Darynda Jones: Death and the Girl Next Door

I stopped and turned. He was wearing his requisite jeans that fit low on his hips and a gray T-shirt with a brown bomber jacket thrown over his shoulder. The cloudy day had splashed color across the sky behind him. A hint of orange, pink, and purple served as a backdrop to his powerful set of his shoulders, the lean hills and valleys of his arms. Somehow I didn’t think that a coincidence.

I tried to subdue the jolt my heart I received every time I looked at him. The wind molded the T-shirt to the expanse of his chest, revealing the fact that he was cut to simple perfection. And he had this way of moving, this animal grace, that could mesmerize even the stoutest of minds.

“How was your last class?” he asked, stopping in front of me. His voice, deep and smooth like butterscotch, caused a fluttering in my chest, a rush of heat to my face. How could any being, supernatural or otherwise, be so perfect?

“Pretty boring,” I said, clearing my throat to recover. “But it did have an interesting twist at the end.” I grinned at Brooklyn.

“That’s good,” he said.

I nodded and glanced at his arms. The bands of symbols that lined his biceps were visible beneath the edges of his sleeves. The designs were ancient and meaningful, symbols that stated his name, rank, and serial number in a celestial language. Or that was my impression. I loved looking at them. Thick dark lines that twisted into curves and angles. A single line of them wrapping around each arm. They looked like Native American pictography combined with something alien, something otherworldly.

“Not good,” Brooklyn said, tapping on her phone. “It was awful. I’ll meet you in P.E. Keep practicing.”

She wandered off, still gazing at her phone, as Jared asked, “Practicing?”

I snapped the compact closed and stuffed it into a pocket. “The whole vision thing. Brooke swears I just need to practice.”

“Ah.” The humor in his liquid brown eyes was infectious.

Jared had come to Riley’s Switch a couple of months ago to do a job. That job was to pop in, take me a few minutes before I was slated to die anyway, then pop back out again. But he’d disobeyed his orders. He’d saved me instead, thus breaking one of the three rules that celestial beings are bound by. Even the powerful Angel of Death. As a result, he was stuck on Earth. Stuck helping me. According to prophecy, I was supposed to stop an impending war between humans and demons before it ever started, but how I was supposed to manage that, nobody knew. Least of all me.

I pointed over my shoulder and started to turn. “I guess I’ll get to class now.”

He nodded and looked into the forest behind the school. “Are you okay?”

“Me?” I stopped, surprised. “I’m great.” When he looked back at me, his eyes full of doubt, I said, “Well, I’m better than I was a minute ago.”

One corner of his full mouth lifted in a delicious smile that melted my knees. “So am I.”

A person would have to be blind not to notice all the attention Jared drew every time he made an appearance. And I couldn’t help but notice that when he bent to kiss my cheek, more than one girl at Riley High stopped dead in her tracks.

He put his fingers under my chin and lifted my face to his. “I’ll be close.”

Ever since Jared had arrived in Riley’s Switch, he’d been kind of undercover as a student. Partly because we didn’t really know what else to do with him without drawing unwanted attention, but mostly because he wanted to stay close to me, to keep me safe. I liked to pretend it was because he liked me, but I had a sneaking suspicion it was more because of my status as a supposed war stopper. I tried not to think about that part of the prophecy that had been handed down for centuries. My stomach clenched painfully every time I did.

So instead, I focused on the dark brown depths of Jared’s eyes, shimmering beneath his thick black lashes.

Oh, yeah. That felt better.

Sadly, P.E. was going to require effort. We were ordered to run the Path, which was a footpath in the forest behind the gym. Fun for some, life-threatening for others. I was about as coordinated and sure-footed as spaghetti. This was not going to end well.

“How are you supposed to practice if we keep having to work in all of our classes?” Brooklyn asked as we jogged along the forest track, dodging tree branches and navigating the occasional rut. We’d had a dry winter and leaves crunched under our feet.

“It’s crazy, right?” I said, teasing, my huffing breaths only slightly wheezy. “To expect such a thing from an establishment of learning.” I checked the pocket in my hoodie to make sure I’d remembered my inhaler. Nothing screamed unattractive like a face bluing from lack of oxygen.

“Exactly.”

I had a feeling Brooklyn reveled in my prophetic status. She talked about it all the time and urged me to practice. To concentrate. To concentrate harder, darn it. Of course, she’d seen almost as much as I had when Jared came to town. She now knew there were things that went bump in the night. They were real and they were scary and they’d almost gotten us killed, so I couldn’t really blame her obsession. Though I could complain about it every single chance I got.

As Brooke went on about her new plan of action, one that would surely strengthen my visions, I saw a dark shadow dart past to my right. I stopped and a girl behind us slammed into me.

“Watch it, McAlister,” she said, pushing past me. I stumbled and caught myself against a tree trunk.

Brooke jumped to my defense, squaring her shoulders and jamming her hands onto her hips. “You watch it, Tabitha.”

“Please,” she said as three other girls ran past. “Like you could take me on your best day.”

Tabitha, also known as head cheerleader and my archenemy, just happened to be about seven feet tall to Brooke’s five. She smirked at us before continuing her trek through the forest, her blond head bobbing through the trees.

Brooke offered a hand for me to steady myself as I brushed leaves off my shorts. “How rude.”

“When is she not rude?” It was a sad twist of fate that Tabitha had P.E. with me, the person she most despised and most loved to harass. “But I did stop in the middle of the path.”

“Why? Did you have a vision?” she asked hopefully.

“Kind of. I saw something.”

When I pointed deeper into the forest, we both leaned forward and squinted for a better look. Two girls walked past, clearly having given up on the whole jogging thing. I could hardly blame them.

“Well,” Brooke said, “I don’t see anything, but the way this day has been going, maybe we should get back to the gym, just to be safe.”

But I had seen something. An outline. A shape that resembled a head peering from behind a tree about thirty yards away. I stepped closer as something farther down the tree trunk moved. I focused as a ray of light glinted off a silver blade.

I froze.

“Don’t you think?” Brooke asked.

I eased my hand around her arm and stepped back onto the path. She caught on instantly and looked into the forest again.

In a hushed whisper, she said, “I still don’t see anything.”

“I do.” When the shape emerged from behind the tree, hunched down like it was going to attack, Brooke gasped, finally seeing it. I squeezed her arm tighter and whispered, “Run.”

Third Grave Dead Ahead

Second Grave on the Left

First Grave on the Right

“Only Darynda Jones could make the Angel of Death crush-worthy! Wickedly sharp with brilliant wit, Death and the Girl Next Door will leave you craving more!”