by H. D. Gordon
With the way things were going, I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance to know, and perhaps this would be a mercy.
“Are you afraid of heights?” he asks.
“I’m afraid of them,” I answer. “But I like to do things that scare me.”
Only after I say the words do I recognize the suggestiveness of them. It is obvious he is a thing that scares me.
He nods, dark eyes roaming over me slowly, as though they are drinking me in. I feel it like a touch, and now the goosebumps that raise along my arms do not have so much to do with fear, but with something else entirely.
Samael stands, glancing around. I am sitting atop a low stone wall that surrounds a quaint house. Bright fuchsia and lavender rhododendrons sit at its base, and duel columns support a porch where rocking chairs that belonged to my great grandmother and grandfather sit waiting for their next occupants. I cannot look at them without seeing myself and my sister playing there as children, back before I lost her and then lost myself shortly after.
Inside, Rose and Kai are preparing an early dinner together, celebrating the coming of their child, the beauty of their lives, standing in the same rooms as did generations of my family before them. My throat swells and my eyes prickle.
“She still has a handful of hours,” he says, and his voice is gentle, more so than I would have thought he was capable. “Give me one of yours, and then I’ll bring you back here to finish what you started.” He holds out his hand to me, tail flicking lazily back and forth near my ankle, barbs coming close but making no contact, massive scythe still resting against the stone wall.
I stare up at him, my eyes catching on the handsome lines of his face, the intense look behind his gaze. His wings flare just a little, a movement that seems involuntary, as though he is the one who is nervous, this tiny movement the sole indication.
The only reason I do not question these strange thoughts and feelings is because there is no time. No time for questioning things. My mind is made up.
“One hour?” I ask. I sound a little breathless.
“One hour of your time, Cecilia,” he promises.
“And you won’t try to stop me from coming back?”
“It is not my job to intervene. Only to enforce punishment after the fact.”
Enforce punishment. The words send a fresh zing of fear through me, though I sense that they are not meant to. It seems I was correct about not being alone in my resignation regarding the whole matter.
I place my hand in his.
He pulls me to my feet. Tugs me against him. I can feel everywhere he touches. The warmth of his skin is intoxicating. I have been cold for so long, and I had not even known it.
His wings flare and my breath catches. I am afraid to look up at him, though not at all for the same reasons as before. His fingers brush under my chin and raise it up, forcing me to look into his face.
“Hold on,” he says.
And we shoot up into the air, the speed and force snatching the breath right out of my lungs. I cling to him, burying my face in his broad chest as my hair whips around my face. His wings flare wide and beat fiercely, a single arm wrapped around my waist, holding me fast.
I suck in air, the pointless beating of my heart kicking into high gear. I am terrified and electrified all at once. I did not know that I could still feel this way, and no small part of it is due to the way he is touching me.
Touch, I’ve learned, is a thing as crave-able as any food.
“Open your eyes, Cecilia,” he says, his voice a deep whisper against the rushing of the wind. It sends a shiver through me, and his arm tightens in response, the other wrapping around me now, too, for good measure.
I want to cry out in exhilaration, but I play it cool and open my eyes.
Samael laughs at whatever expression is on my face, the rumble resounding in his wide chest, reverberating through my own with our proximities.
“A fall would not hurt you,” he says, amusement playing across his features. Despite our altitude, all I can manage to look at is him.
“No, but my brain still associates heights with danger,” I say, shouting a little over the wind.
In answer, he flips me in his arms, the adjustment so sure and abrupt that I am powerless to stop it, and let out a little yip in response. Now, my back is pressed against his front, his arms cradling me around my chest and waist. Like this, I see the earth for miles and miles spread out below me.
The greens and blues of the land enthrall me, the vastness making me feel small and somehow offering peace at the same time. My brain is telling me I should be afraid, but I feel safe in Samael’s grasp, and I cannot remember the last time I felt anything like that.
The last time I felt anything at all.
Gods help me. We are flying, but I feel more like I am falling.
I should not have agreed to this.
One hour, he’d said. What harm could be done in one hour?
I am a fool. I should know better than anyone that immeasurable harm can be done in an hour. Hell, it can be done in seconds, and quite often very much is.
I squeeze my eyes shut once more and bite back a shudder, and it has nothing to do with the altitude.
10
6:45 p.m.
When he sets me on my feet, I have to grip his arms to keep from stumbling.
One side of his mouth pulls up at this, and I do my best not to let the expression capture me.
The nausea helps. I wasn’t aware I could still get the sensation. For once, it’s a feeling I certainly do not miss.
Once I have leveled myself out, I glance around at where he has taken me. The breath I just caught dances away from me again.
We must’ve gone halfway across the world in a matter of minutes. The amount of power it must take him to travel that fast boggles my mind, and I clench my jaw to keep the awe from appearing on my features.
Golden sands roll away in every direction, shimmering under a sun likely hotter than any I’d personally known in my mortal life. A warm wind whispers over the dunes, stirring the sands and perpetually rearranging the landscape. In the distance, a city grows up from the desert, ancient and imposing.
“Where are we?” I ask.
Samael is looking down at his feet, at the sands around his boots, the grains shifting over the toes of them. “This is where I landed,” he says. “When I fell.”
As I stare at him, at the handsome lines of his face and the sadness that occasionally flashes within the ruthless depths of his eyes, I am slow to put the story together.
Samael was an archangel before he became a reaper. I knew this from the stories whispered about him. It is part of what makes him so fearsome, so powerful. There are no other reapers I’ve heard of that started out as angels.
So when he says this is where he landed when he fell…
I do not know what to say, and my throat constricts as if it won’t allow words, anyway.
“The sands have long since erased the crater,” he says, still looking down, not directly into my pitiful soul, for once. “But I can still feel it. Can feel the impact I made upon the earth.”
He is silent for long enough that I think I should speak, but still cannot find words.
He looks up at me now, and I forget what words are altogether.
“This was the last time I remember truly feeling something,” he admits. “Before the years of reaping washed the ability away.”
I wonder not for the first time why. Why tell me all this? Why try to intervene in my affairs at all? Just… why?
Before I can ask, he scoops me up in his arms, and once more, we are shooting into the sky, rushing through the air like a rocket. The sensation is no less thrilling the second time, my stomach rising in a way that makes me giddy.
We are traveling through time and space, crossing the world in single bounds, and yet, all I can see is the former angel holding onto me, all I can hear is the rapid pounding somewhere near the space that once housed my heart.
&nbs
p; My brain has barely processed the leap before we are once again upon the ground. I glance around. Now I know exactly where we are.
I pull myself out of his grasp, suddenly defensive and suspicious. “Why are we here?” I snap, taking a step back from him.
He counters my retreat with a step forward.
“Why did you bring me here?” I repeat, voice trembling on the words. I was a fool to have trusted him.
“This is where—,” he begins.
“I know where this is,” I snap, cutting him off.
I could not forget if I tried. This was where I lost my sister, where I traded my immortal soul in order to save my niece. This was the last place I’d been truly human, seven short but endless years ago.
I have not been back here since.
I do not want to be here now.
I don’t know whether to stomp away or take a swing at his face. I opt for the former. Self-preservation and all that.
Samael catches my arm. It shocks me both because it is strange to be near someone who can actually touch me and because I am too angry to think straight.
I yank out of his grasp. “Don’t,” I say, and go to make my escape.
This time, his words are what stop me. “I was here that day,” he says.
My shoulders tighten. I pause in my tracks.
He moves around me, so that I have to look at him. “Seven years ago. When you made the deal that spared your niece and imprisoned you… I was here… I saw what you did.”
I blink at him. Then I blink again.
“You…what?”
“In all my years, I’d never seen anything like it. Never been personally witness to such a selfless and reckless act. I… I’d forgotten people could be so kind…so good.”
I am trapped between the flood of memories from that day and the confession he is making. I see my sister, as I had for the last time. I see the resignation in her hazel eyes, the sure and sudden acknowledgement that she was not long for this world.
I remember how I’d felt the presence of the bloodsuckers before I saw them. How the hair on my arms and neck stood on end. And the shock; the shock of it all.
My heartbeat picks up in pace, same as it had that night.
This was before the human world knew about the existence of supernatural creatures, before I’d known there were such things as vampires and werewolves and witches and reapers.
Back when life made sense.
Being here brings it all back. The pack of vampires, surrounding us. The unholy red orbs that were their eyes. The hissing sound that seemed to be their own language with which to coordinate their attack.
Their hunt.
Hearing my sister scream as they bit viciously into her neck, as they ripped 13-year-old Rosie from her grasp and tore into her as well. The hunter that came in time to save me, but not them.
The demon that followed, with a deal; I could save one of them, either my sister or her child…
And all I had to do was trade my immortal soul.
I wrap an arm around my stomach, wondering if it is possible in this half-existence to throw up. I gag but nothing comes up. This makes sense. There is nothing inside me to come up.
A look of concern comes over Samael’s face, my reaction to the location clearly not one he’d been expecting. Before I can think further, I am in his arms again, and we are rocketing up into the air.
I bury my face in his stupid chest. I hear no beating there.
“My apologies,” he mumbles into my hair, his deep voice little more than a whisper under the roaring of the wind. “It was not my intent to upset you.”
Men, I think to myself as I swallow down nausea. Even the immortal ones are idiots.
This time when we touch down, he does not set me upon my feet, but instead, continues to cradle me. My pride is telling me to demand that he put me down. Some other part of me is telling my pride to shut the fuck up.
I don’t tell him to put me down, though I think I hate him even more now than I did before. We pass beneath pines as tall as skyscrapers, and I take a breath of air that is crisp and green. It is faint, but I can actually smell the air here—wherever this is.
Samael continues to carry me, and I continue not protesting.
“The veil is thinner here,” he explains, mouth close to my ear to be heard over the roar of the wind and the beating of his massive wings.
I can only sigh in response. It is magnificent, this thin-veil air.
We climb higher and higher up the forested mountain side until we reach a tree that stretches so high I can scarcely make out its uppermost branches. It hangs partially out over the edge of a cliff face, and it is to the edge of this cliff that Samael takes me.
He lands with an impact that rattles the earth. Then he sets me down on my bottom with my feet dangling over the side of the mountain, thousands of feet above sea level. As Samael takes the seat beside me, he dangles his muscled legs over the drop as well.
I check my hourglass. Our hour together is almost up. I am not sure whether to be relieved or not. What could he say or do in twenty minutes that could make any difference? Nothing was going to stop me from saving my Rosie. Nothing was going to change my mind.
I stare out at the sea of green beneath us, and I wait for the reaper to speak.
Eventually, he does.
“Do you know what happens to a reaper’s soul when it is shredded?” he asks.
I bite my lip and draw a slow breath. “I guess I just thought it disappears, ceases to exist or something.”
“Some truths hold across the realms and through the planes, and one of those truths is that energy is never lost, created, nor destroyed.”
“The laws of physics always apply?” I ask. “Even to reapers. Is that what you’re saying?”
Samael nods. “Otherwise they would not be the laws of physics, the laws of the universe. But the point is, no, shredding does not mean the soul ceases to exist. Not really…” He chuckles lowly, without humor. “Cessation would be a mercy.”
Now I see where this is going.
“There is a void, Cecilia,” he whispers. “So vast and so dark that not even light can escape it. And from this void comes all things that were, are, and ever will be. It’s here your energy will return to, here where your soul will be dismantled into its most basic elements, stored, and repurposed into something not at all resembling what it once was. It will be millennia before it emerges from the void again. And then its evolution must begin anew.”
He is trying to scare me.
He is doing a good job.
“And for what?” he asks. “Temporary gratification. Mortals think about temporary gratification. Humans think about it. You are a reaper now, and reapers think about the Balance, first and foremost.”
I make a noise in my throat. “Reapers don’t think at all,” I counter. “We don’t think. We don’t feel. We don’t anything. This void you speak of doesn’t sound like that much of a leap from what I already am.”
Anger mingles now with my fear. I continue, “And as for temporary gratification, I do not look at saving the lives of my niece and her child ‘temporary gratification.’ I call it love. But for all your wisdom, you clearly know nothing about that.”
I see anger flare over his striking features as well as he turns toward me, so close that I could lean in and brush his lips with my own…
Or punch him in his stupid face.
“You’re wrong about the void,” he says. “It is worse than being a reaper. It is worse than anything, because it truly is nothingness. You think you know emptiness, young one, but you do not. You haven’t a clue.”
“I am not a damn child,” I snap. “And if I am, stop looking at me like you want to eat me up.”
I am smug in this response for a half heartbeat before he leans in and says, softly, “But what if I do? What if I do want to ‘eat you up’? What if I want to eat you up until you scream?”
Heat swirls low in my belly. It has been so long th
at it takes me a hot ass second to remember what the feeling is.
Now the realization makes heat flood my face. One side of Samael’s mouth pulls up as if he knows exactly what I am thinking.
Eat me up until I scream.
Did he really just say that?
He leans closer. Closer still, until I am unaware of anything in the world save for his proximity.
His arm slips around my waist, and I feel myself melt into him. My eyes fall shut as he brings his mouth close enough to mine to kiss.
He stops a breath away. “Time’s up,” he says.
There is a jump, a skip as if over the rocks of time. When I open my eyes, I am once again standing outside of my niece’s house, in the exact spot where the reaper found me an hour before.
And Samael is no where to be seen.
11
7:00 p.m.
That’s because it’s time.
The hourglass hanging above Rose’s head confirms it.
The sands therein are close to depleting. Whatever is going to happen to my dear niece, it is going to happen soon—in the next handful of minutes.
I wet my lips, my mouth suddenly dry, stomach nervous. I have felt so many emotions and sensations on this day that I feel simultaneously wired and exhausted. My teeth are set on edge. One hand is clenched into a tight fist around the rod of my scythe. My other hand toys with the elixir I purchased from the Abbah.
The front door of the house opens, and out steps Rose. The setting sun kisses her face as she crosses the porch and bounds happily down the steps. The oblivious peace in her expression coupled with the dwindling sands of the hourglass over her head makes my heart hurt.
Birds call out and summer bugs sing as Rose approaches the mailbox at the end of the drive. When she reaches it, she opens it and peers inside.
I glance up and down the street, expecting to see a car or truck barreling her way, but all is quiet. The sands in her hourglass are so few now, and I don’t breathe for Gods know how long because I don’t need to do so and I forget. My darling Rose has a matter of seconds.