by ID Johnson
“I mean, I have some things I’d like to talk to you about, and I don’t really think work is the best place for it.”
Her eyebrows shot up, and she could see his face morph, as if he wasn’t even sure what he’d just said.
“Not… I’m not… it doesn’t have to be a date. I just… wanted to get to know you better.”
Ru began to giggle. She couldn’t even imagine someone like Cutter asking her out, and now he was doing such an abysmal job of asking her—whatever he was asking her—she wasn’t sure what to say. “Uh, yeah. Of course,” Ru replied, nodding her head. “I don’t usually date coworkers, but then, until now they’ve pretty much all been women.” They both laughed at that. “But… I mean dinner and talking? Sure. I can do that. That sounds… good.” Now she was the one who sounded like a moron. She decided to close her mouth.
“Great,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief. “I’ll call you in the morning and you can tell me what time and your address, okay?”
“Sure,” she replied. “Sounds good.”
“All right. Well, have a good night.” Cutter smiled at her, took two steps backward, spun, and headed out the door toward his own classroom as Ru called out that she hoped he had a nice evening, too.
Turning back to her desk, she couldn’t help but smile. No, it definitely wasn’t a date, but the idea of seeing Cutter outside of work, of spending the evening with him, was more than a little exciting.
“I thought you were leaving,” Candice said, walking back into the classroom.
Ru picked up her purse. “I am,” she replied.
“What is up with your face?” Candice stopped a foot away from her. “You look… happier than usual.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ru replied, pulling her keys out of her purse and picking up her lunchbox and a few other items off of her desk that needed to go home with her.
“Yes, you do,” Candice insisted. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Ru couldn’t hide her excitement, even though she was really trying.
“Is something going on with you and Cutter?” Candice’s voice was a sharp whisper, but Ru couldn’t help but shush her. His door was open, and so was hers. “Tell me everything!”
“No,” Ru replied, taking her friend by the arms. “He just asked me to have dinner with him tomorrow—to talk about a few things. It’s not a date or anything.”
“Oh, my God!” Candice squealed, and once again Ru found herself telling her friend to be quiet. “Seriously! Oh, I am so jealous of you right now!”
“It’s nothing,” Ru insisted. “Really, it’s not.”
“When? Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” Ru admitted. “He said he’d call me tomorrow.”
“Well, I am definitely coming over to help you get ready for this. Girl, this could make or break you. He is totally hot, and you’ve got to rein him in.”
“You are ridiculous,” Ru replied, shaking her head. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It will be. When he falls in love with you.”
“All right, girl. I’ve got to go.”
“No, you don’t. You think I can’t tell when you’re lying to me?” Candice stood in front of her, her arms crossed.
“Well, I needed to get you out of here so he could finish asking me.” Ru was staring at her with wide eyes.
“Point taken,” Candice replied. “Okay. My room is a mess. I have to go clean it up before I can go.” She looked around Ru’s classroom. “Seriously, you have the best kids. It’s not fair.”
“I know,” Ru replied, following Candice to the door. “It’s because God loves me more than He loves you.”
“He must. Or Mrs. Long does, anyway. Talk to you tomorrow.” Candice stepped into her classroom, and Ru could see even from the hallway she wasn’t kidding; it was a mess.
“Take care,” Ru replied. She pondered the idea of sticking her head into Cutter’s classroom before she went out the door, but she’d already told him goodbye, and she didn’t want to give him a chance to change his mind. Despite Candice’s opinion, Ru knew this was not a date. She still wanted to have the opportunity to spend some time with him away from school and didn’t see the point in making herself seem any odder than she already was.
She walked out the door and her feet froze in place. Her car was not where she had parked it that morning. Rather than being parked in the first row, right next to the door, it was in the second row, four or five spots away. She looked down at the keys in her hand, back at her car, and then at the now unoccupied spot she was certain she’d parked in that morning. Before she could even think about what she was doing, she used her key card to re-access the building and flew down the hallway the few steps to Cutter’s classroom. His door was still open, and she rushed in, screeching to a halt in front of his desk.
“Hey, Ru. What’s up?” he asked. He had his phone in his hand and looked completely relaxed. “Something wrong?”
“How did you do that?” she asked. “That’s… impossible.”
“Do what?” he asked, setting his phone aside.
“Move my car.” She knew she was staring at him like he was an alien or some sort of a super powered freak, but she didn’t care at this point. She’d had suspicions all along that there was something… off about him. Fixing a copier or a cell phone was one thing, but this was a whole new level.
“What do you mean?” Cutter asked, leaning back in his chair and bringing his foot up to rest on his opposite knee. “I just… moved it. Like I said I would.”
“But I had the keys!” She raised them up for him to see.
“No, you didn’t,” Cutter replied, nonchalantly. “You gave them to me. In the hallway.”
“No, I didn’t.” What in the world? How could he even say that? “I had them in the meeting. I took my purse with me so I could try and find my lip gloss, and I saw them in my bag and thought it was too bad that you wouldn’t be able to move my car. I know I had them with me. The whole time.”
“Ru, I don’t know what you think you saw in your bag, but I had your keys. How else could I have moved your car?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, crossing her arms. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
He chuckled. “I think you’re tired.”
“I think you’re….” She stopped herself. She had no idea what he could be or how she had intended to finish that sentence. And since she’d been called a freak so many times for blowing up small appliances and starting electrical fires, she didn’t want to speak too soon. “I know I had my keys.”
“Okay,” he shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, then.”
“Tell me you unlocked my car and started it without my keys.”
“How about we talk about this tomorrow—when there aren’t a bunch of our coworkers wandering around?” He looked at the door over her shoulder, and the sound of footsteps alerted her that there was at least one other teacher nearby.
With a sigh, Ru said, “Fine. But tell me I’m not crazy.”
Cutter smiled at her. “You’re not crazy, Ru. And I have a simple explanation for it, I promise. You’ll just have to wait until tomorrow. Okay?”
She nodded her head, still very unsure of what in the world might be going on. Spinning on her heel, she headed for the door, feeling a bit like a robot. Tomorrow evening couldn’t come soon enough. She needed to know Cutter’s secret; something told her once he revealed it to her, nothing would ever be the same.
As Ru remote started her car and unlocked it, she checked to make sure that it was fine—which it was. No signs of forced entry, not even a scratch. She slipped inside and stuck the key into the ignition. It turned over with no problem. Sitting in the car for a moment, she contemplated what Cutter had just said. Maybe they really were more alike than she’d ever even realized. Was he able to use whatever power she’d often felt coursing through her veins to start her car?
“That’s ridiculous,�
�� Ru muttered, dropping her bags on the passenger seat and shifting into drive. She put her seatbelt on. “There must be a logical explanation.” As she began to pull out of her parking spot, she felt the logical world beginning to fade away. Maybe she’d been looking at things all wrong her entire life, and she wasn’t as alone as she thought she was.
Cutter made sure Ru was out of the building before he switched from texting and gave Rider a call. As the phone was ringing, he stood and walked to his door, closing it, just in case anyone was listening in. Rider answered on the second ring. “What’s going on? How did it go?”
“Well, the good news is, she agreed to go out with me tomorrow.”
“Oh, you’ve turned it into a date then have you?” Rider teased.
“No, not exactly,” Cutter replied, sitting back down. Not that he would mind dating Ru, though her comment on not dating coworkers was about to be taken to a whole ‘nother level. “But something else happened you need to know about.”
“Yeah, I saw your text.”
When Ru had walked in, he’d been in the process of trying to explain to Rider what had happened with the car. There was a distinct possibility he had taken things too far too quickly. “I had the opportunity to give her a bit of a clue, just to see how she’d react.”
“What did you do? Levitate? Set something on fire? Cause a blackout?”
Cutter chuckled. “No, nothing that drastic. I moved her car. Without the keys.”
“You moved her car—like you floated it somewhere?”
“No, no,” Cutter replied, quickly cutting him off. “I mean, I was supposed to drive it to a new parking spot, but I didn’t have the keys, so I improvised.”
“You started her car without the keys?” Rider clarified.
“Yes, and unlocked it.”
“And… how did she react to this?”
“She freaked out a little.” Cutter had to be honest with his cousin. “And I guess I can’t blame her.”
“I’d say not. Well, did you get her calmed down?”
“I’m not sure. At first, I tried to convince her that I did have the keys, but she’s too smart to fall for that.”
“Oh, good. We’re not dealing with a complete moron then. Did you really think she wouldn’t know if she gave you her keys?” Rider asked doubtfully.
Cutter ran his hand through his hair. “No, not exactly. I mean, we were in the hallway when I said I’d move it, and she was in a hurry to get to a meeting, so I thought I might be able to convince her that she’d given them to me. But I didn’t try to actually convince her convince her.”
“I should say not. The last thing we need is for her to think we are playing mind tricks on her.”
Knowing the risk of doing so was what had convinced Cutter not to try in the first place. They needed Ru to trust them, and actually using his powers to sway her mind wouldn’t help with that. “So… I told her I’d explain it to her tomorrow.”
“Well, I wanna be in the next booth at that Applebee’s. You’re gonna have to light the place up to get her to believe you.”
Cutter had considered where he should take her to have the type of conversation they needed to have. The idea of being in public wasn’t the best one. “I haven’t quite sorted all of that out yet,” he admitted.
“Whatever you do, we need to get a move on it. Mrs. Delvecchio died two weeks ago, right in Reaper’s Hollow, and then Mr. Sturgeon two blocks away from the school last weekend…. He knows something.”
This wasn’t the first time that Rider had pointed out these facts to him. “I know. That’s why I decided to go ahead and talk to her.”
“Hopefully, Nat will wait a day or two before he strikes again, and maybe by then we’ll have more clues as to what he’s up to.”
“Maybe,” Cutter said, but he doubted it. Even if they talked to Ru tomorrow night, it would take time not only to convince her but to train her. “All right, I have some work to finish up, and then I’ll head home.”
“Okay. Make sure you give all the little kiddies good grades. No sense in starting them off on the wrong foot. You could scar them for life.”
“Talk to you later, Rider.” Cutter hung up, chuckling at his cousin’s recommendations. All of his housemates had their opinions about how Cutter should handle his teaching assignment, and he’d said more than once he’d like to see any one of them take over. Teaching definitely wasn’t easy. He’d known it wouldn’t be going in, but it was even harder than he could’ve possibly imagined. And Ru made it look so easy. It was a shame he was about to rip that life away from her.
Chapter 8
Ru sat on her sofa, her legs extended down the length of it, her laptop open in front of her, with Piper curled up at her feet. Spotify was blaring The Clash from her favorite punk playlist. Most people would be shocked to hear that she listened to this type of music, but it had gotten her through some dark times.
Her keyboard had a very thick, plastic protector on top of it, and the rest of her laptop was not only in the thickest case she could find, she never sat it directly on her lap, always putting a blanket or pillow between herself and the electronic device. So far, she’d only blown up one computer, and that had been years before. Replacing a hairdryer was one thing, but buying a new MacBook Air was another story.
She’d been home for three hours, and most of that time had been spent researching special powers on the Internet. So far, she hadn’t found much reliable information. Other than some guy in Poughkeepsie who claimed he could move objects with his eyes and a few kids playing around with bending metal, for the most part, everything she looked at seemed more than a little fake, and neither of those stories seemed particularly credible. Was it possible that Cutter actually had her keys, and she just didn’t remember it correctly? She doubted it. Ru would never be one to tout her strengths, but she did have a good memory.
Eventually, her search for answers led her to a page that had to do with the occult, a topic Ru had always avoided like the plague. Her mother was very serious when it came to discussions of demons and Satan—one of the kind who wouldn’t let her kids trick-or-treat because she believed it was the devil’s holiday and thousands of children each year were kidnapped on All Hallows’ Eve and sacrificed to the devil. Ru could remember being terrified as a child when there was a lunar eclipse and Liddy Brown insisted the moon would turn to blood, signifying the beginning of The Tribulation.
One particular website she stumbled upon caught her interest. It was a listing of demons, complete with artists’ renderings of what they were supposed to look like, dating back to Biblical times. Most of them were horrific and scary looking. Azrael caught her attention. Some of the pictures showed him as a hideous creature with more than one face and dozens of hands and wings, some as a black-winged angel with a dark face, and others as a glowing Archangel of God. “It is said that Azrael was a helper to God, but then he was cast down, like Lucifer himself, and now he resides in the pits of Hell, still overseeing The Book of the Dead as the Archangel of Death.”
Ru stopped and considered what she’d just read. It all seemed silly to her. How could anyone even know who the angels were and which ones had been cast down from Heaven—if any of that were even true? “The demons are all just fallen angels,” she continued to read aloud, as if Piper were at all interested in what she had to say. “Whether or not our depictions of them are true is impossible to say.” You’ve got that right, she thought to herself.
Piper moved, readjusting on her feet, and Ru continued to scroll down the page. One of the pictures caught her eye, and she stopped. The face she was looking at was male, but he was lovely—perhaps the most symmetrical she’d ever seen, with soft eyes and full lips. There was a haunted look behind his eyes, a sadness, and even though it was just a charcoal drawing, Ru couldn’t help but wonder if the artist had actually seen this face before; it looked so real. She began to read below the drawing. “Thanatos, Death incarnate. One of many demons who walk the Earth searching
for souls to collect. Otherwise known as The Grim Reaper. There are many who fill this role but none so well-suited as the son of Azrael.”
“The son of Azrael?” Ru repeated. Of course, the words “Grim Reaper” had also stood out to her. Living in a town named Reaper’s Hollow, they were all well aware of the legend of the man with the black cloak and the scythe, but Thanatos looked nothing like the bony depictions she’d seen in every other picture of The Grim Reaper she’d ever seen.
“How can Azrael have a child?” she asked. Piper didn’t seem to care either way, so she started another search. It led her to a passage from Genesis that discussed the sons of God reproducing with the daughters of men. The offspring were known as Nephilim, and they were giants who walked the earth, heroes. Whatever became of them, the passage didn’t say. Ru continued to search and found another word—Gibborim—which seemed like another word for Nephilim to her. Ru ran a hand through her hair. Was it possible that Azrael’s child came from one of these unions?
“This is ridiculous,” Ru finally said, closing her laptop. The house went quiet with the fading out of the music, and despite her declaration, she felt a little uneasy. “All this reading about demons and angels is going to my head, Pipe,” she said, setting her laptop on the coffee table and scooping up her cat. Piper cuddled into her arms and began to purr, and Ru leaned backward, adjusting the pillow behind her head with one hand as she did so.
She almost had to laugh at herself for chasing that rabbit so far down the hole. Trying to figure out how Cutter might’ve moved her car without the keys had led her to research about demons, and now she had scared herself. She felt more than a little ridiculous. Despite her upbringing, she’d never really thought any of that stuff was real. Sure, she believed in God, which meant there might be some angels out there somewhere, but for the most part, she believed the earth was basically what you see is what you get—no other realms, no supernatural creatures. While she had to think there was a possibility some people could manipulate their surroundings differently than others—otherwise, how could she account for her own inability to touch electronics without causing problems—she had always assumed there had to be a scientific explanation. “Either that, or I’m just a jinx—cursed, like Liddy always says.” She yawned and adjusted the blanket she had been using to protect her laptop so that it was spread across her lap. She had no idea what time it was, but the long week was beginning to catch up with her, so she closed her eyes.