Page 7 of Secondhand Soul

“None of the above,” Victoria mutters, arms wrapping around her body. Her skin is rapidly turning a raw kind of pink. Too cold, but she isn’t as almost-dead as I thought.

“Rhea is about your size. My mom. She’ll have some clean clothes you can borrow. You get warm and dry, and then we’ll get you back to your car. Unless you think you need the ambulance?”

“No. I don’t think so.” She keeps looking at her leg.

“You hurt?”

“Not much. I fell down.”

I stare at her. “You hit your head, Vicky?”

“Don’t call me Vicky.”

“Geez, sorry. Are you hungry?”

She struggles for a minute, like it’s a crime to admit a basic need. “A little.”

“Well, Manny is like the snack cabinet king.” I don’t tell her that I know that because I’m always raiding it, taking back food to my “home” that I refuse to turn into something more habitable. “I’m sure there’s something you can eat while I figure out how the hell to make this squash thing for sixty people.”

“Sixty people!” Victoria blinks and turns her head to face me.

Ooh. Mistake. I stop looking at her. I have to.

She’s gorgeous.

Maybe she can’t see what I am. Maybe she’s just concussed or startled, or she broke her glasses. Maybe that’s why she jumped and struggled away from me—or just because I’m a big guy and she’s a girl, and sometimes big guys make women feel endangered.

I wish she could meet Manny. She’d never feel that way around him.

I want to say, “What do I look like to you?” but that would be a whole new level of awkward. “Where are you from?”

A pause. “California.”

“Hey, me too.” The joy at having something in common vanishes. “I hate California.”

“I don’t like it either.”

“Great! Now if you’re also an undead monster who can’t cook and loves TV Land, we’ll be besties,” I say sarcastically.

She actually laughs. A little. “I’m not undead.”

That’s kind of a strange place to leave it, but I don’t have time to worry. We’re at Manny and Rhea’s. “Time to go in and save Thanksgiving.”

Chapter Four: Victoria and Lazarus

See, the nice thing about working as a hired killer is—nothing.

But if you do that kind of work on a mafia boss’s dime, then you are usually only killing bad people who do bad things—and a lot of the men I’ve killed specifically have done bad things to me or to other girls like me. I haven’t been working for Pazcuso that long, so maybe he’ll eventually send me on an assignment I can’t stomach, but so far, it’s been a job I can tolerate.

I kill bad men. Bad things.

So I’m sort of frozen, knocked out of my assassin mindset when Lazarus rescues me, takes me through a nice little town (and I thought this place was like the CrossRealms, all demon-infested and full of evil), to a nice little house in the ‘burbs. I’m even more shocked when he carries me inside in my filthy, muddy clothes, pops his own shirt off and drops it in my hands, and then puts my shaking, hypothermia-having, pale-blue ass down in a kitchen chair.

“Dry off with that for a second. Take my phone and call whoever. I have to get this food started, okay?” A phone skids across the table to me, and the big, gray, shirtless beast starts slamming around the kitchen.

This doesn’t seem like typical murdering monster behavior—and I should know. I’ve seen the tapes. I’ve been a murdering monster—but I’m a monster who kills worse monsters, so that’s okay with me.

“Ummm. Okay, preheat oven to 350—nope, that’s not gonna work. Preheat oven to 450, say a little prayer... squash in fridge—holy shit, that’s a lot of squash. Uh.” Lazarus throws a frantic look at me as he buzzes around the kitchen like a muscular gray blur.