Blurred by Tara Fuller Page B

human. Especially one like Cash. Yes, he was definitely special. I just didn’t know why yet.
    “Where are you going?” I asked, watching all signs of civilization zip past us, only to be replaced by open highway and hills. Most humans were predictable, but I still couldn’t figure this one out.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Anywhere away from you would have been good. But I can see that’s not going to happen.”
    “You don’t have to be so rude,” I said. “I’m just doing my job.”
    “Bullshit.” Cash flipped on his headlights and passed a sign that said he was leaving Lone Pine city limits. “Your job is taking souls and I’m still here.”
    “Are you forgetting you asked me for this?” I reined in the anger that simmered beneath my voice. “How many times did you beg me to show myself? And now I’m here with answers, and all you can do is yell at me.”
    Cash glanced at me from the corner of his eye and made a huffing sound.
    “Don’t you have questions?”
    He tapped on the steering wheel with his thumb as an oncoming car’s headlights splashed light over his features. “Can they hurt me? The shadows?”
    “No.” Some of the tension melted away from his frame and the needle on the speedometer dropped a few numbers. I bit my lip to keep the guilt inside where it belonged. The truth was, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what Cash was and that meant I didn’t know what dangers our world held for him. I had never in a thousand years seen these shadows go after someone so aggressively, but he didn’t need to know that. “They feed off of souls. You’re still alive, so for the time being they should be nothing more than an annoyance. It’s when you die that you have to worry about them.”
    “When you said if you had taken me I’d have gone to Heaven…” His gazed darted to me and back to the road. “Is that the only place you take souls?”
    I touched my blade and thought of how many souls it had brought peace to over the years. Too many to count. I wished I could tell him yes, but it wouldn’t have been true. There was far more bad than good out there. It’s one of the reasons Easton stayed so busy.
    “No,” I finally said. “There are other places. Each reaper has a territory. I am assigned to the Heaven-bound.”
    Cash smirked. “Let me guess. Finn was assigned to Hell. He had to be.”
    The venom in his voice took me by surprise. I couldn’t understand where it was coming from. Finn may have made a lot of mistakes in his afterlife, but to his core he was good. “No, actually he collected for the Inbetween.” When he raised a brow I went on. “You might think of it as a sort of purgatory. A type of limbo for souls who don’t quite belong in Heaven or Hell yet.”
    Headlights passed us, splashing light over Cash’s confused expression. “How did he get to be alive again? Did he just quit? Cash in his human card?”
    I pulled my bottom lip between my teeth and stared out the windshield. “It’s not that easy. What happened with Finn…it’s unheard of. He had to have struck quite a bargain with Balthazar to get this.”
    I was afraid to find out what he’d sacrificed. Knowing Finn, he would have given anything to be with Emma.
    “Balthazar?” Cash said. “Is that your boss? Is he the one stringing me along?”
    “Yes.”
    Cash nodded and pulled off the road onto a scenic overlook. Outside the windshield, daylight was dying. The sun dipped low in the sky, setting the mountains on fire with color. The valley below was a sea of black, seemingly bottomless in the night. Cash leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “This is so screwed up.”
    I focused on his chest. The rise and fall of his lungs, something so foreign to me it was almost too painful to watch. “I know it is.”
    “Do you really?” His head rolled to the side and his eyes looked like caves staring back at me in the dim cab of the Bronco. “This is the kind of shit you deal