Hey, stranger things had happened — and right on this very ground.
“Cillian’s soul count for the day is coming in,” Oliver volunteered, his eyes on a computer screen as he watched the numbers tick upward. The Grimlocks were reapers — all of them, including their tempestuous baby sister — and as warden of the death gate, the place where the souls crossed over before reaching their final resting place, it was my job to make sure they were all accounted for. I was interested in pressuring Braden for information on his grandparents, but I still had a job to do.
“What’s the count?” I asked, turning to my own computer.
“Eight. He must’ve had a busy day.”
Rather than expressing his agreement that his brother had worked hard, Braden snorted. “Did I ever tell you about the day I absorbed fifteen souls in one shift? Now that was working hard.”
I lifted my chin to study his face over the top of my computer. All the Grimlock children, even the lone girl, boasted the same ridiculous good looks. They had black hair, defined cheekbones, strong chins, and distinctive purple eyes. They joked that they looked like a science experiment gone awry. It was true. It was also criminal how attractive they all were.
“I remember your fifteen-soul day,” Oliver volunteered before I could comment. “I believe they all came from the same fire at a senior residential center. I’m not sure that counts. Cillian’s came from eight different locations.”
Braden frowned at the vampire. They had an easygoing relationship for the most part, though Oliver was somewhat protective of me because he knew me as a child. I didn’t exactly remember those days — it was before the death of my parents thanks to a monster coming through the death gate and killing them — but I felt a kinship with him that I didn’t think possible until we’d been reintroduced upon my return to Detroit to oversee the gate my parents perished protecting.
“It was still fifteen souls,” Braden grumbled. “I mean ... has anyone ever beaten that?”
“I believe your father absorbed twenty souls in one day,” Oliver replied, not missing a beat.
Braden’s eyebrows migrated up his forehead. “No way!”
“Your father wasn’t always a bureaucrat,” Oliver pointed out. “In recent years, he’s turned into a desk jockey, but before that he was quite the worker. If I remember correctly, the twenty souls happened on one of his last days in the field.”
Braden pursed his lips. “So ... about eleven years ago?”
Oliver nodded.
“That doesn’t count.” Braden was firm. “He was working twenty-hour days in the aftermath of my mother’s death. He was just trying to keep from feeling ... well ... anything. I could do that too, except I like feeling things.” His eyes drifted to me and he winked. “Like right now. I’m feeling ... something.”
Oliver threw the stapler perched at the edge of his desk toward Braden’s head. “Don’t be a disgusting pervert.”
Braden’s reflexes were solid. He caught the stapler with minimal effort. “I’m not a pervert. I’m simply expressing my emotional core to the world.”
Even I had to roll my eyes at that one. “Your emotional core?”
“That’s a thing,” he shot back.
“Uh-huh.” I would have to take his word for it. I was in no mood to listen to another Grimlock tall tale unless it had something to do with the incoming grandparents. “Why don’t your grandparents live here any longer? I would think they’d want to be close to their family.”
“You’re thinking of normal grandparents. My grandparents hate us.”
Yup. There was that Grimlock penchant for exaggeration again. “No grandparents hate their grandchildren.”
“Mary and Emmet do.”
“You call them by their first names?” This particular question had been plaguing me for days. I couldn’t fathom Braden and his siblings calling their grandparents by their first names if they really were as rigid as everyone professed. “I mean ... do they ask you to do that?”
Braden shook his head. “It’s just something we started doing when we were kids. My grandparents weren’t around much. When they were, well ... they were difficult. They had specific ideas about how children should be raised. My father was okay acting as a poser for a few days. But my mother refused to pretend we were anything other than what we were.”
“And what were you?” Oliver asked. “I seem to remember you guys being little hellions, but that could simply be my memory playing tricks on me.”
“Oh, no. We were jerks.” Braden beamed at him. “You have to remember, there were five of us born in a six-year period. We grew up in a gang ... and we fed off each other. My father might not have liked it when we were little because he was brought up a certain way, but at some point he embraced the chaos.”
I smiled at the way his eyes sparkled. He and his siblings were hell on legs as adults, so I could only imagine what they were like as children. “Did your grandparents try to punish you a lot when you misbehaved?”
Braden nodded without hesitation. “They most definitely did. I remember them being at the house one Halloween. I think Aisling and Aidan were five that year. I only remember because they were dressed like Wednesday and Pugsley Addams and spent their time running around the house trying to stab each other with some new swords Dad had purchased at an auction.
“Anyway, we had just finished our rounds in the neighborhood trick-or-treating and we were supposed to be sitting quietly in the parlor sorting our candy,” he continued, smiling at the memory. “Aisling and Aidan were running around the room screeching and my grandfather caught both of them by the ear and demanded they stop. He threatened to kill himself if they didn’t. My grandmother picked that moment to tell my parents that it was time they started considering boarding school for all of us because we needed discipline.
“That aggravated my mother. She was more of a free spirit when it came to raising us. She demanded that my father take her side. Aisling was angry because she didn’t like having her ear pinched, so while my grandfather was distracted she pulled his wallet out of his coat pocket and threw it in the fire. Needless to say, talk of boarding school only increased after that.”
I was surprised by the story. “Your father was okay with sending you to boarding school?”
“I don’t know.” Braden shrugged. “He always used to threaten to send us to live with the circus. Truthfully, despite how loud we were, I think he liked having us around. We knew they were empty threats.”
“Is that why your father had a falling out with them? Because they wanted to send you guys away?”
Braden worked his jaw. “It wasn’t that. When we were kids, our grandparents used to visit once a year. It was a tense time, but we put up with it — mostly because Dad threatened to make us sleep in the dungeon if we didn’t. That was enough to keep Aisling in line, because she was afraid of the snakes. Without her stirring the pot, we behaved ourselves for the most part.”
“So, what was it?” He was being evasive — which wasn’t his way — and that only made me want to dig deeper.
“My mother’s death changed things,” Braden replied in a soft voice. “The entire balance of the family was thrown off. They came to town to help. Well, that’s how it should’ve been, right? But they made things worse.”