PROLOGUE

PREPPY

There’s this light in the distance. It’s bright, burning, and blinding as fucking hell. It’s just out of my grasp. A whisper away. I can talk about it. I can think about it, but it’s almost like it’s not real. Like it’s not really fucking there, and it drives me insane because all I can think about is reaching for it.

Reaching for you.

Because as my letter said, YOU are my light when I’m surrounded by nothing but dark.

I try to ignore it, the echoes of my name being called between time and space, because FUCK death.

Fuck anything that tries to keep me from finding my way back to you. If and when I'm liberated from the shackles that keep me tethered to the gates of hell, have no doubt, I’m coming for you, Doc.

Because YOU are what has kept me alive all these months.

Kept me WANTING to be alive.

Which is fucking hard sometimes because when death calls out to me, he sounds like an old friend offering comforts that would be so fucking easy to take. But you know me, probably better than anyone, and I’ve never been a man to take the easy route. Maybe that’s why I’ve chosen instead to take the road back to you.

To the US.

The Reaper came for me, and he demanded that I take his hand and he told me he was my friend, my companion in death.

I couldn’t help myself when I laughed in that fuckers face and told him his sister gives good head. Luckily he sent me right back across the river on my merry fucking way.

Back to LIFE.

Back to POSSIBILITY.

A long time ago, when I was just a skinny little nothing being beaten up by a bully in the school yard, I met someone who defended me when no one else would. We made a plan to be our own bosses that very day. It didn’t matter that we were just kids because we meant it then, and I mean it just as much right fucking now.

Which is why, when faced with the fucking end of my life, I spit in the Reaper’s face.

Because my name is Samuel Clearwater, and I take orders from no one.

Not even death

CHAPTER ONE

DRE

“What does he mean by that?” Ray asked, coming over to stand next to me at Preppy’s bedside. After his sudden outburst he’d passed back out, leaving me more disoriented than when I walked in the door to find him ALIVE. “Why did he call you his wife?”

I shook my head. “I...I’m not really sure,” I answered, not able to focus on her question, still consumed with the fact that Preppy was alive. Battered and looking nothing like his former self.

But ALIVE.

“It was probably just nonsense,” Bear said from the doorway. “He’s been muttering a bit over the past few days. One of the doctors thinks it’s a sign that his body’s healed enough to start fighting his way out of the coma. He said it might still be a few weeks, but it’s a decent sign.”

“Yeah, but those other two quacks think it could be just reflex’s, and it don’t mean shit,” King added, looking every bit skeptical.

“How...how is this...how is this even possible?” I asked, covering my open mouth with my hand. I leaned over his body like I was checking to see if he was real or if my teary eyes were deceiving me. His chest rose and fell, and it sounded like the most beautiful music I’d ever heard.

Ray paused as she was about to answer like she was considering my presence with a new kind of skepticism. She stared hard at where my hand was touching Preppy. Apparently, she was the only one who questioned my intentions, because the other three that were with her had disappeared from the doorway, leaving the two of us in the room alone.

NOT alone.

With PREPPY.

I squeezed his hand and let out a sigh of relief, sending out a few thank you’s into the universe along with a few choked sobs.

“He was...” Ray looked at the floor and shuffled her feet. She crossed her arms over her chest. “He was here the whole time. In Logan’s Beach,” she said, like she still couldn’t believe it herself.

I gasped. “Why? How?”

“We don’t know a lot of the details. Just that he was being held close by and that the guy who was holding him must have had a lot of people in his pocket to make us all believe he was dead.”

“What did the police say?”

It dawned on me how stupid my question must have sounded when Ray cocked her head to the side. “How well did you know Preppy?”

“Well enough to know it was idiotic of me to ask about police involvement.” I flashed her a tight-lipped smile.

Ray nodded as if I answered correctly. “King and Bear are on it. They’re not trusting anyone to look into it but themselves. They’ve been up most nights until the sun comes up going over theories and retracing everyone’s steps to find out who else could be involved.” She pointed to Preppy, “But only he knows what happened down there, and there isn’t any way a single second of it was something good. The only thing we know is that he’s lucky to be alive. We are all so lucky that he’s alive.”

“Yes, yes we are,” I agreed, turning my attentions back to Preppy whose eyebrows were pointing in toward the middle of his face in a sharp V as if he were having some a nightmare he couldn’t escape.