Reaper (8 page)

Cora stayed behind with Oz.

He focused his attention on the paramedics,
futilely trying to untangle bodies from the wreckage. Limbs lay
detached from their owners, waiting to be bagged and tagged. News
vans arrived and police taped off the area. Oz never thought he’d
witness something so catastrophic. It was one of those things that
never happened until it happened to you, and it was happening to Oz
in a really big, really fucked up way.

“Is she really dead?” Oz struggled to keep
his eyes off the pilot’s body. “I mean, no-coming-back dead?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Where is he taking her?”

Cora hesitated before answering, “Somewhere
safe.”

Safe. It was hard to imagine the meaning of
that word.

“What were those things? The wolves?”

“Simply put, they’re the bad guys.”

“And not so simply?”

Cora gently steered Oz away from the
wreckage, guiding him with a hand on his back. “They live off of
the potential energy that makes up a Ba. No one really knows where
they come from, or if they’ve been sent by someone, or something
else. At times they seem to work on their own, with the theft of a
Ba their only motivation. And others... I don’t know. There have
been rare times when they seemed to be driven by something more
organized, more ugly. Imagine the worst thing you could think of
happening to a person, then multiply it until you’ve lost count.
That’s where the latter take the Bas.”

“Hell?”

“If you think Hell is the worse place
imaginable, then you’ve got a lot to learn.”

* * *

The terminal buzzed with life. With so much
death outside, Oz forgot that life still went on. He tried not to
look at their faces. What if one of them was next? He convinced
himself that if he ignored them all, he could prevent it from
happening. Just go on with your business, people. Nothing to see
here. Oz spotted a man in a checkered scarf eating a slice of
pizza. Now he had the right idea. He refused to get caught up in
the chaos. Refused to break down. This, too, would pass.

Oz wanted to be like that guy—stoic on the
outside and screaming hysterics on the inside. There was blood on
his shirt and hands. He ducked into a bathroom at the end of the
concourse. It was empty save for one stall where someone retched in
violent bursts. Oz held his breath while he scrubbed and scrubbed
the red from his fingers. It was gone, but not gone. He felt it
beneath his skin, like a second dermis, a layer of memory he’d wear
for the rest of his existence.

When he emerged, hands stuffed in his
pockets, Cora waited with a large bottle of Jack Daniels perched on
her hip. “Figured we could both stand a drink.”

“Whiskey makes me want to fight,” he said
lamely.

“So we’ll drink near something you can
punch.” She fisted the neck of the bottle and placed her empty hand
on Oz’s shoulder, nudging him forward.

“I need a new shirt. And pants. I just want
to burn it all,” he said, squirming. “How’d you get that,
anyway?”

“Reapers’ five-finger discount.”

He noticed a splash of blood across her front
and frowned.

“Not mine,” she said.

He nodded. “Are you okay?”

She shook the bottle. “Let’s find out.”

* * *

Oz didn’t drink much when he was alive, but
when he did it took a vat of liquor to get him sloshed. Sitting on
the roof of his apartment building with Cora, sipping warm whiskey
from the bottle, he was getting drunk faster than he thought he
would. He struggled to sit upright. Cora matched him, sip for sip,
with a blush in her cheeks as the only hint that she was
buzzed.

It was a calm night. No clouds. The crash
site was far enough that not even a breath of smoke was visible
from where they sat. Anyone with anywhere to be was already there,
so even the typical clack and clamor of foot traffic was missing.
It didn’t feel right. The city should’ve been screaming.

“People die every day, Oz,” Cora said, as
though reading his mind. “You’re only going to make yourself crazy
if you let every person get to you.”

“How do you do it?”

Cora shook the bottle of disappearing amber
liquid and tipped the rim to her lips.

“I don’t just mean with the people. I mean
with everything.”

Cora nodded, but didn’t answer.

He’d been buzzed for a while, since the sun
went down, but now all fluffs of pink sunset were gone and Oz was
angry.

“And why the fuck is Bard such a... a...”

He reached for a word that would accurately
describe Bard’s douchbaggery, his assholeness, his unmitigated,
unmatchable ability to be a beastly fuck. Unable to come up with
anything, Oz fell back against the cement and covered his face. His
hands felt cool against his hot cheeks. He heard Cora take another
swallow.

“He’s got a lot on his plate,” Cora said.

“I had to watch my best friend die,” Oz shot
back.

“We all have.”

Oz removed his hands to look at Cora. Her
face was pink and her eyelids hung sleepily.

“More or less,” she added.

“You know, it’s funny. At The Department, my
life revolved around death. I must’ve killed thousands of people,
and in the most obnoxious, obscene ways. It was nothing to me. Just
what I did. Constantly. I don’t remember ever leaving my desk. I
was a fucking robot. And when I got here, when I got this body, I
thought –”

Oz sat up and rubbed his face. Snatched the
bottle from Cora’s hands.

He took a long pull.

“And?”

“Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

Cora placed a delicate hand on his thigh.
“You have to keep it in your mind that we do good. That without us,
Bas would have no way of moving on. We’re the good guys.”

Oz’s eyes met hers. A static charge hung in
the uncrossable chasm between them.

The whiskey told him it was a good idea and
because stupid people need lessons taught more than once, he
agreed. He leaned toward her too quickly. Cora dodged his face and
Oz kissed concrete. He tasted blood but the alcohol numbed any pain
that might’ve accompanied it.

“Oz...” she slurred. There was a noticeable
annoyance in her tone.

From the corner of his eye, Oz watched her
negotiate to a standing position and march toward the roof entrance
door in the overly stiff fashion of a person trying to appear
sober. It slammed behind her like the period at the end of a
sentence.

Warm tears stung his eyes.

“Fucking dyke,” he muttered and, after
throwing back one last gulp, he pitched the bottle over the
concrete rail.

* * *

The newbie paused.

Bard replayed the moment in his mind
repeatedly, and in each spin of the reel, Oz paused before finally
taking care of the pilot. It was probably nothing. Nerves.

Then why was it that Bard couldn’t stop
thinking about it, even with Victoria’s broken body shuddering in
his arms with his every step?

She was as light as a child and her legs
draped over his arm like a cloth doll. Her face painted with blood.
Bard didn’t know if it was hers or his; he was covered as much as
she. Her neck hung over her arm at a sickening angle. Such a
delicate neck, susceptible to stolen kisses and a wolf’s jaw. He
clutched her tightly to his chest and, when he was far enough from
the lights and chaos of the airport, he said, “Ready.”

The ground cracked and split. Bard stepped
over the edge.

Victoria jostled in his arms as he landed,
but Bard was able to retain his hold on her slight frame. The cold
air chilled straight through to his bones and he ground his teeth
to keep them from chattering. A path of broken bricks led to a
chamber illuminated by a chandelier made up of broken bottles and
twisted iron. Torches lined the hall with green flickering flames
that sent menacing shadows dancing across the stone walls. At the
center of the chamber, a blindfolded, marble woman, draped in black
cloth around her chest, hips, and over her head held a sword,
outward in a stabbing pose, that glinted in the light of the
flames. A set of copper scales balanced on the blade.

Bard laid Victoria in the scale to his
left.

The chamber echoed with the sounds of
scraping marble as the woman roused. “Quite the body count you’re
developing, Bard.”

“Can we just get this over with?”

“Keep this up and you and I will get to be
good friends, won’t we?”

“Fortuna.”

“Yes, love?”

Bard tapped the scale.

Fortuna slid her sword from between the
scales, replacing it with her arm with such speed that Bard hadn’t
noticed the movement. Not so much as a ripple passed over the
scales as she did so.

She touched the tip of the sword to Bard’s
forehead. A drop of warm blood dripped down the side of his
nose.

“Don’t touch,” she said.

“Get to it, then.”

“I’m only making conversation, reaper.”
Fortuna lifted the sword from Bard’s face and used it to lift a
black feather from a wicker basket sitting to the side of the
scales.

He crossed his arms and stole a glance at
Victoria, curled inside the scale like a fetus. “Now is not the
time for conversation,” he said, his voice just above a
whisper.

“You’re different from the last time we met,”
she said, amused, and let the feather drift from her sword to the
scale.

Bard held his breath until, after a momentary
wobble, the scale tipped in favor of the feather.

“I hope so,” he said.

* * *

The sound of glass on concrete shattered the
silence of the stairwell.

In hindsight, she shouldn’t have gotten him
drunk. He’d been in the body only a matter of hours. There was no
telling how he’d handle it. But then, it seemed like the only
logical thing to do: follow up what amounted to be a pre and post
mortem massacre with something strong and debilitating. Knock the
recent memories loose for a few hours. Give the psyche time to
adjust.

There was something in Oz’s eyes that’d
freaked her out. Something deeper than just having seen so much
death: a disturbance so profound that it’d startled her, made her
reaction time to his advances even more sluggish than the whiskey
alone would have.

She gripped the handrail and lowered herself
delicately onto one stair after another, each one seeming further
away than the one prior. It’d been decades since she’d been this
drunk and she couldn’t help laughing—one nasty, belchy guffaw. The
laugh of a person who sees disaster coming and has no way to avoid
it.

Outside, the air had gone stale. Humidity
clung to her skin in beads.

A voice in the back of Cora’s hazy mind told
her to bring up her concerns with Bard. He’d know better than
anyone if there was something to worry about. Maybe he hadn’t seen
it because he was still bitter over having to train yet another of
their ranks, or maybe he had seen it and refused to acknowledge it.
Or maybe she was just drunk.

She ran her fingertips along the brick wall
of Oz’s building as she walked past and chanced a look up to the
roof. A stream of urine fell, splashing against the sidewalk.

Didn’t matter what century she was in, men
were always pissing on things.

It was late, but she knew Bard would be
awake. She’d talk to him. See what he thought. Set her fears at
ease. First, she needed to be less drunk.

* * *

Cora hadn’t noticed the almost perfectly
round splotch of blood on her jeans until she slid them down over
her legs and laid them on top of her shoes next to the fountain.
Without access to a proper washing machine, it’d be a bitch to get
out.

Wearing only a pair of plain black panties,
Cora sat at the end of the fountain and let her feet dangle in the
water, running her toes over the coins that’d settled at the
bottom. She’d bet more than half of them were hers, back when she
thought wishes held some weight. Once her feet grew accustomed to
the cool temperature, she slid her body, inch by inch, into the
fountain until she was lying flat against the bottom, six inches of
water above her, and watched the ripples drift across the
surface.

When she couldn’t stand to hold her breath
any longer, she pushed herself into a seated position and rubbed
the water from her eyes. Her head no longer spun and her vision
cleared. At the center of the fountain, a marble water nymph stood
guard against an advancing, fanged demon.

“Feeling dirty?”

“Anyone ever tell you you’d make one hell of
a professional stalker?” Cora said, squeezing the water out of her
hair. “Hand me my shirt.”

She heard the slur in her voice. The soak
hadn’t done the sobering job that she’d hoped. Bard draped the
shirt over her shoulder.

“What you call stalking I call concern.”

Bard averted his eyes while Cora stepped out
of the fountain and finished dressing. Her shirt clung in awkward,
uncomfortable places so she pinched the front between two fingers
and pulled it away from her body. If Bard hadn’t shown up, she
would’ve walked home in her panties and changed before going to
find him. It wasn’t as though anyone would notice.

“While I appreciate your concern,” she
dragged the last syllable, “I’m perfectly capable of getting
shit-faced and finding my way home without Daddy-Reaper’s
help.”

“Oh yeah?” He smirked.

The bastard was enjoying this. “The one you
should be concerned about is Oz,” she replied.

Bard struggled to keep the smirk on his face.
The corner of his mouth dipped slightly.

He’d seen it, too. So why the secrecy?

“There’s nothing wrong with Oz other than
that he’s a dipshit. He’ll be fine,” he said.

“You don’t even believe that.”

Bard turned his back to her and lit a
cigarette. “You’re drunk.”