Ember (Death Collectors, Book 1)

by Jessica Sorensen

  “It’s up to their leader to punish them. Or we could go into battle,” he says. “But Michael, my father and the ruler of the Angels of Death, won’t allow us to bend any rules under any circumstances.”

  “You said your dad was bad. And dead.” I frown. “And that you moved from New York to get away from him.”

  “We did,” he says, holding back something with a fire in his eyes. He swiftly changes the subject. “You look beautiful like that.” He strokes the tip of my fake wing. “When I saw you, I almost had a heart attack. For a second, I thought somehow… you became one of us.”

  The wind howls violently, flipping my wings in front me and my body off balance. Asher slides his fingers over my hips and hugs me against his chest. I sense the impending goodbye like a death omen waiting for me at his lips. My black hair flaps in thin wisps around our faces. We stare at each other, hearts beating, eyes connected, never desiring to move. The moment is fleeting, like the sound of a weightless laugh, the flash of a lightning bolt, the last breath of the dying.

  “You’re leaving me, aren’t you,” I say quietly.

  “I broke the rules and now I can’t stay. I wasn’t supposed to get involved with you—no one is. It’s all supposed to be of your own free will, to prove a point.” He kisses my lips and I grip onto his shoulders. “But I couldn’t help it. When I saw you that night at the party, standing there by yourself, so sad and lost, I knew I had to get to know you. You were the first Grim Angel I met that’s ever done that to me.”

  I hook my arms around his neck and breathe in his comforting scent. “Why were you there at the party?”

  “I was collecting someone’s soul for Michael.” His hands travel down my spine and reside on my lower back. “But I messed up. I let the person live and took someone else’s soul instead.”

  “You were supposed to take Raven’s, weren’t you?” I arch into his hands. “You let her live and took Laden’s soul instead.”

  “I could see in your eyes when you were talking about her that night that you need her.”

  “And you killed Laden, because he was trying to rape her.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to take his soul or kill him. I just got carried away,” he says, and I’m reminded again of what I read in the book: passionate in battle. “And the Anamotti used it to their advantage. They took his body and made it look like your dad’s crime scene to mess with your head.”

  “And you got in trouble for it,” I say. “What are they going to do to you?”

  “I’m in trouble for a lot of things.” He lures my chest against his and kisses me with such heat my skin nearly ignites. I rake my fingers through his soft hair and his hands grip my thighs, his fingertips pressing into my skin, wanting everything, but knowing he can’t take anything.

  But I need him, like I need air. “Don’t go,” I plead. “Please stay with me. You’re the only one who’s ever made me feel at peace. ”

  The sky rumbles and his eyes travel upward to the dark clouds. His face is masked with pain as the sky begins to drizzle. His long eyelashes flutter against the raindrops. “I have to. Michael doesn’t ever let any angel go unpunished. And besides, you have to do this on your own.”

  They sky booms again like the snap of an elastic band. I feel it break, my freedom.

  He guides my ear toward his mouth and drops his voice to a low whisper. “Find out everything you can about Grim Angels and the Battle of Death. Find out what happens with the last Grim Angel standing… There’s a part I can’t tell you. And Ember, don’t trust anyone. Ever.” His hand slides down my neck, searing hot against my damp skin. “Shut your eyes.”

  Reluctantly, I close them and cling to him. I hear his wings snap wide and then a delicate flutter as he flaps them. He kisses my forehead, my cheek, my lips, and then like a feather in the wind, he flies away.

  When I open my eyes, I’m alone, kneeling in the mud, rain soaking my hair and clothes. I refuse to move; I’ll stay here forever in the cemetery with the only peace I have left.

  “Oh my God!” Raven screams and I turn around. She’s staggering through the mud toward me. “What the hell happened? How did I get here? Em, I’m… I have no idea what’s going on or why I’m in a cemetery.” She stops just short of me and glances down at her white dress, tattered and marked red with tonight’s torture. Her artificial wings are ripped to pieces and her neck is still bleeding a little.

  I pick up a piece of Asher’s shirt, stand up, and press it to her neck. “We need to get you to a hospital.” I drape her arm around my shoulder and lead her toward the gate.

  Her death is back; standing on the ledge and someone begs her to jump, so she does. Different, but still painful.

  “Em, why are there feathers all over the grass?” she asks. “Was it from your costume?”

  I make the decision, the thing my dad tried to engrave in my mind since I was young, and what Asher warned me to do—don’t trust anyone. “Yeah, Raven, they are from my costume.”

  We walk together across the cemetery, yet I’m in this alone. A pawn in a game between the Angels of Death and the Grim Reapers—between good and evil.

  But which one am I?

  As if giving me an answer, sirens sing through the night and blue and red flashes vibrantly across the dark cemetery. Doors shove open and cops hop out of the vehicles.

  “Alright,” one of them yells with his gun out in front of him as he glides through the gates. “Put your hands up where we can see them.”

  I obey, knowing I’m in trouble this time. Mackenzie’s body is in a grave and the only proof that I didn’t kill her flew away with the wind.

  Raven sobs into my shirt and clutches onto me. “I want this to all be over. Please make it stop. It’s driving me crazy.”

  I raise my hands in the air, renouncing. “Don’t worry. It’s almost over.”

  A swarm of cops bustle through the gates, spotting their flashlights across the grass and tombs, guns and batons in their hands. The one that shouted at me approaches with caution, step by step, never looking away from us. When he reaches me, I let Raven stand on her own.

  “Ember Edwards, I should have known,” Officer McKinley’s expression instantly turns biased as he remembers the night he picked me up from my house, after my car was found in the lake. “There was an anonymous tip that the body of Mackenzie Baker could be found at the Hollows Grove Cemetery.”

  With my hands up, I shake my head. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  He spotlights the flashlight in Raven’s eyes. “What’s she on? And why is there blood on her neck? Were you two doing some kind of ritual out here or something?”

  “Like a vampire ritual,” I joke unenthusiastically.

  He narrows his eyes. “You don’t need to get smart. This is Halloween—all the crazies are out tonight.”

  Raven blinks and shields her face with her hand. “We were taking a shortcut to our houses through the woods and I tripped and cut my neck on a branch.”

  Internally, I sigh. “That’s what we were doing, just barely—heading to go find a phone and call the hospital, because neither of us have our phones.”

  The cop checks underneath the piece of shirt Raven has pressed to her neck and then pulls a revolted face. “That’s going to need a few stitches.” He sighs. “Come on, follow me.”

  As we walk for the gates, the cops search the cemetery, by the trees, behind headstones. A female officer, with her hair braided in the back, wanders toward the hole in the ground where Mackenzie’s body lays.

  “Hey, I think I got something over here,” she shouts, with her gun poised in front of her.

  A lanky officer, with a bald head, hurries over to the hole. He beams the light down in it and I wait for him to announce he found the body.

  “It’s just a hole,” he calls out. “It’s probably some high school prank or new fad, like that grave that was dug up a few weeks ago.”

  Cameron.

  Officer McKinley stops us and shines
the light in our eyes. “You two know anything about this?”

  Raven and I shake our heads innocently. “Nope.”

  He zones in on me. “Are you sure that’s true?”

  I wonder if he’s a real cop, or the same kind as Detective Crammer. “Yep, it’s true.”

  He shakes his head, unbelieving. “Well, I’m still going to have to take you in for some questioning. We have to make sure your story adds up.”

  We head across the grass toward the gates as the rest of the cops keep searching for Mackenzie’s body. Although, I have a feeling her body may be gone forever. But who took it is the mystery.

  Cameron? Or Asher?

  Raven and I climb into the back of the cop car, each on our separate side, divided by lies, secrets, and distrust. As the policeman drives with his lights flashing, I watch the cemetery disappear from my view, feeling the trail of death follow me.

  Epilogue

  I wake up to a bright sunny day, shining through my bedroom window. My cheek is resting on an open book, and my sweaty skin sticks to the pages. I stayed up all last night reading through pages about angels and death, searching for answers and a way to bring an Angel of Death back to Earth.

  I climb out of bed and get dressed in a ratty T-shirt and some cutoffs. The house is as quiet as a cemetery. My mom is in a drug treatment facility trying to recover from her addiction and when she gets back I have to decide how to ask her about Grandma and the necklace without putting stress on her.

  Raven is on vacation with her mom, who got released from the same facility my mom’s at the day after the Reapers tried to destroy us. And Ian spends most of his time locked away in the attic. His muse disappeared for a little while, and when I asked Ian about it, he told me it was none of my business. But I heard her—or him—sneak in last night.

  My life is lonely, but I prefer it that way for the moment. Being around people hurts just as bad, if not worse, now that I know what I am—know that my insanity can wear on them.

  I wander to the computer and click it on. I’ve been working on trying to track down the author of the book Raven has. His name is August Millard, unless it’s his pen name. I found an email address for a writer with the same name, but if it’s not the same guy, he’ll probably think I’m nuts. Or maybe he’ll think I’m crazy either way; perhaps he’s a writer of words, not a believer of them.

  I check my inbox, but it’s empty.

  What if I told you I could take away every ounce of pain you have and would ever feel?” I could make all that sadness go away.” So I sink into the couch and flip through the channels, searching through the news, looking for headlines about a body being found. But the news isn’t on until later, so I shut the TV off. I clean the house to distract myself. I turn up “Holding onto You” by Story of the Year and block everything out. I scrub every room downstairs and then move upstairs.

  After I’m finished, I drag the garbage can out to the curb. The sun is setting behind the mountains and the sky is splashed with neon pinks and oranges. Leaves flutter down and, from across the street, Ms. Courtenay is rearranging her sprinklers.

  She glances up as she drags the hose across her yard. I politely wave and her gaze darts down at the lawn, like I don’t exist. She’s afraid of me still, just like everyone else in the town is. Laden and Mackenzie are still considered missing persons, but I know they’re dead.

  My eyes travel down the street to a two-story house with unmaintained grass and a For Sale sign in the yard. I have no idea what happened to Cameron’s parents, or if they were really his parents. But every time I look at the house, I feel a pull toward it—toward him. Sometimes, I think about asking him to come back. It’s out of sheer insanity—I know that, and that’s what helps me keep my lips closed.

  However, if I knew how to bring Asher back I would. I tried a few times, murmuring to the wind for him to come to me. “Asher, where are you,” I whisper.

  The wind is my only answer.

  “Hey, stranger.” Todd, Raven’s brother, walks down the driveway and picks up the newspaper. He’s wearing ratty jeans, a black T-shirt with holes in it, and his blue hair is sticking up like he just woke up. “Thinking about buying a house?”

  “Huh?” I collect the mail from the mailbox.

  He smiles. “I saw you staring at that For Sale sign like you were about ready to rip it out of the lawn.”

  I align the envelopes against the palm of my hand as I walk to the edge of the thin strip of lawn that separates our houses. “Do you know anything about where they went?”

  He shakes his head and glances at Cameron’s vacant house, with dust in the windows and a dried lawn out in front. “I’m not sure. But it’s weird, right? How they moved in and then a few weeks later the house went up for sale.”

  I shrug. “You know how it is. A lot of people can’t take Hollows Grove. Like your sister.”

  “Yeah, she seems worse about it now with the,” he makes a line across his neck, “with the scar on her neck. She’s taking that one hard.”

  “She just needs to give it time to heal,” I say, but deep down I know it will never fully heal. After everything settled down, Raven started to remember things she did—horrible things that she won’t always share with me.

  He wraps the newspaper in his hand and nods his head at a car on the street. “You think they’re ever going to give up whatever it is they’re looking for?”

  I turn around and give the cops in the patrol car a small wave. They pretend not see me and eat their lunch.

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “But why are they so fixated on our neighborhood?”

  I glance down at Cameron’s house, at a short frail person with a pointy nose, standing near the mailbox. “I’m not sure… maybe they think someone here knows where Mackenzie is.”

  “Her family seems really determined to find her,” he remarks, holding up the newspaper. There is a picture of Mackenzie’s face on the front page under the headline: Have You Seen Our Daughter?

  I watch the man at Cameron’s distractedly, trying to figure out where I’ve seen him before. “Yeah, well maybe they should start looking closer at her family.” It clicks. That’s Cameron’s uncle, Gregory—the one that was digging up the grave for him the night I first saw Cameron.

  “Ember,” Todd says. “Are you okay?”

  I quickly force my eyes off Gregory and change the topic. “So when will Raven be coming back?”

  He backs down the driveway toward the front porch. “Didn’t she call you?” he asks and I shake my head. “Oh… well, she got back late last night. I thought she went over to your house when she got here.”

  “No… I haven’t seen her since she left...” It’s like a jigsaw puzzle coming together: Raven is Ian’s muse. And I don’t like it because it means Raven was spending a lot of private time with Ian while she was possessed by the Reapers.

  “Well, don’t take it too personally. She’s been acting like a total mental case, mom says, drawing weird pictures of hourglasses and having conversations with herself.”

  “Is she home right now?” I hurry for their front door.

  He shakes his head. “Nah, she went out shopping or something.”

  Without saying goodbye, I sprint into my house and up to the attic door. I hammer my fist on it, but Ian doesn’t answer, so I shove the door open. “Ian, are you in here?”

  The lights are on and System of a Down’s “Lonely Day” is playing from the surround sound speakers. Canvas and sketches cover the walls, paint dyes the wood floor, and the oval window is covered by a sheet. It smells like sage and something stronger… something I’ve smelt many times in Ian’s studio.

  “Dammit.” I pick up the butt, squish the tip against the edge of the windowsill, and throw it in a cup of water balanced on a stool. I turn to leave but notice a large canvas in the corner, covered with a black sheet. I tug it off, letting it float to the floor.

  It’s a picture of Raven. She’s lying in the middle
of a snowy field, wearing a black cape over her head. Blood drips from her mouth and the corners of her eyes. Grasped in her hand is an empty hourglass and underneath her body is a bright red X. On the bottom corner of the drawing, bleeding in red, it says: Alyssa, please forgive me.

  “What the fuck is this? She’s not… No, she couldn’t be…” Shaking my head, I walk swiftly to Ian’s room and bang on the door. “Ian, open up the door. I know you’re in there!” I bang louder. “I can smell the smoke coming through the door.”

  I jiggle the knob and rattle the door. “Ian, open up the door. You’re worrying me.”

  I run back into my room and grab a bobby pin. I crouch down in front of Ian’s door and work the pin until I hear it click. I push the door open and smoke blows in my face. I cough and then let out a frustrated sigh. Ian is sprawled on the bed, in his pajama bottoms and a ratty T-shirt, clutching a photo.