The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love Read Free Page B

label what she saw. Whatever they were, they didn’t wear masks. They didn’t need to. Their appearance was hunched and gnarled, their skin so colorless it looked like paste. And their eyes . . . white except for the pinpoints of the pupils. White lanterns in the most gruesome faces she’d ever seen.
    Santo jerked her away just as the man with the mask pulled the trigger two times in rapid succession and Sal and Jim hit the floor.
    “No!” she cried as a hot spray splattered her skin. Santo was dragging her through the swinging doors when something slammed into her from behind and she stumbled. Excruciating pain exploded through her, and Santo was all that kept her from falling.
    He shouted something, but she couldn’t make out the words through the screeching agony. The pain became an entity that owned her.
    She looked down to see that blood covered her pink Love’s T-shirt and bubbled when she tried to suck in a breath. She’d been shot. Just like Reece . . . Her thoughts blurred and her knees gave.
    Santo swept her into his arms as he raced across the dining room, charging into the bug-infested night. Roxanne felt herself slipping, hurtling toward a black unknown that felt ominously familiar. They’d met before, Roxanne and death, and she knew that in the darkness, she’d find someone waiting. He always waited, that nameless, faceless presence that welcomed and terrified her at once.
    Santo called her name, and for a moment she was back with him, looking into his eyes, trying to read what she saw there. What did he have to do with all of this? In a sliver of lucidity, her mind connected a dot she didn’t understand. Before she could decipher the hidden meaning, it was gone again.
    She thought of her older brother and sister andbegan to cry. Her eyes squeezed tight against the pain that throbbed from inside out.
    She released one last wheezing breath.
    And then, for the fourth time in her life, Roxanne Love died.

 
    T he reaper— Santo now, he reminded himself, while he remained in this world, his name was Santo Castillo—raced to the vehicle he’d taken from the human’s garage with a feeling of panic as alien as it was unwanted. From inside the bar came sounds of chaos and carnage that assaulted his new senses. He tried to reconcile the riotous impressions into some kind of order. But he couldn’t. What had just happened in there?
    One of the creatures who’d spilled through the back door chased him out to the street but stopped short of crossing.
    He looked over his shoulder as he ran with Roxanne’s soft, defenseless body clutched tight to his chest and caught a flash of burning white eyes and long,curved canines. The creature snarled at him before it disappeared back into the restaurant, leaving him with the unsettling idea that he’d been spared.
    He’d never seen anything like it before, couldn’t hazard a guess about what manner of beast it was. But he’d seen cunning in those lantern eyes and he couldn’t mistake the feeling burrowing deep inside him now. Fear.
    Fear. In a reaper.
    In his arms, Roxanne lay bloodied and completely still. Her heart had stopped beating. Her labored breath had fallen silent. Her skin had chilled.
    Dead by any assessment, right on time.
    Except he knew her lungs would fill again and those startling eyes would open. If he let them.
    He’d come to reap her, after all.
    He’d crossed from the Beyond, breaking the laws of the Otherworld to experience her death on both planes. He’d fantasized about it, waiting impatiently for the call that her time had arrived once again.
    His plan had been simple. Fire for them both. End it all with flames that would destroy her human body at the same time it devoured the one he’d taken. It was easy. Clean. Irrevocable.
    So why didn’t he act?
    Was it because he’d seen her now with human vision that discerned detail and dimension he’d never known as a reaper? Vision that perceived nuance andsensitivity? He’d