by Keri Arthur
Not that I really wanted to breathe. I didn’t want to take that scent—that wash of despair and loss—into myself. And most especially, I didn’t want to see the reapers and the tiny souls they were carrying away.
I was gripped by the sudden urge to run, and it was so fierce and strong that my whole body shook. I had to clench my fists against it and force my feet onward. I’d promised Mom I’d do this, and I couldn’t go back on my promise. No matter how much I might want to.
I walked into the elevator and punched the floor for intensive care, then watched as the doors closed and the floor numbers slowly rolled by. As they opened onto my floor, a reaper walked by. She had brown eyes and a face you couldn’t help but trust, and her wings shone white, tipped with gold.
An angel—the sort depicted throughout religion, not those that inhabited the real world. Walking beside her, her tiny hand held within the angel’s, was a child. I briefly closed my eyes against the sting of tears. When I opened them again, the reaper and her soul were gone.
I took the right-hand corridor. A nurse looked up as I approached the desk. “May I help you?”
“I’m here to see Hanna Kingston.”
She hesitated, looking me up and down. “Are you family?”
“No, but her parents asked me to come. I’m Risa Jones.”
“Oh,” she said, then her eyes widened slightly as the name registered. “The daughter of Dia Jones?”
I nodded. People might not know me, but thanks to the fact that many of her clients were celebrities, they sure knew Mom. “Mrs. Kingston is a client. She asked for me specifically.”
“I’m sorry, but I’ll have to check.”
I nodded again, watching as she rose and walked through the door that separated the reception area from the intensive care wards. Down that bright hall, a shrouded gray figure waited. Another reaper. Another soul about to pass.
I closed my eyes again and took a long, slow breath. I could do this.
I could.
The nurse came back with another woman. She was small and dark-haired, her sharp features and brown eyes drawn and tired looking.
“Risa,” she said, offering me her hand. “Fay Kingston. I’m so glad you were able to come.”
I shook her hand briefly. Her grief seemed to crawl from her flesh, and it made my heart ache. I pulled my hand gently from hers and flexed my fingers. The grief still clung to them, stinging lightly. “There’s no guarantee I can help you. She might have already made her decision.”
The woman licked her lips and nodded, but the brightness in her eyes suggested she wasn’t ready to believe it. Then again, what mother would?
“We just need to know—” She stopped, tears gathering in her eyes. She took a deep breath, then gave me a bright, false smile. “This way.”
I washed my hands, then followed her through the secure door and down the bright hall, the echo of our footsteps like a strong, steady heartbeat. The shrouded reaper didn’t look our way—his concentration was on his soul. I glanced into the room as we passed him. It was a boy about eight years old. There were machines and doctors clustered all around him, working frantically. There’s no hope, I wanted to say. Let him go in peace.
But I’d been wrong before. Maybe I’d be wrong again.
Three doorways down from the reaper, Mrs. Kingston swung left into a room and walked across to a dark-haired man sitting near the bed. I stopped in the doorway, barely even registering his presence as my gaze was drawn to the small form on the bed.
She was a dark-haired bundle of bones that seemed lost in the stark whiteness of the hospital room. Machines surrounded her, doing the work of her body, keeping her alive. Her face was drawn, gaunt, and there were dark circles under her closed eyes.
I couldn’t feel her. But I couldn’t feel the presence of a reaper, either, and that surely had to be a good sign.
“Do you think you can help her?” a deep voice asked.
I jumped, and my gaze flew to the father. Before I could answer, Fay said, “This is my husband, Steven.”
I nodded. I didn’t need to know his name to understand he was Hanna’s father. The utter despair in his eyes was enough. I swallowed heavily and somehow said, “I honestly don’t know if I can help her, Mr. Kingston. But I can try.”
He nodded, his gaze drifting back to his baby girl. “Then try. Either way, we need to know what to do next.”
I took a deep, somewhat shuddering breath, and blinked away the tears stinging my eyes once more.
I could do this. For her sake—for their sake—I could do this. If she was in there, if she was trapped between this world and the next, then she needed someone to talk to. Someone who could help her make a decision. That someone had to be me. There was no one else.
I forced my feet forward. The closer I got, the more I could feel … well, the oddness.
Pain and fear and hunger swirled around her tiny body like a storm, but there was no spark, no glimmer of consciousness—nothing to indicate that life had ever existed within her flesh.
It shouldn’t have felt like that. And if death was her destiny, then there would have been a reaper here waiting. But there wasn’t, so either the time for her decision had not arrived or she was slated to live.
So why couldn’t I feel her?
Frowning, I sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up her hand. Her flesh was warm, though why that surprised me I wasn’t entirely sure.
I took a deep breath and slowly released it. As I did, I released the awareness of everything and everyone else, concentrating on little Hanna, reaching for her not physically, but psychically. The world around me faded until the only thing existing on this plane was me and her. Warmth throbbed at my neck—Ilianna’s magic at work, protecting me as my psyche, my soul, or whatever else people liked to call it pulled away from the constraints of my flesh and stepped gently into the gray fields that were neither life nor death.
Only it felt like I’d stepped into the middle of a battleground.
And it was a battle that had gone very, very badly.
Fear and pain became physical things that battered at me with terrible force, tearing at my heart and ripping through my soul. My chest burned, breathing became painful, and all I could feel was fear. My fear, her fear, all twisted into one stinking mess that made my stomach roil and my flesh crawl.
And then there was the screaming. Unvoiced, unheard by anyone but me, it reverberated through the emptiness of her flesh—echoes of agony in the bloody, battered shell that had once held a little girl.
Her soul wasn’t here, but it hadn’t moved on.
Someone—something—had come into the hospital and ripped it from her flesh.
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