Never

by K. D. McEntire

  Don't just barge ahead. Think things through, Wendy, she urged herself. Ask the right questions. Slowly, she straightened.

  “Piotr. If we…if we chose a side, which one would you pick?”

  He raised an eyebrow and knelt beside her, laying the cloak on the floor. “A side? What do you mean? What sides are there?”

  “Think about it,” Wendy urged. “The Reapers, right? They're not…well, they're not what they were initially supposed to be anymore. They haven't been for quite some time. The whole point was to reap as many ghosts as they could so a backlog didn't start to build up. But then they started narrowing down the field of who could reap, and then they started killing off the most powerful Reapers, the naturals, because they were scared of them. It's like…it's like a game of telephone!”

  Piotr gave her a quizzical look and Wendy sighed. She loved him a great deal but he missed so much sometimes. “It's not important, okay? My point is that the original message, the original point of the Reapers, has been hugely garbled. And Elise, who tries to keep from reaping at all and instead just uses the spirits, is making it way, way worse!”

  “I understand,” Piotr said, leaning against the wall, “but I do not understand why you speak of choosing sides.”

  “Think about it…why is Sanngriðr poking holes in the Never? There's got to be a reason for it—she's even got Reaper-ish people on her side, like Dr. Kensington. He was working closely with the creature and…oh. OH!” Wendy's hand flew to her mouth. “That son of a bitch!”

  Piotr gave her the quizzical look again. “What is it?”

  “Chel and Jon are naturals. We know they took a Seer up to Alcatraz and fed her to one of those weird holes in the Never to start up the earthquakes…And Dr. Kensington was trying to make Chel and Jon stay at the hospital where he could keep an eye on them. I bet he was planning on…” Wendy stopped, shivering with fear and rage. “I bet he was planning on feeding them to one of those nasty holes, as well. To start a quake or be a body for a creature or something.”

  “They're in the hospital now,” Piotr reminded her, voice tight. “Unconscious.”

  “And easily transferable,” Wendy moaned. “He's already proven that he's okay with giving the go-ahead to fake paperwork! He'd have to be an idiot to miss a chance like that. Sign a few sheets, doll up a couple family members like EMT's…hell, lie and get actual EMT Reapers in on it…and whisk Jon and Chel away on a ‘hospital transfer’ that never reaches the next hospital.” She pressed a hand over her mouth. “They've been in the hospital for over an hour! What if he's doing that right now?”

  “We must hurry faster,” Piotr said grimly, stumbling to his feet and gathering the cloak. “I am with you, whatever you decide, Wendy.”

  Wendy nodded and stood quickly. “Then let's cut him off at the pass. Let's hunt down Sanngriðr and find out from the horse's mouth why she's doing all this, what she wants to stop this madness.” They stepped outside the townhome door. The spirit web forest waved in front of them, thick and full and brimming with stolen life. Beside her, Piotr hugged the cloak to his gut and groaned.

  “She's in the city somewhere,” Wendy said, wrapping an arm around Piotr to help support him. “But where?”

  “I think there,” Piotr said, lifting his head and pointing to a thin spot in the forest canopy. Through the hole in the webs they could see the huge purple-lipped mouth of the hole pulsing and moving, almost as if it would speak. Wendy didn't have to see above the canopy to sense that the hole now filled the sky.

  A sharp Light burst up and outward like a firework. The earth shivered wildly beneath their feet.

  “That,” Wendy said when the tremors had subsided, “is not a good sign.”

  “What, like the end of the world?” Piotr whispered as the sky above the flash of Light peeled open. Creatures from the deepest parts of the space between worlds began falling like hail from the mouth in the sky.

  “We have to close the hole,” Wendy insisted. “How long do we have before those things can start inhabiting normal people?”

  “I do not know.”

  An ambulance careened around the corner in front of them; Wendy jumped back, barely avoiding being flattened.

  “That hole is big enough it's near Nob Hill now,” Wendy muttered, orienting herself on the stoop. “Come on, Piotr. Let's go!”

  They ran. They ran as fast as they could, as far as they could, dodging the zombie-like living who shambled up and down the sidewalks. Spirit webs clung to the living like twisted wires, sucking their life with audible gulps. Wendy and Piotr dodged swerving cars as the drivers, succumbing to the low-hanging webs, spun out and crashed, slamming into walls and trees and nearly running over passersby. The ghosts of the living shouted at one another in tinny voices that hardly penetrated the strange thick-thinness of the Never. Wendy and Piotr moved from healthy spot to weak spot, from solid to the shreds of once what was.

  They ran and ran and ran, Piotr clutching the cloak and his side but never complaining, never asking to stop. Finally, at long last, they caught a taxi heading in the right direction. Wendy shoved Piotr into the passenger seat as the taxi idled, waiting as a speeding trolley zipped past. Wendy flung herself after Piotr into the taxi and crouched in the passenger side as the family of four in the backseat sat perfectly still, the spirit webs clinging to their faces sucking all the joy and life out of them through their eyes. Wendy worried that if she moved the webs would sense her feeble energy and attack her.

  “Hang on,” Wendy whispered to Piotr. “Hang on.”

  Wendy arrived at the foot of the Mark Hopkins to find over a half-dozen Reaper bodies lying on the ground like litter—many of them women she'd spotted earlier in the evening waiting outside as Nana Moses’ body was loaded into the hearse. Several Walkers hovered nearby—more than one had given themselves up to the beasts, as well, and were twice as twisted and vile as before. But some, thankfully, seemed to be merely their normal, rotting selves. Wendy wondered what they thought of the mess their Lady had gotten them all into.

  Knowing Walkers, they didn't care.

  Elise and Sanngriðr were face to face only feet away from one another. Sanngriðr's hands were curled into fists; Elise wiped blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. They'd obviously been having words.

  Elise coughed, blood flecking her lips. “I won't let you do this. The Never isn't yours to play with!”

  “You have no say, old woman,” Sanngriðr sneered. “Your years of torturing the dead for your own gain are almost done. I can see your remaining hours. They hang above your head pendulously, dipping lower and lower as your time runs out.”

  Wendy and Piotr approached. Wendy, feeling as if her gut were burning up, realized that her flesh was as thin as paper, her hair brittle as glass.

  “Piotr,” she whispered. “I'm almost done. I'm dying.”

  “I know,” he said. “I can nearly taste your death approaching. You do not have much time left.”

  “Very poetic,” Elise snapped at Sanngriðr. “Futile, though. You have been the bane of my family for too long. This ends now, you rotten old hag.”

  Elise smiled; her teeth were lined with red. “Go into the—hurk!“

  Elise dropped to her knees, hands going to her gut. There was a fist through her side that flexed open and closed, blood dripping from the creature's fingers and splattering on the floor. The hand wiggled its fingers as if to say hello, and then, suddenly, yanked back through Elise's body with a loud, wet squelch.

  “Damn it!” Wendy cried as Elise, no longer supported by the arm thrust through her belly, slumped to the floor. “Why the hell do you have to be so damn evil, lady? You are not making this decision easy on me, either of you!”

  Sanngriðr ignored Wendy's outburst. “What were you saying, dear?” she asked Elise politely, kneeling down and tilting her head so that they were on the same eye level. “You seem to be at a loss for words. Cat got your tongue? Or just your spleen?”

  The twiste
d-Walker nearest Wendy chuckled, as did the one who'd impaled Elise on its fist. It shook its claw, blood droplets flying and coating Elise in a fine spray.

  “I don't care what you had planned for your family, for this age,” Sanngriðr said, wiping a few of the red droplets off the slightly more intact side of her face. “I have long since tired of this hideous gray land. If I can't escape it, then I will simply have to bring the Never down, and Miðgarðr along with it. Freyja will know her folly soon enough.”

  Sanngriðr reached forward and casually yanked the golden necklace free from Elise's neck. “I'll take that, thank you.”

  “Don't…” Elise moaned. “You don't know what you're doing…that's been in my family for…must protect it…”

  “She thinks Elise was wearing—” Piotr began.

  “I know,” Wendy hissed, hushing him. “I'll talk to her. You…you just stay back, okay?”

  The creature nearest them sniffed and turned their way. It howled, low and long, and Sanngriðr turned, spying Wendy.

  “My, my, my,” she purred, finally acknowledging Wendy. “Look what the cat dragged in. Hello, Wendy. Or should I call you Lightbringer? I prefer Reaper's Bane to be honest—you've done such a good job keeping them busy and on their toes for me while I accomplished my business about town. You've even gone so far as to donate your own kind to the cause.”

  Sanngriðr tilted her head up at the gaping wound in the sky and laughed. “Your sister must be on her way to Alcatraz by now, did you know? Your brother, too. The little Seer we used earlier hardly did anything at all—only let one or two beasties through—but two naturals…well, they'll make such a bang! Maybe one even loud enough to wake the gods.”

  The Lady Walker shook Elise's necklace. “And if not, well, I'll set the alarm. But you don't know what I'm talking about, do you? Oh no, no history or books for the lovely Lightbringer…this girl reaps not by rote but by vote,” she sneered. “You ask the ghosties if they want to go away. How…progressive of you.”

  “Sanngriðr, you're making a big mistake,” Wendy said, trying to appease her, to slow her down enough to get the Lady Walker to drop her guard. “A huge mistake. You don't want to do this.”

  “Did I give you permission to use my name, girl?” sneered the Lady Walker, Sanngriðr, bridling, all lazy humor vanished as she narrowed her eyes at Wendy. “I think you ought to shut your mouth while you still have one to shut. How did you even learn…no. No matter. Perhaps you're not as dumb as you look, after all. Anything is possible, I suppose.”

  “Making with the grandiose threats, huh? Have we reached that part of the fight already?” Wendy said, rolling her eyes. Her hands thrust into her pockets and her fingers brushed the haft of Lily's dull knife. It worked on Reapers…maybe, with luck, it would work on the Lady Walker or the other creatures as well.

  “Listen, lady, I think you're nasty,” Wendy said baldly. “I mean, seriously, seriously gross inside and out. But the fact of the matter is that you're not going to accomplish anything by opening up that wormhole or whatever you've got hanging in the sky. All you're going to do is get every soul in the Never devoured.”

  “That is the whole point, is it not? Isn't that what your Reapers are really supposed to be about? Sending every single soul on? I'm simply speeding up the process by ripping a hole between the worlds.”

  “Every soul,” Wendy stressed. “Including yours. Or do you think all the creatures that come crawling from the depths of nothingness are going to sit pretty and beg for treats the way these two are?” She flicked a glance at the two twisted-Walkers and noticed the discomfiture briefly cross their faces. The creatures inhabiting them were beginning to understand what Wendy was getting at, and they didn't like it.

  Smiling, Sanngriðr jiggled Elise's necklace in front of Wendy's face. “That is why Brísingamen is key to my ambitions. This bauble is my pass from this place, girl. When I use it, when I call Freyja to this gray hellhole that she created, a rift shall open into Fólkvangr and I can slip through. I have spent two millennia here, cut off from my divinity, living as a human might, suffering as a human does…no! No more. It has driven me mad with grief for the host-fields! No, girl, I will go home and nothing you or your pitiful little family can do will stop it.”

  “Sanngriðr,” Wendy said, trying to calm the terrible rage building within the Lady Walker, “then why have you done the things you've done? Why have you stalked the Reapers all these years, hindering them instead of helping them?”

  “Hindering? HINDERING? I WAS HELPING! Every single soul in this place is one soul too many, girl! And you call yourselves Reapers!” Furious, Sanngriðr pounded a fist against her thigh.

  “You don't deserve the name,” she sneered at Wendy. “If a single one of you had done your job, your mandated duty, correctly in the first place, then all of us would have long since entered the Light! But no, oh no. NO! You, little girl, get the idea that a soul must have a choice, that they have to be ready to move on. And that one—” Sanngriðr spat at Elise, “uses the souls for her own selfish gains, to advance her pathetic living existence. That is not the way of the Reaper! You cleave the soul, you set them free. You do not sit down with them and have a drink of vodka!”

  Wendy thought of Frank, most likely waiting at the bar in the Top of the Mark, tossing back shots and watching the bleeding sky with dead, tired eyes. Wendy winced.

  “I tire of this. I tire of all of you,” Sanngriðr said softly, gripping Elise's necklace so that the tendons of her hand creaked and popped. “Your grandmother, your aunt…I hated them and they hated me, but once they understood the history, there was no question of not doing their duty. This one, this would-be matriarch, had them killed for daring question the status quo!”

  “My mother—”

  “Ah, yes, let us speak of Mary, shall we?” Sanngriðr shook her head, glaring at Wendy. “How you of all people managed to topple the White Lady is beyond me. She alone of your cursed clan was able to adequately work the weave and weft of a spiritual connection. Such talent and skill…snipped close by her pathetic excuse for a daughter.”

  Wendy flinched. She'd stopped her mother from destroying the thirteen kidnapped Lost and then accidentally sent them into the Light herself. The White Lady and all her attending Walkers had vanished in a flash of Light, a blaze so hot it had sent everyone in the room on…except for Piotr.

  Wait a moment.

  Overwhelmed, Wendy slumped to the ground. How could she have been so stupid? The problem had been staring her in the face for hours now and it wasn't until now—now, watching Elise bleed out—that the answer had come.

  “You are…were…a Reaper,” Wendy said, pondering her words carefully. “Are you still? Can you still, uh, separate a soul from its body? Can you still, um, ‘work the weave and weft’ of a spirit's connection to its shell?”

  “Are you really flame-haired beneath that terrible dye?” mocked Sanngriðr coldly. “Are you truly female? Manipulating the mysteries of the spirit is not what I do, idiot girl, it is what I am. I could no more turn off the inner workings of my very nature than this pathetic woman,” Sanngriðr kicked Elise, “could smother her greed.”

  Wendy licked her lips nervously. She couldn't believe that she was going to ask this.

  “I think…I think maybe you don't have to…” Wendy cringed, “maybe you don't have to be this extreme. Destroying both worlds, I mean. Putting the living lands at risk so you can go home. I know you're angry, I know you want everyone…everyone to suffer the way you have but…I think we can help one another.”

  “I sincerely doubt that,” Sanngriðr said. “I can't imagine what you could offer that I need.”

  Wendy swallowed thickly. “Well, for starters…how about I end the world?”

  Sanngriðr blinked in surprise. Wendy was mollified to realize that she'd startled the Lady Walker into speechlessness.

  “Let me explain,” Wendy rushed to say. Her best chance of getting Sanngriðr to go along with the half-
reasoned plan—she was still working it out—was to keep talking before Sanngriðr could get a word in edgewise. “This isn't a trick.”

  She sneered. “An auspicious beginning, for certain.”

  “Look…I'm not…” Wendy glanced at her feet. “I'm not Elise, okay? We have to see eye to eye on that before we can go any further. Yeah, I want spirits to want to go into the Light, rather than just shoving them in without the go-ahead, but I'm not withholding the Light from them if they ask. I'm not making them do stuff for me. I'm just…I'm just putting myself in their shoes. There's no penance to it.”

  “You understand so little about the Light, girl,” Sanngriðr sighed. “Once they get close enough to the Light, any fears or trepidations a soul has melts away. They are eager to enter the Light. It is where they are supposed to go.”

  “I know that now,” Wendy said, nettled at Sanngriðr's tone. “Even the most sane of spirits has a self-destructive streak, Sanngriðr.”

  “Again, you use my name,” she said and there was steel beneath the words. Sharp steel. “I warn you, girl, such careless words will—”

  “Yeah, yeah, you'll be pissed at me,” Wendy said, making a zip-it motion to Sanngriðr. “My plan's simple, okay? I want to blow up the Never.”

  Sanngriðr groaned. “I should have known that you were speaking nothing but lies, girl. Either that or you are a naïve fool. The Never cannot be ‘blown up.’ It is as eternal as blasted Freyja. It is endless and heartless as the Lady herself!”

  “Oh really?” Wendy said. “Because not a month ago I destroyed every spirit in Palace Hotel in one fell swoop. There's nothing of the Palace left in the Never. It's all gone. Just a blank space the webs have taken over.”

  Sanngriðr raised an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon? How—”

  “I'm a natural, you know that,” Wendy said. “One who, as you yourself noted, is burning up.” She held up a nearly transparent hand. “There's not much of me left, to be honest. I'm crispy fried.”