Love Bites Then it Sucks by Julie Steimle (story books to read txt) 📖

had entirely forgot about the rehearsal dinner. All the guests had showed up, but neither bride nor groom had arrived. Both the McAllisters and the Johaansens called Hanz while he was at the police station, showing the police the weird text he got but not the letter, making no excuses. Some of the local police knew what Eve was, after all. His parents called again after no response.

<< Hanz? Where are you and Eve? Some strange person answered her phone and said it was left at her work. >>

Hanz nodded, then looked to his watch. It was late. “I’m so sorry. Something happened, and I totally lost track of the time. I’m at the police station right now.”

<< Did something happen to Eve? >>

“Yes,” he said, his hands shaking. “I think she’s been kidnapped.”

An audible gasp erupted on the other side of the phone. << Oh no… >>

“Right now I’m with the police looking at the evidence. I called Eve’s number after she sent me a weird text message,” he said. “And I spoke with the girl who has her phone. She was the last person to see her. She has Eve’s wallet also, and Eve left her suitcase in my apartment.”

<< Eve was in your apartment? >>

“She left a message of where to find her, but I was too late to get to her.”

<< Oh no. What do we tell her parents? They’re right here. >>

“I need to meet with you,” he said. “I also need to call a few people.”

<< But Hanz, you might consider that Eve maybe just had cold feet— >> 

“She did not have cold feet,” he said with bite. Pressing a hand to his forehead, he said, “Look, just tell everyone the wedding is postponed. That something urgent came up. Ok?”

Silence on the other end.

“I’ll meet you at your hotel. I also need the McAllisters there. I have to tell them something.” Hanz closed his eyes, feeling his eyes burn as tears fought to come out. He held them back. “We’re still getting married.”

 

Novice

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Five

 

 

Reaping my first death was… I can’t really describe it. It shook me. Not in a bad way, as biker George took me to the ward where the elderly were waiting anxiously for release, but it did rattle me to my very bones. Some of the dying could see me. They gazed at us both, and one of the elderly there who was dying asked me, “Am I going to hell?”

“No,” biker George chuckled. “But your angel is a little… unconventional.” He then led out a hand for me to ‘reap’ this man. The man’s forehead was marked in red light, the sigil on it incomprehensible to me. I realized then that I really did not want to use the scythe. But remembering what George had said, I reached out my hand and took hold of the elderly man’s hand, lifting his spirit out of his body.

He flat lined. Nurses around noticed and went to attend to him. Under orders not to resuscitate, they merely counted and waited for proof of final passing. However the man’s spirit looked back on his body and then on me and said, “That wasn’t so bad.”

He then looked upward. So did I. I saw a conduit open, filled with light. He whipped right up into it and was gone.

 I was shaking. That light was so bright and so beautiful. It reminded me a little of the angel that had driven off the singular evil spirit who had been in the Bale’s haunted house, only brighter.

“Not bad, first-timer,” biker George said, patting me on the shoulder. “Quiet grace. That’s how a reaper should do it. No fuss. No drama. And taking his hand was a nice touch. But all you really had to do was touch him. One finger would have done it.”

I stared at him. It bothered me how causally biker George talked about the ending of a human life, even if that person had been aching to go. And more how he hardly was affected by the light that had come and gone. I pointed to where it had been. “Did you not see that?”

He sighed, nodding sadly. “Yes… I did.” He turned to walk out of the room.

I followed him, dodging a nurse who abruptly rushed in. “How can you see that and not be affected?”

Sighing more, closing his eyes, he said, “I try not to look. It makes me homesick.”

I stared. Homesick? Then I realized, he must have gone to Heaven or close to it, and was sent back to be a death angel. He had seen it.

I whispered, “What was it like?”

Turning his eyes to me, he replied, “Worth it.”

He would not answer more.

On that floor, we only visited those who were entirely ready to go. Biker George spoke with those who could see him and even inquired if their family had visited yet. Some were lonely and alone, and no one had visited ever. Others had family already around them, waiting for their passing. Often when they saw us, we knew it was time to help them pass on. However, one begged to be on earth a little longer.

“I am waiting for my son,” she said.

George looked to me and settled down to one side of the room. A few minutes after, a young man with long hair and a beard rushed in. He looked like he had been through the mill, and he also had a mark for death on his forehead. It was not red, but it was glowing bright.

I looked to George.

“At risk,” he said. “From my guess, potential cancer. You can see from the discoloration of his teeth and fingers that he smokes. It is possible he has first stages of cancer.”

“You can’t tell?” I asked.

George shook his head. “Nope. I don’t have x-ray vision. Do you?”

I could hear the man’s imps scream from him to get out a cigarette. It made me sad. George was good at guessing this sort of thing apparently.

“People are funny,” George said with a sigh. “I never really understood how foolish most people are until after I died. How something so small can affect the rest of their lives…”

Once the son had a few words with his mother, she looked to George, hardly able to look at me, and she nodded.

George gestured to me and I reached around her son and touched her forehead. Her spirit slipped out and then went immediately into the bright conduit over her head. The machine flat lined and everyone around reacted, some with sobs, some calling for the nurses.

Biker George and I stepped out of the room, dodging around the nurses—though I just walked through the wall. George smirked at me, shaking his head. “That is so natural to you, isn’t it?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been doing it for a while.”

But George belly-laughed. “For a while… I bet I’ve been doing it longer than you have been alive, yet I am still not used to it.”

I shrugged again. “It comes natural to me then.”

He nodded. It was most likely true. My imp heritage made it easy to adapt to being physically insubstantial.

But then we went down to the trauma ward. I could feel the air get colder, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw ghosts ducking to hide. George hooked a few with his suddenly appearing scythe and jerked them up into what looked like a slice in the air. It was like he had cut open the space before us and tucked those ghosts into it, like sewing with a needle.

“It is impossible to get all ghosts,” George said. “But if you catch them off guard, you can collect a few.”

“Why are there so many here?” I whispered with a shiver.

He blinked at me. “You can feel them?”

I nodded. “It’s cold.”

Leaning back, he got this crooked little look on his mouth, not quite a smirk, but definitely with lots of amused thought. “That might be helpful for you. Us already dead people don’t feel anything. Not hunger or thirst.”

“Will I get hungry?” I wondered out loud.

He looked at me, closed one eye and said, “If you let go of the mortal in yourself, no. But I think you might be hungry for a bit since you still are alive.”

Would I even be able to eat? That worried me more. I could not pick up anything. If I bit into something without using my hands, could I chew it and swallow, or would I pass through it? Would I starve? And would that affect me or just be something in my head? Frowning, I wondered—until a group nurses and surgeons rushed into the hallway and nearly rammed a gurney into me. I shot up to the ceiling before impact could happen. Those people hastily passed under me while giving a person marked heavily in red on their forehead a bag of blood and rushing in through a pair of swinging doors.

“Good instinct,” biker George said, standing casually aside in the hallway. “It’s best we not stand in the center of the hallway in this place, though.” But we then walked into the emergency surgery room after them.

Standing in the room was a huge angel with a sword. George hastily nodded to him and hooked me by the back of my shirt, dragging me toward the doors. “Not that one. That man apparently lives.”

I wondered who that person was, the one with the big angel. Someone important, maybe?

Hopping back out into the hall, sticking to the sides of it as people rushed down, George and I ended up in the burn ward where George pointed out three people who were not recovering properly and would probably have to be claimed later that week. We then passed through the wall into a room where a shooting victim was bleeding to death internally. The bullet had passed through him. In this case, George pushed me aside and reaped the man himself. The shot-man’s spirit had tried to escape the moment he had separated from his body, realizing that there was no going back to life but he most certainly did not want the afterlife either. But George hooked him and sent him on his way quicker than two blinks.

Panting (which was weird because George had no living lungs), George shook his head and sat on a spare stool in the room as the doctors called the time of death. “Keep an eye on gunshot victims,” he said. “Those that got themselves shot know they are in trouble in the afterlife. And I don’t mean suicides. I mean gangster types who don’t know the meaning of the word ‘law’. Those folk. They run the moment they realize they are dead. The same goes with any gangster violence.”

Gangster. The way George said it made me think he was a biker from the twenties. Did they have motorcycles back then?

“What other ghosts run?” I asked just to make certain my bases were covered.

Nodding to me with satisfaction that I was trying to honestly learn the ropes of this business, biker George replied plainly, “The guilty. You could say we are like the cops of the afterlife. Those that want to see us and want our help will happily greet us. But those that