Rain Dance (Sunshine & Scythes Book 1)

by D. N. Erikson

  Despite being a classic, it had already made my never-in-an-infinite-lifetime reading list. Which, when you dealt with magical creatures, was a real possibility. The immortality thing—not reading The Lord of the Flies. Leave it to two-thousand year-old vampires to shit all over good classics. Why couldn’t he have picked the type of crap that had made me drop out of high school, like The Scarlet Letter? Not even the try-hard study bees enjoyed that Puritan mess.

  I dug my Reaper’s Switch from my pocket and tightened my grip on the broken handle. A futile gesture if there ever was one, but it made me feel better. Like I had a little chance—like when you buy a Powerball ticket, and start dreaming of all the yachts you’re going to buy. Never going to happen, but hope is a powerful drug. Slightly emboldened, I banged against the solid doors. My knuckles barely made a sound against the stony wood. No answer came, so I waited, feeling smaller and more inconsequential by the second. My pulse rose in my ears, and the little voice in my head returned to whisper run, run, run. But I’d already crossed the Rubicon.

  A voice finally came from the office, its icy edge well-cultivated from years of pillaging.

  “Come in, Eden Hunter.”

  It’s said that people can’t get enough of hearing their own name. But that was the second time that night when hearing it had been a markedly unpleasant experience. The solid door opened on its own, controlled by an invisible mechanism. I slipped inside, finding myself in the same room I’d visited every Friday for the past four years. As always, Aldric’s office was utilitarian and spartan. Behind the desk, I could see his close cropped black hair and the hint of a well-maintained beard. He’d been turned as a young man, so his appearance offered no hint of his true age—other than the titanic, room-enveloping presence of his long-lived soul. The effect was so overwhelming that I suspected everyone could sense it, even if they didn’t know exactly how to describe it. They might refer to it as an aura, or some sort of je ne sais quoi kind of powerful charisma.

  He didn’t turn to greet me, but I could feel his hawkish green eyes studying my reflection in the immaculate window pane. I could also see my face wrought with fear, lip trembling, legs about to collapse beneath me. Guess I wasn’t ready to die again. Maybe I should’ve listened to that little whisper.

  Oh, well. Too damn late now.

  “If it isn’t my favorite Reaper.” A smooth hand came up. “Please, sit.”

  “You’re, like, my third favorite vampire.” I looked at the leather executive chairs like they’d been plucked from a dumpster fire. “I’ll stand if it’s all the same to you.”

  “I should have chosen someone more pliable for this job opening.” He snapped his fingers, which had no effect on me. I’d seen humans willing to throw themselves off high-rises from after such a gesture. Training at Black Sea Holdings was…a little different, let’s say. “One of my few regrets.”

  “I believe the way you described me was a diamond in the rough.” Or something to that effect. My initiation into the supernatural world had been fraught with fear and confusion. Being suddenly revived from the dead will do that.

  “Sometimes diamonds are merely cubic zirconia. Or illusory glimmers in the dirt.” Aldric sighed, his lean muscles tensing beneath his sharp suit. My heart beat a little faster. If he so chose, he could rip my throat out and feed it to me before I even realized his chair was empty. But he remained seated in restrained annoyance.

  “Is that why you tried to kill me?”

  He rubbed his chin and ignored my question. “There is no going back, as the people of this country say. There is only forward.”

  “You sure we’re really a part of America?” Not that I needed to be correcting him, but I’d never considered Atheas an American territory. Maybe, after all these years, my mother’s rules and pleas to “be proper” had rubbed off on me. That was almost more horrifying than the thought of my voice box lying in bloody tatters on the ground.

  “The FBI seems to believe they have some jurisdiction in my territory.” Aldric spun around slowly in his chair, the bearings creaking. His eyes carried the passage of two thousand years, and even though I was immune to any of his vampiric tricks, they still were powerful enough to make me almost freeze in place. His entire body was lean and sharp like a well-tempered blade, down to his high cheekbones and strong chin. It wasn’t the angularity that made him ugly. If I didn’t know better, I could share a drink with him at a bar. But once the curtain came up and the truth was out there, blood dripped from all those sharp angles. You could see death sticking to his well-tailored custom suit, branded upon each smooth pocket of skin.

  “Oh?” I managed to say, without anything clever pre-prepared.

  “But truth be told, I could not care what they think at all.”

  That was a lie, and a bad one. Their presence clearly ate away at him. I could practically see his blood steaming and simmering beneath his skin. This was one of the last places on Earth run and operated by a single man. An island kingdom with its vampire warlord, a place, that due to weather features and vagaries of science that no one understood, was invisible from the air and impossible to find without a knowledgeable navigator. Some might call that magic, others a strange quirk of chemistry and physics. But the reality remained the same, either way: no maps to Atheas existed, and in a world covered in satellites and selfies, it lay uncharted and left to its own devices some hundred miles south of Hawaii.

  Which begged the question: how the hell had the FBI found it?

  But that wasn’t really why I had come.

  I took a step toward his desk, and Aldric raised his hand.

  “What happened to your Reaper’s Switch?”

  I glanced at the broken handle. “You know what happened.”

  “Give it here.” He held out a smooth hand, the perfect cuff of his collared shirt peeking out from beneath the imported fabric of his jacket. I hesitated and glared. “Or I can take it from you.”

  “You wouldn’t—” But it was out of my hands and in his before I could finish my sentence. His Italian loafers were propped upon his desk as he tossed the blade back and forth.

  “You should treat your gifts better.” He caught the knife with a final flourish and gave me an icy stare. “Otherwise, those who spent a lot of time and money on them might get the wrong impression.”

  “Is that why you tried to kill me? Impressions?”

  “Wake up calls are not the same as assassinations, Eden.” Aldric stroked his beard and pushed an open manila folder toward me with his shoe. The starry glow of the night and 3 AM lights of the city below were enough to read what was inside. “Although, I suppose, the odds were not in your favor.”

  “You said I was the only one.” I stared at the document from what felt like a safe distance. It looked like it had come from a CIA typewriter circa-1960. Written by one of Moreland’s goons, no doubt. Like the best criminal masterminds, Aldric had a network of spies and informants running around the island that could challenge the best intelligence agencies. Some of them took their clandestine approach very seriously.

  It would seem they had discovered some troubling news.

  “And yet, this news leaves me with my—is it, they say, with one’s hands tied?”

  “Close enough,” I said. “You still get your souls either way. What do you care?”

  “Because.” Aldric’s expensive shoes slid slowly off the desk, which was far more terrifying a gesture than slamming his fist or putting a knife to my throat. “It means that a competitor has arrived.”

  And warlords didn’t do competitors. Souls were like gold—a currency valued for both their relative rarity and myriad of uses. Other than a medium of exchange, they could be used to create magical items, grant someone powers—like my lantern sigil—who otherwise had none, and a host of other useful things. This was why Aldric had gone to such great lengths to acquire a Reaper of his own: my presence on the island gave him a steady flow of the most valuable commodity in the supernatural world.
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br />   If someone else had their very own Reaper, that meant his stranglehold on that particular black market revenue stream was deteriorating. No muy bueno. The dark, massive room suddenly felt very small indeed, like everything was crumbling around me. I’d thought I was the only Reaper on the island. But, apparently, I was wrong.

  Speaking of competition, I had an issue of my own. Because, judging from the estimate harvesting totals, I was now the second-best Reaper on Atheas. Naturally, this was an unacceptable level of performance. Hence why I had received the vampire warlord equivalent of being summoned to the boss’s office.

  “Wouldn’t hiring two assassins to kill your own Reaper strengthen your competition?” I said, closing the folder and then taking a step back.

  This got Aldric’s attention. His head cocked sharply, like a predator listening to something it didn’t like. “The wolf was the only one.”

  “Then explain why someone was firing off a six shooter in front of my house,” I said.

  Aldric looked at me sharply. “Whoever that was, he was not doing my bidding.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

  “What you believe changes nothing.” Aldric’s muscles relaxed, and he leaned back in his executive chair. “You should be more concerned about your professional performance, and how you might rectify it in the future.”

  I rubbed my soggy sneaker against the slick floor and waited for the words to come—the silver-tongued phrase that would make this all okay. But I could sense, from the way Aldric had chosen to impart his little lesson on performance—and how his eyes were cutting into me from across the heavy desk—that nothing I could say would change his mind.

  So I just said, “What do you want me to do?”

  “That’s simple, Eden.” Here, a normal person might’ve smiled—maliciously, perhaps, to show their dominance, or with a sneer, to indicate that incompetence wouldn’t be tolerated. But Aldric didn’t need to resort to petty displays of power. His expression remained etched in stone: cold and dominant. “Seven souls a week.”

  I stifled the urge to say shit. Five had been hard enough. Creatures have to die for you to harvest their souls. Well, that wasn’t technically true. You could take them from the living, if you wanted to moonlight as a murderer. Since I wasn’t a serial killer, that meant I had to keep on the pulse of every dead thing across this massive floating land mass.

  “Okay,” I said, seeing no other option.

  “And you must remove your competition.”

  “Remove as in what?” I asked.

  Aldric didn’t respond. Oh, Lucille would love that. Not one, but two murders on my hands. That would go over real smoothly.

  “You wouldn’t perhaps know who this other Reaper might be?”

  “I trust you’ll be resourceful,” Aldric said. “After returning from the dead, such a task should be simple.”

  His opinion of simple and mine were apparently different. I waited for him to elaborate—maybe give me any intel beyond there’s someone who’s doing a better job at this than you and I do not approve of this. But I must’ve been wishing for too much, because he simply stared back in stony silence. After a moment, I turned to leave and he cleared his throat.

  “Forgetting something?”

  “What?” I glanced back, just in time to see the open Reaper’s Switch hurtling through the air. I barely caught it before it would have cleaved off my ear. The handle was wrapped in thick tape.

  “Duct tape is one of the few signs of progress in this modern world,” Aldric said, expression not changing. “Don’t waste this gift, Eden.”

  I looked at the knife and then retracted the blade, swallowing hard. His “gift” wasn’t the slap-dash fix for the Reaper’s Switch.

  Aldric meant my second chance, which, in my book, wasn’t really much of a second chance at all.

  4

  Well, wonderful. I had been almost killed for being outperformed by a fellow Reaper who, until ten minutes ago, I hadn’t even known existed. That seemed unfair, but then again, fairness was for second graders. The real world was just relentless buckets of ice water. If you were lucky, whoever was tossing them in your face didn’t leave the ice pick inside.

  I put the bike back underneath its floral camouflage and headed back to the beach. It’d been a couple hours since I’d heard the gunshots, so if the killer was still lurking around, that made him an idiot. Aldric had claimed that the shooter wasn’t his, but I remained skeptical. Then again, I might not have trusted my employer, but there wasn’t much reason to lie. If he’d wanted me dead, he could’ve killed me in the penthouse office. No one would have ever found my body. One old-school warning was enough for a warlord to make his point.

  After passing the spot on the dark beach where I’d killed the wolf—finding no trace of our struggle beyond a few raggedy footprints—I headed back to the villa. My bones ached, and I felt a tremendous weariness seeping through every sinew of my being. Where had this fatigue been a few hours before, when I’d been tossing on the couch? I guess the fact that it hadn’t come on then was a minor blessing: if I’d been asleep, it would have been me floating in the South Pacific, instead of my furry would-be assassin.

  With some trepidation, I approached my villa. While the word villa probably conjures up ostentatious overtones of jet-setting millionaires drinking champagne in their pastel polo shirts, I worked hard to buck such clichés. No one had visited me in four years, and I aimed to keep it that way. The last person who had been inside other than me had been the real estate agent.

  And that wolf. But he hadn’t been on the guest list.

  In any event, the place was the only residence around for a couple miles, enjoying its own little pocket of idyllic isolation on the southwest tip of the island. If anyone had ever come out to visit, they’d probably have wondered how a twenty-eight year bought a spread like this, all in cash. The answer was simple: crime did pay. Well. Until I died. But, when you get a second bite of the apple, you also can get someone to retrieve your rainy day fund.

  Aldric also paid me well, but I gave his blood money to the local food bank. Ripping off scamming Wall Street assholes and narcissistic Silicon Valley sociopaths had a certain Robin Hood appeal, but spending his money made me feel ill. Besides, I had about three million in cash, gold and bearer bonds stashed in a weather-proof steel box in the nearby jungle, in case of emergency.

  I heard nothing but the normal chatter of the jungle at nighttime as I headed up the winding marble staircase. The villa’s exterior drew on no specific school of influence, as if the designer had simply flipped through a few ancient architectural books for inspiration and then decided to create his own modern Greco-Roman spread. Moonlight glinted off the moss dappled red tiled roof and orchid-covered stucco exterior, accenting the modern silver trim on the doorknobs and window frames. Little touches like those brought classical elegance into the 21st century. The windows, too, were wide and sweeping, a fact I was now thankful for, having been forced to unceremoniously flee through one of them.

  I got to the top of the stairs and stared ruefully at the wreckage of the thick oak doors. I really wanted to head inside and flop down face-first on the couch. But the unsolved mystery of who had been shooting—and screaming—next to the villa overrode any weariness or prudence. I didn’t know what I’d find—a body, blood, or just a few shell casings.

  So I wound my way back down the staircase and headed toward the shoreline. I needn’t have looked far to get my answer. There was a body was next to the bushes, right near the window from where I’d leapt out. I shoved my hand into my still damp jeans, touching the Reaper’s Switch just in case. But this guy wasn’t getting up any time soon.

  The two bullets in the back of his head would make sure of that. He was lying face down in the sandy grass, so I couldn’t tell much more. There was a small burn that looked like an ink stain or a powder burn on his right arm. Maybe from the gun’s hot barrel pressing against his skin. The man was young, by
the color of his hair and how thick it was. The clothes were nice, but he kind of looked like someone else had dressed him—a sales associate at an expensive chain, maybe. I surveyed the surrounding area, spying six spent casings in the pre-dawn darkness. I nudged one with my foot. It looked like a .45, but I couldn’t be sure given the low visibility.

  A thought suddenly pierced my fatigued mind like a flaming arrow: this body was right next to my house. That was not good. Not good at all. The opposite of good. As in, I would have a lot of people up in my shit if they found this dead guy taking a permanent dirt nap in my bushes.

  So I did the only practical thing I could think of, rattled and exhausted as I was: I reached down and tugged on his damp collared shirt to start pulling him toward the ocean. The body shifted slightly, and something metallic let out a ting as it slipped out of his pockets and bounced against the rocks. It glowed in the darkness, catching my eye.

  A gold bar.

  I was caught between inspecting the precious metal further and dragging the body into the ocean, but before I could make up my mind, I heard shouts coming from up the beach, accompanied by the kind of flashing lights that meant only one thing.

  Cops.

  “Damnit.” I let go of the shirt and darted back around the front of the house, keeping low as I made my way up the stairs. After skipping over the wreckage that was now my door, I frantically searched through the large kitchen, which was empty and undisturbed. I guess the killer hadn’t seen fit to rummage through my stuff while I was away. A single bottle of whiskey and a coffee pot decorated the granite countertops—the only two things a budding Reaper needed to make it through her day. Buried in the recesses of one of the cabinets, I found a dusty trash bag. With no small degree of urgency, I rushed back to the entrance. I could see the lights crisscrossing up the black sand beach, now. The cops had searchlights to go with their more traditional red-and-blues. This was serious. Someone had called in a crime. But seeing as how I was the only one out here, I had to wonder who that might’ve been. Maybe Aldric was testing me again. But I think he’d gotten his money’s worth out of his dead werewolf assassin. I was safe from his trials for at least a few days—until my fellow Reaper made me look bad again.