Not Just Voodoo

by Rebecca Hamilton

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  Reaper’s Redemption

  Thea Atkinson

  1

  I collect the dead.

  You’d never guess it by the way I look: platinum hair, eyes the color of the palest horizon. A voice so soft it could be down feathers drifting from a blanket of air and landing on your shoulders with the weight of a whisper. I’m breathtaking in an otherworldly way, perfect grace, angelic features. I’m not vain; I’m just honest.

  Because I’m honest, I have to tell you I have a dark heart. Every other reaper in the soul-scape knows this about me. Dark enough to drag a mortal soul kicking and screaming to its death if I need to. Dark enough that at my height, I took one of the brightest angels down without a second thought to the consequences he would suffer for leaping with me from the heavenly host.

  Reaping is a perfect gig for a fallen one with such a dark heart. And it’s not a bad gig, really. Especially not when you consider the alternatives. The way I see it, being a reaper is inferior to what I really am but far superior to being human or even human-in-waiting. Like I said, I’ve done both—well, to death, actually.

  I used to be Cleopatra. That’s right. The Cleopatra. You can bet I was beautiful too. You can bet I knew how to use my looks, my smarts to get everything I wanted. You know the story, I’m sure… Or at least the propaganda the history books have recorded. I could put a few chinks in those tales if the historians cared to listen, but that’s only one small part of my soul-scape anyway. I can’t get too bent out of shape over it.

  After Cleopatra, I was a poor mosaic artisan in Pompeii. After that, I was Mata Hari.

  It’s important that you know these things. That in my time, I’ve lived the gamut of the human condition: rich, poor. Famous. Obscure. I’ve been beautiful and ugly. Man and woman. History has recorded me and it hasn’t.

  It’s important because we Fallen must gain an acute understanding of the human condition before we’re allowed back home. It’s why we spend incarnations in the mortal coil. We have been ordered to feel what it’s like to live and love and to suffer longing.

  Then we are required to extinguish it.

  Reaping is a sort of psychic limbo for the heavenly disgraced after they’ve done eons of incarnations of mortal suffering. It’s supposed to recondition us in some way. Or punish us. I’ve never quite understood the purpose and I don’t care by now. All I know is that souls sigh when they see me because they know what I am. Each fare I reap gets me that much closer. The rules are simple. Collect the dead. Move to the next one.

  Collect enough and you shed your shackles and return to your original form, never having to spend another lifetime as a human or reap souls again until the last day of judgement.

  Collect enough and start again with a clean slate, wings restored and keys to the kingdom back in hand. I’m so close now I can smell the Divine’s lavender-scented armpits.

  For me, it’s one more. That’s it. One more reaped soul and I’ve earned my ticket.

  It makes me anxious, having one last soul to reap. I’ve never known another reaper to regain the wings lost during their fall. There’s rumor in the soul-scape that one almost did, once, back in the forties during a particularly nasty collection when he tried to cheat and reap half a million fares all at once and created a great war to do so.

  That fallen angel had one last fare to collect and he’d be home free, but stuck in a bunker deep in the woods of Germany, he had none left but himself. Imagine the irony of reaping your own human flesh when it’s the most unpardonable of all the Divine’s sacraments. I’ve heard he’s still whispering around the soul-scape, trying to find that one fare that can erase the taint of suicide and gain him his ticket.

  I admit, sometimes, they’re stubborn, the fares. It sucks when I have to trail them because their future is uncertain. It means I have to take form. Make contact. Push them one way or the other so I can move on and collect my next fare. I tend to nudge the uncertain in a particular direction if you get my meaning. I can use any human form I’ve been in my past, from any age during the life I lived to do so.

  I tend to go with my first human persona in my long list of mortal incarnations because that young woman was the truest mortal form of my original self. She died before she turned twenty: exactly the number of millennia I’d lived when I was forced into the mortal coil as penance for defying the Divine order.

  A nineteen-year-old Isiriel, with her pale blonde hair and sighing blue eyes is perfect for those times I need to nudge an uncertain. Like this fare in front of me now. My last fare. He’s most decidedly an uncertain. He doesn’t see me yet, but he will. Just give it a moment. He’s too busy confronting a bully on some stranger’s behalf, and to turn away from that beast now would be suicide. And that’s the nudge I need to give him.

  From where I stand behind him, I know that he has no idea the bully has a knife, that the bully fully intends to use it. That’s the beauty and the awfulness of this reap. It’s why his future is uncertain. If he sees the knife he may back off. So I need to distract him. Step out from the crowd of teenagers and let him see the striking face of a young and breath-taking Isiriel.

  The youths around me jostle me sideways as I take shape and no one notices just one more body in the crowd screaming at the boys to go at it. Hit him. Mess him up.

  “Take him out,” I shout and that does it.

  For one eternity-splitting second, he glances sideways into the crowd and catches sight of me. I know he’s surprised by what he sees. I know what I look like. It’s almost too much for a human to bear, my beauty. Even so, it’s me that takes a step back in surprise because he merely looks confused, not enraptured. He has creamed coffee skin and those electric green eyes narrow in confusion as they land on me. I try to make out his thoughts to see why he’s not affected the way I expect. Usually, I can hear the last thoughts of my fares. It gives me that edge I need to push them teetering over the brink.

  This time I hear nothing except the rush of a thousand wings beating on air.

  He’s beautiful enough to make me catch my breath and think for one second that if I were human again I’d want to make love to him. Cleopatra style. A passion to bring worlds to their knees, a desire to die for.

  I want to be with him badly enough that I do the unthinkable. I leap for him when the bully pulls out his knife. My momentum shoves him out of the way just in time for me to catch the edge of the blade as it slices down my forearm.

  I land on my ribs and all of the air in my newly formed lungs sighs out of me. I can hear the last of it cough its way free. The taste of blood in my mouth reminds me how much I hate being human. So much pain. It’s not worth the price of paradise.

  “Shit,” the bully, says because he realizes he’s just torn through an innocent bystander. A girl, no less.

  Several kids gather around me, leaning over me. I see several pairs of eyes, but not one of them is those electric green that sent me diving for the pavement in the first place.

  Some girl’s black hair dangles over my eyes and dips into my tear duct, making me blink frantically in an effort to get rid of the scratchiness. I brush her away impatiently.

  Now that the fare is safe, I might never get another chance to nudge him. The moment is gone. And here I am mortal again for the time it takes for him to fall prey to his future. A future that now seems to include living and breathing. I groan out loud at my foolhardiness.

  “Get off me,” I growl because it was stupid of me. “I’m alright.”

  “You most certainly are not alright,” the girl says and I feel her hands pressing into the skin of my forearm. “Someone get me a belt or something. You,” she says, jabbing my fare in the chest. “Call 911.”

  My fare. He’s there after all, pushed to the front of the crowd hovering over top of me and squatting across from the bossy girl. I’m not sure how I feel about that in the second that I can catch his eye. I’m not sure I want him to see me lying here helpless. He pulls o
ut his cell phone from his shirt pocket. I hear little popping sounds as he taps the screen.

  The crowd is already dissipating as he does this. Several of them mutter to themselves before they shuffle off to some unknown destination. No doubt the bully has already taken flight. No one wants to be around when the cops come. Too many questions demanding too many answers. The alleyway is too narrow to contain all that youth-drenched hormone-laden air anyway. Good riddance to them.

  I push at the girl again and roll over onto my side. I’m going to be okay. I already know that. The flesh is already itchy where it’s stitching itself back together from the bottom up. The worst thing is that now I’ve botched up my fare’s uncertain future and turned it into a certain one, there’s no going back from it. Last fare indeed. I have no idea no how I’m going to fix this thing.

  “It’s nothing,” I tell the girl and shove at her hard enough that she falls backward onto her bottom, the soles of her ankle boots grip the pavement as her knees prop up.

  “That isn’t nothing,” she argues from her spot on the alley floor.

  Her palms are flat on the ground beside her and even so indisposed, she still looks formidable. I almost admire her except a fallen one does not admire a human. Mortality has nothing to be proud of. It’s a miserable existence of oneness and individuality.

  “Look,” I angle my arm toward her so she can see that the gaping slice she thought she saw is really nothing but a scratch. “It’s already getting better.”

  She looks at her hands, which are bloody and full of debris collected from the alleyway floor. “So much blood.” she says.

  I try on a grin because I don’t want to freak her out. I have the feeling it spreads my mouth in an angry grimace instead because I’m pissed at myself. I need to find some way to collect my fare and be done without too much more fuss. If she sees what I truly am then the fare becomes void. It’s a sticky little rule and it has caused me to lose too many fares in the past. It’s not going to cost me this one. I need this one. I’m homesick.

  I find my way to a shaky stand and look down at her. I can tell from a quick appraisal that I’m inches taller than she is. I blink at her, quietly trying to decide what to do. A mortal would reach out for her, help her up. I know this from a centuries old instinct, but I do nothing except gawk at her and curse myself for the foolhardy impulse that has now put me in full view of one more human than I had hoped for. Whatever made me do such a ridiculous thing as interrupt the reap? I’m in such shock from it, I can’t even make a simple decision.

  In the end, it’s my fare who does the right thing. He reaches out for her arm and pulls her to a stand.

  “They’ll be here soon,” he says.

  I realize by the way she looks at him as though he’s a tall drink she wants to drown in that she knows him. Intimately. A strange tightening grips my throat as I think about the two of them together. I imagine all of the things Cleopatra would do to him and then I imagine this black haired girl being the one performing those acts. I feel my teeth grit together. They don’t even seem to notice me. Me. The one who just sacrificed everything for him.

  “What will we tell them?” She folds her arms across her chest. “We don’t even know her.”

  He reaches out and flips an inky lock of hair off her shoulder. “Maybe I’ll leave you to do the talking,” he says. “You’re better at it than me.”

  He slips his arm around her waist and pulls her close. Her palms move toward his chest as though she wants to push them away, but instead they land like moth’s feet just at the hollow of his throat. I swallow down hard. Something squeezes deep in my solar plexus.

  “Let me guess,” she says. “You won’t be here when they arrive. So typical of you, Daniel, always disappearing when someone gets hurt.”

  Before he can answer, I cough. They have forgotten me entirely and I’m not used to being forgotten.

  I sidle close enough that I can push a hand between the two of them, separating them. I’m trying to work out how I can fix my mistake and get this handsome devil to fall prey to some horrible accident but there’s something just beyond the two of them that catches my attention. Some shadow that I hadn’t noticed before next to the building.

  The spot between my shoulder blades tingles painfully.

  “Do you see that?” I hear myself saying, and even as I do something shifts in the shadow and shivers into a form.

  “See what?” Daniel says and sends those crystalline eyes over my face, reading into my eyes as though he can see all the way back into my darkest self.

  I squirm beneath that gaze, because it makes me think of days long gone when there was no such thing as day or night, just long swaths of pleasure. I admit to a heady desire to have that gaze touch on my lips instead, trailing down my chest. It’s insufferable the way I long for his touch when there’s so much threat of danger laying on the air like a moldy shroud.

  There’s something wrong with me. I can barely drag my eyes from his mouth. If I were sleeping, I’d believe I was being drained by an incubus. Every part of my body feels alien and heavy, as though I’ve forgotten how to move the muscles or fire the synapses to speak. It’s only when the shadow beyond him trembles and the air around it wavers like steam from a kettle that a little gasp escapes me.

  I know two things in the moment that the shadow transforms into a short man with a square little mustache. The first is that neither of the two humans can see the form that has taken shape in the alleyway like a bit of smoke and the second is that the man standing there with a smirk of victory is most definitely not human.

  He’s a fallen one. A reaper. The reaper. He who thought to cheat the Divine one of a trip home and ended up in limbo, waiting for that one last fare that could save him.

  That can only mean one thing. The reaper has come for one of us, and since neither of them can see him and I can, I’m pretty sure I know exactly which of us the reaper has come to collect.

  The only one of us who can wipe out the nasty stain of suicide.

  Me.

  I feel myself stumbling backward, scrabbling behind me with my hands to find the brick wall of the building. There must be a door somewhere. There must be somewhere I can disappear to. Except there isn’t. I know it because I’ve chosen to take form, and until my fare is dead, I’m stuck here in the flesh.

  I need to run but I’m terrified to make a move. Anything, any movement, any decision can send me plummeting toward the inevitable moment when I can’t turn back. He will reap me then. Because I’m in human form here and vulnerable.

  “No,” I gasp out as the reaper edges into the realm of physicality. “Leave me alone.”

  “What’s wrong?” Daniel says.

  I know I’m staring out at him with eyes that must look like panic-stricken goggles. I can’t help myself. I have no idea what’s going to happen to me if I get reaped, but I imagine it will put me back at square one. I envision another dozen or so millennia living life after human life until I can earn a way back into the reaper realm so that I can spend another dozen or so millennia reaping souls to earn my wings back.

  “It isn’t fair,” I mutter. “I’ve done my time. I can’t start over again.”

  Daniel coos to me, shushing me. I peer up at him and watch the way his mouth puckers. I force myself to imagine those lips on mine because that was the thing that put me in this damned spot: wanting him. Lusting for him. Me. a member of the heavenly host, hankering for a human male. I deserve to be reaped if I couldn’t smother that desire long enough to claim my wings. I deserve to have to start again. Have I learned nothing in all of my eons? Seeking unequal union had got me pitched into the ooze of disgrace in the first place.

  I can’t stand the thought of it. I can’t spend one more human lifetime suffering through childhood and the angst of teen years only to get married and spend another dozen or so years with an insufferable partner. I can’t spend another mortal lifetime wanting things I can never have, working jobs that will never g
ive me satisfaction. I don’t know how the human souls do it. I don’t how they spend incarnation after incarnation making the same mistakes.

  The reaper advances on me. He won’t touch me, I know that. He just wants to nudge me in the right direction. I look around frantically, trying to see what danger could possibly be in my way. A stray cat tumbles out of a trash can and a tin of salmon rolls toward me. The sharp edge of it glints in the light. I shrink away from it. My forearm burns with the memory of a winking blade.

  “Get it away from me,” I say. “Leave me alone.”

  Daniel reaches out for me, cups his palm behind my nape to hold me still. “No one is going to hurt you.”

  Panic rises to my throat nonetheless. He has no idea. He’s just human. A beautiful, heart-achingly touchable human. The skin stretched over my form shivers with the pleasure of contact. It feels hauntingly familiar. It’s too much. I can’t stand to look at him, to let his fingers bring a blush to my skin. I sag against the building. I feel weak. As though something is draining out of me.

  Bossy girl lurches into view. “Daniel,” she says. “Do something for her. She’s freaking me out.”

  I laugh out loud at that. “Daniel can’t help me,” I say. “Nobody can.”

  I strain to make out the edges of the reaper’s form over his shoulder. Is he solid or is he just a vaporous cloud? I need to know. If he has taken form, then my future is still uncertain and there’s still hope.

  Bossy girl shuffles closer as though she’s afraid I might leap for her if she moves too fast. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “We can help you.” She holds her hands out at me as she moves, cautious and slow.

  I shake my head. A lock of pale hair catches on my eyelashes and I end up peering at the two of them from behind the lacework of it. My reaper stands several feet away, his arms folded over his chest, most definitely human now but standing so still they don’t even know he’s there yet. He’s smirking at me. He knows something I don’t.