and the sobs become a kind of gleeful hiccup.

  “Jesus,” I mutter. I swear I can feel my ovaries die.

  When I turn back to the room I realize something is wrong. Not just that I’d run into the room without thinking and was surely caught on camera. But the room is suspiciously quiet. The hum and click of electronics I’d noted upon first entering the room is gone. The clocks have stopped ticking. Latent electricity in lamp wires, phone outlets, an answering machine and internet modem have all stopped. The camera too, of course. Everything still, everything quiet—the way a house is quiet after a power outage.

  “Shit.”

  This time last year, when my life started to get out of control, and homicidal maniacs tried to kill me and whatnot, I started to develop this new—I can’t believe I’m going to say this—power. Unfortunately, there just isn’t another word for it. It’s not part of my weird death-replacement thing, but something that can’t be explained scientifically by my NRD—my Necronitic Regenerative Disorder, a neurological disorder that allows me to die but not stay dead.

  No, this is something else entirely.

  And it would seem I have some strange connection to electricity. It’s not like I can control it. When it started last year, it was just a shocky thing—a static sort of electricity managing to blow light bulbs at the flip of a switch, or shock people quite a bit stronger than the usual I-shuffled-my-feet-and-now-zap.

  It’s evolved.

  Lately, I can do this surge thing. When I’m startled, or scared, I send a shock out and BAM, electronics fail. So far I’ve only managed to blow up my own shit—bye, bye the possibility of morning toast or midnight margaritas, which is fine except now I’m blowing up other people’s shit.