Reaper (Lightbringer)

by K. D. McEntire

  Published 2012 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books

  Reaper. Copyright © 2012 by K. D. McEntire. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover illustration © Sam Weber

  Cover design by Grace M. Conti-Zilsberger

  Inquiries should be addressed to

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McEntire, K. D., 1980–

  Reaper / by K. D. McEntire.

  p. cm.

  Summary: After being forced to destroy the twisted and diseased soul of her mother, known in the Never as the White Lady, Wendy must guide the spirits of the dead into the afterlife all by herself, while across town her best friend Eddie lies in a coma, his soul mysteriously separated from his body.

  ISBN 978–1–61614–632–0 (cloth)

  ISBN 978–1–61614–633–7 (ebook)

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Soul—Fiction. 3. Death—Fiction. 4. Future life—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M478454238Re 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012006471

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  As always, this book wouldn't exist without a truly fabulous group of people. I'd like to thank the consistently awesome Joe Monti and Lou Anders. Both are super busy guys who always make the time to talk plot and all things geektastic. I wouldn't be half the writer I sort of am if it weren't for you two. Thanks also go to the spiffy Gabrielle Harbowy who sifts through my gobbledygook for the good stuff. Thank you so much!

  Thank you to Karen Ramsey and Jennifer Day, my glorious beta readers. Other dudes who rock include Sam Weber, the amazing cover artist (http://sampaints.com/). Check him out!

  Of course, I would be utterly remiss if I were to forget the fabulously talented George Levchenko—not only is he an amazing photographer and web designer (http://www.glnet.tv) but he very graciously accepted 9 p.m. translation request texts without grumping at me. Thank you, George. You rock.

  Last but not least, thanks go to my husband Jake. Without you I'd never have time to write, especially now that we're juggling a toddler and a newborn. Thank you.

  When the slow, steady beeping turned shrill, every nurse on the floor rushed into the room. Wendy, dozing at her best friend's bedside, shoved back from the mattress and staggered to her feet. Beside her, Eddie's machines continued to beep steadily. His roommate wasn't so lucky.

  Despite the bustle of the hospital staff and the long, intricate dance of defibrillator and medical personnel, the shrill tone stretched until a doctor pushed back from the body on the bed and said, “Call it.”

  “Seven-oh-two,” a short, stocky nurse murmured, tugging the dangling pen at his neck free of its cord, clicking it open. As he passed Wendy the nurse patted her on the shoulder. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Wendy said, watching the spirit of Eddie's departed roommate step away from her cooling body and hesitate at the curtain separating their beds before reaching out a tentative hand and sliding through. “I've seen it before.”

  Biding her time, Wendy waited until the orderlies had carted the body away and stripped the bed before she waved to the ghost. Even dead, the girl was all bones and sallow skin, long lank hair and large, protruding eyes. She'd been admitted to the ward three days before but Wendy had known that she wouldn't last; the silver cord dangling from her navel that connected her soul to her body looked as if moths had been at it even then. Now, as she stood near the bed that had once been hers, her cord was barely more than a desiccated string.

  “Am I dead?” The ghost approached and ran her hand over Wendy's plastic chair. Like with the curtain, her fingers passed smoothly through the back. “I don't feel dead.”

  “I know. Weird, right?” Wendy settled on the edge of Eddie's bed and glanced around the room. It had been at least half an hour since the girl had died. The Light should have appeared for her by now. “But you're not hurting anymore, so that's good.”

  Wendy hated this part; making polite conversation with the dead strangers that filled her world until their Light arrived. She wasn't good at small talk with the living; why she felt compelled to keep the dead company right after their deaths was beyond her. Perhaps because it was the sort of thing Piotr did.

  It didn't help that the script rarely varied: they asked if they were dead, she confirmed, she pointed out that at least they weren't in pain, they agreed. Sometimes there were protests or further questions, but the act of dying was enough to stun the average human soul into a slight fugue for a while, often long enough for their Light to appear.

  “Yeah,” the girl agreed and shuffled her feet. The remnants of her cord dangled like shifting seaweed from her navel. She noticed it and gingerly plucked at the cord, lifting it up and tentatively poking her index finger into one of the holes like a toddler examining her belly button. She winced as if she expected the poke was going to hurt but then relaxed, pinching the thin, tattered end of the cord curiously. “So…what now?”

  A talker, huh? Wendy took a deep breath, sighed, and stood. “Well, when your Light gets here you step into it. No more mortal coil. Boom. Done.” Wendy grimaced and pushed a frizzing red curl out of her eyes; getting a haircut and a fresh dye job was on the perpetual To Do list. “So if you've got any, err, final-final words, any secrets you feel compelled to spill to a friendly ear or a message you just have to get to someone, now would be the time to share.” She grimaced. “I don't do revenge stuff, though. Just sayin’.”

  Dropping her cord, the girl squatted down beside Wendy's chair and prodded a chair leg, marveling at the way her hand slipped in and out of the metal. “Then what?”

  “Then…I don't know. You pass on.” Wendy shrugged, uneasy with the way the conversation was turning and uncomfortable with the way the girl was experimenting so easily with her environment. Normally the newly dead just wailed or wandered about in confusion; this girl seemed to be actively trying to figure out the physics of the Never. “I don't know what happens after the Light. Not really my jurisdiction.”

  Behind the spirit the room was beginning to lighten, a delicate whispering hum rose from nothing, and a tangy scent of ozone and hickory filled the air. Wendy grinned, thrilled to see the familiar sight though her nose itched at the aroma. “Looks like your ride's here.”

  A thin shaft of Light, no wider than a hair's breadth, broke through the hospital ceiling and struck the tile floor. Then it began to widen, filling the room with heat and Light, and the hum became a high, plaintive siren song like tinkling bells—a pleasant, sweet sound.

  Rising fluidly out of her squat, the girl glanced over her shoulder at the Light, at Wendy, and at the Light again. Her hands twisted together; all of a sudden she was on the edge of tears. “Are you an angel?” she whispered plaintively. “Because I never…is that Heaven? Was I wrong? Before? Or is there…I mean…” She wildly gestured at the Light. “Is it my fault that I didn't know?”

  “Not an angel,” Wendy hurried to say, glancing down at her inartfully shredded fishnets and mud-caked motorcycle boots. No corset today, just a faded black tee over her favorite plaid mini, but she'd borrowed Eddie's ratty old motorcycle jacket and it was slung over the en
d of the bed, across his feet. No matter how goth her look got, they always wanted to know if Wendy'd been sent from some higher being. The angelic assumptions never ceased to amuse her.

  “Not an angel, I promise. I don't know if there even is a Heaven, okay? The Light…that's…” Wendy paused, looking for the right way to explain the Light. Her fall-back description always seemed inadequate, but it was the closest thing to truth she could muster.

  The Light was getting stronger and stronger, the music rising to a lovely crescendo. Soon it would begin to fade, and Wendy didn't want to stall the girl; she settled, once again, on the pat reply. “It's like your elevator home, okay? Your one-way ticket to peace—call it Heaven, call it Nirvana, call it whatever you want—but it doesn't discriminate and it doesn't wait, so don't hang around here too long. Take my word for it. The Light goes away after a while. After that, well, you've got to find your own way home.”

  Wendy thought of the month before—how the White Lady, Wendy's own mother, driven insane by the sundering of her soul, had tricked Wendy and Piotr into a showdown in the basement of the Palace Hotel. There had been a dozen huddled Lost chained to the walls, drained and weak and crazed with hunger. In order to return to her body, the twisted thing Wendy's mother had decided to sacrifice Wendy. She'd almost succeeded, but Piotr had held Wendy's—even now, Wendy wasn't quite sure what to call it, but the easiest explanation was thinking of the orb of Light as her “power”—in the palm of his hand. He'd stubbornly refused to give the Light over and had instead allowed it to break.

  Of those in the room, only Wendy and Piotr survived the blast of Light; Elle and Lily had escaped the basement and subsequent explosion by the skin of their teeth. James, Lily's love, had been one of the unlucky ones. Wendy still felt badly about his passing.

  Wendy abruptly shook her head to clear the painful memory from her mind. “Believe me,” she urged, “that when I say finding your Light a second time isn't easy, I mean it. It's not simple, it's nothing like this. Not at all.”

  “Oh. Okay.” The girl, shivering, glanced between Wendy and the Light. Longingly, she looked at the chair another moment, marveling at the way her hand slid through the back and how her fingers wiggled out the other side. “I guess…I guess I'll go, then. Thanks for keeping me company.”

  Uncertain still, but her decision made, the girl started backing toward the Light. Worry for the girl niggled at the back of Wendy's head. She looked so small and young. She couldn't be much older than Wendy or Eddie. “You never said if you wanted me to pass a message on,” Wendy reminded her quickly, listening as the siren song reached its peak. “Last chance.”

  “Nah,” the girl said, nearing the edge of the Light. She tilted her head back and smiled sweetly, inhaling the scent and shivering with joy. “It's better this way.” Then she paused and examined Wendy closely. “What about you? You seem like a girl who's known a lot of dead people in your time. You want me to pass a message on to the great beyond?”

  “For me?” Startled by the unexpected offer, Wendy struggled for a reply. “I…”

  “Last chance,” the girl said and grinned, showing a sudden flash of humor. Smiling, resting in the outer nimbus of Light, she was no longer pale and wan, but slim and subtle and lovely, her hair backlit with Light. “But if you want me to punch someone in Heaven, sorry, I don't do revenge.”

  Glancing down at Eddie, Wendy chuckled softly. “Tell you what, if you see this guy's dad out there—name of Matt Barry—let him know I'm keeping my promise.” She touched Eddie's knee and smiled sadly. “I'm trying to, at least.”

  “Matt Barry,” the girl repeated and nodded once. She held her hand up to her Light and sighed deeply, a slow, grateful smile curling across her face. In the warm wash of Light her face appeared fuller, her hair brighter. Wendy realized that this was how she must have looked before whatever illness she'd had had begun to eat away at her body, to chew the edges of her willpower apart.

  “Got it. I'll pass it on.”

  “Thanks,” Wendy said.

  The Light winked out and with it went the girl. Only a faint, charred circle on the tile spoke of what had happened to the spirit. No normal living soul would be able to see it, but Wendy was used to simultaneously peering into the afterlife and the living world. To her, the circle outlined in the Never was as clear in all its grim grayness as the bright orange chair she'd been sitting in.

  Settling back in the bedside chair, Wendy took one of Eddie's cool hands in her own, rubbing small, soothing circles into the webbing between thumb and index finger.

  “I'm trying, Eds,” she said, turning her face away from the circle and trying not to picture Eddie vanishing into the Light, his teasing grin and crinkled smile gone forever.

  Unbidden, an image of Piotr stepping into the Light came instead. Frowning and silently cursing her overactive imagination, Wendy pushed the unwelcome picture away and concentrated on her friend. Piotr was strong and he had Lily and Elle with him. He didn't need her. Eddie did.

  “I promised your dad I'd take care of you,” Wendy said, voice pitched low so the nurses wouldn't hear, her eyes stinging from weariness and unshed tears. She leaned forward and rested her forehead against Eddie's, noses touching, her fingers threaded through his.

  “I'll find you,” she whispered. “I promise.”

  Night in the Never fell slowly, a flag of silver-tinged darkness uncurling in a steadily rising dusk. Before meeting Wendy it had been centuries—no, more—since Piotr had seen real, living twilight. Most of his memories had been eaten by time and by death-workers like Wendy's mother, but he could still remember the way the stars would emerge in the fading light one by one, mysterious pinpricks dotting the sky. All else had been swallowed by vast stretches of time where the years piled up like cobwebbed shadows in the corners of his mind.

  Then he'd met Wendy.

  Now? Now he could catch the light of hazy twilight between flickers, though it wasn't nearly the same thing. Concentrating on the light did no good—he'd gaze out into the Never if he actively attempted to see the living lands—but when Piotr relaxed and went with the flow, sometimes the quality of the light would shift and change: brief, powerful flickers allowed him to see the world as Wendy must, in all its solid, living glory.

  Though it had been only a little time since the White Lady's demise, Piotr had already realized that he'd been permanently altered by the encounter. The changes in his vision were one thing, the urge to strike out and discover his own origins another. The real question had become what to do next, how to live his afterlife, or if he even wanted to do anything special at all. Before, he'd had the Lost to protect, his duty as a defunct Rider to keep, but now he had nothing but Lily and Elle and his own ambition to guide him.

  It wasn't enough.

  Out of habit, Piotr wandered the familiar span of turf between San Francisco and Mountain View, killing time by catching rides in the back of taxis and trucks and keeping a lookout for spirits in danger. Dark things wandered the city at night—Walkers and worse, who'd traded their humanity for the certainty of continued existence, even if it cost them their very souls—and Piotr had spent too many years as a protector, as a Rider, to willingly walk away from another ghost in trouble, be they Shade or Lost or anything else.

  It was late though, past midnight, and rides were starting to grow scarce. He could have taken Caltrain, but by doing so he would have run the risk of being brushed by a passenger. Living heat burned fiercely and, after the explosion of Light that burned away most of the White Lady's army but left him intact, Piotr was finding himself far more susceptible to the touch of the living than he had been previously.

  Without one of the Lost to help speed the healing process, it now took weeks to heal a burn from straying too near one of the living; for something as basic as an aimless train ride from point A to point B, Piotr was unwilling to risk the pain. Daring the unknown backseats of random cars, with the potential for infants in bucket seats or teenagers stretched out i
n the back, was risk enough.

  Flashing red-blue-red stuttered through the darkness, and the SUV he'd hopped into at the last on-ramp slowed and changed lanes in deference to the sirens and light. Piotr, spotting the pile-up up ahead, rolled neatly out of the car through the side door and came to his feet in the breakdown lane. Glass was everywhere—some had even crossed over into the Never—and Piotr stepped over the glittering mess and made his way to the pile-up.

  A child, no more than six, huddled on the side of the road. He was small and blond and sported a plain white tee over grass-stained jeans. He worried a baseball cap between his hands and rocked back and forth, forehead pressed to his knees. Piotr knelt beside him.

  “I like that comic,” he said gently, referencing the emblem emblazoned across the front of the cap, a large stylized A. “The hero is very quick, da? What I would give for a shield like a Frisbee. You see a bad guy and whoosh!” He made a grand swooping gesture with one hand, miming taking off an enemy's head with a flick of a wrist.

  The kid snorted but didn't look up. His fingers clutched the cap tighter.

  Piotr was familiar with this give and take. “I am Piotr,” he said kindly, trying again. He waited.

  Several minutes passed before the boy turned his face in Piotr's direction and looked him up and down. “Jamie,” the boy said. “And you talk weird.”

  “To me, Jamie,” Piotr said, grinning broadly now that he had the little boy's attention, “perhaps it is you who talks weird, da?”

  “What does da mean?” Jamie straightened.

  “Ah. It means ‘yes,’ yes?”

  “Yes?”

  “Da.” Piotr flopped onto the ground beside the boy, stretching his legs so that his knees popped. “You know, Jamie, I think your name, it does not suit you. Heroes always have secret identities; I think we should pick out a hero name for you, hmm? Would you like that?”