by K. D. Worth
Max’s eyes were wide. “He’s not supposed to be dead, is he?”
“No, he isn’t,” Slade agreed, studying the spirit across the street. “Yet he is.”
“W-where does h-he go, then?” Max stammered. Though he tried to act tough, he was as deeply affected by the natural call of a reaper to help the dead cross over as me.
Slade turned his gaze on us, his expression full-on teacher-mode. “When a reaper delivers the Touch, the opal ring heats as God’s holy spirit is channeled through that stone, giving you the power to separate soul from body. But only on people that are meant to die. That is order. Fate, destiny, whatever you choose to call it, but it was already foreordained. However, when a wraith kills someone who is not slated to die, it creates chaos. Not only are spirits choosing to not go to heaven because they do not believe, but there are lost souls who were never even given the choice.”
“So he’s a shade too?” Max clarified.
“Unwittingly, yes.”
I studied the man across the street and an overwhelming rush of pity filled me. A person never given the chance to see a door, no reaper, no guide to tell him everything would be okay or that he was forgiven and God loved him so he could move on.
Suddenly the image of a bridge hit me, the water churning below me, the aching sense of hopelessness… but then Max came. He made everything better. And poor Brady had been worried about his family and whether or not there was baseball in heaven. I’d been able to help him too.
But no one was here to help this man.
“We have to help him,” Max and I said at the same time.
“You will,” Slade assured us with a smile.
I took a steadying breath, noting Max did the same. Though I had known wraiths were out there killing people, leaving souls wandering, seeing one of those lost hurt my heart. More than that, it conjured my own earthly struggle, the sleepless nights, the loneliness and the doubt. I’d believed in God, but then, at times, I’d felt so forsaken—just like this man.
“Your purpose is to bring order where there once was chaos, Kody,” Slade whispered. “To heal the rift the wraiths put in the cosmic balance between heaven and earth. With Max’s support, you will find the strength and power to deliver these lost souls to God.”
“I will?” I said, my voice tiny.
Though consumed with a necessity to help that soul—and a mere moment ago, caught up in the dance, I’d felt confident—the memories of my own failings and doubt flooded my mind.
What if I can’t—
“That was what was, Kody,” Slade said in my mind. “Not what is or what will be.”
I stared at my boss, my mentor, unable to look away as he repeated the words he’d told me not so long ago at a café in Paris. Then Max put his hand on mine, funneling his strength into me, hot and fiery yet so very peaceful and powerful. I gasped a little, and Slade did too. Surely he felt the surge of Max’s power because they were both touching me.
I thought of the woman I’d just danced with. She’d been sad yet still hopeful. She believed the man she mourned was in heaven—I had been sure of it too. But here he was, lost and alone on the street, left behind. I suddenly felt like I owed it, not only to the man but also to his living friend, to get him to heaven.
I nodded, my conviction strengthening me. “I think I can do this.”
I had to do it.
Slade lowered his hand. “That man over there isn’t supposed to be here. His soul was severed from his body by evil, not by the kind Touch of a reaper, as it is supposed to be.”
“Has a wraith stolen his body?” I wanted to know.
“Yes,” Slade answered sadly. “And before you ask, no, you don’t have the power to put his spirit back in his body, Kody, but you do have the power to send him home.”
Nodding, I took that in, grateful for Max’s presence fueling me. “What do you want me to do?”
Slade gave me a casual shrug. “I suggest you go talk to him.”
“That’s it?”
“I’m going with you this time,” Max declared.
Slade put a hand on his shoulder. “Kody needs to do this alone.”
“But—”
“No.” Slade’s tone shut the subject down like the slamming of a door. “Like before, Kody needs to face his fears and doubts on his own.” He held up a finger when Max opened his mouth to protest. “We’ll both be here for support, but we cannot do this for him. Kody is powerful, Max. He’ll be able to sense your love and draw on your energy from across the street.” Slade smiled at me. “He can feel it from a lot farther away than that, if necessary.”
I didn’t know how powerful I felt just then, but with Slade’s confidence and friendship, and Max’s unconditional love… yeah, maybe I could do this.
Those gray eyes met mine, full of reassurance. “Go on, Kody.”
Taking a deep breath and one last squeeze of Max’s hand, I walked forward.
Inside me, Max’s strength remained.
“Just talk to him,” I muttered to myself. “That’s easy enough, right?”
Forcing another deep breath, I approached the shade—correct that—the man at whose funeral I had just danced. Brady’s soft voice echoed in my mind: “They’re scared. Can’t you see them crying?”
Then immediately on the heels of that thought, I recalled a giant spider on my bedroom ceiling and Dad trying to coax me out of the corner farthest away from it. “They’re more scared of you than you are of them.”
The odd memory made me smile. I could do this. If this man felt one ounce of the pain and helplessness I’d gone through in my earthly life, if he had any shred of the agony I’d faced standing on that bridge, then he was not something to fear.
He was a lost soul, scared just like I’d been at one time.
And I had to help him.
Determined, I walked up to the spirit and simply said, “Hi.”
The man jumped, and I knew the instant he realized I could see him.
“Who are you?” His dark skin glistened in the New Orleans heat, though I knew a spirit couldn’t feel temperature. Doubtless his subconscious believed the heat still affected him. More of my tension eased at seeing his sweat. He was no longer physically a human, yet even in his mind he was still just another person.
“Kody. What’s your name?”
“Chad,” he said. “You a ghost too?”
I smiled. “No, I’m not a ghost.”
He wrinkled his brow. “Then how can you see me?”
“I’m a reaper. I’m here to help you cross over to heaven.”
The wrinkle in his brow deepened. “Heaven?” He shook his head and made a light scoffing laugh. “No, man, I ain’t leavin’.”
“Why not?”
“A dude mugged me five days ago,” Chad said, his southern accent thick. “Sumthin’ like a zombie took my body. Straight out the Walking Dead.” Whistling, he shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened. “I been trying to find it, but I can’t.”
I could see his thoughts, hear them as I watched Chad’s murder at the hands of a wraith. He’d been walking home late at night from a bar, carrying his music case—a trumpet. Chad was a jazz musician, or so he’d wanted to be. He was young, just twenty-six, and trying to break into the Big Easy’s music scene.
I never shoulda gone down that alley. Damn shortcut, I heard him chastise himself. I could sense that he’d been kicking himself over that mistake, obsessing over it even.
The wraith had come out from behind the dumpster, skin rotting on his flesh.
I shuddered.
Zack’s possessed body had only been dead a few seconds, skin still warm. But the creature that drew a knife and stabbed Chad had been stiff with rigor mortis, skin loose, eyes sunken and dark. Its hair shaggy.
Didn’t hair and fingernails continue to grow after death?
I’d read that once, and the visions of Chad’s wraith—though mere flashes to me—hinted it might be true. The wraith h
ad raised its stiff hand, fingernails long and unkempt, and it made a growling sound as it took Chad by surprise.
A sharp pain stole the breath from my chest as I relived his spirit being torn from his body. The agony was almost as painful as the encounter with the wraith in Britany’s apartment, but this time I did not fall to my knees.
But I did buckle over to catch my breath. I braced my hands on my knees.
“Kid, you okay?”
No, this is not my pain. I am not feeling it—well? Yes, I was feeling it, but it wasn’t happening now, and it wasn’t happening to me. Drawing on Max’s energy, I forced myself to accept that reality.
Shut off the power to that room, so to speak.
Slowly the pain dissipated, though the lingering memory of it was fresh in my mind. Chad’s pain had been so much worse than when a reaper delivered the Touch.
This poor man….
I could feel Max right there with me, not physically but deep in my soul, in my bones.
That love gave me the strength I needed.
I blinked several times until Chad came into focus again. He was standing above me, concerned and offering support. He was worried, I could feel it, and before I let that worry confuse or disrupt my thoughts, I reminded myself: It’s not your emotion. Don’t let it confuse you or you can’t help him. These were his feelings, not mine.
I had to keep telling myself that, because like a submarine with cracks, I could feel them seeping through my exterior, threatening to flood me once more.
I visualized Max’s shield inside me, wrapped around my heart and keeping my emotions inside me, and Chad’s out. As I drew on that, my breathing came easier.
Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Slade with one hand on Max’s shoulder, holding him back. Max’s hands were white with crackling light.
“I love you so much,” I whispered in his mind.
Max’s face softened from attack mode, and though I could tell he was anxious, he gave me a slight nod. “I love you too. You got this, babe. I’m right here if you need me. I believe in you.”
I thought I saw Slade smile.
And then I was completely myself once more, with Max’s fiery light glowing deep in my belly, as if he were holding me close.
A smile pulled at my own lips, and I faced Chad. He should not have died, but he was my charge now and he was going to heaven.
Confident, I straightened.
There was no need to deliver a Touch, for the wraith had already separated spirit from body. Chad’s thoughts were open to me, and though I saw his horror and shock when the icy black form of the wraith left the corpse and funneled into his body, with Max’s help, I managed to keep it from making me lose control.
“I’m here to take you to heaven,” I repeated, feeling stronger at those words.
He scrunched his face and gave me the once-over. “And what? You’re like the Grim Reaper? Ain’t you a little young?”
“I feel older than I look,” I said with a laugh, the sound rolling down my body and shaking off the last of his pain like a dog shaking off water.
More confident by the second, I sat on a nearby bench, indicating he should do the same. “But I’m not the reaper. There are quite a few of us actually,” I told him. I tossed aside all the reaper rules, like charges only needing to know the minimum. His gruesome and unconventional demise hadn’t followed the rules of order, so why should his crossover? “We work for archangels and we help the recently deceased cross over to heaven.”
“Really?” Chad said skeptically. “There’s a heaven?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head, and after a moment, he sat beside me. “I’m not so sure about that, Kody.”
“What part? The reapers, the archangels, or heaven?” I sounded a bit like Slade, testing his doubts with sarcastic humor, and I was rather proud of myself for it.
He sniffed a laugh. “All of it.”
“Why?”
When he didn’t answer, I waited patiently.
His pain and hurt were mere echoes in the distance now. If I chose to, I could see the moment of his death, playing out in his mind on a never-ending loop, but miraculously I was able to keep it at a distance and focus on helping him.
Max’s light—a gift from God for sure—kept me strong, and the more time I spent with Chad, this victim and unwitting shade, the more that light seemed to grow until it felt like it came from inside me, rather than being put inside me.
Max and I were one, as we had been inside his force field in the mountain temple.
Chad let out a weary sigh. “If there was a heaven, why didn’t I go there right away?” He frowned at me again. “How am I supposed to trust you? You’re just a kid.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I’m a kid, but I’ve seen more than men twice my age, I’ll wager that.”
“You ever seen a thing like that?” he asked, looking nervously over his shoulder. “The thing that went all Walking Dead on my body?”
I decided to be honest. “Yes, once. We call them wraiths. When a spirit refuses to move on to heaven—because they don’t have faith or there is something powerful keeping them stuck in the earthly realm—they become shades. They live in limbo or purgatory. Some of them have learned how to reanimate bodies the moment the soul leaves the body. Once they do that, they become a wraith.”
“For reals?”
“For reals,” I said, sighing wearily.
“You mean, I was killed by a zombie wraith?”
“Yes, a wraith possessing a dead body killed you so it could take your body because the vessel it was in was falling apart in rot. Now you’re stuck in limbo too.”
“Sweet Jesus,” he whistled. “So I’m a shade? Not a ghost?”
“Yup. And wanna know something even crazier?”
Chad’s eyes went wide, and he shook his head, mind blown by what I’d told him, I’m sure. “Not sure I do.”
I chuckled, liking Chad immensely. “There was a prophecy about a healer coming to help the shades and wraiths get to heaven.” I looked at him, unsure why I was telling him all this, but it felt right. “I’m that healer, Chad.”
“But you’re just a kid!” he exclaimed. “You shouldn’t be messing with those things!”
This time I didn’t defend my age. “I know, right? But God knows more than we do, so I’m having faith in Him. Works out best that way.”
Funny, but I could’ve taken a dose of that advice more than once in my existence.
“I don’t know, man. Those nasty things don’t belong in heaven,” he said, eyes wide in disbelief. “Shouldn’t they go to hell?”
“One would think,” I said, sitting back with a sigh and rubbing the tops of my thighs. “But one more thing to blow your mind, there is no burning hell with pitchforks and devils. Hell is what the wraiths are living.” I studied Chad’s face. “And what you’ve been living in since it stole your body.”
Chad took a moment to ponder that, and rather than try to read his emotions—I had full control of mine now and wanted to keep it that way—I sat there quietly.
Yes, Chad was living in hell, and it struck me that the last years of my human life had been hell too. The not knowing, the loneliness, and hopelessness.
A desperation for something, anything to stop the pain and madness.
I had been willing to take my own life. The wraith that killed Chad had been pushed to utter madness too. If Max hadn’t saved me, would the wraith waiting at the bottom of the bridge have left my spirit stranded like Chad? Would my earthly angst and sorrow have been enough to push me into becoming a wraith?
I wanted to imagine the answer was no, but I couldn’t be sure.
I shuddered at the reality of what I could’ve done, the things grief and not knowing may have pushed me to.
But that was more of the “what could have been” Slade always warned me about. And obsessing over that was the very thing keeping me from fulfilling my higher purpose.
I did not become a shade or
a wraith, because I’d had Max.
Chad and the rest of the shades, even the wraiths, had nothing.
No.
They had me.
“Chad,” I began softly, pushing my healing energy into him, careful to keep his emotions out of my room. “There’s so much going on in the world we aren’t meant to understand. Or maybe we just aren’t old enough to see it or ready to understand it all. But know this one thing. God is real. He hasn’t forgotten about any of us. Not even the soul that killed you. I don’t know what that soul’s destiny is. All I know is that God gave me the privilege of helping people like you get to heaven. And if you let me, I’d like to get you there today.”
I felt a bit like a car salesman in that moment—What can I do to get you behind the wheel of this cream puff today?—but I was selling God and heaven for all I was worth. Chad hadn’t been dead long, less than a week, but there was already something insubstantial, hazy about him. He was hunting the wraith that took his body, and though it was no longer affecting me, I could feel his desperation and anger. Such obsession would prevent him from letting go, and fuse him to this realm. A potent cocktail the wraiths would feed off, possibly converting his desperation into joining their ranks.
Not on my watch.
Chad studied me for a long moment, and I did not look away. “So you just deal with dead people all day? That sounds pretty sad.”
“Not when I get to give someone a second chance,” I said, reaching out and resting my hand on his knee.
The instant I did it, a vortex of energy sucked out of my body. I gasped and sharply withdrew my hand. My vision blurred and my head spun. I pressed a hand to my face, forcing a deep breath.
“You don’t look so good, dude,” Chad said. “You okay?”
I forced my eyes open and looked deep into his brown ones. Max’s power simmered inside me, almost gone now, and the coldness had returned. With all my strength, I focused on Max’s light, and as if by sheer will alone it swelled within me, strengthening me.
I wasn’t alone and neither was Chad.
Instinctively my hand moved out, and I touched Chad again. This time there was no pain.