The Reaper's Kiss

by Abigail Baker

  “And when you fall asleep, children, do not look to the dark corner, for the Black Beast will be there, waiting to ferry you home.”

  —Marcus Bordeaux, Bedtime in Styx, circa 1945

  The door to my bedroom closet hung ajar, allowing a partial view of Miss Piggy, my twelve-gauge shotgun. I stood in silence, holding my backpack, which was stuffed with clothing and the Interceptor—the four-by-four box that had provided me hours of Canadiens hockey games in lieu of Marin’s doomsday broadcasts. I would not leave the Interceptor behind. I had a feeling it still had a purpose, yet I didn’t know what exactly.

  Now that I had committed a Level Ten crime, Brent and I had agreed that running was the only option. For the first time, Miss Piggy would be used for what it was intended—protection. What Brent and I would do once we found a place to hide out west, we didn’t yet know, but somewhere remote, somewhere not high on Marin’s radar seemed a worthy option until a better plan made itself clear to us.

  “Hurry,” Brent hollered from the living room of my apartment.

  He had given me ten minutes to pack. It had only been five.

  My thoughts kept racing back to Eve and how we had left her body and Remy in the middle of the street a moment before the ambulance and police arrived on the scene. The emotional truth of Eve’s death had not yet crashed down upon me. Running overrode any chance to pause and reflect. Until now.

  Determined not to think too long about Eve, I bent to grab the shotgun and winced. The flannel cinched my ribcage. The stab wound had healed. I was no longer coughing blood. So, I picked at the knot. It didn’t budge.

  Brent had made certain it wouldn’t come undone, hadn’t he?

  After a deep breath, I paused. My fingertips glowed red, ready for the challenge. I put them to the soft cotton and burned through the fabric. The tourniquet unraveled. I finally had use of my entire lung capacity, and it felt as invigorating as sliding into a pool on a summer day.

  “Ollie, come on.”

  I grunted vulgar words, grabbed Miss Piggy, but stopped in the doorway of my bedroom to take one last look at a lifetime of charcoal drawings tacked on the walls. Beaches, mountains. Freedom. A bucket list of dreams.

  I backed into the hallway and made an about face for the door. But as I passed by the kitchen, I noticed the plate of chocolate chip cookies on the counter. The treats stopped me cold.

  Mama.

  Papa.

  With everything that had happened, I didn’t consider how they might feel. They needed to know what happened. They needed to know I wasn’t dead.

  “Brent, I can’t leave Mama and Papa. I…I shouldn’t leave at all. I should just tell Marin what happened, and maybe he’ll give mercy.”

  Brent was cupping my face, his nose practically touching mine, before I even saw him move.

  “No.” His voice was dense with tension. “Marin won’t show you a lick of mercy. You have to get away from Québec. We’ll figure out everything else once we’re safely outside of his radar. Do you understand?”

  Eyes watering, I gave a reluctant nod.

  “Promise me you won’t consider coming back here until we have a plan.” His hands were hot against my skin. Those eyes could’ve flashed red to emphasize his point. Those cerulean jewels, almost human-like, urged me to comply.

  “I won’t mention it again,” I murmured.

  He started to pull me into a kiss, but pursed his lips as if a thought diverted him. Instead he finalized his action with a kiss to my forehead. He lingered there for a moment longer and then backed out of our closeness.

  I watched as he slipped a backpack over his shoulder and strode toward the door. He might have been a rebel for longer than I was alive, but I was a novice. I had familial connections and reasons to stay in Québec City. I wasn’t ready for this.

  “I at least have to let my parents know I’m leaving.”

  “Keep them distant.” His voice was dry. “It’s the only way you can protect them.”

  I ran my fingers over the green plastic blanketing the cookies. Mama loved colorful plastic wraps, embellished Ziploc bags, anything to adorn her culinary masterpieces. She had once scoured Québec City for a red Crock-Pot at Christmas. She had settled for a red-and-white pot that looked like an overstuffed candy cane filled with gumbo.

  “We’ve got four hours until sunrise. Let’s go.” Brent was in the doorway. Dudley was at his side.

  I made for the door, refusing to consider how long I would be gone. But I stopped halfway across the living room, struck by a thought. If I took the cookies, Mama and Papa would know I’d come home after the incident—which would surely be in Marin’s noon report—and that I was okay…at least for now.

  Rushing out with cookies in one hand, my shotgun in the other, and Eve’s soul in my necklace, I made a hasty valediction to the apartment I had called home.

  I was a gun-slinging rebel now.

  Whoever or whatever made Brent Hume a car singer was a sick son of a gun. Everyone knows the type—they can’t carry a tune, but they sing as loud as can be, leaving everyone in earshot cringing.

  Brent’s vocal straining distracted me from continuing the conversation that we had started back on the street where Eve met her end. What did Brent mean that I was the ultimate destroyer? Between lulls in the songs—when I could hear myself think—my curiosity about being a potential mastermind exterminator took over. How could I do it? Why had no one ever told me before now? Was it enough to scare Marin and his allies into leaving my family and me alone?

  Another question came to mind, but it felt wrong, considering the turmoil swarming around me like a plague of grim locusts.

  Why had Brent kissed me and then declared it a mistake?

  Between Brent’s singing and my inner mayhem, I’d found myself sketching a portrait of a screaming woman for the last nine hours. My sanity was summed up in her misery.

  I hadn’t felt right complaining because Brent had taken the first, second, and the third driving shifts. I wasn’t keen on maneuvering a stick shift Dodge truck through mountainous roads, tweaked as I was. Brent didn’t mind driving. He also didn’t notice that I wasn’t a fan of nineties pop music.

  His singing started back at the United States border, where the Patrol Officer had asked us where we were headed. I said New York City because it would be easy to blend in there. Don’t people go to cities to hide?

  Besides, maybe Brent would find some nineties-themed karaoke bar so he could sing his precious heart out. Brent argued against it—not finding a karaoke bar, but rushing off to New York City. So, instead, we were heading to Beattyville, Kentucky, home of moonshine and Brent’s family, so we could rest in a safe place, load up on supplies, and make for the west before the Watchmen caught on to our whereabouts.

  We were still only in upstate New York however. I had twelve more hours of my inner turmoil and him screaming the greatest hits until I was thrust into the middle of a Reaper family reunion. There was not enough sketch paper in the world to keep me from putting my charcoal pencil up his nose before then.

  All things considered, I slammed a fist on the radio dial. A silver CD spat out from a slot. Robert Smith’s homage to Friday stopped, and Brent’s strained baritone petered out into a self-conscious chirp.

  I looked out the passenger window at Holsteins and bales of hay as the American countryside flew by. The view would have been lovely had I been someone not on the run for committing multiple Level Ten Offenses against Death.

  “Your singing is getting on my nerves,” I said after a beautiful stretch of silence, the first in hours.

  His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. “At least you’re honest.”

  “Speaking of honesty.” I cleared my throat. “Why don’t we talk about why you kissed me and then acted like it was a mistake?”

  I spotted his discomfort in his iron grip on the wheel. He eyed the CD, seemingly intent on pushing it back into the radio, hitting play, and excusing himself from answering my dir
ect query.

  “Am I a bad kisser? Am I not your type? What?” I went on.

  “It’s complicated,” he said.

  I wanted the fucking truth. So, I let silence and my hard stare eat him alive.

  He blew air from his nose multiple times, cracked his neck, and said, “Mixing romance and rebellion is problematic.”

  That made logical sense. “You could’ve told me that the other night.”

  He chewed the inside of his cheek as if bracing for a screaming fit about playing with another’s emotions. Personally, I had no energy to expound on the subject. There were bigger questions to pose. The inquiry over the kiss was just my warm-up.

  “Now that we have that covered, let’s talk about what you said on the street. Why am I the ultimate destroyer, huh?” There. Straight-fucking-forward.

  He brushed his fingers though his hair. “What do you know about Master Scriveners?”

  “Not much; just that they were all killed off in the Purge by Eidolons.”

  “Then you don’t know about melting.”

  The image of my black neoprene gloves dissolving from my hands popped into my head. The smell was sickening. I hated that.

  “If you go nuclear, you can kill a fellow Stygian—including Eidolons and even Marin, if you have an Eidolon to help you. It takes a significant amount of work, but Masters can do it. And it is scary as hell.”

  Maybe what I had witnessed in the past twenty-four hours had destroyed what was left of my emotions, but I was not as shocked as I was deadened. I rapped my fingers on my drawing pad, which I had folded to my chest.

  “This skill must be what triggered the Purge,” I said.

  “You got it. Marin won’t have anyone under his rule with the ability to melt him into nothing.” His strong brow rose, creasing his forehead. “That’s why Chad was after you. If he saw any sign of your potential, he would have taken you to Marin. You would’ve become a fine story for Reaper Monthly.”

  I looked out the window at the blurs of cows and farmhouses as I thought about narrowly avoiding exile in Erebus for an innate trait that should have been considered a gift or talent, not a threat to authority. As I pondered what happened on the street outside of Eve’s apartment, I couldn’t help but think about my friend. Somehow I had convinced myself that Eve was alive, working at Le Nektar, and that I was on a classic American road trip.

  It was the only way to get through.

  “So I guess I can’t go back to working at Salon de Tatouage, eh?” I joked.

  “No,” he said with no humor in his tone. “You will never go back to that life now that they know what you are.”

  I put my fingers to my beloved lotus pendant. Mama’s cookies and hugs. Papa’s visits to fix broken faucets in my apartment, and our late night conversations about life. Coffee with Eve. Discussing the injustices of Styx with Gerard. Walks with Dudley around the familiar nooks and crannies of my humble neighborhood. These things were never going to happen again.

  Their loss had not yet hit me. And I cringed that it someday would. When it did, no mental preparedness would protect me from the fallout.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Have a wild and woolly time.”

  —Beattyville Local Advertisement

  16 April

  The remainder of our trip to Kentucky was conducted in silence. Well, save for Brent’s long playlist of eighties and nineties vocal hits. Our lack of conversation troubled me until I accepted that, although Brent had been chatty at the outset, he wasn’t one for idle small talk. Or perhaps he just wasn’t comfortable with my ability to melt him into oblivion. To be honest, I wasn’t comfortable with that truth either.

  Could I accidently melt someone I liked—maybe Brent?

  And was I bound to Brent’s side now? Would we get to the Rocky Mountains and then would he announce that we’d have to go our separate ways to keep off Marin’s radar? If he did, I would not be pleased. For now, I appreciated Brent’s company, and the broad smiles he’d flash me when he’d catch me staring.

  His smiles dwindled into forced cheer when I spotted the sign welcoming visitors to Beattyville, Kentucky. The welcome promised one thing: A Woolly Worm Festival. Brent refused to explain what woolly worms were. Unfortunately, we didn’t spend enough time dawdling in Beattyville for me to ask the locals when the next woolly worm stampede was.

  He had sped through the miniscule Southern town so fast I hardly had a chance to observe the handful of 1950’s style two-story buildings, and the people milling outside of the shops. When I had asked what was the hurry, he mumbled something deliberately incoherent. I made out “Watchmen” and “hillbillies.” That was enough to shut me up.

  Once we hit State Route 52 and began climbing a hill, the truck’s speed eased even if Brent’s attitude did not. We were soon cruising through winding roads that would have been romantic if the swerving hadn’t offended my weak stomach.

  In spite of my discomfort, I still grew excited to see the young leaves sprouting in fluorescent green, not yet the deep emerald of summertime foliage. New birth and growth were encouraging. I rolled down the window to take in the springtime air—far warmer and more soothing than the briskness of Québec City, which hadn’t left winter behind. I hung my head out the passenger window, a few dreadlocks flapping in the wind.

  A robin sprang from her nest in one of the overhanging trees and swooped to one side of the road and then another before rising above the treetops.

  That’s when I saw it.

  “Sunlight.” I threw a hand out of the window and let the heat sink into my skin. We Stygians lived under an umbrella of cloudiness for good reason. But the sun…if we ever did see it in the brief breaks in the souls, it was a gift worth talking about for days. Feeling it against our skin for longer than a second was even more unique and more worthy of celebration. Right now, I was in some sort of euphoria from which I did not ever wish return. Sun. Warmth. It brought life and happiness. Without it, the world would wither into nothingness. No wonder it felt like a drug greater than sugar or coffee.

  “Is the countryside less congested with souls?” I asked because Québec was never this clear, in my whole history of living there.

  “Something like that.”

  I grinned, watching golden rays highlight my pale arms. A wet nose brushed my ear. Dudley was probably as tired as I was of the Cheetos, Twizzlers, and road trip funk. I hauled him into my lap and wrapped an arm around his waist so he could indulge, too. His neck stretched long and his little black nose twitched as wind whipped at him.

  The truck slowed. We made a jarring left onto a narrow dirt path. Tree branches slapped at the sides of the truck. Leaves smacked Dudley and me in the face. Time to close the window. Dudley crawled into the backseat and groaned from renewed boredom.

  The road was becoming less and less developed. Grass filled in where dirt left off and that faded into underbrush. Everything in the truck creaked and bounced.

  Soon, the road wasn’t there at all.

  “Are we in the jungle?” I asked.

  “We Humes live as remotely as possible.”

  Dudley flopped around on the backseat like a salmon in a boat. His ears bopped. Paws clung to the seat with no chance for grip. Stress filled his beady eyes.

  “We’re almost there, Duds. We are almost there, right?”

  The truck came to a halt, throwing us forward. The engine rumbled and then died. A fallen pine tree blocked the trail.

  “Get your stuff. We’re hiking,” Brent grumbled.

  Dudley gave a pitiable whimper.

  I scratched under his chin. “It can’t be that much further, Duds.”

  Oh, how wrong I was.

  Our journey turned into a three-hour scramble through dense brushwood. I enjoyed hiking, having gotten lost in the Québec countryside numerous times, but this trek was not any fun with Dudley stopping to pee on every tree we passed and Brent refusing to answer when I pressed him about where we were headed or why, exactly, we
could see the sun in all its glory.

  Every now and again he put his hand out, bringing us to a stop. He’d then scan the wilderness, put down his hand, and lead us onward.

  When Brent stopped for what felt like the twentieth time, I lost the last of my patience.

  “What in Hades are you looking for? Woolly worms? Because I can’t help you find them if you don’t tell me what they are.”

  He pointed across the web of trees. “There. See it?”

  I followed the trajectory of his finger to observe exactly what we had seen for the last five miles—trees and more trees, with maybe a squirrel here or there.

  “It sees us.”

  Being told something is watching you is unnerving, even for Stygians, who are typically the creepers in the woods watching unaware humans. However, nothing looked amiss. Birds chirped. No crunch of undergrowth punched out the rhythm of an approaching assailant. It was peaceful. There was…

  By Hades, a soul hovered between two distant pine trees. It had to be as tall as Brent. “What’s it doing there? Is it lost?”

  “More like trapped.” My perplexed expression was enough for him to continue. “These souls are similar to Eve, except they aren’t in your necklace. They never made it to the next step because their Reapers never finished the job. They were probably arrested and sent to Erebus before they had their chance. Good ol’ Marin’s laws working against us.”

  Sadness for these souls crept over me. “Can’t we help them?”

  “The only way is if we convinced Marin to bring back those Reapers from Erebus to release their souls from hell.” He started to walk, but stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Or if Styx had a Head Reaper who wasn’t hell-bent on fascist control.”

  As he commenced his hike toward the soul hovering nearby, I admitted my confusion to myself and then to him. “What does that mean?”

  “It means we need to remove Marin from power so Styx can start running like it should.”

  I tried keeping up with his pace, but he was several steps ahead before I could take even one. When he stopped, I had thought it was to give me a chance to catch up.