The Wounded Heart

by K. D. Worth

  Any spare time Max found apart from training and writing lines, he’d spent researching shades and their evil counterparts—wraiths.

  “Is it about wraiths?” I asked, suppressing a shiver.

  Max gave me a quick, albeit guilty smile. “Kinda sorta.”

  Knowing I wouldn’t win until he showed me what had gotten him so excited, I relented and let him lead me to the farthest corner of the library, but my feet were dragging. “Kinda sorta isn’t an answer, Max.”

  “I found something about shades, not wraiths, so kinda sorta is an answer,” Max countered.

  I scoffed.

  Shades were lost souls that couldn’t, or wouldn’t pass over to heaven when they died.

  If it weren’t for Max, I would’ve become a shade.

  My guilt and refusal to forgive myself would’ve kept me tied to the mortal realm, and that’s why he’d broken the rules to save my life. I would forever be grateful because living as a shade had to be horrific. Tormented by unfinished business, they were stuck between worlds, endlessly trying to fix the unrepairable. Unfortunately, by refusing to let a reaper help them cross over, a spirit chose that life of punishment over one of peace. That was the real hell, not the one I’d learned about in church.

  Sometimes a shade regretted their choice.

  We’d recently learned a shade could enter a human body when its spirit departed because the corpse still had enough electrical current to be reanimated.

  The moment a shade chose that type of existence, they became a wraith.

  The addiction to being almost alive was the allure, but the host body eventually decayed and the shade ended right back where they started—stuck in limbo, or purgatory as some call it. The dark twisted entities always needed new “vessels.” They walked among the living in reanimated corpses, searching for the dying and even killing humans before their time in order to get one.

  Talk about a real-life zombie apocalypse.

  “Check this out,” Max began, leaving my side.

  The instant he released my hand, I almost grabbed for it back, but Max hurried out of reach and wheeled out the large whiteboard he’d hidden behind an old bookshelf. Though the risk of discovery was minimal, neither of us thought it wise to let the others see it. One of our fellow reapers, Jake, browsed the bookshelves sometimes, but more often than not, the only one besides us who spent much time in the library was Herman the cat.

  Post-its and scribbled notes covered the whiteboard. Anything he’d learned about shades, wraiths, and limbo. Plus a whole lot of questions about our boss, Slade.

  Slade gave us reapers our assignments, and he got his orders directly from God. Despite his nonstereotypical appearance, Slade had to be a higher being than us humans-turned-reapers. I imagined him to be an angel of some sort, though he’d never clarified exactly what sort. While I called him an angel, I didn’t mean a chubby cherub or a glorious savior with a white robe, wings, and a halo. He was a big, blond, tattooed biker-dude, often seen toting a crossbow or a sword.

  Pulling out a chair and plopping down heavily at the small library table, I noticed a new note written in blue and circled several times.

  I keep meeting shades on the battlefield. They’re everywhere. Slade called it an “epidemic” and said it’s getting harder to control purgatory, but he won’t tell us why.—Ed Carter, 1921.

  I pointed at the new entry. “Where did you read that?”

  Smiling, he wheeled out the library cart with all the books he’d amassed and chose a dusty green one from the top. “That’s what I wanted to show you.” He took the seat next to me. “This belonged to Ed Carter. He was an eighteen-year-old who died in World War I and used to be on Slade’s team. I think we would’ve liked him a lot.”

  Intrigued, I leaned in to examine the journal Max placed on the table in front of us. “Is this his diary?”

  “Yeah.” Max wore a huge grin. “And you’ll never guess what?”

  “What?”

  “He was gay too!”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Max continued excitedly. “When his boyfriend died in a farming accident, Ed lied about his age and joined the Army Air Corps in 1917. That’s what they used to call the Air Force. He was only seventeen but he became a fighter pilot! Isn’t that cool?”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty cool. I could barely handle my homework when I was seventeen.”

  “Right?” Max sounded awed by this former reaper. “Anyway, he was kinda like me, I guess, never satisfied with the answers Slade gave him about stuff. Slade kept secrets even back then,” he went on with a twinge of annoyance.

  Slade and Max had an ongoing battle of wills, Max always pressing him for information and Slade always evading answers by posing more questions. It was highly entertaining when I wasn’t the topic of said discussions.

  “Ed had lots of run-ins with shades because he worked the battlefields in Europe,” Max went on excitedly. “The soldiers weren’t ready to leave because they were so young.”

  A deep swell of pity filled me. “Those poor men. Can you imagine being in a war at our age?”

  “Well,” Max began, attention still on the journal as he flipped pages. “That wraith did tell me there was a war coming. Maybe we won’t have to imagine much longer.”

  I suppressed a shiver.

  Two wraiths had confronted Max the night we met. One of them had been waiting for my body when I’d been on the bridge—thank God I hadn’t witnessed that! Also unbeknownst to me, they’d followed us. Max fought them off with a lightning power he hadn’t been able to duplicate since, no matter how much he practiced. And during the eight months Max believed me to be dead—I’d been sorting out some things in limbo with our boss Slade, and time moved slower there—wraiths had followed Max every time he entered the human realm.

  I was glad they hadn’t done so on our first two trips out to reap souls.

  Max pointed to an entry dated August 4, 1920. “This is the first time one of his charges refused to go with him to heaven.”

  I sat up straighter, intrigued. “What does he say? Does he describe them?”

  Max told me wraiths looked like black, faceless shadow beings, and until Slade explained the difference, he’d assumed those wraiths in the diner were shades. Both of us wondered what shades looked like, and if they had any resemblance to dead spirits or if they too changed into something else.

  Max shrugged. “Here, this is what he wrote: Today I delivered the Touch to a man my age, perhaps a year or two older—one could not be considered a boy after what we have seen. I stopped asking Slade long ago how old my charges were, for it has become quite depressing to me. His name is Eugene and he was yet another victim of a land mine, panicked and afraid like the others. But even as his legs reappeared and the chaos of the battle faded around us, he would not come with me. He saw the door but would not enter. He ran back into the battle, searching for someone named Karl. I cannot condone my failure, and guilt and agony gnaw at my insides. My poor Eugene. What will become of you?”

  “That’s awful.” The powerful need to help souls get to heaven was ingrained deep within a reaper. I couldn’t fathom how I would feel if I had to face a similar situation.

  “Can you imagine?” Max’s face scrunched up. “Trying to reap souls during a battle? Totally nuts. But he never says anything about what Eugene looked like, other than the thing about his legs, so I’m gonna assume he didn’t change much. Maybe that only happens after they become wraiths?”

  Not as excited about this gay reaper as I had been, I pushed my chair back, feeling the weight of more than just a loss of energy from the crossover. This whole topic might intrigue Max, but I hated talking about it.

  The day I became a reaper, Slade had said, “Kody has a purpose. He has from the beginning. Just took me a bit to figure out what it was. For now, he’s gonna be a reaper.”

  For now.

  Those words always made my guts knot.

  I had a purpose? Like what? Ma
x seemed to think it had to do with the unique circumstances of my death. And though the wraiths had continued to follow Max, they had only confronted him the once—when I was with him.

  Something he was wont to remind me of.

  He also speculated I might have to help him fight these wraiths one day. But the mere idea of a spirit reanimating a corpse frightened me with thoughts of zombies eating brains, and I wanted nothing to do with any of it.

  Apparently, I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

  “Kody?” Max placed a hand on my arm, startling me from my thoughts.

  I forced a smile. “Yeah?”

  “You okay? You kinda zoned on me for a sec.”

  “Um,” I began, standing up fast. The movement made my vision spin a little. “I just remembered I gotta do something for Slade.”

  “Like what?” Max said, scrutinizing me in a way that made me wonder if he could read my mind. I didn’t think he could, not the way we could hear our charges thinking or Slade heard our thoughts. But Max was a highly intuitive guy, making it difficult to keep him away from the things I didn’t want to bother him with. If he knew everything that was going on, he would be so upset.

  “Nothing big. I don’t wanna bore you.” I stepped out of his reach, bracing myself on the chair. Though Max’s constant warmth had revived me, I didn’t have the energy to stay and listen. I didn’t need another night of pacing my bedroom for hours—a habit Max knew nothing about—worrying about my future afterlife.

  He raised his brows. “You feeling okay?”

  Forcing a smile, I stood straighter. Pretending and hiding had been skills I perfected a long time ago. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just gonna go lie down. Helping people cross over takes a lot out of me.”

  “It does?”

  “Yeah, I’ll just go to my room.”

  “I thought you had to do something for Slade.”

  “Yeah, but I can do that afterward,” I said quickly. “You have fun with Ed.”

  He assessed me for a moment, then smiled. “Okay, I’ll catch you later. Maybe I’ll bring his journal and we can read some more together.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Never better.”

  When he turned back to the journal, my stomach knotted.

  Lying to my boyfriend had become a habit I didn’t know how to stop.

  KODY—Chapter 2

  “PENNY FOR your thoughts, kid?”

  I jumped at the question, startled out of my whirring mind.

  I was sitting at a café in Paris—crazy, right?—having breakfast with my boss and mentor, Slade. The busy sounds of the city reminded me of an amusement park, loud, ever-changing, and throbbing with excitement. The chatter of foreign voices flitted around us like music, the occasional laughter or honk of a horn needing no translation. Though it had been a few weeks since we’d met for coffee, I was glad to be in Paris once again. In our previous visits, we’d also come to this plaza because Slade loved watching all the people headed to and from the nearby park in front of the Eiffel Tower.

  And because the little café had the best espresso.

  “No thoughts,” I answered.

  Slade let out a deep rumbling chuckle. “Not from where I’m sitting.”

  His mind-reading trick had definitely taken some getting used to.

  Though the September morning registered in the midfifties, and the humans and I wore jackets, Slade only wore a faded black Metallica tank top, jeans, and boots. Snake tattoos that were, frankly, sort of creepy covered his exposed arms. He always had tattoos, but they were never the same. Did the snakes mean he had something twisting and coiling up inside his head? He’d been acting antsy ever since we arrived.

  Slade chuckled. “Thoughts are twisted and coiling up inside my head? You should try listening to yourself sometime.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.” All the struggles I’d battled with while alive—anxiety, guilt, you name it—still crept around in my mind, rearing their ugly heads just when I started to feel good about my new life. I thought becoming a reaper would change me, but dying didn’t really fix anything.

  It just presented new problems.

  I picked up my café crème—the closest thing I’d found to an American cappuccino in Paris. I’d added chocolate sauce to it and some sugar, much to the puzzlement of the garçon. He’d brought the chocolate without asking this time, obviously remembering us from our previous visits.

  Of course, nobody was likely to forget Slade.

  My boss set his espresso down and put both elbows on the little table, leaning toward me. Taking a sip of my sweetened brew, I savored the way the heat of the ceramic warmed my cold hands, and did my best to ignore his stare.

  The potent aroma of his drink, mingled with the heavenly fragrance of my croissant, made me hungry. I took a hefty bite of the flaky pastry, making a note to research recipes for croissants later. Reapers could eat if they wanted, though we didn’t need to. As supernatural beings, we just sort of existed. Most of my peers ate food for pleasure, but I always wondered where it went. We didn’t go to the bathroom, so did it just magic away?

  “Kody,” he began, “something’s bothering you and it’s not reaper digestion. Wanna talk about it?”

  I set the croissant down and brushed the crumbs from my fingers. Over the last few months, Slade had become a great source of help and advice for me as I whined and complained about my former and current life. We used to meet every morning, in various places all around the globe, from Mumbai to Warsaw, anywhere the risk of being in human form was minimal. But we’d been unable to have one of these private chats for some time, and while Slade had always been supportive, I hesitated to answer him because it had to be getting old listening to my sob story.

  Slade chuckled. “I never said it was getting old.”

  Though sometimes embarrassing that he could read my thoughts, it did make communicating easier. Placing my drink beside his, I mimicked his stance, elbows on the table and hands fisted together, and decided to just tell the truth. “It’s hard, always pretending everything is okay.”

  He quirked his blond eyebrows. “And it’s not?”

  I raised one brow in a challenge to his two. “You heard everything I was thinking.”

  Scrunching his face, he made a seesaw gesture. “Yes and no. I can hear your thoughts and get the gist, but a human’s stream of consciousness only makes real sense to themselves. And right now, yours is all over the place. Instead of me trying to translate every nuance of what you’ve been stewing over, why don’t you spell it out for me?”

  I studied him for a moment, an angelic serenity juxtaposed with such a rough exterior. I often felt naked and exposed in front of him because I believed I couldn’t hide my thoughts. Knowing I still had some privacy in my own head eased some of those nerves.

  Heaving a sigh, I spun the opal ring on the first finger of my right hand with my thumb, still not used to the weight. “I don’t know. I thought when I officially became a reaper and finished my training I would feel different, like, reborn or something. Things are better than when I first arrived, but if I’m being honest, the hurt is still in here.” I awkwardly pointed at my heart before I resumed spinning my ring.

  “It might stop hurting if you didn’t visit your mother so much.”

  At once, I knotted my hands in my lap, not meeting his eye.

  Okay, so he couldn’t translate all my thoughts, but apparently, nothing escaped his notice.

  “Not much,” he agreed.

  I studied my hands guiltily, the brilliant round opal catching the sunlight, a kaleidoscope of blues and greens, with a hint of pink. Seeing my mother was not exactly breaking the reaper rules since I didn’t talk to her. And Slade didn’t sound angry. It seemed rather harmless, sitting in the kitchen while she cooked or made banners for her PFLAG chapter. With autumn pending, it relaxed me to watch her decorate the house with pumpkins and gourds. Mom had always decorated
for every season, though now that Dad had filed for divorce, she did it all alone.

  Max had asked me if I was still visiting her and I’d told him no. But the truth was, I’d been unable to make the break. When she put a tiny rainbow flag on one of the pumpkins, I’d cried. After all the years of her trying to fix me, knowing she’d become my number one supporter soothed some of those old emotional wounds.

  Even if I couldn’t enjoy it in person.

  Slade sighed. “Kody, you can’t keep clinging to your mortal life or your real purpose will never be revealed to you. And visiting your mother is holding you back from embracing your new life. You need to live in the now, not the ‘then’ or the ‘will be’ or the ‘what could’ve been.’ Do you understand?”

  I nodded, unsure how to do any of that.

  “Well, if you don’t figure it out, that wound in your heart will never heal,” he told me in a soft tone.

  At once I looked up into those powerful gray eyes. “My parents are getting divorced,” I said, my voice cracking. “Did you know that?”

  “I did.”

  The day I’d watched Mom sign the papers assaulted me, and I knew Slade could see it unfolding in my mind’s eye—me curled up in a ball on the couch, crying while Mom baked cookies as if nothing were amiss. She had no clue I was actually there. But my memory would always be there, the disappointment and stress I’d caused.

  My life and my death had a role in their divorce, of that I had no doubt.

  “It’s all my fault,” I muttered, lips feeling suddenly thick. “Their lives are being destroyed and here I am sitting in Paris.” I gestured around at the beautiful city growing blurry through rising tears.

  Since I’d learned about their divorce, the old crushing weight of guilt, the one I thought I’d let go of, had become my companion once more. While I’d managed to shed the notion that I couldn’t be gay and a Christian, sadness, guilt, and anxiety… all those emotions had remained, battling inside me every day. Yes, things were better for me on this side, but knowing my life and death played a role in ruining my parents’ marriage had begun to suffocate my every action.