Reaper (Lightbringer)

by K. D. McEntire

  Jamie's answering smile was tentative but sweet. He crossed his legs underneath him; his frightened rocking ceased. “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Oh, I do not know. Perhaps Cap?” Piotr nudged the cap in Jamie's hand. “It is a good name. We could find you a matching star-spangled shield for your enemies.”

  Jamie shook his head so that his hair drooped over his eyes. He'd needed a trim before he'd died. “I can't do that, Cap's already taken!”

  “Ah, so, true enough.” Piotr positioned himself between the boy and the tiny twisted body the EMTs were now lifting out of the back of the car. A small, grimy hand, still clutching a Captain America baseball cap, flopped over the edge of the gurney before an EMT considerately tucked it and the cap back beneath the sheet.

  “They took my mommy away,” Jamie informed Piotr, leaning past him to watch as the EMTs loaded his body into the back of the ambulance. “The airbag went poof and she bounced all around. She's got a broken head and arm but I think the rest of her's gonna be okay.”

  “That happens,” Piotr said, nodding. He glanced around for Jamie's Light but the telltale rays were nowhere to be seen. “You weren't buckled in?”

  “I was,” Jamie said and then blushed. “I dropped my cap,” he confessed. “Mommy turned to yell at me for unbuckling my belt and crash! Bash! Boom!” He made a series of drawn-out grinding and crinkling noises to outline exactly what had happened to the rusted Mustang he and his mother had been riding in. Then he frowned. “It was loud.”

  “I see,” Piotr said, and he did. This wasn't his first time sitting at the side of the road while the police cleaned up glass and oil. It wasn't even his thousandth.

  “Well,” Piotr said, realizing with quiet relief that he was on Rider duty once again, “I know a very nice place we can stay for a while until your Light appears. Will you come with me?” He rose to his feet and offered Jamie a hand. It was nice to be doing good work again, he mused as the first of the police cars drove away. It was wonderful to not feel so aimless and lost.

  “My Light?” Jamie hopped to his feet and tucked the bill of his cap into the back pocket of his jeans before resting cool fingers in Piotr's open palm.

  “I'll explain on the way,” Piotr promised. As he walked and talked he saw Jamie's steps grow more confident, and his pace sped up. The after-death double vision must be fading, he realized. The living land was receding for Jamie, the Never pressing to the front. Soon Jamie would only see the grey and brooding Never as the bulk of the bright living world entirely faded away.

  Piotr explained how sometimes, if you concentrated, you could faintly hear the shrillest, loudest living noises through the bulk of years, but they were muted, hardly more than faint whispers in the Never. He spoke of phasing through walls, thin in the Never, that were solid in the living lands, or how if a building or object were witness to enough powerful emotion, even after it had been destroyed in the living world a solid wall could remain in the Never, blocking passage.

  The trip toward the abandoned steel mill Piotr's old clan had dubbed “the Treehouse” was much shorter than he remembered. Underfoot the road shimmered and shifted between buckled concrete and warped bricks, the striation of the roads that had existed before being layered on top of one another like packed sand on the beach.

  They were almost to the Treehouse when he heard the scrape of stone on stone, the tumbledown sound of gravel shifting nearby. Immediately on edge, Piotr grabbed Jamie's wrist and yanked the boy behind him. When Jamie began to protest Piotr shushed him sharply, shoving a finger against his lips so hard he knew he'd bruise the next day.

  “Walker,” Piotr whispered, realizing only then that while he'd explained what Jamie would have to expect from being dead in the Never, he hadn't had the time to explain about the bogeymen that were the Walkers. Now was an inopportune time to learn.

  “Stay back,” he murmured, and fumbled at his hip, unsheathing the old bone dagger one-handed. Jamie hissed in surprise but Piotr didn't turn around. Just ahead, a few feet past a copse of skeletal oaks, Piotr watched the shadows shift.

  Moving forward in the sliding hunter stalk Lily had taught him ages ago, Piotr balanced on the balls of his feet and shifted his toes under the crackling debris of the street. This slow stride made no noise and the relaxed stance of the shadow at the edge of the alley left Piotr confident that his presence had not yet been noted; he would easily be able to sneak up on the unwelcome visitor.

  Rounding the corner, Piotr found himself face to rotting face with a black-robed Walker. The beast was, like all Walkers, grotesquely tall, slim, and bone white. Sections of its face were beginning to stretch against its bones, the desiccated flesh pulling taut against the ridge of cheekbone and jaw. Yellowing teeth clicked in a rough staccato as Piotr leapt forward, knife thrust outward, and stabbed the Walker in the shoulder.

  “It dares!” hissed the Walker, swatting Piotr aside as if he weighed nothing. “The useless Rider flesh tries to sneak up on me!”

  Unable to catch his balance, Piotr slapped hard against the side of the building, and cursed as the jagged bricks of the corner cut his left cheek in an irregular swath from nose to ear. He swiped the back of his hand against the wet spill of essence that sluiced down his chin and soaked his collar. Luckily his short flight and abrupt landing hadn't jarred the knife out of his hand. The bone blade wasn't even nicked.

  “Ny ti i svoloch’,” Piotr ground out, tightening his grip on the dagger, feeling the well-worn heft of it shift perfectly in his palm. “Of course, you must excuse me, but I just have this thing about foul dogs dropping in uninvited.”

  “You left this territory, flesh.” The Walker stretched to its full height and swayed above Piotr menacingly. The hem of its robe fluttered about the yellow-bone shins, dangling hunks of rotting flesh slapping against its calves as it swayed left and right, left and right. “Riders are all gone. This land belongs to Walkers now.”

  “Over my dead body,” Piotr snapped and dove for the Walker again. This time the once-man didn't even bother flinging him off—it merely let out a sound like grinding glass over asphalt, the best its stripped vocal cords could make of a laugh, and stood there while Piotr stabbed and stabbed and stabbed. Then it lifted its arms to reveal the swiss cheese he'd made of its cloak…and the skeletal frame beneath. None of his swipes had broken the taut, stretched flesh.

  Piotr fell back a step to analyze the situation. This Walker was far tougher than he was accustomed to, and smarter. Usually a solitary Walker would run rather than risk its precious skin in a fight. So why was this one staying, mocking him? Since there were no Lost nearby, there was no reason to…

  Stilling, Piotr went cold all over. It'd been weeks since he'd had a child, a Lost, to protect, and he'd forgotten all about Jamie in the heat of the fight! Spinning on his heel, Piotr rushed back around the corner to where he'd left the boy.

  Jamie was gone. Only his cap, rapidly fading, remained.

  Growling, Piotr scooped up the cap and scanned the area, hoping against hope that he'd hear a distant scream that would lead him in the right direction. The last of the cap, the tiny bit of Jamie's spiritual essence remaining, lost coherence. His fingers pressed together, and it was gone.

  Jamie was gone.

  Sick to his stomach with guilt, Piotr staggered a few steps away from the building, paying distant attention to the shadow at his back. The Walker was still laughing as it turned the corner and rested against the wall, the edges of its frayed hood trembling with glee.

  “Rider loses something? So sad!” crooned the Walker. “Perhaps he is waylaid. It happens.” The Walker was too nonchalant. It wasn't afraid of him in the least, which meant it had either recently fed well or it wasn't alone—or both.

  “You are working in pairs,” Piotr said, fingers clenching for the handle of his knife. Anger pulsed in a hard, steady beat behind his eyes, giving the clearing a stutter-flash look similar to what he saw when he let the visions of the living world sneak up on him. H
is fury felt like it was lighting up the night. “You haven't gone back to your old ways.”

  While the ghosts of adults and those of younger people, like the ones the Riders gathered in large, protective groups, tended to congregate where they'd had the most fun while alive, the Walkers had shed their silver cords and their souls in order to ensure their own sort of hideous half-life. For centuries they had been solitary, mistrusting creatures that avoided not only the light and heat of the living but also the other dead.

  Until the White Lady came.

  “Hunting alone?” The Walker waved a negligent hand as if to say that is so yesterday. “Why should we do so when it is so easy to draw foolish Riders away from prey?”

  “Not all Riders are like me.” Piotr put his back to the closest wall. “Most Riders go in packs. They're strong in will. Much stronger than a beast like you.”

  “Yes, we learn from the flesh!” The Walker cried, clapping its bony hands together. “She healed us, made us stronger, and taught us well! Many good lessons from the White Lady, yes! She says for us to work together, like flesh, like Riders do, like the other spirits do. It is hard at first but the White Lady had ways of making us follow her orders.”

  It touched its face, where the taut skin beneath the hollow eyes was crisscrossed with twisted ropes of scars and crosshatched brands burned into the flesh.

  Despite his hatred of the once-man before him, Piotr winced in sympathy. He'd been well acquainted with the White Lady's persuasive methods. She'd been a master of healing the Walkers with a kiss or, if they angered her, stripping them to bare bones with a swipe.

  It was no mystery why the Walkers had flocked to the White Lady, while they willingly subjected themselves to all sorts of agony in her employ. Living in the Never required a constant influx of willpower, the ability to keep slogging through the dim, gray days of eternity without looking too hard at the shadow of the world around you. The younger a person was when they died, the easier it was to keep going on in the Never. The young seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of willpower and hope.

  Not so for souls who'd lived a longer life before passing into the Never. It was often a struggle just to keep going, and adult spirits who found their will weakening had a limited number of choices—they could allow themselves to fade away, as the Shades did, or they could follow the path of the Walkers.

  Being a Walker was to willingly become a monster; Walkers chose to cannibalize the essence, the unlived years, of other spirits. Those unlived years were most plentiful in the ghosts of children, the Lost. They could get nothing from the Riders, but the Lost were like ripe peaches, sweet and juicy and filled with life.

  No one could remember when it had all begun, but it had been this way for eons. The Riders grouped together and protected the Lost from the Walkers, the Walkers did everything in their power to steal away the child-spirits every chance they got.

  Then the White Lady—Wendy's mother—had come into the Never and everything had grown further twisted and wrong. The Walkers, normally untrusting and near feral, began to work together. And the Riders, normally a tight-knit group dedicated to the Lost's cause, had fallen apart.

  Part of this, Piotr knew, was his fault.

  “Jamie's gone,” Piotr said, holding out his hand to show the Walker that the cap had vanished. “But you're still here. Didn't you want some of your prey?”

  The Walker patted its midsection. “I eat when I eat. Tonight is not my night for prey. Tonight is my night for talking to the Rider. We knew you would come back if we waited long enough.” It licked its lips. “You stink of female flesh, Lightbringer flesh, still. We knew you would come.”

  The anger drained away and Piotr was swept with sudden chills. Lightbringer. Wendy.

  “We have parted,” Piotr said carefully, certain now that he could hear rustling in the deepest, darkest shadows. He counted the individual movements that he could make out and was dismayed. Piotr's conversation with the Walker in front of him had allowed the others to sneak rather close. He put the count at somewhere between two and five more, each taking turns shifting closer.

  “Maybe you part from living flesh, maybe not.” The Walker leaned in from its ridiculous height, bringing with it a puff of air stinking of maggoty meat and pond scum roasting in the summer sun, and said, “The Walkers who are left think not. We talk about flesh, we talk about Lightbringer, and we say to ourselves, ‘Why would they part?’ It makes no sense, flesh. It is senseless.”

  For a moment, just the briefest of seconds, Piotr was tempted to laugh. Senseless indeed. He'd struggled with the decision to leave Wendy the entire time she lay comatose; endless hell. She'd looked so small and fragile in her hospital bed, childlike with her black-tipped curls tangled damply against her cheeks.

  Piotr had loathed himself in those long hours, watching her sink deeper and deeper into the twilight-world of her own mind with no way to reach her, no way to draw her into the waking, burning heat of the living world. He knew; he'd tried everything he could think of to reach her soul, even once going so far as to kiss her, hoping it would be like a fairy tale, that she would wake in his arms and love him. He'd failed.

  “I left her,” he said to the Walker stiffly, “for her own good.” And it was the truth, so far as truth went, even if there was more to it. Wendy had found herself in the hospital because he'd been unwilling to step away from how he felt about her, because he wouldn't allow her to become her mother's pawn; he'd been unwilling to sacrifice the Lightbringer's soul for his fellow Riders or even the Lost. He'd sworn to protect them and, when faced with a choice of losing Wendy or the Lost, had let an explosion of Light obliterate everyone in the room instead.

  Somehow, out of them all, he alone came out unscathed. How he'd survived…well, that was still a mystery.

  “The Lightbringer needs the likes of you?” The Walker chuckled again and its bones rattled in mirth. Piotr felt a wave of cold come off the Walker, a chilly breeze that reminded him not to let the Walker get too close lest it freeze his very essence and trap him there to be shredded apart. “Rider flesh has a high opinion of itself.”

  “You said you were waiting for me,” Piotr snapped, annoyed now and revving up for a fight, trying to stay out of the cold air pockets but feeling pressed upon on all sides. He glanced left and right, trying to pinpoint exactly where the others would come from, or how he might turn their numbers to his advantage. “So what is it that you want? Some sort of deal, like the White Lady had with you? You wish this territory?”

  “Want? Flesh wants to bargain with us?” Rocking back on its heels, the Walker shook its head and laughed its gravelly laugh. “There is no bargain with Walkers, flesh. You have bothered others too long.”

  “Others?” Piotr asked. “What others?”

  “Others matters to flesh? Now? How funny! We come for you now because it is time. We are paid, we take care of you. You are example. To other Riders. To Lost. To Lightbringer. I am bored. We are done here. Goodbye.”

  The rustles had grown very close now. He could feel the encroaching cold, the ice that clung to branch and rock wherever Walkers trod. Now his breath frosted the air. Piotr knelt down.

  He was tensed, preparing for the attack, when a long, yodeling war cry cut the air. Twin blades flashed as a slim, dark-haired woman darted from behind a nearby bush and leapt at the Walker.

  A second shape darted by and Piotr found himself thrust aside into the rough-hewn wall by a familiar blonde figure. Slowing only a split-second to make sure Piotr was unharmed, Elle flashed him a quicksilver grin and leapt into the fray.

  Watching the girls fight was like watching a ballet. Elle, who'd died a rich society girl in the late 20s, had been an only child of two world-jaunting glitterati. Her parents had no time for their darling only child but spared no expense when it came to her education, interests, or hobbies. Fencing, archery, horseback riding, dancing—Elle had tried it all and was good at most of it.

  Lily, on the other hand, had l
ived the quiet life of a plains-dwelling tribeswoman, a girl so long dead she couldn't even reliably recall the various names of her tribe and only occasionally the names of her gods. Her range of talents wasn't quite so varied, but the lithe brunette unerringly wielded her twin bone daggers with lethal precision.

  In moments the pair was flanked—five Walkers, all towering above the tiny girls, all armed with their claws sharpened to razor-fine points and stunning, slowing ice-breath.

  The Walkers surrounded the girls and pressed forward on one side, attempting to nudge them into a less advantageous position so that they'd be overwhelmed, slowed by the cold. Piotr expected Lily to fall back—she was adept at strategizing, especially during close combat such as this—but instead she shrieked and flung herself forward, slashing high at the nearest Walker's face with one dagger and punching low with the other.

  Hissing, the Walker fell back, clawing at his hood, which dropped to reveal the last few remaining wisps of sparse white hair across his crown. His features were a desiccated maw of teeth and rudely stitched-together twine frayed at the edges and seeping yellowing pus-like essence.

  Elle, likewise, was aiming for the eyes or, at least, where the eyes used to be. The Walkers fought hard but the girls fought harder, recklessly ignoring the chill and dodging the sharpened hands. Within minutes all but one Walker had fled the scene, bleeding and cursing, leaving the pair facing the Walker who'd distracted Piotr earlier. They stalked around and around, moving toward him as the Walkers had circled Piotr, slowing only when Piotr stepped forward and cleared his throat.

  Though intimidated by their strength and skill, Piotr was also pathetically glad of their support and his unexpected salvation. Trapped in a group like that, he never would have thought to go for the eyes, much less been willing to take on such heavy odds, even with another Rider at his side. Lily and Elle had hardly blinked before wading in and saving his skin—again.

  The first Walker, backed up against a wall at this point, held still and silent, a ruined rabbit in a terrible snare. Looking between the three of them, it chuckled, seeming to appreciate the irony of falling prey to the fate it'd initially intended for Piotr.