Reaper (28 page)

“Of course not,” Lily replied, rubbing her forehead. Eddie clearly meant well, but he was missing the point entirely. Piotr's issue wasn't just his sickness. Lily took a deep breath and began trying to explain. “But there is more to it than just his physical—”

“Trying to get rid of me?” Piotr demanded, appearing suddenly through the wall.

Despite herself, Lily flinched back; Piotr's tone was icy, sharp, and high. She'd known Piotr hundreds of years at this point, and he'd never spoken like that before…unless you counted the crazed minutes after he'd found Eddie and Wendy kissing.

Casually, Lily moved to place herself between Piotr and Eddie.

“I knew you would one day,” Piotr snarled, striding closer. Like Eddie had once been, Piotr's edges were now flickering like a dim light, only he seemed to be growing thinner and less substantial before their very eyes. “It was just a matter of time.
YA nikogda ne doveryal tebe
.”

“What?” Eddie glanced at Lily, confused.

He was flush, Lily realized, either with anger or dismay; despite their kiss she still didn't know him well enough to tell. This was
terrible—the last thing she needed was all her good work with Eddie undone by Piotr's temper as her gift of energy and will was sapped away by whatever was draining Eddie slowly dry.

“What are you talking about, man?” Eddie asked nervously. “We're trying to
help
you.”

“Piotr,” Lily said, calmingly, disregarding Eddie's paleness in favor of calming Piotr. Once Piotr was relaxed Eddie would calm as well. She hoped. “You are fading in and out. Please, Piotr, please sit. Rest.”

Piotr, apparently, was having none of it. He pounded the doorway with the side of his fist and glared at Lily. “You won't trick me this time,” he snapped. “Where is she? What have you done with her?”

“Who, Piotr?” Lily asked, patience personified, though she felt that the situation was rapidly spiraling out of her control. “Who are you seeking?” “

“I…I…” Piotr hesitated, an expression of momentary confusion darting across his face before he clenched his fists and glared at the ground.

“Are you looking for Wendy?” Eddie asked cautiously.

“No. Yes. YA
ne znayu
! I do not know!” Moving in a jagged jerk, Piotr ripped one of Dora's sketches off the wall—a picture of the tree outside in full, glorious summer bloom—and crumpled it, throwing it at Eddie's head.

“Man, chill out!” Eddie shouted. “Just…relax, okay?”

“I've waited for her for so long,” Piotr said coldly to Eddie. Lily frowned; the cadence of Piotr's speech was changing, his body language was shifting. He had come in raging and now he was moving, rocking, from side to side, as if singing a slow song with his words. “So long. Centuries and centuries and centuries again. You can't take her from me,
hooyesos
, with your sweet words and kind eyes, your friendship of years masking your intentions. I have waited for her decades beyond your years! I have the greater need! I won't allow it!”

“Why do I get the impression that what he just said was extremely mean?” Eddie whispered to Lily as she eased further in front of him, pushing him back into the shadows behind her with a nudge of her hip and shoulder. Piotr was radiating a kind of sinuous seriousness that worried her.

“Piotr, do you remember something from before?” Lily held out one hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled and gestured to the room slowly. “Do you remember your life now?”

“Of course I remember,” Piotr said, snapping out of his back and forth daze and glaring at Lily. “A fool, you think I am. No more! I always remember!”

“Not always,” she reminded him softly, not wishing to shame her friend in front of his rival for the Lightbringer's affections. “Sometimes you forget.”

“I am not confused!” Piotr shouted, pounding the wall again, this time with both fists. “I am not a child to be coddled!”

“No,” Lily quickly soothed, wishing briefly that he were a child. That she could just reach out and pull Piotr into her arms as she might one of her Lost, that she could rock him in her lap until the memories surfaced or whatever terrible fears he harbored subsided. Piotr, however, had the right of it: he was not a child, not a Lost. He was her equal and Lily knew that he needed her guidance, not to hide in her embrace. “No one thinks you are. Please. Please, Piotr, please. You are angry once more. There is no reason to be. We are your friends. We are your allies. Talk to me, Piotr. Tell me what you know.”

“The hearthstone,” Piotr said, his sneer sending chills up Lily's spine and raising the fine hairs on the nape of her neck. “Where she kept her cloak of fur and feathers. The feasting hall, the great fire in the center, stone rough-scorched and charred black at the edges. We huddled close, together, waiting for the others, and she told me stories of battle and blood, of how she rode and rode for days on end until her hunt was done, until the soul was gathered. All these things, these important things, I remember. I remember her.”

“Has he gone nuts?” Eddie whispered in a
sotto
voice, rolling his index finger in a ‘cuckoo’ gesture around his ear. “I thought he had some kind of Wendy's-Mom-induced-amnesia? That not the case anymore?”

“Hush your mouth,” Lily hissed quietly, wishing that it were Elle at her side for this and not this jester dressed in silver and grey. “Tripping over these words does us only ill.” She stepped toward Piotr and gingerly reached for his hand. “Please, Piotr, go on.”

Piotr, seeing her intent, yanked away.

“Why do you care? You are a warrior, one of the fierce women! See? Even now, even in death, you walk in the halls of the dead.” He spat at her feet but Lily paid it no mind. There was such fury pouring off him that she was obliquely grateful she wasn't actually the real target of his rage.

“I wish to know because I am your friend,” she said softly. “You have to know that. In the light of day perhaps you will not know your words, perhaps they will be lost again to the halls of memory but I, Piotr, I will recall them.” Lily pressed her palm to her heart. “Allow me to remember for you.”

“In my dreams I walked,” Piotr said shortly, turning away and resting his forearm against the shattered window. Where his flesh touched a thin film of ice spread and crackled along the slivers and jagged triangles of remaining glass. The wood of the frame constricted as he grew close, pulling nails out of the tough, old window casing with a low screech. Beneath his palm the glass, brought to its breaking point by the incredible cold, shattered, both in the Never and in the living lands.

Eddie and Lily exchanged a glance as the tinkling shards fell. Lily was glad to note that Piotr did not seem to notice their shared concern. It might set him off once more. “I walked until I could walk no more and then, at the narrow V of the river where I tickled for summer fish when I was a boy, there I huddled in that damned cloak, that cloak of blood and feathers and fur, and I slept the cold sleep. The long sleep.”

“Is he trying to say what I think he's saying?” Eddie whispered. “Because I wasn't the best with poetry, but it sounds like he's talking about when he died.”

“Shhh,” Lily hushed him, though he had a point. “Listen. Remember.”

“There, slipping into my dreams, in the snow and wet, I knew her. I saw. Over a thousand years and a thousand years again, I've waited and dreamed, because…because I knew. I knew then. I know now.” His voice echoed hollowly and Lily shivered again. She could almost see the years, sense them, stretching out around Piotr in a nimbus of confusion, hidden from his view but nearly tangible, lost in the annals of his mind.

“He's not making any sense,” Eddie hissed through clenched teeth. “It's kinda hard to remember dithering nonsense.”

Glaring at Eddie, Piotr snorted, and Lily fought the urge to grab him by the shoulders, to shake sense into his stubborn, combative head. No lover, even the Lightbringer, was worth this sort of ridiculous drama!

“I make no sense?” Piotr drawled at Eddie, gesturing rudely. “Fine. Make sense of this,
boy
. I dreamed of her hair against the snow, red like my blood dripping between my thumb and forefinger, like the hair of my mother and her shield-sisters. I dreamed of her markings, her badges of rank pricked into her very skin and soul.”

He turned to face Lily and she was struck by how solid he was compared to a few moments before; denser than she'd ever seen a ghost become, dense as the Lightbringer in the midst of reaping; Piotr could have been alive.

“I dreamed of Wendy two thousand years ago,” Piotr said shortly, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “I have been waiting for her since the day I died. And neither of you will take her from me. Not you, boy, not you, Lily, friend or foe.”

“Piotr—”

“You say friend, but I say that you are playing me false. You,
Elle, warrior-women, are shield-sisters. You are one of them.” Piotr turned away from her and Lily felt her gut clench. He didn't mean it, she reminded herself. It was the poison, the sickness talking, nothing more.

“You are like all the rest,” Piotr declared. “You wish to watch me fail.”

“One of the fierce women,” Lily said, finally putting two and two together. She felt a fool for not scenting the connections, tasting the venom dripping from each word, sooner. “Did these women kill you, Piotr?”

Piotr smiled grimly at Lily as snowflakes began fluttering down from the ceiling. Lily felt them nestle in her hair, their cold kiss upon her cheeks, and she suppressed a shiver.

“
Net
,” Piotr said. “My
dyadya
did that. My uncle was the death of me.”

G
roggy, Wendy opened her eyes. The sky was bright and blue above her, skimmed only lightly with clouds, and the air was dense and still. She was lying oddly, Wendy realized, with her legs stretched upward at an uncomfortable angle, ankles crossed and hands folded neatly over her ribcage. It took a moment for Wendy to realize that she was resting across the slick red backseat of an old Chevy Bel Air, head pillowed by a leather jacket.

Wendy shifted and the world around her shimmered and shivered in the strange grey light of the Never.

Wait, the Never? Wendy squinted and the Never receded, but only with some real effort. Wherever she was, the world of the dead was strong here. Even the massive trees at the edge of her vision flickered back and forth between the living lands and the Never, green and lush one moment, silvery-grey and twisted the next.

Turning toward the trunk, Wendy poked her head over the backseat and squinted at the world past the edges of the convertible. The convertible was parked diagonally in the middle of a vast drive-in parking lot, one Wendy recognized.

“The West Winds?” Wendy murmured uneasily, tasting the ghost of Red Vines and cream soda on her tongue. “How the hell did I get here?”

When she was young her mother rarely took nights off, but on the few memorable occasions that she did, the whole family would empty the Safeway candy bins, pile in the Charger, and drive down to San Jose to catch a movie. Wendy clearly remembered being small and young and crawling in the front seat to bury her head against Mary's shoulder while Dumbo's mother wreaked havoc in the circus. Her mother had wiped away her tears and offered to cut the Disney special double feature short, to take sobbing Wendy home. Her dad had protested that it was an honor to see the classic flicks on the big screen, the way they'd been intended, but Mary had held firm—whatever Wendy wanted.

Knowing that Jon and Chel would be sad to leave, that her father was right about it being a once-in-a-lifetime event, Wendy had chosen to stay…and wept again when Bambi's mother died an hour later.

To this day she still hated Disney movies.

“We brought you.” A greaser roughly her own age, perhaps a few years older, vaulted into the front seat from beside the car. Wendy jumped in surprise.

In the Never the screen looming behind the boy suddenly flickered. The radio of the convertible hissed loudly and static thrummed for a brief instant before a countdown began on the screen behind his head. The radio beeped with each number.

“Hang on a sec, radio's up too loud,” he said, reaching back and twisting the knob so the beeps were barely heard. Just in time: the vast screen filled with dancing concession foods as “
Let's go out to the lobby!”
started playing. A long hot dog cha-cha danced with a melting Hershey's bar. A slack-eyed Coke cup tipped its lid, and as the frothing liquid filled it to the brim, it drummed its feet and grinned hugely.

There was something about the way it writhed and twisted on the ground that filled Wendy with unease. Discomforted watching the short clip, Wendy grimaced and turned her attention back to the boy.

“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.”