hooked his foot around my ankle beneath the table, rubbing my leg in sympathy and comfort. I shot him a grateful smile and made myself meet Tod’s eyes boldly. The best way to even the playing field was to knock him down a peg. “Why are you stuck here?” I asked, hoping I’d correctly assessed that as his sore spot.
“Because he’s a rookie.” Nash smirked. “And there isn’t much opportunity for advancement in a line of work where the employees never die.”
“You’re a rookie?” I looked at Tod again, and again his jaw bulged with irritation. “How old are you?” I’d assumed, based on that “ageless” comment, that he was much older than he looked.
“He’s seventeen,” Nash said, his smirk still firmly in place.
“I was seventeen when I started this job,” the reaper snapped. “But that was two years ago.”
“You’ve been doing this for two years and you’re still a rookie?”
Tod looked insulted, and I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or apologize. “Yeah, well, my recruiter wasn’t very concerned with truth in advertising. And your boyfriend here is right about the turnover rate—it’s nonexistent. The senior reapers in this district are edging up on two hundred years old. If we hadn’t lost one last year, I’d still be sitting in the TV room at Colonial Manor, waiting for old men to keel over into their oatmeal.”
“Wait, how do you lose a reaper?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Freak sickle accident?” But no one else looked amused by my joke.
“The less you know about reaper business, the better,” Nash whispered, and Tod nodded arrogantly.
Oh. I held both hands up in defense and leaned back in my chair. “Sorry. So.old men keeling into their oatmeal …?”
Tod shrugged. “Yeah. But at least here I get the occasional gunshot victim or unexpected relapse. Life’s all about the surprises, right?”
“I guess.” But surprises had kind of lost their novelty for me with the discovery that I wasn’t human. Except for that whole fatal premonition thing. I’d love to be caught off guard by death again, like normal people.
Well, not by my own death, of course.
“Speaking of surprises …” Twisting the lid off my Coke, I glanced at Nash for a signal, and he nodded, telling me to continue. Evidently I wasn’t imagining Tod’s willingness to talk to me, rather than to him. “We need your help avoiding a really nasty one.”
Tod made a show of glancing at his wrist, conspicuously absent of a watch. “You two have already wasted my whole break. I have an aneurism on the fourth floor in ten minutes, and I can’t be late. I hate the ones that linger.”
“This won’t take long.” I pinned him with my gaze, refusing to break contact once I saw him hesitate. “Please.”
The reaper sighed, running one hand through his mop of short curls. “You have five minutes.”
I breathed softly in relief. Until the reality of the situation sank in.
Had I just begged for an audience with Death?
“THIS IS ABOUT the exchange rate?” the reaper asked, drawing me out of my own head, where shock over the events of the past couple of hours was finally catching up with me.
When I didn’t answer, Nash nodded.
The reaper shrugged and slouched back into his chair. “You know as much as I do about that. A life for a life.”
Nash glanced at me with both brows raised, to ask if I was okay. I nodded, drawing my thoughts back into focus, and he leaned forward with his arms crossed on the table. “But that’s the penalty for saving someone on your list, right? Someone who’s supposed to die.”
“You’re not ‘saving’ anyone.” Tod scowled—we’d obviously found his hot button. “You’re stealing souls, which only delays the inevitable. And throws my whole shift off schedule. And hurls my boss into all new realms of pissed-off. And you don’t even want to know about the paperwork involved in even a simple, equal exchange.”
“I’m not—” Nash started, but Tod cut him off.
“But beyond all that, it’s illegal. Thus the penalty.”
I screwed the lid back onto my bottle and pushed it toward the middle of the table. “But does the penalty still apply if we save someone who wasn’t supposed to die?”
Tod’s forehead wrinkled in confusion, then his expression went suddenly blank, leaving a cold comprehension shining in his eyes. “Shit like that doesn’t happen here—”
“Come off it, Tod.” Nash eyed the reaper intently, old pain etched into the lines of his frown. “You owe me the truth.”
But Tod went on as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “—and even if it did, you’d never know it, because no reaper could afford to admit he accidently took the wrong soul.”
“We’re not talking about an accident.” I glanced up when the cafeteria doors flew open and a woman entered with three kids in tow, reminding me for the first time since Tod had joined us that we were discussing very odd things in a very public place.
“What about the list? Wouldn’t that prove it if someone wasn’t supposed to die?” Nash whispered now in concession to our new company.
Tod scrubbed his face with both hands, clearly frustrated and losing patience with our questions. “Probably, but you’d never get your hands on the list. And even if you could, it’d be too late. The penalty would already have been applied.”
“Are you seriously saying a reaper would take an innocent life in exchange for a soul he shouldn’t have claimed in the first place?” Indignation burned hot in my veins. If any process in the world was free from corruption, it should have been death. After all, wasn’t death the great equalizer?
Or was that taxes?
“No, you’re right.” Tod gave me a halfhearted nod. “In theory, the penalty shouldn’t apply in a case like that. But theory and reality don’t always coexist where death is concerned. So even if you could get your hands on the right list, and even if you were right about the reaper’s …mistake, chances are that an innocent soul would already have been taken. Or one of your own.”
I couldn’t help noticing he didn’t put us in the “innocent” category.
“So we’re screwed either way.” Exasperated, I tossed my hands into the air and leaned back in my chair, closing my eyes.
“What’s this about, anyway?” Tod asked, and I opened my eyes to find him watching me in… was that interest? “Who are you trying to save?”
“We don’t know. Probably no one.” Nash poked at the last bite of cake with his fork, smearing chocolate frosting across the paper plate. “Several girls have died in our area recently, and Ka—” He stopped, omitting my name from the sentence at the last second. “She—” he nodded in my direction “—thinks their deaths are suspicious.”
“‘She’ does, huh?” A grin tugged at the corner of the young reaper’s mouth, and I could practically hear the gears turning in his head. “What’s suspicious about them?”
“They were all teenagers. They were all very pretty. They all died the same way. They were all in good health. They each died a day apart.” I ticked the facts off on my fingers as I spoke, and when I’d used up one hand, I showed it to him. “Take your pick. But either way, that’s too many coincidences. There’s no way all three of them were supposed to die, and I don’t care whose list they were on.”
The gleam of interest in Tod’s