Descent (Kissed by Death) - Tara Fuller Page 0,6

once full of potential, now lay limp and lifeless on crumbled concrete.

And none of them had a ticket to Hell. Lucky me.

Scout, my new partner and pain in my ass, leaned down to inspect the young man paramedics were furiously working to revive. Scout wasn’t exactly new to the reaper scene, but he was a recent transfer to my territory. It had taken me seventy years to learn to play nice with the last guy. I looked Scout over, with his mop top of messy blond curls, torn jeans, and surf T-shirt. Yeah, this one was going to take longer.

The living scurried around us in a panic, talking about a gas line going up. The wounded were dragged out of the debris while the dead were passed up for those who still had hope at survival. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the word. Survival was just a pit stop on your way to your real forever. Death. Humans worked so hard to hang on to life, when in the grand scheme, the thing they valued so much was nothing more than a grain of sand in the sea of eternity. My grain had lasted only eighteen years, but it had been enough for me. Life was overrated.

“So much for staying in shape to live longer, huh?” Scout said. “No man should ever have to die in spandex.”

I looked over the biker’s skintight yellow-and-black outfit. “He shouldn’t have to die looking like a bumblebee either, but here we are. Enough of the fashion drivel. We have a job to do.”

Scout knelt down and touched the man’s shoulder, which was bent at an odd angle.

“He’s mine,” he said, tossing his blond curls out of his eyes. “That means you get the pretty one. Bastard.”

I dragged my gaze across the road to where a girl lay across the sidewalk in front of what had once been a café. If it hadn’t been for the halo of blood around her, I could have been fooled into thinking she was simply asleep. Her face was a mask of stillness and peace, her purple dress smeared with blood and ash. She was innocent. I could smell the purity on her from across the street. Damn it. She was Heaven-bound.

A dull scream echoed in the back of my skull. I searched the debris for the source. And there he was. He was half hidden by brick and ash, and his chest worked frantically as he gasped for breath. He wouldn’t last long. His eyes were wide and wild. His fingers, stretched toward the girl on the sidewalk, looked like broken branches. Strange…even with death at his doorstep, he was concerned for her. Scout grumbled as he set to work and I tore my gaze from the temporarily living human.

“Pretty one? You think I care?” I raised a brow. “Take them both. You’re the one hell-bent on getting in an angel’s panties. Maybe you can try your luck while you’re up there. Besides…looks like I’m going to have a straggler.”

Scout stood and brushed off his hands on his jeans. “Nah. I’ve given up. It’s an impossible mission. Those girls may as well have chastity belts under those pretty white robes. They’re immune to my charms.”

“You say that as if you’ve ever actually had any.”

The paramedic backed away, head hung low, and the last breath of life puffed out of the bumblebee biker who had met a tragic end. I slipped through the crowd of onlookers and moved into position, anger washing over me as I prepared to log another soul that wasn’t going to my territory. I was getting sick of playing errand boy for Balthazar. For picking up the slack for Anaya. The former Heaven’s reaper might have been like a sister to me, but it didn’t mean I had to like the fact that she’d left her post to trail after her boyfriend for the next thousand years.

Souls like me, the only ones deemed already tormented enough to endure the daily visits to Hell, the ones haunted by the sins of our former lives, didn’t belong upstairs. Surrounded by that kind of purity and light, I was considered nothing more than a stain.

And yet here I was, staring down at a soul who had probably never had a dark thought in her short life. She would probably be expecting someone full of light and comfort waiting to guide her home. Too bad for her, she was getting me.

Taking out my frustration on the