by Lila Huff
Jack and I could have been mistaken for any two normal blokes walking through Hyde Park during the day if it weren’t for our eyes – and the fact that the clock was just now striking two in the morning – while Carlo and Sasha, who were acting like dogs, would have been collected by the nice men in white from the sanitarium.
“We only collect souls at night,” Jack said quietly to me as we walked. “We have no fear of the humans, but if they knew about us, they would fear us less.”
I heard a hissing laugh in front of us. Carlo definitely enjoyed that the humans feared us. He’d have been the kid who stole the other children’s lunch money in primary school. From the moment I had met Carlo he seemed like the type of bloke who had been a bully. Then again, they all did.
My musing was interrupted by a strange pulse. It was like an electric current had run through all of us, the rigidity in the group was palpable. I looked behind me for a moment, a habit from my human days, and when I turned back, Sasha and Carlo had transformed to their more demonic forms. I could hear their heavy breath and see it as it rose in steam like clouds.
“Gallu has called them. They know exactly where to go now.” Jack explained. His arms shook and I could tell that it was as hard for him to remain composed as it was for me.
Sasha’s ears were laid back against his head and I could hear the low growl that rumbled from behind his teeth. It was echoed by the hiss that came from Carlo. There was a strange smell in the air. I couldn’t place it. It was an odd, metallic taste, and yet, my mouth was suddenly watering. Though I hadn’t eaten in months, and knew I had no need of food, I suddenly found myself starving for whatever was attached to that smell.
“That is the smell of death,” Jack explained through clenched teeth. “Mouthwatering, isn’t it?”
I swallowed to keep from drooling, “is it always this enticing?”
Jack just nodded. “It’s more potent when she calls you, but being in the vicinity of a call is always this intense.” He closed his eyes, rolling his neck to the side as if to stretch out his muscles, “actually, I think it gets worse with time….”
And then it was gone. The maddening scent was gone and my mind was clear, but Carlo and Sasha did not seem to have been released from its effects. They were still half crouched in the street when they took off after some invisible target. Their heavy footsteps fell silently on the cobbled back alleys, as they deftly jumped fences two and three times our height.
It wasn’t difficult to keep up with them, although I paused at the top of every fence and wall that we jumped. This was a part of London I had never visited in my twenty-nine living years; the seedy underbelly where the vermin of the human race congregated, at least the English portion.
It was during one of these pauses, perched atop a cinderblock wall, that Jack held me back. His hand secured firmly around my elbow, he growled, “they’re here.”
As Carlo and Sasha ducked into doorways on either side of the alley it began to snow again. The soft white flakes fell on my hands and immediately evaporated. Small streams of smoke-like steam rose from my shoulders and I looked to Jack, seeing the same streams coming from his shoulders and scalp.
Jack leered at me menacingly, “show’s about to start.”
Perhaps the humanity slowly left reapers as they aged. Why else would they consider killing fun? I was beginning to feel that I was far from ready for my new occupation. However, in the brief minute that I was held by that strangely delicious metallic scent, I could have seen myself killing, even without warrant.
I looked down into the alley. Carlo and Sasha had vanished, but two men dressed in ill-fitting clothing, with brown paper sacks in their hands were entering it, singing drunken songs and blessing the Queen Mother.
They had just passed the first door in the left building’s wall when Carlo stepped from it and followed them silently. At the second door, Sasha joined his dragon headed friend, and the drunken men’s fates were sealed.
Sasha let out a low growl and the taller man looked down at his stomach and then back up, squinting one eye toward his companion. “Di’ you ‘ear tha’?” he asked.
“‘Ear wuh’?” his friend turned around to face him, and I could no longer read the emotions that crossed his face, but he staggered backwards while sharp gasps escaped his throat.
The tall one was not yet aware of the demons that stood behind him; he was too focused on his friend’s strange behavior. He started to take a step toward the friend, who was now backed up against the wall we stood on, but Sasha grabbed him and sunk his razor sharp fangs into his neck.
I heard the tall drunk’s neck snap after a second, and the gurgling noise that escaped his lips. His friend was frozen, staring wide eyed at the man dying before him. I saw Carlo’s sneering smile exposing his silvery, needle-like teeth, and his forked tongue quivered as his jaw opened.
I heard a feminine scream that I thought came from the condemned man below me, and then Jack was off of the wall. Carlo was jaw deep in drunkard, and I saw Jack’s jackal head as he flew down to the alley’s entrance. A scantily clad woman stood in the crux of the street and alley with her hand clutched over her mouth. Fear was the only thing in her brown eyes.
Jack came down on her with such a force that even a hundred feet away, I heard her skull crack on the pavement. The three in the dark alley below me tore at their victims as though they would have to physically rip their souls from them. I turned away from the carnage below me and tried to ignore the crunching of bones.
I wasn’t supposed to be disgusted by this, right? I was a demon now. Killing should be a second nature to me. Shouldn’t it? If that metallic smell still hung in the air I might not have been able to restrain myself, I might have jumped down into the alley myself; I might have done a lot of things that made my stomach turn as I thought of them now.
I felt the presence on the wall next to me and looked toward Carlo, escaping the thoughts of what I might have done.
“Too much for you?” he asked, with a flash of smugness crossing his face as he wiped a trickle of blood away from his mouth. His dragon head was gone, but his teeth were still stained red.
I looked toward him stoically and shrugged, “just bored,” I lied.
“Mike couldn’t handle his first show. He went nuts and combusted. It took him two days to calm down enough to turn his flames off.” His laugh still retained the hissing quality of his dragon persona.
“Yeah? Well there’s not a lot that Mike and I have in common.” I stared into the darkness, waiting for Jack and Sasha to be done. “That boy’s got a lot to learn.”
Carlo laughed derisively, “he is fifty years older than you.”
“When he starts acting like it, I’ll treat him differently.” I said, matching the derision that Carlo’s tone had held. I saw his approving nod in my peripheral vision.
When Jack and Sasha joined us on the wall I looked back and saw two piles of burning trash amidst the snowy alley, each topped with a desiccated body of the drunkards. The girl, however, was left lying in the middle of the alley waiting to be found, a light layer of snow already forming on top of her prostrate figure.
“I’ve got one more stop before I can head home,” Carlo said to the others and they both nodded.
“As do I,” Jack said in a strangely pensive voice.
Sasha nodded and added, “Me too.”
The way they said it was as though they had errands to run. My mind immediately jumped to imagining Carlo running to the chemist, Jack to the grocer and Sasha picking up the dry cleaning. I bit my tongue to keep from laughing.
“You can make it home on your own, right kid?” Jack asked, planting his enormous hand on my shoulder. It was another one of those moments where I felt like he was treating me as though I was his little brother.
“No worries,” I said, and I watched all three of them burst into flames and vanish. “I just have another stop before I make it back too.” I said to the empty alley below me.
I
visualized the flower shop that I knew well. My mum’s birthday and mother’s day found me there at least twice a year, and within and instant I was in the darkened room. Opening the refrigerator doors, I pulled out a large bouquet of red roses. The perfume of the shop was nauseating, and I wondered how people could work in them.
Pinching flowers wasn’t the noblest thing to do, but it wasn’t like I had any money. I laughed at the thought I had to pop over to Hawaii and find as many plumeria flowers as I could handle and fill her room with them.
I thought back to the time that our families had met on the island of Maui. How happy she had been there, how much she loved the small flowers. I hadn’t realized that I loved her until that trip, but I was far from willing to admit it to myself, much less her.
I knew that Ellie would be asleep. She’d be back at her parents’ house again. I’d slip in unnoticed and leave them on the desk next to her bedroom window for her to find tomorrow morning. It would be my final gesture, the one time I could see her in death. I knew that it was wrong of me to sneak into her room while she was sleeping, but I didn’t have many other choices. I wasn’t left to my own devices very often, so I doubted I would have another chance to get away.
I closed my eyes and thought of the family. I whispered her last name, Ellerbee, but when I opened my eyes, I was not in the family home as I had expected. I was in a place I had been only once before; the family’s cemetery.
It was located on her grandmother’s farm in Oregon. On a hill above a wide flowing river that I’d never asked the name of – or, if I had I couldn’t remember it now. I stood beneath the massive Myrtle Tree that sat on the northern border of the cemetery and looked up toward the embankment that held the only tombstone I had ever paid attention to. But there were new markers next to it.
I looked down to my feet realizing just how much of a mistake I had made… my thoughts must have taken me to the highest concentration of Ellerbees, and this would definitely be the place. I walked up to her father’s grave, about to leave when I saw the names on the stone in front of me. Martha and Frederick Ellerbee.
Her mother had died? I was dumbfounded by this new development. Her father had died years ago. But the tombstone next to it, Todd, her younger brother, confused me even more. There was only one more tombstone that was new like the two in front of me.
I sunk to my knees as I read her name, engraved into the dark marble. She had died the same night that I had been changed to a reaper. She had never made it home.
I should have stopped her. I never should have let her leave like that. I felt the distress welling in my chest. How could I have let her go? I felt anger and heat building in me. I was so upset that I couldn’t see straight. I felt the flames as they threatened to emerge from my skin and I clenched my fists tightly together to keep from combusting.
I looked through blurred eyes at the darkening night sky for answers, but found none. There were only a few that could tell me what had happened to her, and I doubted that they would be willing to divulge any information. They would say it was for my own good, that I shouldn’t dwell on my human past. That was the answer I received when I asked Gallu about Ellie. She had to have known.
I punched my fist downward into the ground, leaving a round divot in the soft earth by her grave. I knelt there for a long time, and it began to rain. I let the water wash down my face, and stared absently as it filled the hole my fist made. The cold rain did little for the fire that raged within me.
There were so many questions that flooded my mind, and yet I was frozen with rage. My death was completely and utterly inconsequential when compared to Ellie’s. She was possibly the one person I had known that I could have honestly said did not deserve, even in the smallest, most minuscule of sense, to die. I would have had no problem hunting down any other person in the world, to take their soul, to take their life, but Ellie… Ellie’s death; I would have vehemently protested. I would have fought any of the Asakku to keep her alive. Even if it meant that Jack would send me to the hereafter.
What if they had known that? What if they had taken her soul before it was time because they knew that I would have a violent reaction to their taking it, if I were aware. I thought of how fragile she seemed, how unmistakably beautiful she was, and now she was gone, buried deep underneath the earth, fodder for worms. It was an injustice that I felt I would have to avenge. Her killer would be punished.
I couldn’t stay here any longer. I laid the roses, which had been glued to my palm, on her grave and disappeared in a burst of flames, leaving the graveyard empty once again.
Back in my room, I laid on the hard shelf that served as my bed. Thoughts raced through my mind and I stared at my reflection in the ceiling for a long time. The conversation that Jack and Carlo had came back to me. Jack had gone out after a girl the night I had been taken. My head swam with the possibility that he had gone out after Ellie. I would find out what I could, but I would do as I was told until then. I couldn’t avenge her if I was destroyed.
The first order of business was to find Jack. He would probably be the most forthcoming. He would at least be the most readable.
7. London
-Joellen-
Opening my eyes to the grey light that crept through the white eyelet curtains of the room, I smiled and stretched my arms over my head. I swung my legs out of bed, thankful for my thick wool socks as my feet touched the hardwood floor, and went to the window. It was overcast and a slight drizzle was coming down. I saw a black taxi pull away from the curb and looked out across the Thames. I don’t think the smile that was covering my face would ever leave it.
My first day in London.
Mrs. Peppery, the adorable old woman who ran the small bed and breakfast I was staying in, did little all day other than to do her best to make sure her guests were comfortable. It didn’t matter which guest, just so long as she was busy. She referred to it as her calling in life.
She had told me all about moving to London from the devastatingly small town of Hyannis, Nebraska shortly after her husband died so that she could open up this establishment.
She was a lot sturdier than she seemed. The stout woman was coming out of the door from the kitchen with her hands full. A basket of scones in one and several jars of jams and jellies precariously balanced in the other. I had noticed from the time I arrived, that she bustled this way and that, occasionally wiping her hand on her apron.
“Good morning Jo,” she said with her trademark smile. “I hope you slept well. Mr. Greene said he slept horridly, tossed and turned all night. And there was some sort of commotion out on the street, the old man’s probably just imagining things.”
“Don’t worry Nan,” she insisted on being called this. “There’s not much that can wake me once I’ve gone to sleep.” I thought back to the thunderstorms in the Pacific Northwest, and to other people’s accounts of them sounding like a fully loaded semi trucks and trailers falling on their roofs. I had never been awakened by them.
“That’s good Love; now go get something to eat before it’s all gone.” She gingerly pushed me toward the dining room.
I wasn’t as worried about the food being gone as she was, but apparently, I should have been. I walked into the dining room and saw that all of her rooms must have been full. There was a large table in the center of the room and only one seat left at it. The other eleven chairs were taken.
There was a family of four it looked like, a man and woman talking hurriedly in French, while the two children– who could not have been much older than seven – sat between them and quietly ate.
I sat next to the small man that Nan had introduced me to the evening before. Mr. Greene was a retired Naval Captain who certainly didn’t seem to have his sea legs anymore. He was emaciated and frail, his wrinkled skin looked like olive toned crepe paper – as though even the smallest pressure could tear it.
“Good morning, Jo,” he said good naturedly. He had been rather grumpy the night before. “Did you hear the comm
otion last night?” He shook his head in dismay. “It sounded as though there was a horrendous dog fight outside.”
“I didn’t,” I replied as I reached for a scone and halved it, buttering the warm inside.
“I can’t imagine how any of you slept through it.” He said it loud enough that I was certain he wished for the others at the table to join in.
“I’m sure that it was just a pack of strays.” Mrs. Peppery said, walking in with a new basket of scones and a bowl of grapes. “They’ve no doubt moved on by now.”
I quietly sipped a glass of orange juice as I observed Mr. Greene’s indignation at the lovable old woman’s dismissal of the noise.
“Do you not recall the number of animal attacks the city’s been having in the past few months?” His question was rhetorical, but Mrs. Peppery opened her mouth as though she were about to retort, and Mr. Greene continued, “it only seems right that we keep an eye out for stray packs so they cannot do any harm to innocent young people out on the street.”
I popped a grape into my mouth and my eyes traveled from Mr. Greene to Mrs. Peppery – all of the eyes at the table did so. Her face was beet red.
“Are you implying, Mr. Greene, that I want those attacks to go on?”
“All that I am saying is that perhaps the authorities should have been notified.” He placed a hand on my shoulder and I froze as he continued. “What if it was our dear Joanna that was attacked?”
“For your information Mr. Greene,” she was not pleased, “I did contact the authorities, and I, of all people, want to be sure that nothing happens to Joellen.” She said the proper elongation of my name with a cold edge.
The entire table went silent and Mr. Greene got up from it without a word, hobbled past Mrs. Peppery while relying heavily on his cane. Mrs. Peppery huffed off after him, but the room was silent for a short while longer.
I focused on my scone, lemon poppy seed, one of my favorite varieties, and spent the next several minutes in deep concentration of the scone. It was my first scone in England after all.
