Free Dying for a Living (A Jesse Sullivan Novel) by Kory M. Shrum Page A

Or in an asylum.” When I exhaled the fluff of bubbles flew up and away from my face.
    She arched an eyebrow. “Why an asylum?”
    “They use us up and throw us in the nuthouse. Isn’t that how this goes?” And with good reason because something is wrong with me.
    She lathered up a wash cloth. “I gave Garrison the paperwork we had. There’s nothing else we can do except hope that he’s smart enough to figure it out.”
    “If that doesn’t work I’ll have to pay the $100,000. I just don’t have that kind of money unless I sell the house, and if I do, where will we live? Winston is too spoiled to rough it on the street.”
    Ally found my hand under the water. “Listen to me.”
    I stopped my rambling panic and met her eyes.
    “Everything will be okay. If the worst happens, you’ll sell your house. You can buy another house. You can survive jail. Neither of these cases are the end of the world or your life. And you know I’d never let anything happen to Winston.”
    I was having a hard time focusing on any subject for very long with the pulsing pain in my neck. I stared at the speckled white ceiling and heating vent. My mind wandered over the last few days without focusing on anything specific. To push back the pain, I told Ally everything Garrison said while she clean dried blood from under my fingernails with a little brush.
    “You never mentioned Rachel.”
    I let out a long, dramatic breath. I hated talking about Rachel but since it was important to the FBRD, then it must be related to my situation, right? Ally was smarter than me. Maybe she’d make some connection I’d missed.
    “When I first paired up with Brinkley, we worked in St. Louis. It had the highest crime rate in the country which was good because I needed the practice replacing people. I had this mentor, another one of Brinkley’s charges.”
    “What happened to her?”
    I wasn’t sure where to start the story. “Rachel was an awesome mentor. She’d replaced almost two hundred people. That’s a record high. People loved her and Brinkley wanted me to be just like her.” I took a breath because this was where the story got horrible. “One day I went over to her house to visit her after a replacement. I had brought her this huge bag of jellybeans because she loved them. Anyway, I knocked on her door like fifty times and she didn’t answer, so I got worried. I went in and found her in the living room, sitting in a circle of her own blood.”
    Ally gasped. “She killed herself?”
    “No,” I said and shook my head. “She just used a knife to cut up her arms and hands. The she used her blood to draw a circle around herself, calling it a protective circle.”
    “Did you get the knife away from her?”
    “I tried. I asked her what was wrong, tried to get her to talk to me, but she just kept going on about angels telling her what to do and that she had to protect herself from the bad angels.”
    “So wait, what happened with the knife?” Ally asked, washing my hair.
    “This whole time she was sitting in her living room floor and sort of mumbling all this craziness. Then she finally looks up at me. Her eyes get really big—as if she didn’t look insane already, covered in her own blood. She starts screaming, ‘It’s you. You.”
    “What did you do?” she asked, hands still in my hair.
    “I screamed too because this naked, bloody girl is waving a knife around and trying to tackle me. I am ready to get the hell out of there but I drop the jellybeans and the bag bursts open. Now, I’m slipping and sliding all over the floor like a cartoon character or something. Then Brinkley shows up and saves the day.”
    Ally let out a breath. “How did he know you were in trouble?”
    “He was in the car. He was the one who had brought me over to see her. Apparently, when I screamed he heard me and came running. When he pulled her off of me, she just kept screaming, “She came from him! She came from him!”
    “Bizarre,” Ally