Waking Up Dead Read online

  WAKING UP DEAD

  Skye Savoy

  PARANORMAL ROMANCE

  Secret Cravings Publishing

  www.secretcravingspublishing.com

  ABOUT THE E-BOOK YOU HAVE PURCHASED: Your non-refundable purchase of this e-book allows you to only ONE LEGAL copy for your own personal reading on your own personal computer or device. You do not have resell or distribution rights without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner of this book. This book cannot be copied in any format, sold, or otherwise transferred from your computer to another through upload to a file sharing peer to peer program, for free or for a fee, or as a prize in any contest. Such action is illegal and in violation of the U.S. Copyright Law. Distribution of this e-book, in whole or in part, online, offline, in print or in any way or any other method currently known or yet to be invented, is forbidden. If you do not want this book anymore, you must delete it from your computer.

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000."

  If you find a Secret Cravings Publishing e-book being sold or shared illegally, please let us know at [email protected]

  A Secret Cravings Publishing Book

  Erotic Romance

  Waking Up Dead

  Copyright © 2011 by Skye Savoy

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-936653-34-8

  First E-book Publication: May 2011

  Cover design by Paul Martin

  Edited by J.B. George

  Proofread by Ariana Gaynor

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2011 by Secret Cravings Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  PUBLISHER

  Secret Cravings Publishing

  www.secretcravingspublishing.com

  Dedication

  This is dedicated to the many strong, funny, inspirational women in my life.

  WAKING UP DEAD

  Skye Savoy

  Copyright © 2011

  Chapter One

  “What in Sam hell?” I muttered in confusion as I stood over what was without a doubt my body clad in a ratty, hot pink, “Put Some South in Your Mouth,” oversized T-shirt. This has got to be a dream. I leaned in and looked closer at my sleeping body twisted in the sheets. Good Lord! I had no idea there was so much cellulite on the back of my legs.

  Boy, did I have things bass-ackwards. Three years of freedom from my philandering ex-husband, Craig, and I let myself go to pot. I kept everything plucked and dimple free during my thirty-two years of indentured servitude to the fool who left me for a phone book rep half his age.

  That’s it. I’m making an appointment for a body wrap and mani-pedi at Beverly’s Salon and Bargain Boutique as soon as I wake up.

  I sat down beside myself on the bed. Who’d a thought that finishing off those leftovers from the party last night would lead to an out-of-body experience? It must have been those shitake mushrooms. I knew better than to cook something everybody at Senator Bubba Thorsen’s re-election campaign fundraiser would joke about! ‘Shit’ this, ‘Shit’ that. Those people had all the money in town, but, like Big Mama always said, money can’t buy manners.

  A horrible thought jolted me off the bed and sent me pacing around the room. What if all the people who ate the meal I catered were having the same disembodied experience?

  Reverend Jeremiah Warren is going to personally erase my name from the First Baptist Church Charter Member Roster.

  I expected Senator Thorsen’s campaign fundraiser to elevate me from my six-year career of catering small family reunions and children’s birthday parties. A mind-altering mushroom did not figure into my plans. The shitake’s sure to hit the fan when my competition, the surgically-enhanced Nina Blackstone, gets wind of it and blackballs me out of the catering business.

  Damage control starts with getting back into my body right now. I inhaled a deep, cleansing breath.

  Where’s my Third Eye when I need it? At least I remembered a couple of things from those yoga classes my sister forced me to take when I wanted to wallow in post-divorce depression.

  Relax and hurry up about it. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Rrr. Why do I keep seeing myself in those stupid yoga pants Kitty found and made me wear? I can’t visualize floating back into my body very well in those things. Minutes trudged by. I opened one eye and realized I sat in the very same spot.

  Damn. I’m too fat to levitate. I sighed and turned to study my body more closely. Hunh. Why is there a pillow over my face? The only time I ever slept with a pillow over my head was when Craig snored louder than a chain saw after a drunken bender.

  Dread bubbled up. I slammed a lid on it. Any minute now I am going to wake-up, completely skip Beverly’s salon and immediately make an appointment with a plastic surgeon for liposuction and treatment for those new spider veins on the back of my lower legs.

  I gingerly reached and poked at one of the veins on my body. Icy flesh met my touch. I drew my hand away instantly. Oh, Jesus! There’s no way I can be…

  Somewhere between denial and disgust, I gathered enough courage to snatch the pillow off my head. I stifled a scream with my hands.

  Blood shot eyes peered at me from a purplish-black face enlarged to grotesque proportions. Even through my worst hangover or bought with the flu, I never looked this bad.

  Dry heaves racked my ethereal body. I didn’t throw-up like I really wanted. I screamed and propelled myself away from the horrible sight of my undeniably dead body.

  A man materialized right before my eyes and directly in my path. I couldn’t stop the momentum. I ran smack into him, knocking both of us onto the floor with a giant thud.

  I sort of remembered straddling a man. It was like riding a bike, only most bicycles hurt after a while. In this case, some very physical feelings erupted in an area conditioned to respond to battery-operated stimulation.

  “Never, in centuries of collecting souls have I been mowed down by one,” he said with his head cocked to the side, “and a very unhappy one at that.”

  “Didn’t anybody ever teach you to knock? What the hell are you doing in my house?”

  He wiggled to get out from under my weight. “Why are you so solid? You are supposed to be dead.”

  “Solid? You never, ever tell a woman she’s solid!” I pushed him into the carpet as I tried to hoist myself up without doing what I really wanted to do—grind my knee into his groin.

  “Wait. What do you mean I’m supposed to be dead?”

  The answer slapped me right between the eyes. He killed me and returned to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind. I screamed loud enough for the folks in the next county to hear and threw myself away from him.

  “You humans are all alike, dead or alive.” He jumped to his feet. “Look, if you do not stop screeching, the devil himself is going to come looking for you.”

  I screamed some more as I crawled to the far corner of the room, hesitating as I fumbled over clothing and miscellaneous items strewn on the floor.

  I looked behind me to see the stranger’s hands pressed firmly against his ears and a menacing glare in his black eyes.

  “Devil himself? You—you murderer. You are the devil.”

  He dropped his hands and stared at me. A smile crossed his dark face. My heart hammered loudly in my ea
rs.

  “Astonishing. You think I killed you?”

  I jumped up from my crouching position by the dresser and scrounged through its open drawers for the Glock Kitty gave me when Craig moved out. It probably helped someone rob a convenience store since it came from a dumpster.

  My fingers wrapped around something cool and cylindrical. I slid the safety off. Zzz. My hand and the contents of the drawer vibrated. My “Battery Operated Boyfriend” buzzed away on its highest setting. Can you vibrate someone to death? Nah. I didn’t bother to turn it off and kept hunting.

  I finally found the handle of the gun, plucked off the big white pair of underwear snagged on the barrel, and aimed it at the mystery man. “B-b-back off, buddy! I know how to use this thing!”

  His lips twitched and he pointed his finger at the gun as I squeezed the trigger.

  I expected a backlash like I felt at the city dump where Kitty took me to practice before she got distracted by some metal clothing racks she jammed in her SUV. My nails dug into my skin. “Where the hell did the gun go!”

  “You really didn’t want to shoot me,” he said in a smug tone, his tight, sculpted body against the bedpost. “It would take your small town sheriff years to figure out what really happened to you.”

  He reached into his pocket, and I ran for the bedroom door. A rush of air slammed into my face as the door shut with a bang. The force almost knocked me on my butt. My patience snapped. I whirled to face my evil captor and found him calmly typing away on one of those Smart phones.

  “Look here, mister,” I said and shook my finger at him. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s just plain rude to make things disappear then slam the door in someone’s face? If you aren’t the one who killed me, for no good reason I might add, then you’d better have a hell of a good reason for being here.”

  “I am not the person who killed you,” he said without looking up from his phone. “I am here to collect you.”

  “Collect me for what? Are you an alien? Is this one of those alien abductions? Because if it is, I’m allergic to latex and have a very low tolerance for pain. Oh, and I can’t have children even though I’m only forty-three.”

  “You are Ava Berry, are you not?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “You are fifty-one.”

  “How did you know?”

  “One hundred and eighty-five pounds.”

  “The hell I am! I’m one hundred and seventy-two pounds. I’ve been dieting.” A lady never reveals her age or her weight.

  “Not according to our records.” He continued in a matter-of-fact tone. “This is 120 Greenfield Place.”

  “Yeah.” I sounded like a deflated balloon.

  “You expired at two-eleven a.m. due to suffocation.”

  “Okay, Matlock. If you know so much about me, then tell me who did this to me and why?” I crossed my arms over my boobs, which only made me self-conscious of the ratty T-shirt and white mamaw drawers I sported.

  “They did not tell me. I am just here to collect,” he stopped short and shot me a pained look. “Take you to await the decision on where you’ll spend your afterlife.”

  “Afterlife?” I asked and stomped over to the bed. “I haven’t had much of a current life up to now! It is just wrong, wrong, wrong for someone to smother me when my career is taking off!” The mattress protested loudly as I flopped down. My hand hit the cold leg of my former self on the bed. I jerked it away, repulsed.

  “Would you just look at me? This is not how I pictured I’d go. I mean I’m wearing a ratty T-shirt. Well, it wasn’t ratty when Paula Deen wiped her hands on it after I prepped all the food at her cooking demo for the Europe Tennessee Convention Center’s Tenth Anniversary. My hair looks like it got licked by a cow on one side. I’ve got cellulite spreading like kudzu on the backside of my legs and spider veins on the front.”

  Mr. Silence just stood there, a brick wall with a bored look painted on like graffiti. “Are you through? I have a schedule to keep.”

  “Let me tell you what you can do with your schedule!” I picked up one of the hands on my lifeless body and let it fall to the bed with a thunk. “I have dishpan hands. What’s more, I have no idea why anybody would want to kill me.”

  “I have to keep my schedule because I am one of the fallen angels,” he said impatiently. “It is what I do.”

  “You don’t look like any kind of angel to me.”

  My jibe damaged his pride. He grabbed my arm and yanked me off the bed with so much force my head spun.

  “I doubt someone like you would be able to discern between an angel and a demon.”

  Only a few short inches separated our faces. My hackles rose in response to the power in his curt words. A sensible person would be terrified, but ‘stubborn’ and ‘opinionated’ typically described me. People rarely said, “That Ava Berry is a sensible person.”

  “I refuse to let you do a beam-me-up-Scotty with me if it’s the last thing I do!” With my free hand, I reached for the post by the headboard and hung on with all my might. “No sir-ee. I’m not going anywhere with… whatever you call yourself, period!”

  Disbelief flitted across the angel’s face. He let my arm fall from his grasp. I quickly attached it to the flimsy, particle board bedpost.

  “As I mentioned,” he said as he slicked back a strand of wavy, dark hair escaping from the gold tieback, “I have a schedule to keep. You cannot stay here.”

  “You can shove your schedule. I’m not going.” The last part of my sentence turned into the singsong tone of a six-year-old daring someone to make me.

  “Why not,” he asked like an exasperated parent. “You said earlier that your life had not been all that great. Do you not want to see what the afterlife has in store for you?”

  “Nope. Not today, thank you.” I sang again and hugged the bedpost tighter.

  “Oh, come on woman! For thousands of years, I have carried out my sentence to escort mortal souls to their ultimate end, and never have I left one behind much less messed up my schedule until you”

  The walls shook. I buried my head into my arms and prayed. Wait? Do dead people pray? I let go of the pole and whirled to face him.

  “I am not going anywhere until I find out who murdered me, and you can’t make me,” I said as I poked him in the chest with every word.

  He batted my finger away. “I have never had to make anyone come with me before. Of course, you are not just anyone, are you? I am beginning to think you might be one of the fallen angels.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m not a saint but I’m not a fallen woman either.”

  “Angel,” he corrected. “As for a ‘fallen woman,’ that is a matter of opinion.”

  “Angel or not, how dare you judge me!” My hand connected soundly with the side of his face, his smooth strong jaw threatening to throw me off guard.

  I quickly tucked the offending hand behind my back and waited for him to give me the whammy.

  Instead, he worked his jaw back and forth, his brooding eyes locked on me as if I’d morphed into the Incredible Hulk. He gathered the wits I slapped out of him and said, “You are right. It is not my job to judge you. That is why you need to come with me and let a greater power decide.”

  He reached for my elbow. Long fingers gently latched on. My chest did a few romance novel heroine heaves at the thought of what those fingers might do to the soft folds of my most feminine flesh.

  We drew near to each other—close enough for me to see sweat beads on his forehead. I raised my free hand to his jaw to smooth away the red marks from my slap. He jerked his face away.

  “And I told you I’m not going,” I snapped and yanked my elbow from his warm, secure hold.

  “I…am…well…aware…of…that.” The room rumbled with each word like an approaching avalanche. His eyes glowed a fiery gold.

  “Why are you mad at me? You’re not dead or totally humiliated. What have you got against mature women in Paula Deen shirts, anyway?

 
; “I-I have every right to be mad at you,” he sputtered. “I have been trying to send you into the afterlife and you will not go. That is what I have against you!” The angel emitted a very un-angelic howl.

  “Hon, you have got to stop getting all riled-up. If heaven offers an anger management course, you need to enroll.”

  A ceramic duck from the Peabody Hotel and an Elvis coffee cup from Graceland rested in a pile of clothes on the floor. They weren’t much, but they were all I had of my less than glamorous life, life without travel, without kids, without event at least until I died. Tears leaked from my eyes as I returned the items to the dresser.

  “I have never met anyone with such resistance to my power. The only explanation I have is the fallen angel lineage you possess is stronger than that of most other mortals.”

  “Let me see if I understand. You are a ‘fallen angel.’ If I remember my Sunday school lessons right, you guys wanted to have wild orgies and enjoy the pleasures of the flesh on Earth. So you left Heaven to be like a mortal, right?”

  “We were sent to educate and protect humans not to have orgies,” he said shaking his head in consternation. “And, I doubt they taught you about orgies in Sunday school.”

  I picked up some of the clothes on the floor and continued to rationalize this crazy train of thought. “You’re saying that one of these fallen angels—not you, came down from Heaven, did the wild thing with one of my ancestors who got pregnant. Now, there’s a whole line of half fallen angel, half mortal people who happen to be my relatives?” My voice sounded a little hysterical on the last word.

  “I would not put it so crassly, but yes. And, that is why I cannot send you to eternity,” he narrowed his eyes at me, “as much as I would love to, until you decide you want to go.”