Reaper (Lightbringer)

by K. D. McEntire

  Piotr waved a hand. “I need no—”

  “Stop being stubborn,” Lily replied sharply. “Take the medicine. You need not be in great pain for us to think you brave. We don't know how long our…melding will last.”

  “It looks like it's salvaged,” Eddie added. “So I don't know where Wendy got it from, but it's probably better than nothing right now.”

  “Fine,” Piotr said, holding out his hand. “So be it.”

  Eddie handed Piotr a Percocet and watched curiously as Piotr dry-swallowed it. “No clue if this'll be enough to help or not. I'm not a doc.” He frowned at the bottle. “How does this stuff work, anyway? You guys don't even have regular blood, right?”

  “The nature of being deceased is one of the mysteries I am examining in my lab,” Ada said, warming immediately to the subject. “Animals can speak to us in the Never, which they do not do in the living lands. Here we have no ‘blood’ to guide herbs on their way, only essence that we can shape and form the outer edges of at will, but yet medicine often works. Most complicated machinery does not function here, except when it does.” She grinned broadly. “The Never is a place of such extreme contradictions at times; it is truly fascinating!”

  “It is aggravating,” Lily replied. “To have such modern wonders at our fingertips, to see them in use every day in the living lands, and yet to be unable to work them ourselves.” She frowned. “The Council stockpiles weapons of all types—including guns—and yet they can do nothing with them. Imagine the capability to destroy a Walker with but a single bullet? Think of how many would be put out of their misery.”

  Lily stilled then. “Wait. This lab of yours, these mysteries…is that what you are doing there? Trying to ascertain why certain objects work in the Never and others do not? Are you attempting to make objects such as weaponry work in the Never?”

  Ada shrugged. “This I cannot say without potentially rousing the ire of the Council. But if you were to accompany me to my lab, I would be very willing to give you a tour of my projects. Not just the Reaper poison, of course. Other things.”

  “I know I'm not the spiffiest science guy that ever scienced,” Eddie broke in, “but is your lab really that important? Can't you just use your big brains and cook up some antidote here?”

  “Hardly. On Alcatraz I have a stockpile of materials that are difficult to come by without significant time and effort,” Ada explained. “I've spent decades assembling my apparatus. And, to be frank, this place makes me uneasy. It is too open, too exposed. Alcatraz was built to be a fortress and then fed with the emotions and pain of the prisoners above, causing the walls to be doubly solid, both in the Never and in the living lands. Even Reapers cannot easily breach the defenses.”

  “Not to mention, we must collect glutted spirit webs for your concoction, am I correct?” Lily added. “There are none to be found here, but in the city…”

  Eddie snorted. “Yeah, that little day trip's gonna be a hoot and a half. Flesh-eating plants? Sign me up.” He sighed. “I guess you can't go collect them by yourself?”

  “I could,” Ada said, pursing her lips, “but I've been told there is a beast in the forest surrounding the Palace Hotel. I am not a warrior, Edward. I am a scientist.”

  “There is indeed a great beast,” Lily said. “We have seen it. No, risking Ada's skill and knowledge in such an endeavor is out of the question. We shall gather the webs for her.”

  “So it has been decided,” Piotr said, suddenly weary of all the talk. “We escort Ada to Alcatraz, stopping by the forest to collect glutted spirit webs on our way. When shall we leave?”

  “Soon,” Ada said. “Your wounds might be temporarily healed, but they still worry me.”

  “I don't know. Maybe we should wait for Wendy and Elle?” Eddie asked, just as the door to Wendy's room suddenly swung open.

  Wendy was home.

  Overjoyed to be done with her family, Wendy waved at Chel and Jon, stumbled up the stairs and opened up her door, nearly walking through Piotr on her way to her bed.

  “Are you okay?” she asked Piotr, poking his bicep as she toed off her filthy sneakers. Despite her burning touch, Piotr briefly leaned into her hand and Wendy relaxed. “You look better than you did before.”

  Piotr glanced at Ada. “I do feel somewhat better, da. It is good to see your face. I was worried at how long you had been gone.”

  “You went to see your family,” Lily added, disapproval writ large across her face. “After we traveled to warn you against them.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Wendy said, rubbing a hand across her eyes. She glanced at Eddie and her heart skipped a beat. Eddie's essence looked so…so thin. “I'm sorry, but…look, I kind of got ambushed. They just showed up this morning.” She reached over and nudged Eddie with her shoulder. “In exchange for training me to take my mother's place, they promised to help find Eddie's cord and to help me get him back in his body. I'm not willing to piss them off right now, not if maybe they can help get Eddie back to normal.”

  Lily nodded once, her expression closed off, and Wendy knew that her explanation had been understood, even if the reasons behind her choice weren't entirely accepted.

  “So, you're new,” Wendy said, eyeing Ada and flopping on her bed. She stretched and yawned, wishing that she'd had a chance to grab a catnap earlier.

  “I am,” Ada said cautiously. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Winifred.” She crossed her arms over her chest and stepped closer. “I am a member of the Council. Of the dead.” Uncomfortably, Ada fidgeted in place and cleared her throat. “I have heard much about you.”

  “Yeah, I bet,” Wendy yawned; the room was practically spinning, she was so exhausted. She tried not to think of Sarah, of the begrudgingly amused expression on the little girl's face as they parted, of how willing she'd been to talk for a while in exchange for nothing more than a battered paperback. Wendy buried her face. Eddie. Sarah. Could she do nothing right? Wendy's heart hurt. “So,” she said to Ada, to take her mind off Jane's triumphant peace-sign, her wide grin and pleased swagger back to the car, “you knew my mom, huh?” Across the room Eddie sighed, and Wendy glanced furtively at him from beneath her eyelashes. One person at a time, she thought to herself. Piotr, then Eddie. Eddie wasn't poisoned, right? He had time.

  Hopefully.

  Ada hesitated. “I did.”

  “Cool. I'll want to talk with you at some point about that.” Wendy yawned again and held up a hand; it was trembling wildly. “Guys, look, I want to chat and talk to you about my morning and maybe cobble together some sort of a plan of attack but I haven't slept in…gosh, since I don't know when. I need…an hour? No more. A nap. Just a little one.” Wendy rubbed an arm across her face and turned to Piotr and Eddie. “Can you guys wait that long? How are you two feeling? You're…well, you're clearly not fixed, Piotr, but you don't look as bad as you did before. Eddie, I…”

  “I can wait an hour,” Piotr assured her. “Please, do not worry yourself, Wendy. Rest.”

  “Yeah, you kinda look like crap warmed over,” Eddie agreed fervently. He offered an arm to Ada. “Neither one of us is going to drop any deader. We won't go far, take a load off.”

  “On it,” Wendy mumbled, yanking off her socks, glad that Eddie knew her so well and was just so…Eddie about everything. “Just a bit. I'll be right with you, doing whatever I have to, but just an hour nap, okay? Okay.”

  Punching her pillow into a c-shape, Wendy curled on her side and rubbed her cheek into the smooth cotton as Eddie, Ada, and Lily left through the wall, Eddie glancing over his shoulder at Piotr with a frown as he vanished into the hall.

  “So…Ada, huh?” Wendy asked Piotr, patting the space beside her on the bed. “She looks like a trip and a half to hang out with. Is she always so stiff?”

  “Ada is concerned for my well being,” Piotr said quietly, settling on the bed beside Wendy, “and she has brought us disturbing tidings.” He touched his stomach. “She believes that, with work, she may be able to heal me of my wound
s.”

  “Okay,” Wendy murmured, closing her eyes as Piotr carefully stretched out beside her, no part of him touching her, but still spooned nearly around her like a cat. She took a deep breath and inhaled the sweetly smoky evergreen scent of him, the smell of dirt and growing things, of dark green trees in the snow, reaching branches to a sky white with heavily-laden clouds. “How?”

  “We will need to travel with her to the bay,” Piotr explained quietly as Wendy's eyes fluttered closed. “She has a laboratory there.”

  “Not gonna wait for Elle, then?” Wendy murmured. “I mean, Lily came back so fast, there's a chance Elle might still pull through. She could…” Wendy hesitated, thought of telling Piotr about Sarah, but decided that she couldn't talk about the little Lost yet without tearing up. “She could…find a Lost, still. Maybe. There has to be at least one out there.”

  “It is true, Elle is still searching,” Piotr said and gently touched the back of her neck with one finger, then another, then another until he cupped the nape of her neck with his palm. He hissed and Wendy shuddered, but neither of them drew away. “But this is a good longer-term plan, I think. And this way we may be able to ascertain how much ill or good the Council truly holds for us.”

  “You should stop,” Wendy said when her head was swimming and her skin was jumping beneath his palm as if he were administering tiny electric shocks to her flesh. “Your memories…the pain…”

  “The pain, it is something I can handle,” he replied, breathing evenly through gritted teeth. “The memories…I don't need them. Let them go.” He pulled his hand away and replaced it with his lips, mouth grazing the back of her neck as he said, “I hated every moment we were apart.”

  “Then why did you leave?” Wendy asked quietly. The exhaustion was so all-consuming that even the feeling of Piotr kissing the back of her neck was soothing and not exciting. Wendy wanted to sag against him, curl into his side and sleep for a million years; only the fear of what pressing her living heat to his chill might do to him stopped her. She fought encroaching sleep but exhaustion was winning. Wendy struggled to stay awake for his reply but it didn't come.

  When she realized he wasn't going to answer her, Wendy was asleep in seconds.

  “Because I was scared,” Piotr said at long last, when Wendy's breathing had evened out, when she lay lax across her bed. He pulled away so that they were touching no more. “And because giving you up then was easier than walking away later.” He paused and then smiled. “You are asleep? Wendy?” Piotr nodded once and held up his palm. It was blistered and charred, heavily wounded from touching the back of Wendy's neck. “And because if you knew what touching you did to me, you'd never allow it again.”

  That said, even if only acknowledged to himself alone, Piotr stretched out beside her, careful to not touch her again, and let himself drift. Perhaps it was the poison, or his wounds, or perhaps it was simply the strain of touching Wendy again, but he was bone-weary and ready for sleep. Slowly his own breathing evened out and Piotr slid into dreams of his own.

  In her dream Wendy walked and walked.

  At first, the fog was so thick that she was unsure where she was, but then Wendy thought she recognized the tied boat bobbing with the tide, the rotting rope holding it to the pier, and the short stretch of rocky beach bordered with scrubland that stretched out beneath her feet. This was like the place where she'd met the White Lady for the first time, the dreamscape where her mother had tried to scare her off and punished Wendy for defying her. Later she'd ripped Wendy's tongue piercing out of her mouth in the dreamscape and Wendy had woken to find her ring gone and tongue healed, as if she'd never had the bar in the first place.

  As if she'd conjured it up, a glint of silver at her feet made Wendy pause. She knelt down and there it was—her old tongue ring. The barbell was slightly tarnished by sand and sea and sun, but still recognizable.

  “Gross,” she said, and pocketed the ring, more for the novelty of finding it again in such a strange place than out of any actual plans to use it again.

  Was this a dream or a dreamscape? Wendy didn't know. She searched the sand and scrub for the telltale door of seashells but could not see one. Of course that didn't mean anything; sometimes the doors were well hidden, sometimes they were out in plain sight. But dreams never had the doors, only dreamscapes did. Wendy could spot none and decided to assume, for now, that this was just a dream.

  Above, the wind picked up, scuttling the fog clear of the beach and rock outcroppings like bones, bleached white and strange in the sand. Wendy realized that no, she'd been wrong, this beach wasn't the same. That beach had been in Santa Cruz but this was clearly not Santa Cruz at all. It was smaller, for one, and the steep scrub was much closer to shore than she'd originally thought. In fact, Wendy realized, unless she was very much mistaken, she wasn't on the mainland at all, but an island.

  “Is this…is this Alcatraz?” she muttered to herself, twisting and craning until she could spot the familiar white washed lighthouse perched above Alcatraz Island. The tower was there, but the top of the building was thin and wavery, insubstantial and faded; the harder Wendy squinted, trying to make out where exactly on the island she might be, the thinner the building seemed to become until it looked as if the lighthouse stood alone amid the rocks and scrub, a dot adrift on the cold, unforgiving sea.

  A light step nearby startled Wendy into jumping aside, but it was just her mother—not the White Lady, but Mary, feeding ravens and crows gathered in peaceful droves on the slim slope of beach. High above the tableau seagulls squawked and screamed, dive-bombing the shallow waves lapping the pier in groups and coming up with mouthfuls of struggling crabs and fish and filthy water. One nearby gull squatted over a freshly-killed squirrel and struggled to gulp it down in one bite, turning the furry corpse over and over in its bill, looking for the right angle to eat.

  In the distance, from the prison behind them, a black pillar of smoke drifted up toward the clouds. A bell donged on the island and the wind picked up, hot and humid, and Wendy shuddered at the touch; the breeze felt like moist fingers fondling her skin, tugging at her skirt and yanking sharply at the loose tendrils of her hair.

  “Mom?” Wendy asked, carefully picking her way through the quiet flocks of crows and ravens, “This is a dream, right? Not a dreamscape. Right? Mom?”

  Her mother shrugged.

  Frowning, Wendy reached her side and, taking a few pieces of stale bread from Mary's plastic bread-bag, crumbled up the food for the birds. “So I met—well, really met—my cousin Emma today and your…aunt? And your grandma. You won't guess what Eddie named her, by the way. Nana Moses. Can you believe it?”

  Her mother remained silent, simply spreading out the bread and letting the breeze tug her tumbled red curls forward, obscuring her face. Bemused, Wendy shrugged and tried again. “I heard that you were some sort of super-Reaper. Crazy, huh? Why didn't you ever tell me?”

  Again, her mother's silence. Wendy frowned. When Mary had been the White Lady, she hadn't shut up for a minute; the entire time they'd been together, the White Lady had run her mouth, talking and sniping, offering unwanted advice and picking at Wendy's choices whether she wanted to hear it or not. Reminding Wendy over and over again that she wasn't good enough, and would never, ever be good enough.

  Irritated now, Wendy strode several feet away, digging her feet in the sand and wriggling her toes into the grit. Her foot caught a rock and Wendy stumbled, scraping her hand against a sharp outcropping poking up from the sand.

  Hissing in pain, Wendy cradled her hand against her chest and glared around her. Where her mother rested against a large rain-sculpted grotto, the island seemed peaceful, almost sweet, but down the shore where Wendy stood, the waves were cold and filthy and rank; spotting a hole in the sand, Wendy had a mean impulse to stomp on the hole and cave it in.

  Glancing over her shoulder at her mother, still resting some distance away, Wendy shrugged and stomped, relishing the squish of sand beneath her heel. Pu
nishing the earth and possibly the clam for her own misgivings made Wendy feel simultaneously better and truly awful. For a moment she considered digging the clam out to let it breathe, but then remembered that this was a dream and even if she did, one of the birds would just crack the clam and eat its meat. Maybe it was better to leave it be.

  “Mom?” Wendy called, straightening, emboldened by her stomping about. “Mom, did you really go crazy? Was it really the Lost that did all that to you? Or were you a little crazy to begin with?” No answer. Wendy forged ahead. “Piotr says he talked to some guy name Frank and that you were working with…working with…”

  Wendy faltered to a stop. There was odd movement against her toes, slight scratching against the arch of her right foot. Slowly, so slowly, Wendy looked down…and stifled a scream.

  There were spiders at her feet, pouring from a hundred holes in the sand just like the one she had stomped. Startled, Wendy tried to back away but the spiders were everywhere, large and hairy and underfoot, crawling over her toes and heaving themselves bodily out of new, larger holes in the sand. Everywhere she turned new holes were opening up, spewing out their eight-legged contents in a scuttling mass.

  Fighting back a yell, Wendy scrambled back toward the grass and rock as best she could, but the spiders followed, intent on overcoming her. Overwhelmed, Wendy had no idea if they were poisonous or not, but when one dropped on her hair from above she couldn't help herself. Shrieking, she slapped at her hair, feeling the bulging heat of the hairy thing beneath her hand as she yanked fingers through her tangled curls, praying and crying that it wouldn't get caught in them. Instead she felt the slick, wet pop as it burst against her palm and the burning as what could only be its poison worked its way into the scrape.

  Wendy shrieked again and flung the spider corpse away, or tried to. The large dangling legs were tangled in her hair, the cluster of eyes swinging against her cheek as Wendy, sobbing, tried to pry it free.