Reap & Repent (14 page)

Today, she made an effort and left it soft, curly and unbound. First day on the job and all, and she wanted to make a good impression.
Some job.
Was she even going to be paid for this new occupation? She’d have to add that to the mental list of questions for reaper HR.

She wasn’t sure whether there was some sort of accepted dress code for reaping, but she figured she’d be safe with casual and black. She’d only ever seen Deacon in scrubs or jeans and a T-shirt. Following his fashion lead, she picked
out her own black jeans and black fitted T-shirt. Black seemed appropriate for the occasion…and besides, she looked good in black.

Deacon sat at the kitchen table shirtless, wearing only his jeans. A big bowl of Lucky Charms sat on the table to his right, along with a glass of milk he’d prepared for her. He was eating a piece of reheated lasagna.

“Morning,” she said. “Lasagna for breakfast?”

“Good fuel for a big day. Besides…it’s wonderful.” He smiled.

“Glad you like it.”

He came around and gave Ruth a garlicky morning kiss and said, “I like everything about you.”

Ruth blushed. She wasn’t used to compliments of any kind unless you counted grades. She gave him an A+ for effort…and great abs.

“If you’re going to walk around the kitchen of a newly deflowered virgin without a shirt on, we’re going to have to default back to Plan A,” she teased.

Deacon laughed and reached for his backpack. He dug through it until he pulled out a tight, dark gray T-shirt. Ruth resisted the urge to help him with it. She had to exercise some sort of self-control, or they would never make it out of the house.

She sat down next to him and tucked into her breakfast, finishing quickly. When she was done, Deacon tossed her a backpack.

“I filled it up with snacks, but you might want to put in a change of clothes, as well. You never know what might happen.”

She unzipped the top and peeked inside. It was loaded down, and he’d even stuffed a whole jar of chunky peanut butter into it.

“I’m ready as soon as you are,” he said. “It’s going to be a long day.”

“Okay.” She headed back to her bedroom to search for spare clothes. She picked out another T-shirt and a spare pair of jeans, and then added socks and undies. Lacing up her sneakers, she debated over packing a toothbrush and toothpaste, found an extra of both, and added them to the load.

When she left the bedroom, Deacon was standing in the middle of her living room where they’d cast the circle the night before.

“We can leave from here now,” he said, admiring her footwear and nodding. “Good choice. I’m glad you wore some reasonable shoes. We’ll be traveling a lot by foot today… Come on over here.”

Ruth joined him at his side, and he took her hand.

“Ruth, traveling on the consecrated subway is the easy part, and it will get easier and easier the more practice and experience you get. I know it’s strange, but you’ll love it once you get used to it. I promise.”

Ruth wasn’t as worried about the traveling part as she probably should have been. She
was
curious about how she would ever learn to control getting from point A to point B.

“Where are we going?”

“It’s early. We’ll start at the hospital since you’re at least somewhat familiar with that location. Before too long, you’ll be able to travel all over the place, maybe even across the world one day.”

Now that was hard to imagine.

“Think about where you want to be, say the hallway where we ran into each other at the hospital. You’ll pop into the consecrated ground that’s closest to that location. From there you’ll have to hoof it.”

“That seems very inconvenient. Why can’t you take a bike or car or something with you?”

“You can take with you whatever you can carry, within reason. A car? No. A bike, sure…but then what are you going to do with a bike in the middle of a hospital?” he asked, caressing her arms absently. “You’re making it more complicated than it needs to be. You aren’t going to have a problem here. You’ll see.”

“Won’t people be surprised if we appear in the middle of a room somewhere?”

“It will take a few seconds for us to become corporeal again. We’ll have enough time to make it to a more crowded location, where we can stay unnoticed.”

“So I’m going to be traveling by supernatural subway, and I get to be invisible, too?” she asked, intrigued. She’d been trying to make herself invisible for years, but this seemed a little over the top even in light of her new knowledge about the ways of the universe.

“We’re not invisible, but when we need to be—like when we first fade in and when we’re about to reap a soul—we’re…unnoticeable. People might have a vague notion that someone’s in the room or an odd feeling that they’re being
watched, but nothing concrete. As soon as we are gone, they won’t remember us at all.”

“Like the stranger who lifts a car off someone and then disappears?” she asked.

“Yes, something like that. Those are Guardian Angels, which also exist, but the idea’s similar.

“Here,” he said, reaching out to her. “Take my hand and picture the hallway where we met. I’ll do the rest. The circle of protection will close behind you, but I can’t get in and out of it without you.”

“Well, then, I think we can do a lot better than hand holding.”

She smiled, circling her arms around his waist and stretching up for a kiss. He pulled her close and deepened the kiss. She almost forgot to concentrate on the hallway at all, but the next thing she knew they were spinning and swirling as her head grew light and swimmy. When she opened her eyes, they were inside the chapel at St. Mary’s Hospital.

Deacon grinned down at her. “See, no big deal.”

Right,
she thought.

Ruth looked around, relieved that there were no chapel visitors. Deacon led her over to a pew, and they both sat.

“That was step one—arriving. Now, when you’re ready to go back home, you hold the image of your living room in your mind and concentrate on it…hard. You can’t let yourself become distracted until you have a couple hundred flashes under your belt. Otherwise, it’s consecrated roulette. Spin the wheel and who
knows where you’ll end up. If it’s working, you’ll feel a pull. It might take a few minutes the first time on your own, but you’ll get it. Clear your mind, tune out everything around you, and the next thing you know, you’ll be home.”

“That would have been a useful trick to have known all these years.”

“You always had the ability to do it—you just didn’t know it. There was no one to teach you. You’re lucky it didn’t happen by accident. That might have been disastrous.”

About a dozen different scenarios flashed through her mind about what
could
have happened if she’d flashed somewhere unexpectedly. Every one of them ended in a total freak-out, so yeah, she was glad that something like that hadn’t ever happened. It made her wonder how many other tricks she had to learn. It occurred to her that the newly minted advanced degree she’d earned was going to be next to useless in her new job.

“Now what? Do you have reaping to do here?”

“There always seems to be someone dying in a hospital. But first, we’re going to work on your aura reading.”

Ruth tensed. Aura reading was about the last thing she wanted to do. She’d tried to avoid people’s auras for as long as she could remember, and she didn’t think she could suddenly feel okay about inspecting them. Mystical travel? No problem. Looking at the evidence of other people’s greed and lust and heartache with wide-open eyes? Problem.

“Don’t freak out now,” Deacon said. “You’ve done great with everything so far. Seriously, most people would have imploded already.”

Ruth looked at him, surprised.

“I’m kidding,” he said. “You’re not going to implode.

“Reapers have the advantage of seeing people’s auras clearly. We don’t have auras ourselves unless they manifest under extreme circumstances, so we don’t have to see them through the lens of our own screwed-up emotions. What you see is what you get. Most supernaturals don’t have auras.”

“But we have souls, right?”

“Yes, we all have souls. But we are
supernatural
—beyond nature. We can travel in ways humans can’t even imagine, to places that surpass their wildest dreams,” he said, tucking one of her stray curls behind her ear with his finger. “Ruth, we are vessels. When we carry souls, they fill us up, and it’s our responsibility to get them to Purgatory for sorting so that they can move on. You’ll reap young and old, good and evil. We don’t have to judge them, and we don’t choose the time they die. We are conduits. They need us, and most are more than happy to go along for the ride. As your powers grow, you’ll be drawn to the places where souls need to be collected. Until then, the easiest way is to go where the dead are. Some souls are more challenging, but they all go unless they get overlooked or left behind.”

“How could they be overlooked or left behind? Doesn’t God know where they are? You know ‘the hairs on your head’ and all that?” She thought that the whole gist of God was that he was an omniscient and protective overseer of mankind.

“God gave humans free will, Ruth, and because of that, they’re free agents. He wants them to love and worship him, sure. But if they don’t, well, they’ll face judgment eventually. They all do. If a soul is misplaced or overlooked, which can happen if someone is murdered and left somewhere that’s difficult to find or sense, then they’ll wait in a suspended state until they’re found. You would know them as ghosts. They sometimes try to draw attention to themselves so that they can pass over, and this leads to what some supersensitive people would recognize as a haunting.” He continued hesitantly, “That’s what happened to your father.”

“Because I didn’t know to reap him, and no other reaper found him?”

“Yes.”

He put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze.

“You didn’t know, Ruth. And you didn’t kill him. He’s okay now.”

“I hope so,” she said, filled with self-doubt.

“That’s why you have to overcome your fears of the auras so that you can do your job. Do you want to be able to help people, Ruth?”

“Yes,” she said. She did. She knew what it was like to be in limbo. She’d been there way too long herself. She knew what that felt like, and she was ready to start living. If making a living out of dying was her calling, then so be it. It was ironic, but it felt right.

“Okay,” she said, determined. “I’m ready.”

“Good girl.” He kissed the top of her head. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Fifteen

Deacon took her hand, and they slipped out the back doors of the chapel into the hallway of the hospital. They blended into the daily scene, just two more visitors in the crowd.

Deacon led her down and around several hallways to the E.R. for her first lesson. Ruth couldn’t help but avoid eye contact with everyone she passed.

Force of habit.

Hiding her gift had been a matter of self-preservation. Letting go of that habit wasn’t going to be easy, but she was willing to give it a try.

“Let’s sit for a minute.” Deacon led her to an upholstered chair.

They sat in the empty waiting area within view of a nurses’ station. Ruth couldn’t see into any of the rooms beyond the closed double doors, but the station bustled with staff activity.

“See the nurse in the red-and-black scrubs?” Deacon asked. Ruth nodded. “What is the predominant color of her aura?”

Ruth forced herself to study the nurse. A green glow surrounded the woman, swirling with yellows and blues as she hustled behind the station gathering charts.

“Mostly green?” Ruth said.

“Good. Do you know what that color might mean?”

“Green is a restful and healing color, so that makes sense, I suppose.”

Deacon nodded his approval. “Yes, good. The colors alone are nothing to fear. Think of them as a facial expression like a smile or even a warning growl from a dog. People express themselves with their energy without even knowing it.” He kept his voice low. “Auras don’t lie. They’re a method of subconscious communication. It will be useful to you in your dealings with people if you understand what the colors mean, but as a reaper, the color you need to pay the most attention to is white.”

“The death aura,” she said with a shudder. “My father’s aura was white right before he died… My mother was afraid of me after that, because I told them what I saw. She thought I killed him. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out what white meant after that. My mother’s aura was white when I visited her in the hospital.”

“Being in the right place at the right time is very important for you in the early stages of your training. Later, you’ll begin to feel the pull of the dead and dying, and you’ll have a better idea of where to go. The pull is the strongest during and immediately after death, and it starts to fade from that point onward. Your father’s soul had no detectable pull since it had been detached so long.” He nodded toward another staffer. “Let’s practice some more. That transporter there, what color is his aura?”

Ruth looked up at the transporter and tried to isolate the predominant color, but his aura was muddy and mottled.

“I can’t tell. It’s too dark, and it’s all mixed up.”

“Exactly. We don’t know what he’s thinking, but we
can
tell he’s disturbed and on edge about something. Volatile even. He would be a good person to avoid, say in a bar…or on a blind date.”

“I don’t think I’m going to have to worry about either of those things anytime soon.”

“Practice
noticing
people and their auras. I can translate for you until you get the gist of it or at least confirm or correct your own summations. You’ve done well to figure out as much as you have without any help. There are so many subtle aura communications you’ll never pin them all down, but look for the dominant color, and you’ll find the dominant emotion or intent. What else do you know about the colors?”

Ruth sighed, resigned. “A quick checklist might go something like this—purple is spiritual. Blue is balanced, sustaining life. Turquoise is energetic or influential. Green is healing and restful. Yellow is joy, freedom, vitality. Orange is controlling others or exercising power over them. Red is materialistic or physical. Pink is love. And any combination of colors that creates a muddy or dirty aura is trouble. Mustard is anger or pain and white is disease and death.”