I feel myself slipping down the wall until my butt rests on my heels. I wrap my arms around my knees, pulling them tighter to my chin, trying to turn myself into nothing but a tiny ball small enough that it can disappear at will. Of course, I can’t. I chose to take on form.
“He’s already here,” I say. “There’s nothing you can do.”
She crouches in front of me and looks over her shoulder at Daniel.
“You need to let us take you somewhere safe.”
“Nowhere is safe,” I say to her.
I watch the way her mouth works at my confession and I imagine she has no way to tag any sense onto what’s happening. She has no reference point. She’s been a human for all of her days and perhaps a dozen incarnations.
I point at my reaper and he backs away into the shadow of the building. Daniel doesn’t twist around to follow the direction of my finger. He has eyes only for me. Even the bossy girl crouching beside me with her long black hair streaming over her shoulder doesn’t catch his eye.
He crouches down next to the bossy girl and I hear his knees crack. “You’re wrong,” he says. “You’re safe with me.”
Daniel puts a hand on my knee. It’s hot and slightly damp and all I can do is imagine the way it would feel on my cheek. I reach for it without thinking and he lets me take it.
I hear myself sighing. I know they both hear the longing in it, but I don’t care. There’s something familiar about the feel of his hands on my skin. I get the sense that he sees me now, really sees me. And even if he doesn’t know that I’m a reaper, he knows something else about me. That I was human. That I am human.
A pang of guilt creeps up the back of my neck, making the hair prickle against my scalp. So many mortal souls over my tenure. Lived, loved, and in the end reaped for the Divine one. An unfamiliar sensation worms its way into my chest. It hurts. I’ve never felt such pain before. I curl over my knees, trying to protect something inside from breaking.
The girl next to him pushes herself to her feet and backs away. Whatever she’s thinking, it’s riding her face like a surfboard on stormy water. When she crosses her arms over her chest this time, it’s with a slowly dawning understanding. She knows something about the two of us that I’m still struggling to put together.
“I gave it up for you,” I say, realizing now the full extent of what I’d done.
“I’m grateful,” he says.
That caramel skin is so close I can run my tongue over it if I want to, taste the sweetness of his sweat. It’s beading there just next to his ear, coming from his temples and beneath his hairline. I imagine the amount of heat that must be coming off of him, sparking the pheromones and making them wash over me. They smell like caramel mixed with honey and candy floss. I get an image of feathers and gossamer clouds. I close my eyes without meaning to because the desire it transmits is too much to hold in my mortal mind.
I pull his hand to my chest so he can feel my heart beating. I’m terrified to do much more. Any movement I make might be the one my reaper is nudging me toward.
“Feel that?” I say, peeking out beneath hooded eyelids.
He nods.
“What does it feel like?” I murmur.
“Like mine does,” he says and reaches for my other hand. I let him lay it against his chest.
He’s lying. My heartbeat feels nothing like his. His heart hammers beneath my palm. I recognize the stuttering rhythm of fear, so different than the thudding of desire.
I slide my gaze sideways to take in the bossy girl. She looks afraid too. She can’t seem to tear her eyes from my arm.
The whine of a siren cuts the air and an expression of relief floods her features.
I try not to look over her shoulder where my reaper has crept again from the shadows. He’s straining to see over Daniel’s shoulder. I know he wants to listen for my last thoughts. I glare at him, daring him to read them.
For a mortal, I think deliberately for his benefit. I did it all for one chance to be with a mortal man. And I’d do it again.
That last is a spiteful stab. We both know it. He smirks at me. He hears me and he believes there’s more to my confession. It’s that moment when I realize I’m thinking about a different time, not this one moment in the now when I spared a mortal life for lust, but I don’t have to tell him anything. Confession is for mortals. It’s a pact between humans and their Creator. Not for me. What happened eons ago doesn’t matter now.
His brow arches as he inches closer, as if to say, doesn’t it?
I steal a look at Daniel. His green eyes are pinned to mine. I get the feeling he’s trying to read my thoughts or gauge my condition. I can’t help chuckling beneath my breath.
“You mortals,” I say. “All the same. In the end, you’re all the same. Such a waste of my time.”
My words perplex him, I can tell. Maybe even hurt him. And that’s good. I want to hurt him. I want him to think it was all a waste of time, because I don’t want him to pity me.
We’ve been down this road before, I realize. It’s nothing but a flash, an image of gold and serpents and feathers floating free. We’ve been together before, he and I. It all makes sense now, my reluctance to reap him. Some part of me, some part that was human at one time feels the residual pull of an emotion absent in the hearts of the enslaved heavenly host.
“Antony,” I say, trying to work out what the images are trying to tell me. “It’s me.” I can’t say the name. I want him to know, like I know, what we were to each other.
Instead, the girl drags in a sharp breath and scrambles backwards for several feet. I watch her turn heel and tear down the alleyway. She runs right through my reaper who explodes in a rush of mist and then reassembles closer to me than before.
He looms over Daniel, that smirk on his face even broader now. He senses victory in his grip. I lean my head back against the wall and roll it to watch the bossy girl fleeing the scene. She’s waving her arms, shouting for help. Something’s wrong somewhere, that’s for sure. The ambulance is closer, I can tell, because it’s warbling cry has been cut short and doors are slamming everywhere.
“Stay away from me,” I say. “You’re not getting me.”
Daniel’s hand spasms against my shoulder. “I’m not leaving you,” he says.
“Not you,” I tell him. I jerk my head in the direction of my reaper. “Him. He’s not getting me. I’m not starting again.”
Daniel twists to look over his shoulder, and when I expect him to gasp in surprise that someone is standing behind him, he merely chuckles.
“Long time, Azrael,” he says.
“Azrael?” I echo.
I know the name. I remember it. I stare at the features of my reaper, willing them to shift into something angelic and not human. I strain to see the wings unfold from his back and spread across the alley. “You’re not fallen.”
Azrael shakes his head and Daniel turns to me again. Those ice green eyes narrow as they take me in, trying to decipher whether or not I understand the significance of the name.
“In your time of need,” he murmurs, testing me. I squeeze my eyes closed at the familiar words we all used in the time before the fall. The panic is still there, but it’s partnered by dread because I know this is really and truly my last moment.
Azrael doesn’t reap souls, he guides them to paradise.
“He’s not collecting me,” I say, the dread of the knowledge spreading to my shoulders and down my arms and legs. I can barely move for the heaviness of it. “I’m not his fare, am I?”
“No,” Daniel whispers. “You’re mine.”
His thumb traces my bottom lip, pausing at the corner of my mouth for one long moment before dropping to my forearm. He stretches it out in front of me. A long stream of red slithers along the tender insides of it. Blood pools in my elbow and drips onto the asphalt.
So the bully had cut me badly after all. I should have known it all along. Silly me. I should know in the mortal coil, there is no magic.
�
��I’m dying.”
“Yes,” he says.
“And you’re not human.”
He shakes his head. There’s a hint of sadness warming those crystalline eyes. I sigh.
“Reaper,” I say, knowing it now, the reason I couldn’t read his thoughts. “You’re a reaper.”
“You’re my last fare,” he admits and I can swear I hear regret in his voice.
“Azrael is here for you?” I guess. I almost laugh. I’d been such a fool. “He’s come to guide you home. You’ll get your wings.”
“If I want them, yes,” he says and this time he pins his gaze to mine with such intensity my spine burns. The small of my back goes hot. My chest aches, sending pangs of longing up the column of my throat.
“Why wouldn’t you want them?” I whisper and try not to think that until I saw him, it was all I wanted. Until I saw him, I couldn’t remember what it meant to leap for love. Couldn’t imagine love.
“Izzy,” he says. “Do you really not remember me?”
I hear the thudding of shoes on pavement. The noise of voices casting orders and equipment squeaking on tight hinges as it rolls toward me. The bossy girl has returned with the paramedics. She’s directing them toward me, telling them to hurry.
“Izzy,” he says. “Remember me. See me for what I am and it will void the fare.” He’s insistent now, and I guess that the fluttering of my eyelids as I struggle to keep them open must mean something final.
“Not Antony,” I murmur, struggling to get the syllables unwrapped from my thickened tongue. “Not Antony and not Cleopatra.”
He shakes his head. “Before then.”
I blink to clear the blur that rains down my vision. I see Azrael lay his palm down on the stretcher that blinks into my peripheral view. Bossy girl grumbles that it’s stuck and a paramedic complains that the wheel is broken. I have a moment, I know, one moment and no more.
“Izzy. Please.”
I swing my gaze to Daniel. I know him. I should have known him from the moment I leapt for him, but I wasn’t expecting him. Not here, not when I was looking for my last fare.
In my mind’s eye I see him shining and bright, clenching his sword for one agonizing eternity of time before he drops it at the Divine one’s feet. I sense his agony as his wings are taken, each gossamer thread leaving a searing brand as they burn away. All so he could find humanity and pleasure with me.
I know if I say his name the reap will be void. I can save myself and still search for one more fare. Find my ticket. Claim my wings. I’ve wanted it so badly for so long. All my dark deeds as a reaper have been spent in service to this one dream of returning home.
I’ve dreamed of my own gossamer threads winding their way into my psyche and making me whole like I haven’t been for eons. How much more so has he wanted these things all his fallen time? He, of the highest order, giving up the most to be with me from the lowest order. So unequal.
I lift a weighty hand to my brow and try to picture him as he was. For one shining moment, I see it, and I gasp at the pleasure it brings me.
“You remember,” he says. The excitement on his face is palpable. It almost hurts to answer, but there’s something else fueling my response, something both exquisite and painful.
I drag in a long breath, just enough to give him the answer he needs. I touch his face with my fingers, letting the pads linger on his mouth.
“I don’t know you,” I say. Let the gods hear that.
When Azrael lets go the stretcher, and its squeaky wheels prod onward again, I feel a peace I haven’t enjoyed in eons.
And when I see a tiny bit of gossamer drifting down like sweet rain on Daniel’s brow, I regret nothing.
The End
About Thea
Who is this Thea chick? Thea writes what she calls left-of-mainstream fiction from her desk in Nova Scotia with her black lab at her feet and miniature gargoyles to protect the space and the muse. She always has a cup of tea going or going cold. She made it onto the New York Times bestseller list once, but she tries not to let it go to her head.
You can join her clan through her mailing list at http://theaatkinson.com There’s a free read in it for you from her bestselling series Witches of Etlantium.
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Leaves Like Magic
Rebecca Hamilton
1
I don’t have a lot of time.
When my best friend Iris went missing, my entire life ground to a halt. Forget school. Forget familial obligations. Everything about me ceased to matter anymore. Because I had exactly one hour to save her life.
And I’m already ten minutes in.
I burst through the front door, rush past my mother in the kitchen, and turn on the kettle before I throw open the cabinets.
“Where are they?” I start pulling things out—a jar of Nutella, a box of angel hair pasta—and growl as I push things aside. “I need my tea! Why can’t anyone just leave my stuff where I put it?”
“I put it in the other cabinet,” Mom says. “Really, Hadley, it’s not a big deal.”
I don’t have time to glower at her. I don’t have time to explain that yes, it is a big deal. And besides, even if did have the time, I still wouldn’t tell her. First of all, she probably wouldn’t believe me. Second, if she did realize I was telling the truth, she’d want to do something stupid, like call the cops. And you can’t call the cops on vampires. That’s not how any of this works.
So I abandon the first set of cabinets and begin rummaging through the next. When I find my tin of tea leaves, I snap them up and set them on the counter. Then I grab a clean mug from the dishwasher no one ever unloads and place that next to the canister.
I check the flame on the burner to make sure it’s already up. “Our stove sucks!”
“Language, Hadley,” Mom reprimands.
I pace back into the living room and look out the front window, then come back and check on the water. My brother giggles from the kitchen table where he’s doing his school work.
“A watched pot never boils,” he says.
“Shut up, stinkbutt.”
“Hadley!” Mom says sharply.
I raise my hands. “Yeah, I know. Language. But he’s so annoying!”
“Am not,” he says.
“And it’s categorically untrue, by the way. Watched pots do boil. When the stove doesn’t suck.”
Before mom can grumble at me again, the kettle whistles. Finally.
My brother’s mumbling something to her about me being way too obsessed with tea lately. I could tell him it’s not the tea specifically I’m obsessed with—it’s the answers within the tea that I’m after—but my breath would be wasted.
I put a pinch of tea leaves into my cup, pour the boiling water on top, and then watch the clock for three minutes to pass. I spend these three minutes pondering how much it royally blows that the only way to save my friend is to stand around waiting for tea to steep.
The note that had materialized in my hand had been clear. IRIS’S LIFE OR YOURS. ONE HOUR.
There’d been an address beneath that. One that I intend to go to as soon as I have the right spell. But while other witches have spells recorded for them in a book of shadows, mine can only be revealed through tea leaves.
When the three minutes are up, I drink the tea as quickly as I can, leaving the leaves at the bottom of th
e cup with a small amount of liquid. Then I bolt upstairs, cup in still in hand, before my mom can tell me, “No drinks upstairs.”
She won’t follow me, though I’m sure she’ll yell at me about it later.
I lock myself in my bedroom and fall to my knees on the thin beige apartment-quality carpeting. “Real” tea-leaf readers would balk at the fact that I ran through my house, disrupting the liquid, but my gift is a little different. Instead of holding the handle of the cup in my left hand and moving it in a circle rapidly three times, I cradle it in my palms, close my eyes, and say the incantation my mentor taught me.
“Show me the spell I most need to tell.”
When I open my eyes, the bottom of the cup glows golden. The liquid swirls itself, creating a slow cyclone around the inside walls of the mug until it reaches the rim. As the droplets levitate, they vaporize, until all that’s left in my cup is the leaves clinging to the sides and bottom.
Please work.
I start at the rim to read the information about the present situation—not because I don’t know it, but because the leaves will help me decide how much of what I know is relevant to the spell I need to defeat the vampires and save my friend.
Vampires. I can still hardly believe they’re real—despite what my mentor’s told me—much less that I’m planning to negotiate with them.
I see three symbols along the lip of the cup. Ants, which symbolize a bad omen or impending doom. An arrow pointing down, which tells me I’m heading in the wrong direction. And an ‘X’—a warning to stop.
As if that’s gonna happen. I can’t stop.
So I start to read the images in the tea leaves on the sides of the inside of the cup. This is where I’ll get the spell I’m looking for.
Not Just Voodoo Page 38
