I shoved my fist into his ribs and the crowd roared.
He collapsed a little farther against me, my body taking on more of his weight. “Give up now, or else.”
I wanted to laugh, would have if I wasn’t busy punching him again.
This time he fell over onto the floor. I bounced from foot to foot, waiting for him to pick himself up.
He lifted onto his hands and knees, his back heaving with heavy breaths.
Everything seemed to slow down then—like in a car accident when you know you’re about to die and every last second is painfully drawn out so you know exactly what is about to happen.
My opponent glanced to his corner. His handler nodded once and then slid his cold eyes to me. The boxer got up and turned, looking at me with a hard expression. I saw his glove coming, but I didn’t move fast enough. It hit me square in the face and I fell back, down onto my butt.
The guy was on me then, straddling my waist and hammering his glove into my face. My vision went dark. I’d taken thousands of hits like that before and not one of them ever took away my vision.
His glove. It was weighted.
He hit me again and warmth rushed from my nose. He must have put on a new glove, one with brass sewn inside. He was dirty.
I tried to get up, to hit him again.
“I told you I wasn’t going to lose,” the man rasped.
I heard the ref calling out for him to get off me, that he was supposed to back off. I heard the hush that fell over the crowd.
I looked up at him. He saw it in my eyes.
I wasn’t giving up. This title, the money that came with it, was mine.
He reared back one last time, the ref screaming for him to stop.
He drove his glove into my face, up under my nose, driving the bones straight into my brain.
I collapsed beneath him.
As life faded from my limbs, a single flicker of emotion was felt.
For her. She needed me and I failed. What would happen to her now?
Death swallowed me then, taking what was left of my thoughts, my life. Turns out the moment in which my life was defined forever was not what I expected.
In fact, it seemed that my life was now defined by death.
* * *
Red. It’s all I could see. It was all around me, everywhere. At this rate I wouldn’t have one drop of blood left in my body. How long did it take someone to bleed out? How long until their organs, their heart had nothing left to fuel them? A minute? Five?
What I couldn’t understand is why I wasn’t in pain. Surely with this much blood pouring out of my skin I would feel some kind of raw pain. But there was nothing.
Nothing but red.
Why was it suddenly so quiet? I could hear nothing—not even the sound of my own breathing. Then I realized. The hush in the air was because everyone was watching me die. They were likely wondering the same thing I had been moments before: How long? I needed to get up, to prove to them that I wasn’t going down like this. I wasn’t going to die in a fight I should have won—a fight that was rightfully mine.
I stopped thinking completely when I practically flew up off the ground. An overwhelming dizziness overcame me, so disorienting and unsettling that my insides buzzed with discomfort.
I was upright, my body springing up so fast that I hadn’t even consciously tried to move it. Still, all I saw was red. How could someone bleed so much and move so fast?
I looked down at myself, taking stock, mentally preparing for the sight of my blood-drenched body…
Only I wasn’t bleeding.
And my body… it wasn’t there.
In the place of skin and bone was nothing but a fine red mist—a red cloud that was shaped like a man—like me.
Tentatively, I reached out my arm (was it really still my arm?) and watched the red mist dissipate like smoke from a cigar.
I must already be dead.
This cloud—this red—was all that was left of me, left of my life?
I looked up, beyond myself, and saw that I wasn’t in the ring anymore. I was in a room. An office. It was large, uncluttered and had a huge row of floor-to-ceiling closets lining the wall behind a massive desk.
It was clear this wasn’t heaven. But it didn’t seem like hell either.
I watched as the large leather chair behind the desk began to swivel around, slowly turning, and if I had a throat I would have swallowed thickly.
There was something ominous about the way that chair turned, something final. I knew it down to my core.
A boney man with a wide forehead and shrewd eyes appeared, steepling his fingers beneath his chin and regarding me in a way that did nothing to soothe my confusion.
“You’re dead,” the man said simply. “But you don’t have to be for very long.”
“I don’t?” I replied, surprised when my voice echoed through the room. How does one speak without a mouth?
He smiled. It was the kind of smile that I’d seen before. The kind the boxer gave me right before he killed me in that dirty fight.
“I have a proposition for you,” he began, pulling his hands down from under his chin and pushing out of the chair. “One that you won’t be able to refuse.”
And so just minutes after I lived the moment that defined my life forever… I also lived the moment that would forever define my death.
Chapter One
“Death Escort - an assassin employed by the Grim Reaper. Will kill a target by any means necessary. Including charm.”
Charming
Present day
You would think being a Death Escort—a killer by trade—would make a man above getting a lecture from his boss. Apparently when you work for the Grim Reaper, the ultimate death dealer, it doesn’t matter who you are, how many times you’ve killed, or how ruthless you might be because he is better.
After over ninety years of working for him, it’s still annoying as hell.
And so are his lectures.
The fact is it gets old working for someone who is the be-all, end-all in life and death. So when I saw the chance to allow someone to get the best of him, I took it. I mean, it isn’t every day when someone manages to get around the iron-clad rules of the Grim Reaper himself.
So yeah, I talked and wasted time. I “forgot” to mention that one of his new Escorts had figured out a way to break the call of death that was placed on a Target. Turns out in the eyes of the Reaper (who strangely looked a lot like Mr. Burns from that cartoon The Simpsons), that made me an accessory.
And now, after weeks of delaying the inevitable, I was getting my punishment.
Goody gumdrops.
Instead of listening to what a disappointment I was, how he should just Recall me right now and let me twist away in an eternity far worse than hell, blah, blah, blah, I turned my attention instead toward the floor-to-ceiling row of closets that lined the wall behind his massive desk.