I looked down to see the wind whipping up small clouds of sand on the beach a few hundred feet below. I drew Ambriel in closely and kissed her back.
“Maybe you’re right. I’ll do my best.”
Ambriel beamed at me. “Of course, you will. And I will be here to help, anytime you need me.”
The angel carried me high above the rooftops of Dartmouth and across the harbour. She deposited me in Mrs. Gillings’ backyard. A few feet of snow had fallen since Devil’s Island and I could see Sparks, Charlotte and Mrs. Gillings decorating a Christmas tree through the big window at that back of the house.
“Merry Christmas, Ambriel,” I said with a bit of hope in my voice. “Will you come inside for some eggnog? Do angels even drink eggnog?”
The angel waved her hand in front of her and suddenly she no longer looked like an angel. It was Amy. Beautiful Amy as she was before Jael. Before that terrible day on the beach.
“Will this do?” she asked through a wide grin.
I drew her close once more and squeezed. “Yeah, Ambriel. That’ll do nicely.”
She kissed my forehead and took my hand. “Merry Christmas, Tim Reaper. Let’s go get some eggnog.”
25
It opened its eyes for the very first time and drew in a breath. It coughed a ball of phlegm and then vomited across its chest; it had never breathed before. It never tasted the air or heard the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. As it lifted itself off the mortician’s slab it very nearly lost its grip and came close to falling on the floor.
It would take some time to become acquainted with its new functions.
It looked around the sterile room to see a chubby man wearing a lab coat standing next to a woman with a commanding presence. And next to her was a very large man wearing sunglasses and a suit. It had seen large men through the ages. Giant soldiers who would cut through an advancing army with a spear or a sword. Giant soldiers all died just like regular ones. It had seen all manner of death through the ages and soon it would become the hand of death for the woman standing next to the giant man. It was she who managed to call out to the darkness. A name it had heard before. A name they had all heard before over the past one hundred years. The Abomination. The one ejected from the order.
It looked at its hands as it stood on wobbly legs. It had never used human hands before and it marvelled at how each finger moved independently. How its thumbs might grasp something with a smooth handle. Something with a sharp blade. Something.
It tripped and stumbled across the floor, crashing into a cart containing used surgical instruments. It launched at the chubby man in the white coat, slashing his face and hands. Bright splashes of red flew in the air each time the razor-sharp blade came in contact with flesh.
This felt good.
This felt right.
“Stop!” the woman ordered. It dropped the blade onto the floor and stepped away from the bleeding man.
She crossed the floor with a casual confidence that it had seen in the great men and women of the past. The leaders. The kings and queens of old.
They all died. Their souls were escorted away by those of his kind. That was the way of life and death.
“I-I am …” it said shakily. “A death-dealer?”
“Yes,” the woman placed two hands on his shoulders and massaged gently. “You are many things and now you will lay with me.”
She pushed the newborn reaper in human skin onto the floor and hiked up her skirt. She tore off her silk blouse revealing a pair of perfect cream-coloured breasts that bounced joyfully as she rode her creation. His seed would fill her womb with … something. A creature with enough power to kill someone who was very hard to kill.
She rode him hard and Barbie Ross secretly relished the fact that it was a Bishop that she was fucking.
Or he used to be a Bishop before he died. Now it was a grim reaper she’d managed to procure by means of a black spell that only a minion from the dark place would know. A newly minted minion with ambition and a strong desire for payback.
It was the easiest thing in the world for a fallen angel named Jael to do. Offer to extend a mortal’s life in exchange for some short-term possession. And so, it was that Jael had tempted the sinful reverend by darkening her dreams with visions of her ultimate fate once a death-dealer came for her. A flash-glimpse into an eternity of torments. A dark room. Sulphur. Shit and corruption. Barbie Ross would stay alone and in the dark for all time. More than enough to push her into making a deal with the darkness.
She motioned to her chauffeur who crossed the floor and pulled out a golden dagger. He handed it to his naked employer trying to ignore the erection in his pants. She noticed and licked her lips with anticipation as she drove the dagger into her creation’s skull. It exploded with energy beneath her and she felt it fill her with its seed.
The spectral mass that is the essence of all death dealers drifted out of the body of the Bishop. As she climbed off the corpse she reached for her chauffeur’s groin and squeezed.
“You’re next,” Jael said, her full lips arching into a crooked smile. “And I’m so hungry.”
Bonus Material
Don't Mess with Jia Song
Eighteen Years Ago …
The toddler stared hard at the thing in front of her playpen. Her almond eyes blinked every few seconds as her three-year-old brain made perfect sense of what she was seeing. She gazed through a beam of sunlight, and she stood on her tippy toes; stretching out her hand through a pillar of light filled with hundreds of thousands of tiny white flecks drifting and churning in the warm air of the small Vancouver house.
Just beyond the sunbeam, no more than a few arm’s lengths away stood the thing she was looking at another little grill dressed in a frilly cotton jumper with a torn sleeve. She clutched a battered Teddy bear tightly in her right hand, and she was shoeless. Dark red scabs and scrapes covered her feet, and the little girl’s toes were black; as if someone hand coloured them in with a thick black crayon. The thing’s lifeless didn’t blink, not that it mattered much to the toddler in the playpen because she had seen this one before. A thick, pasty smear of redness clung to its scalp – it was so red, the toddler thought it might have been finger paint, which didn’t make any sense at all. Why would a little girl smear red finger paint on the side of her head? That was an open invitation to a spanking from an angry mommy.
The toddler remembered a picnic on weeks earlier because it was the first time she’d ever seen the thing now standing no more than a few feet way in the living room of her house. She remembered the sting of her mother’s hand on her bum after saying hello four times to something that her mom and dad couldn’t see. But the toddler didn’t cry when her mother smacked her bottom. She just stared in wonder at the little girl in the torn jumper, and that only seemed to make her mother even angrier.
And the thing continued to visit the toddler. Once in a while it was almost see–through, like one of the nighties her mommy wore to bed during those bedtimes when she listened to the sound of her mother moaning and calling out to God in Cantonese. Other times the thing flickered like static on the TV when thunder and lightning and rain battered the house so much the floors would shake. This time, it was just as any other little girl and to the toddler in the playpen, it simply made sense to want to play with her. Maybe they could both make something pretty with the finger paints.
“Mommy!” the toddler called out. “I want to play with my friend!”
The thing in the frilly jumper just stood there, and the toddler noticed for the first time that it wasn’t standing on the ground – it was floating.
Maybe, the toddler thought, she could learn how to float too.
They could float together – all through the house, or maybe even outside at the playground across the street.
“Mommy!” she shouted again, this time a little louder. The toddler wanted out of her playpen. Loud thumping filled the air as the toddler’s mother stomped down the hallway from the kitchen.
“Jia Song, there is no shouting in this house unless it comes from me!” the toddler’s mother barked. “It’s not the time for your show yet, and I am making noodles. Play quietly!”
The toddler began hopping on both feet as she pointed through the sunbeam. “I want to play with her!” she shouted back. “I want to finger paint with my friend!”
The toddler’s mother scowled. “There is nobody in this room to play with and my daughter will not have invisible friends. If you cannot see it, then it isn’t real.”
This only made the toddler hop on both feet a little harder. She scowled back at her mother and shouted, “She’s right here, mama! She’s wearing a jumper, and she has a Teddy bear. But her toes are black. Why are her toes black, mama?”
The mother leaned into the playpen and gave the toddler a swat on the bum. “There is nobody in this room except your mother and you, Jia. Stop telling lies.”
The toddler didn’t cry out. Instead, a flash of anger rippled across her face, and she said, “She is floating, mama. She can show me how to float. Listen, mama … listen! She can float!”
The mother didn’t swat her daughter this time. She turned around to look at whatever her child was looking at and all that she was a wall along with a small bookshelf filled with picture books. The temperature in the room suddenly dropped as a shiver crept across the back of her neck.
A flash of light – like a camera flash. It was then she saw it – for the briefest of moments. Less time that it took to blink: the mother caught a glimpse of a little girl with a gaping wound on the side of her head. A smear of blood and a misshapen skull; dented by a hard object like a hammer.
The mother spun around and gazed down angrily at her daughter who smiled at the place where she’d seen … something.
“It’s just my mommy,” the toddler said to whatever she was looking at. “Where is your mommy? Does she spank your bum hard too?”
“There is nothing to talk with, Jia!” the mother snapped. “Stop talking to shadows.”
“But she’s right there, mama! Can’t you see her! She has red finger paint on her head, and I won’t get any on me. I want to play!”
The mother thrust her arms into the playpen and snatched the toddler up, digging her fingernails into the child’s armpits. But the toddler didn’t cry out. She just kept on smiling at her new friend. She smiled right past her mother’s fiery glare, and that only made her mother angrier.
“Stop talking, Jia!” she hissed as she shook her daughter. “Whatever you saw isn’t real, and you will not speak to things that I cannot see!”
The toddler’s smile dissolved as she cocked her head up to look into her mother’s eyes. She opened her mouth, and the voice that came out wasn’t a little child’s voice at all.
“This one is an emissary and will speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves.”
The toddler slipped out of her mother’s grasp and fell to the floor. She scuttled across the carpet to where her friend stood only to see the little girl in the frilly jumper fade away. And the toddler started to cry.
“Why, mama!” she wailed. “Why did you scare her away!”
The mother didn’t bother to answer her angry child. She raced out of the room desperate to distance herself from her only child. A door at the end of the hallway slammed tight as the toddler sat down on the carpet where the little girl had once been. She turned to look at her Cookie Monster chalk board. The magnetic alphabet letters slid across the green slate forming a word.
D-A-R-K-N-E-S-S
And the little girl smiled as she blotted out the sound of her mother wailing from the room down the hall.
About the Author
Sean Cummings is a bestselling fantasy author with published works ranging from traditional urban fantasy (Shade Fright, Funeral Pallor) to a blend of dark fantasy and superheroes. (Marshall Conrad: A Superhero Tale)
2012 saw the publication of Sean’s first young adult novel. POLTERGEEKS is a rollicking story about teen witch Julie Richardson, her dorky boyfriend and a race against time to save her mother’s life. The second in the series is called STUDENT BODIES. Both were published by Angry Robot Books now defunct Young Adult imprint, Strange Chemistry Books.
In 2015, Sean published his first book for children – TO CATCH A CAT THIEF – courtesy of Rebel Light Books.
In May 2016 Severed Press published THE NORTH, a gripping post-apocalyptic zombie thriller for young adults, now a bestseller. In July 2016, Sean’s released the first in a brand new urban/dark fantasy series: IMMORTAL REMAINS – A Tim Reaper Novel, also a bestseller. In December 2016, Sean released the first in a new dark fantasy series best described as Kill Bill’s THE BRIDE meets THE SIXTH SENSE meets SONS OF ANARCHY. #GRUDGEGIRL tells the story of Jia Song, the living manifestation of retribution for murdered women and children whose deaths remain unsolved.
Sean is a veteran, and he lives in Saskatoon Canada with his wife and two one lazy cats cat (RIP GARY THE CAT) who doesn’t earn his keep a large spotted dog named Stormageddon and a retired racing greyhound named Elvis.
Sign up for Sean’s newsletter and get a FREE copy of one of his books: http://sean-cummings.ca
The Girl On Victoria Road: A Tim Reaper Novel Page 22