Reaper (Lightbringer)

by K. D. McEntire

  “Popcorn?” he offered, holding up a large bucket that spilled kernels over the backseat as he tilted it her way.

  Wendy wasn't hungry at all, but she got the sense he might be upset if she refused. Careful of her side, Wendy edged forward, taking the opportunity of reaching for a handful of popcorn to study the boy.

  Up close he was kind of cute, in a rebel-without-a-cause sort of way. His black hair was slicked back at the top and sides but too long at the back, curling slightly at his nape. His tight tee shirt was torn at the collar and tucked into well-worn skintight jeans, the bulge of either a comb or a knife pressed against his hip. A pair of huge black glasses sat on the seat beside him, pressed against his knee, and while Wendy half-expected to see a pack of smokes rolled into his collar or one tucked behind his ear, he smelled clean. Almost like Piotr, to be honest, like evergreen and the crisp scent of autumn wind.

  “Got your fill?” he asked saucily, leaning back against the door as Wendy took her handful of popcorn and leaned back. Tentatively she flicked a kernel in her mouth and was pleasantly surprised at the home-popped butter-salt taste. The before-the-movie short cut out behind him. Suddenly The Lion King was playing on the screen.

  “This'll tide me over, yeah,” Wendy said nervously, trying not to watch the movie flickering behind him. The reel had skipped the beginning of the film; she recognized the skittering, jumping rocks and the dismayed, scared look dawning on Simba's face. This was Mufasa's death scene. “Thanks.”

  “I meant of looking me over,” the greaser said, smirking. He glanced over his shoulder at the screen and shook his head as the stampede began pouring over the ridge. “Though I suppose for a skinny baby like you, a little popcorn might fill you up. When was the last time you had a real meal, Red?”

  Something about his smile struck Wendy as odd. He was stalling, she realized. “Why am I here? Who are you? What happened? I was in my…” She drifted off. “I'm dreaming. I have to be, because I feel fine.”

  “Already with the ‘what's the tale, nightingale.’ I bet you're head of the class with all those questions,” he replied lightly, lifting a hand when Wendy began to protest. “Now, now, let a guy have a second to breathe, Red. So to speak, I mean. Cool it. I've got answers, I promise, I just gotta order ’em up right, you dig?”

  Simba was weeping, curling into his father's side. Wendy turned her head aside, but not before noting that the scene had flickered and changed again. She'd only seen Hunchback of Notre Dame in snips and snatches while staying at friends’ houses, but she recognized Quasimodo right away.

  “Do I want to know why they're pelting him with rocks?” she asked, wincing.

  “I dunno, doll,” the greaser said, chewing his lip and tapping his fingers rapidly against the steering wheel. “You tell me. And while you're at it, have another bite.”

  Irritated with his levity, Wendy tossed another piece of popcorn in her mouth—this one was a widow, mostly kernel, hardly any fluffy whiteness to it—and crunched. The sound echoed around the West Winds strangely, like a gunshot, and a flock of birds took to the sky, cawing raucously. One bird broke from the mass and drifted down, flapping lazily, until it landed on the windshield and gripped the edge with large, curved talons.

  It was one of the largest ravens Wendy had ever laid eyes on.

  “You're a big guy,” the greaser told the raven and it cawed, tilting its head left and right and puffing its tail feathers majestically. Ignoring the passengers of the convertible, the raven began grooming itself, sliding its long, pointy beak deep into the fluff and pulling hard.

  Engrossed in watching the bird clean itself, Wendy almost missed the door. It was only when the raven yanked free a tail feather and let it flutter to the hood that she spotted the faintly glowing seashells rimming the hood of the car.

  Seashells?

  “Damn it, not a dream, another frickin’ dreamscape,” Wendy realized, dropping the popcorn. Half of it spilled across the floorboards, and then, as in past dreams, the dropped kernels became lovely white and yellow spotted butterflies that fluttered and danced around her head. Mollified, Wendy cupped a butterfly in her palm and felt an immense weight lift off her.

  “That's how you got me here. I'm not even awake. You're in my dream.”

  The greaser didn't answer, but the tenseness left him and he seemed to almost sag in relief. He reached for his glasses and put them on; they made his face seem more open and vulnerable, younger than before. She realized that he couldn't be more than twenty and Wendy again wondered if Piotr had ever met this guy, if he'd been a Rider.

  “Bye-bye Disney,” Wendy said and pointed her index finger at the screen. “Pow,” she whispered, and the bruised and bloody Quasimodo shook his fetters off, stood, and walked off screen. The screen went black for a moment and then the “let's go out to the lobby” reel began again.

  “Much, much better,” Wendy told the raven. “Don't you agree?”

  The raven cawed and hopped from the windshield to the top of the front seat and from there to the backseat beside Wendy. It pawed at the upholstery, clawing into the crevices deeply and twisting its head up, staring at Wendy with unblinking shiny black eyes. The echoes were so strange here; in every caw she could make out the thick swell of the ocean in the distance, the screams of angry gulls and, even more faintly, a sound like the White Lady laughing and laughing and laughing.

  Ill from the sound, Wendy inadvertently knocked the remaining popcorn over onto the backseat and turned toward the trees. Movement there, furtive and quick. Wendy squinted and then she saw it.

  “Why is there a Walker here?” Part of the question was angry—she'd never had such a horror in her dreams before—and the other part was fear. She hadn't known it was even possible to draw a Walker into a person's dreamscape.

  Noting that Wendy had spotted it, the Walker drifted forward some, and as it drew closer Wendy's heartbeat tripled.

  For a moment she thought it was the Lady Walker, but once it was close she realized that it was taller and thinner than any Walker she'd ever seen before, seeming to loom impossibly tall, as if the human it'd once been had been stretched on a rack and left to perish broken-limbed in the sun. The wind lifted the edges of its tattered cloak, exposing dark yellow bones with absolutely no flesh on them beneath the flapping hem. No tendons to work the shambling horror, no skin to keep it all together; this thing was older than old, it seemed to move on will alone.

  “If you're working with Walkers, I'm gone,” Wendy said sharply, moving to hop out of the car as fast as the hole in her gut would allow. She'd barely moved an inch or two when the greaser held up one hand and touched her wrist with the other.

  “Wait, doll. I can explain.” His touch was inexplicably warm; Wendy had been expecting the cool of the dead. Beneath his fingers, her wrist tingled.

  “Get your hands off me!” Wendy snapped, throwing him off. Her wound protested the sudden movement, pain rippling through her midsection and slowing her down. Gasping, Wendy had to sit back to catch her breath.

  “Please, wait,” he said, reaching for her again.

  “Don't touch me,” Wendy warned. “Too many people have put their hands all over me today.”

  He rolled his eyes, but acquiesced, sitting back. “Ten minutes, Red. That's all I ask.”

  “Fine,” Wendy said grudgingly, glaring at the screen instead of him. “But I'm timing you.”

  “I've been in the Bay Area for a long time, Red. A lot longer than it might seem, okay? And this place, it wasn't always peaches and cream for the dead, you dig? There was a broad—not a lady, mind you, but a broad—by the name of Elise who used to run the show around here. Maybe you've heard of her?”

  “Elise?” Wendy stilled.

  “Yeah, you know her. I can tell.” The greaser shook his head.

  “Look, Red, your family is one hell of a piece of work, you know that? Some of you cats are all right but some of you…look, any ghost with a lick of sense in his head is gonna tell you
that they get it, they dig where you're coming from. Being an angel or Reaper or whatever the hell it is that you all really do isn't the easiest gig on this wide green earth. It's pretty damn thankless on the best days and a straight-up slog on a mediocre one.”

  Wendy snorted. “Preaching to the choir, man.”

  “Indeed. All you have to do is take one look at what happened to Miss Mary Reaper to know how bad it can go wrong on a bad day. So I get it. I do.”

  “Should I be clapping?” Wendy asked sarcastically. “I feel like you want some sort of award for ‘getting’ me.”

  “Shut up, Red,” he replied kindly. “If I only have ten minutes I can't have you slowing down my flow.” He cleared his throat. “Now, where was I? Oh, right. So it's a slog, right? And any job—janitor, doctor, cop—any job that deals with the ugly parts of existence, well, it wears on a soul. Even a soul with the power of life and death. Maybe you start up with the best intentions but after a few you start to really realize how unfair it all is, how you're working your bum off and all you're getting is diddly squat in return.”

  “Is there a point to this?”

  “The point is that after a while people like Elise maybe started looking a little harder at their job description. Searching for loopholes, if you will.”

  What he was saying was lining up uncomfortably with something the Riders had relayed from their conversation with the Council.

  “You're saying that when Elise had control of the Bay Area, before my mom came along, things weren't that great for the dead.” Wendy shrugged uncomfortably. “It's not that way now, though.”

  “No, I'm saying that things were fucking miserable for the dead back then. Elise wasn't like you or your mom, Red, she didn't do the job and get out.”

  Wendy turned her face away, torn. Logically, she didn't know Elise well enough to say whether or not she could be guilty of such an act, but her gut was suggesting otherwise. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

  “See, I think you're lying. I heard it through the grapevine that you started asking permission to do your little light show, sending spirits on. If a ghostie wants to go, you send ’em, otherwise all is copasetic to you. Is that right?”

  Wendy shifted. “Maybe.”

  “You feeling shy?”

  “No!” Wendy flushed. “It's just…I guess I'm not supposed to ask permission first? I don't know. Everyone's telling me something different and I never got the training I was supposed to get. I'm winging it!”

  “Yeah, well just between you and me, I think asking a lady I just met for permission to do the backseat tango is a far sight better than just diving in and seeing how she takes it.” The greaser shrugged. “Maybe it's how I was raised, I don't know.” He glanced slyly at Wendy from beneath shuttered lashes. “You get my drift?”

  “I do.”

  “Grand!” He rubbed his hands together. “Now Elise, she doesn't exactly have the same eye-to-eye on the subject that you and I share. Permission, and all, I mean.”

  “No Reaper other than me asks the dead if they can reap them,” Wendy pointed out stiffly.

  “This goes way beyond asking for permission before sending a soul into the great beyond, Red. Elise ran one hell of a racket while she was in charge. Ultimately she knew that all ghosties, spirits, and whatnot had to be sent along their merry way to the Light, but there was nothing in the rules that said when she had to do that little deed. So she often wouldn't send ’em on when she had the chance.”

  “What?” Confused, Wendy shifted carefully forward. “But if she had a ghost right there, why wouldn't she?”

  “Why would a bank be a little sad that they got all their principal back in a few months rather than a few years?”

  “Uh, because they profit off of the inter—oooohhh. I get it. She was blackmailing them?” Wendy thought of Elise's shiny rings, her smooth hair, Emma's nice car, and frowned. She knew that a lot of the Reapers got jobs that positioned them near the dead—doctors and undertakers and the like—but would even a doctor's salary pay for all the amenities she'd seen them casually using so far?

  “Give the girl a cookie! The lucky ones, the powerful spirits, yeah, you betcha, blackmail city. Elise'd threaten to send a posse of Reapers to clean out a nest of the dead if we didn't pay up.”

  Confused, Wendy rubbed her forehead. “That makes no sense though. How're you supposed to pay anything that'd be worthwhile to the Reapers? All you have is salvage, right?”

  “Do nasty little errands for her—spy on the living, say, if you weren't all that talented moving essence or ether around, or sometimes an outright haunting of a guy if you could reach into the living world. That fancy house up San Ramon way used to be a prime plot of land in the 60s. That is, until she convinced a few folks to move out of their ‘obviously cursed’ house. Paid them pennies on the dollar, if I'm remembering right.”

  “That's…that's…”

  “One of the mildest things she's done.” The greaser scratched his chin. “And if you had a disliking for doing her dirty work, Elise had other ways to make your afterlife a living hell. She didn't like a clean reap. Too fast and not enough word-of-mouth to further her little agenda.” He sighed, rubbed his chin, and Wendy could hear the scrape of his palm against his stubble. “No, Elise, she wouldn't reap unless she absolutely had to.”

  “So what'd she do then?”

  “Torture, for one, or if she was feeling curious, experiments. Sometimes worse. For example, that little trick the White Lady had of breathing flesh right back onto a Walker? Elise taught her how to do that. She could also do the opposite, and strip a regular soul down to their bare bones with only a cord left, make other folks think that they were a Walker when they were nothing of the sort.”

  Wendy glanced at the Walker standing still and silent at the edge of the parking lot. The greaser, spotting her gaze, shook his head.

  “Oh, no, Red. She's a Walker, but there's more to that story than we've got time to talk about today. Let's just leave it at the little fact that the Never is just as complicated a place as the living lands, and just because a person's walking around without any skin doesn't make them pure unadulterated evil, you dig?”

  “I just don't get how anyone would want to cannibalize—”

  “No, you don't. Look, Red, that's what I've been trying to get across to you. The Never is a complex place and you Reapers, even the good ones who let a spirit go out with dignity, you just rage your way through it like a whole clan of bulls in a china shop.”

  “Hey!”

  “I'm not wrong though, am I? And when Elise was in charge the whole Never was a-quiver. A few souls were just so afraid of being stripped down and tortured, or used, so frightened of winking out like a crazy Shade, or entering the Light and facing whatever awful crap they did while they were alive, that they clung to whatever possible reason they could to stay in the Never. Even if it went against everything they thought they were or ever could be. Humans are survivors, Red. Even after we're already dead.”

  Despite herself, Wendy thought of the Donner party and shivered. “I guess you're right.”

  “Of course I am. Now, the ones that got me are those Walkers that went through hell and back to keep on going—those ones that ate the babies just to survive—but under Elise's rule they figured out the only way to keep on keeping on was to turn themselves in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ever wonder why the Walkers flocked to the White Lady so quickly and stuck around despite the fact that she occasionally mutilated them instead of healing them? It wasn't just because she could mend them up, Red. They knew her before. Like I said, not all Walkers are 100 percent bona-fide evil, and while Mary pitied and loathed them, even she had to admit that they could make themselves useful every now and then.”

  He jerked a thumb at the Walker at the edge of the woods. “Properly motivated, that is.”

  “Mom wouldn't—”

  “Wouldn't she? The thing is, if you can get the
m to work together, Walkers are an unstoppable force, an angry unsleeping army. Mary knew that. How do you think she got the Council to agree to a truce in the first place? How do you think Elise gave up her death-grip—pardon the pun—on the Bay Area?”

  “I was told that Mom was able to prove that she could take care of the Bay Area by herself, so they packed up for locations that needed them more.”

  “It's nice to believe in fairy tales. Personally I always like the one about the fox and the grapes, myself. I think Elise might have been acquainted with that one, too.”

  “That's a parable, not a fairy tale,” Wendy said distantly, but she got the point. “You're telling me that Mom used Walkers—Walkers—to make my family move out.”

  “One thing they told you was true: they weren't needed here if Mary could keep damn near most of Northern California clean by herself. She had the Walkers and the Council round up all the spirits from Santa Rosa to Salinas and had them hidden.”

  “Even the Riders and Lost?”

  He snorted. “One thing I'll say for your boy Piotr, Red, back in his day he taught every single Rider to be a sneaky son of a bitch. No, they couldn't find hide nor hair of the Riders or Lost to bother rounding them up. Probably for the best, to be honest. I don't think the Walkers would have kept in line if faced with so much fresh essence. I bet Mary didn't have them looking too hard at all.”

  “So even if Mom had the whole place on lockdown, why would the other Reapers leave?”

  “Smart girl! Mary sent the Walkers further out, like bait. She had them rage around a bit in cities back east and in the midwest. The Reapers got wind of the chaos and followed, and the Walkers, most of them at least, came back here.”

  “So you're telling me that after Elise left, everyone lived together for years in relative harmony,” Wendy drawled slowly. “Candy corn and sweetness all around.”

  “Now you've got with it! But then you, little Miss Lightbringer, came along and mucked it all up.”