First Grave on the Right (Charley Davidson, #1)

by Darynda Jones

You are like sunshine: bright, incandescent, and oddly irritating at times.

turned my attention to the dead guy standing there, then lowered my lids and asked in a gravelly voice, “Can you get that?” He hesitated. “Um, the phone?” “Mmm.” “Well, I’m kind of—” “Never mind.”

While I normally weighed around 125 … ish, for some unexplainable reason, between the hours of partially awake and fully awake, I weighed a solid 470.

His apology left me feeling guilty for not being more … I don’t know, supportive. Maybe I needed sensitivity training. I once signed up for an anger management class, but the instructor pissed me off.

“I’m still getting used to all this, Miss Piss and Vinegar. Give me a little time.”

“Do you see dead people all the time?” “Every other weekend and holidays.” “Are they, you know, everywhere?” “Is a frog’s ass watertight?”

“You have work to do? On that door?” he asked, all teasing and smart-assy. “What?” “Are you going to paint it?” “No.” “I suggest a deep, rich brown to go with your hair.” He stood, reversing the situation to tower over me. After another stare-down, one with a different meaning entirely, he leaned in and said softly, “Or gold … to go with your eyes.” “I think I just came,” Elizabeth said.

I think I irked him. I could be irksome when I put my left ventricle into it.

Garrett chose that moment to join the conversation. “I appreciate your forethought,” he said, his tone distant, as if his mind were elsewhere. “Not as much as your fore-parts, but still…” I twisted around in my seat to face him. “My fore-parts, as you so ineloquently put it, have names.” I pointed to my right breast. “This is Danger.” Then my left. “And this is Will Robinson. I would appreciate it if you addressed them accordingly.”

“Don’t you think if I was bleeding internally, I’d know somewhere deep inside? Like, internally?”

A lightbulb went off in my head when she said that. Not a particularly bright one—maybe a 12-watter—

“He’s not really death. He’s kind of cool, I guess, in a terrifying way.” She whitened further. Darn it. “When you eventually have to seek therapy, will I have to pay for it?”

“He’s like smoke,” I said, and I felt her still beside me. “And he’s powerful. I can feel it pulse off him in waves. It makes me weak when he’s near, like he absorbs a part of me.”

I took a deep breath and refocused. “No. I’m a grim reaper.” Which always sounded so bad when said aloud. But she just smiled, wide and pretty. It took me by surprise. “That’s what he told me. You ferry souls to the other side. He said you sparkle like a newborn galaxy and have more attitude than a rich kid with his daddy’s Porsche.”

You take everything onto your shoulders like that guy who holds up the world, and you shouldn’t. You’re not nearly as muscular.” “Why do you suppose I’m here?” I asked him. Angel. A thirteen-year-old departed gangbanger. “Just ’cause you’re supposed to be, I guess.”