Page 40 of Someone Save My Midlife Tonight
Shitty Ritchie preened. “Is it outstanding enough for you to give birth to little Ritchie or Ritchina? I’m quite sure I could have a turkey baster of my jizz ready in a few weeks.”
“Dude,” Heather ground out, holding onto her composure by a thread. “Learn this now. Your jizz is not a bargaining chip. Blackmailing me into having your kid is crappy and won’t make you any friends. If you bring it up again, it will never happen.”
Shitty Ritchie, oblivious to the fact thatHeather was about to electrocute him, gave her a delighted thumbs up. “So, what you’re saying is that if I don’t bring it up, itwillhappen?”
“Oh. My. God,” Heather muttered as her chin dropped to her chest. “You’re a relentless little jackass.”
“Thank you!” he replied.
“Wasn’t a compliment,” she shot back. “Table the jizz discussion. We’ll revisit in a century.”
“Will do,” Shitty Ritchie squealed with delight.
He was for sure missing some brain cells. My guess was that he had two and they weren’t connected.
“The real question here is why in the hell it would take Shitty Ritchie weeks to fill up a turkey baster with jizz,” Candy Vargo announced much to the horror of everyone.
“Moving on,” I said in my outdoor voice. If I heard the word jizz one more time, someone was going to lose an appendage. “Heather, what’s on page five hundred and two?”
My sister gave me a grateful smile. “The punishment for reanimating the dead is death,” she explained. “So far, the Higher Power has perpetrated several crimes that end in death—pulling souls out of the Light and creating zombies. My educated guess is that it’s the tip of the iceberg of crimes the Higher Power has committed. It wrote the laws. It set the punishments. The question is, what are we going to do about It?”
“My old theory is trash now,” I said, running my hands through my hair in frustration. “Convicting the Higher Power in a court of Immortal law then reducing the sentence in return for finding out why It wanted Alana Catherine is moot. We know why It wants my baby.”
“Ending the Higher Power is the way to go,” Shitty Ritchie said with venom dripping off of every word. “Destroy It.”
“Impossible,” Charlie snapped. “The balance would be destroyed and the end will come.”
Shitty Ritchie wasn’t having it. “Is that such a bad thing?” he demanded. “Shitty Ritchie is tired. Tired of running. Tired of living in a cave. Tired of existing. Tired of looking over my shoulder every minute of every day.”
He wasn’t the only one who’d had it. It took everything I had not to rip his tiny head off of his shoulders and yeet it into space. Yes, I was a compassionate person. And no, I wasn’t feeling it right now. I leveled the tiny asshole with a stare that made him blanch and back away quickly. My entire body glowed. My hands sparked, and I felt my eyes turn a blinding gold. “You are a selfish piece of shit. If you’re that tired, then end yourself,” I ground out. “You have no right to make that call for the entire world. It’s not just you who would be obliterated if the end came. It’s every Immortal, every human being, every animal… all of nature. What in the hell gives you the right to make that decision? Tell me,” I shouted. “Who are you to end every living thing?”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered brokenly as tears filled his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
Sorry wasn’t going to cut it this time. I turned my back on Shitty Ritchie. Looking at him would simply infuriate me more. Killing him wasn’t the answer. It might feel good for a moment, but in the long game, it would make me sick. I ended people in defense, not because of selfish stupidity.
I needed to believe the solution to the problem was within our reach. We just needed to find it. Everything is possible… I just had to believe.
“Threeeeeeeee,” Jimmy George Carrotswhispered in my ear.
The ghost was fading fast. I glanced around to see if the golden light had arrived to take him away. I heaved a sigh of relief that there was no sign of it. However, his washed-out appearance and quick decline was disturbing. I had nothing to go on but my gut. I just wasn’t sure what my gut was trying to say.
Charlie stood up and paced the room. I knew his mind was working a mile a minute. His eyes were icy blue and his skin glowed. Thankfully, he was maintaining control on his power. Suffocating all of us would be a bad plan. Gideon held Alana Catherine even closer. His eyes sparked red and he was barely able to contain his fury. Candy Vargo had ten toothpicks in her mouth and she stood as still as a statue. The expression on her face was murderous. Heather kept reading more in the Immortal Book of Law. Her enchanted tattoos moved at warp speed. It made me dizzy to look at her. As usual, Tim took notes. However, he’d snapped two pencils thus far in his frenzied writing. Gram wrung her hands, and Mr. Jackson tried to comfort her to little avail. June sat quietly with a worried expression marring her pretty face. Jennifer had three open bottles of wine and was taste testing all of them.
Only Jimmy George Carrots was calm.
“Go with my gut,” I said aloud. “We need to find Jimmy George Carrots’ body parts.”
“What?” Gideon asked, looking at me like I’d lost my mind.
He wasn’t all wrong. However, we were at such a low there was nowhere to go but up. For some reason, I believed that putting Jimmy George Carrots back together was part of the bigger plan. Why? I had no clue. I was working on adrenaline and fear at this point.
Shitty Ritchie was in the Gideon camp. “Why do you think that putting the seer back together will help?” His voice washigher than normal, which was painful, and his words were drenched in sarcasm.
But to me, his words felt like a gut punch—a good one. Maybe… “Say that again.”
“Why?” Shitty Ritchie asked, diving under the couch. “Are you going to decapitate me?”
“I’d love to,” I admitted honestly. “However, not just yet. Repeat what you said. Now.”
