Suck My Life (Sucking Dead #1) - Andie M. Long Page 0,3

an asterisk at the side of I’ve read myself and highly recommend.” She passed me the list. “Let me know which you’d like me to order to store.”

I took the list and put it in my pocket. “Thank you. I’ll go check them out and if any are suitable, I’ll come back and place an order.”

“Oh, okay.” She didn’t believe me. I could tell in her tone. A resigned monotone from hearing it before. She no doubt thought I’d just order them online after finding the best price. Which I would do. I’d have no reason to come back into this store after today because Mya wouldn’t be here.

“So what was your opinion on Death as a romantic partner?” I asked. Temptation had got too much.

“I enjoyed the book. Death was as good a love interest as any.”

“Thank you,” I said, and then I broke out into a huge smile. She looked a little taken aback. It was true I didn’t smile very often. Didn’t really go with the job, Oh I’ve come to collect your soul, accompanied by a big toothy grin, yeah, wasn’t going to cut it.

“Goodbye. Thanks once again,” I added, and then I left the store.

I travelled home to Gnarly Fell, a village just on the London border. It was a small village with under a hundred inhabitants if you didn’t include the wayward souls I lived with. This was what I sought help with. I don’t know if it was due to a general dissatisfaction of present day life, but an increasing amount of souls were stuck between Heaven and Hell. And when that happened, they stayed at the Home of Wayward Souls, also known as my current abode.

I needed a Queen for the place. There had not been one for many years, since the last Death was in power. I’d preferred to live alone until now—well as alone as I could be—but it was time to look for a housemate. My job was busy enough.

I was hoping Mya Malone would accept the role.

Walking upstairs to the second floor, men and women stalked the corridors in various stages of translucence. Spirits could touch certain things like door handles, but while they could use a computer to research rules of the dead, they couldn’t send a loved one an email that said, ‘Hi, babe. I’m currently in purgatory. I’ll let you know when I get to my final resting place. Bye’.

Spence walked towards me, his right foot dragging along the floor. His white hair looked like bed head, his fringe floppily hitting him in his yellowed eyes. “Are you letting me go today, ya bastard?”

I narrowed my eyes at him as we caught up to each other. He grinned at me, showing his rotten front teeth.

“That would depend on whether you’ve decided which side of good and evil you’re coming down on, as you well know.”

“I still don’t give a rat’s ass that Jake Marauder walked the plank and drowned, if that’s what yer getting at.”

“But you gave away the treasure you got off him to help the family whose daughter needed a physician and saved her life,” I repeated for the umpteenth time. “So here we are. Did you do a good deed, or a bad one? Which outweighs the other? You decide. While you regret nothing, you stay here with me.”

“I don’t mind it here and you know it. No nagging wife.” It wasn’t the first time Spence had said this. He might moan and whine, but I think he was perfectly happy here. He had been here a long time. A former sailor, he’d been recruited into piracy and had died around 1720.

“Well, let me know if you change your mind. Anything I need to know about?” Spence liked to give me an update on the other resident wayward spirits.

“That Nancy has been extra pitiful. Doesn’t seem to have come to terms fully with the fact she’s dead. Apparently, she’d been saving Iron Man 2 to watch when she got a moment and so she’s blaming her abusive husband for making her stab him to death and his knocking her into the television set where she banged her head and died.”

Please let Mya choose being Queen over just dead and gone.

“You know there’s always a settling in period. Hopefully, I can set her up with the movie and she might move on then,” I told him.

“I bleeding hope so, because she’d have shattered all the glasses on my ship. I’d have had to