Reaper (5 page)

And of course with memories of
Emily-or-Maggie came thoughts of the shadows that took her. The
shadows that’d laughed as they carried her off because Bard was too
busy fulfilling his selfish second-chance desires. Too busy to do
his job.

Bard had been used to having life dick him
over. When he was recruited and thought he’d gotten his second
chance, he treated it as something he was owed. And for that,
Emily-or-Maggie was lost and he was forever a fuck up.

Oz looked like a fuck up, too.

One hour and three cigarettes later, his
nerves still burned. Bard was getting too old for this shit.

Chapter
Six

At the end of a narrow street where it became
more of an alley, a shop with heavy black drapes over the windows
stood out against its abandoned neighbors. The flower box had been
eaten away by time and termites, but by some stroke of luck it
still hung, almost stubbornly, filled with what looked like parsley
bunches growing from the soil.

Oz looked to the sign above the door.
The
Waning Crescent
.

The door swung open, banging against the
crumbling brick wall. A ragged backpack was thrown into the street,
followed by a boy who couldn’t have been more than thirteen. A
tall, lanky old man filled the doorway, shouting at the boy.

“Go thieve someone else’s shop for a change,
ya little hooligan!”

“Screw you, Grandpa. I didn’t take anything,”
the boy said.

The man kicked some dirt in the kid’s general
direction and pulled the door shut with enough power to weld it to
the frame before twisting the sign in the window to read,
“Closed.”

Oz laughed. He’d been thrown out of his fair
share of establishments in his life. He had no idea how ridiculous
it looked from the outside.

The kid’s grumbling drew Oz’s gaze to his
skinny form. His hair had been shorn into a crew cut and he wore a
black polo shirt and dirty khakis. His sneakers were as frayed as
the bag. What could he want to lift from what looked like an occult
shop? The kid picked up his bag and smacked it to shake away the
added grit before swinging it onto his back. He lifted his head and
looked directly at Oz.

“The hell are you looking at?”

Oz turned, expecting to see someone standing
behind him, but there was no one else on the street. They’d all
remembered something that called them away from where Oz stood.

“Me?” Oz asked, feeling mildly
ridiculous.

“Duh.”

“You can see me?”

The kid took a step back. “Um. Yes?”

Finally.

Oz took two steps toward the kid, who took
three steps backward.

“Sorry. I’m not—my name’s Oz. I’m not going
to hurt you.”

He offered his hand then thought better of
it. There was probably a good reason people turned away when they
came near him. Oz wasn’t taking chances until he knew all the
rules.

“Jamie.” The kid’s bright blue eyes moved
over him, scrutinizing.

“Listen, Jamie,” he paused. “You have
anything to eat?”

Jamie’s gaze softened. He dropped to his
knees to dig through his backpack. After a quick forage, he
produced a sandwich baggy containing a pulverized PB and J and
tossed it to Oz.

He caught it one-handed.

Food.

“Thanks.”

Oz peeled the baggy from the jelly-sogged
bread, then balled up the sandwich and shoved it, whole, into his
mouth. From his stomach, filling his chest and reverberating from
behind his pursed lips came a moan that only the starved could
possibly interpret.

The gummy goodness stuck in every one of his
teeth. It tasted faintly of plastic.

It was Heaven.

“You, um, you ok?” Jamie asked.

Oz gave the universal “one minute” signal
while sucking the final bits of peanut butter from his molars.
“Yeah,”
Suck. Slurp.
“I’m good. Better. Thanks.”

Jamie hiked his bag over his shoulder,
keeping a careful eye on Oz. “There’s a homeless shelter down the
road. They have hot food and stuff, I think. My mom volunteers
there on Saturdays.”

“I’m not homeless,” Oz said with his hand
inside the plastic baggy, attempting to finger the sticky bits from
the sides.

“Ok,” Jamie said. He turned around and began
his rapid retreat.

“Wait!”

Jamie looked over his shoulder, but didn’t
stop. “Look, dude, you’re creeping me out, ok? I’ll call the
cops.”

Oz stopped and put his hands up. “Okay, okay.
Listen. I’m not crazy. I just—I just got back and I’ve spent all
day being dead and alive and ignored by people who can’t see me and
I can’t go anywhere or do anything and you’re the first person
who’s seen me and I just—” Oz wiped his face. “Sorry. Long story.
I’m really not crazy.”

Jamie stopped and cocked his head. “Did you
say you were dead?”

Something bubbled in Oz’s stomach and it
wasn’t the pulverized sandwich. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to be
telling the boy this. “Yes...”

“You don’t look dead.”

“I’m renting a tux.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Yes, I’m dead.”

He’d been dead for a while, even accepted it
in less time than most he’d encountered in The Department, but
saying it aloud, those two words, struck a nerve deep in his mind
that flushed ice through his veins.

In true, thirteen-year-old-boy fashion, Jamie
said, “Prove it.”

“How?”

Jamie folded his arms across his chest and
shrugged. There was something familiar about the boy’s attitude,
and his mannerisms. The way he held his sides while his arms were
crossed and the backward angle at which he tipped his head. It was
creepy.

“Fine,” Oz said, “Follow me.”

Oz backtracked the way he came with Jamie
jogging close behind. The kid was short for his age, so it was
difficult for him to keep up with Oz’s long, determined strides. He
wasn’t going to throw himself in front of a car, even though he was
sure that’s what Jamie wanted. It’s what thirteen-year-old Oz
would’ve wanted, too. The kid eyeballed every vehicle that drove
past and even slowed his pace when a U-HAUL truck turned the
corner.

Showing his inability to enter any building
aside from his apartment building wouldn’t be shocking enough for
the kid, so the only thing Oz could think of was to find a group of
people and make an ass of himself—show Jamie that he was
essentially invisible to everyone except him.

A fountain occupied a corner where the
historical buildings ended and the tall, modern buildings began. At
the center of it, a sculpture of spheres warped in and around each
other. On the bench surrounding it, a couple sat with their faces
glued at the mouth.

Perfect
.

“Watch,” he told Jamie.

The couple had morphed into an eight-legged
lust spider. Oz wondered if they’d ever come up for air. He stood
over them, not wanting to touch them for the same reason he
wouldn’t shake Jamie’s hand. Too many unknown variables. So he
crouched down, bringing his face level with theirs. He took a deep
breath and screamed the loudest, most terrifying,
what-the-fuck-was-that scream he could manage.

The couple only deepened their embrace.

Oz looked up at Jamie, who shrugged.

“They could be deaf.” He pointed to his
ear.

Oz rolled his eyes and leaned over the side
of the fountain. He scooped as much water as he could hold in his
hands and tossed it into the faces of the lust-spider. The woman
squealed, the man cursed, and they tumbled, still tangled around
each other to the ground. The man leapt up looking for a fight but
only found Jamie, engrossed in a Missing Cat poster on a nearby
telephone pole and too far away to have done the splashing. The man
helped the woman to stand and they all but ran from the
fountain.

“Satisfied?”

A wicked smile cut across Jamie’s face.
“That. Was. Awesome.”

* * *

Fried dough, frosting, and sprinkles. Was
there ever a combination more heavenly?

Jamie led Oz to Kramer’s Crullers—a hole in
the wall donut shop decorated in so many shades of pink and yellow
it hurt his teeth to look at it.

A pock-marked cashier leaned against the
counter with a smut magazine sloppily concealed inside a comic book
jacket. He closed it only when Jamie handed him the cash for their
order—a dozen double-glazed. Though he didn’t have much choice,
allowing the kid to pay for their snack after he’d given Oz his
lunch had Oz’s stomach in knots. He didn’t like appearing cheap,
especially to a kid half his age.

As they were leaving, he stuffed his only
dollar into the cashier’s tip jar.

* * *

Oz and Jamie sat on a bench outside the same
park where he and Bard first appeared after leaving The Department.
They steadily worked their way through the box of double-glazed and
Jamie shared what he’d been after: a book.

“When I was little I started seeing things
that other people couldn’t. I guess my mom wrote it off as an
overactive imagination, but when I started telling her about my
grandpa coming around and talking to me months after he died, she
sent me to therapy.”

“Had you really been seeing him?”

“Honestly? I don’t know. I made things up a
lot, even had an imaginary friend. Sometimes it’s hard for me to
tell where real ends and not real begins.”

“So what’s with the book, then?” Oz
asked.

Jamie shrugged. “I just want answers, I
guess.”

“What’s it called?”

“The Three Books.”

“But it’s one book.”

“Yep.”

“You know all that occult crap is fake,
though, right?

Jamie raised an accusatory eyebrow.

“Good point.”

Oz forced the last half of the last donut
into his mouth and chewed with his eyes closed. He couldn’t
remember the last time he’d eaten a donut. Couldn’t even remember
if he’d liked them. But the way the melted sugar clung to his lips
had him wishing for another.

“I’ll pay you back for these,” Oz said.

Jamie shrugged. “Nah, don’t worry about it.
Dad throws money at me to make up for spending a grand total of
twenty minutes with me per week. Not counting arguments.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

Jamie frowned. “We don’t have much in common.
Dad’s really into sports. He’s been on me to get into soccer, but
all that running messes with my asthma. Scares my mom. They fight
about it a lot.”

Oz sighed. Maybe he wasn’t exaggerating. He
felt for the kid.

“My dad kind of sucked, too,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“And he had this disgusting habit of walking
about in a short robe. Got my birds and the bees lesson a decade
before I was ready for it.”

Jamie snorted. “Disgusting.”

“Tell me about it. Scarred for life, I am.”
Oz licked his fingers. “So what does your dad do?”

“I don’t really know what it’s called. Mom
says he’s a mosquito.”

“A mosquito?”

“A blood-sucker.”

“Oh.”

Oz’s father had been a pilot in the Marines.
Even after he retired, he never really let go of the military.
Rising at dawn, training every day, was Hell on Earth. The only
“quality time” they had together was when he barked orders as Oz
struggled to climb a rock wall, assembled over several weekends.
His dad decided it was his duty to whip Oz into shape when
prepubescent baby fat failed to melt with time.

“What do you do, exactly?” Jamie asked. “I
mean, I know you’re dead but...do you just haunt people or
something?”

“Mm. No. I kind of help people move on.”

“Move on to where? Heaven?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know where they
go. I basically just give them bus fare.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“To be honest, kid, neither do I.”

Jamie nodded and wiped his hands on his
jeans, leaving whitish streaks. He stood and secured his backpack.
“I gotta get going. If I’m not home when my dad gets back from the
gym he’s going to kill me.”

Oz laughed. Then realized how long he’d been
gone and panicked.

“Shit! Oh, fuck.” Oz flew from the bench.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just—fuck.”

He’d been gone for hours. Something deep
inside told him that Bard waited at the apartment and he was
pissed.

“Nice to meet you, Jamie,” Oz said and
sprinted toward his apartment building.

Chapter
Seven

Of all the times to be right...

Oz burst through the apartment door to find
Bard sitting cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen with a
smoldering cigarette protruding from between his lips. He chipped
away at a piece of wood—was it part of the floorboard?—with a Swiss
army knife.

“Kind of you to show your face, Princess,” he
said, not looking up from his project.

“Sorry. I was...”

Bard pushed himself off the ground with an
unexpected grace and leaned in close to Oz’s face. He scraped the
corner of his mouth with the blade.

“That jiz on your mouth, Princess?”

Oz wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Fuck you.”

Bard smirked and tucked the knife into one of
his many jacket pockets. “Went shopping for a pair, eh? Well you’d
better hope your excursion didn’t make us late. We’ve got a pick
up.”

* * *

Bard gave Oz the silent treatment the entire
walk to a Starbucks nestled in the bottom floor of one of the
smaller downtown skyscrapers. Oz didn’t mind the punishment. It was
a welcome reprieve from the pain centralized at the front of his
brain that always accompanied the sound of Bard’s voice.

Bard opened the door, and the pair walked
inside without issue.

“What the hell?” Oz eyed the door like it’d
betrayed him.

Bard stalked to the back of the shop and sat
at a table facing the long line of patrons forming at the cash
register. Oz sat opposite him.