Hell Bound (The Immortal Balances- Book 1)

Chapter Nine: Downright Despicable

Fuck.

Fuckidy fuck fuck.

Fuuuuck!

Rachel was gone. Just... gone.

Vanished. Missing... Gone.

I had told her everything. Everything. From the first time I looked after Cerberus to being given her name as my next victim, and saving her and dooming myself. She had sat, frozen, just listening with the occasional nod or 'OK' every now and then. And then she had asked if she could be alone, to get her head straight. She hadn't screamed, thrown up, or even tried to hurt me like I had expected her to.

What I hadn't expected was for her to secretly call Jake behind my back and get him to come pick her up, climbing from her window down to his motorcycle and driving off to God knows where.

Can't deal with this right now. Going away with Jake on vacation, need to get everything sorted out.

That was what she had scribbled down in a rush on the posted notes by the fridge a few hours ago. No date of when she'd be back, no indication to where she was actually going.

I really hadn't expected her to do that. Not at all.

"Brother, how else was she going to react?"Jules asked rhetorically from the other side of the mirror. Despite having ended me up here in this world, I was thankful she had called and tried to help me figure out where I could find Rachel. Seth had tried to join in, but Jules had told him his 'overly sexualised' comments were not needed at this moment in time.

I had only agreed.

I gripped my mug off coffee a little tighter, sipping ever few seconds. Ever since Rachel had served me the drink my first night here, I'd grown quite accustomed to it, soon finding it to be my favourite Living drink. It had nothing to do with it being Rachel's favourite though. Nothing at all.

Rachel.

Despite now knowing everything, including the new Reaper business, I would have taken Rachel as the type of person not to act so impulsively, putting herself in direct danger because she couldn't process the impossible. Sure, I was asking quite a lot of her, but I was only thinking of her safety.

But since Rachel was no longer under my protection, she was completely exposed to attack from this new Reaper. I couldn't even try to watch over her from a distance: I had absolutely no idea where they had gone.

"What you could always do, would be to go over to her boyfriend's house and try to find out where they're tripping too," Jules offered, arms crossed as she leant tiredly against the armchair she'd dragged in front of the mirror. When I had gotten through to her, she'd actually been sleeping, something we rarely saw our only sister do. She was notorious for being able to keep awake longer than all of my siblings put together, and whenever she had slept it was because she had nothing else better to do. But in the past few weeks with all the extra shifts she was putting in with the others to try and cover up this Reaper's killing methods, she'd been sleeping every night.

And she still looked tired.

"It's not a bad idea y'know, since there won't be any chance of you being caught since they aren't there," she concluded tiredly, yawning.

I contemplated the thought.

It was a fair point my sister had, since there wasn't any risks with the plan: Rachel and Jake were on vacation as of a few hours ago, meaning they wouldn't randomly pop back. Not only that, but Jake's parents were never around, always working, meaning they wouldn't see me either along with his younger sister who Rachel had told me was at Summer Camp this year. So really, going to Jake's and snooping a little wouldn't be that bad.