Reap & Repent (8 page)

“Fill up the other one, too,” he said with a wink. “If things get hairy and something or someone supernatural is bothering you, throw a handful of salt right
into its eyes. It won’t kill it, but it will have a much more satisfying effect than pepper spray.”

He walked over to the sink and opened the bottom cabinet doors. Retrieving a bottle of Windex cleaner, he poured the blue liquid down the drain. Turning on the hot water, he let it run until it was nice and steamy while he funneled salt into the bottle. He filled it with the hot water, screwed the spray top back on and shook up the contents.

“We’ll spray this around the perimeter of your car floorboards and along your window ledges, dashboard and back glass. It’s a barrier at best, but most things won’t want to cross it.”

Most?
That was not very reassuring.

“You’re talking about the things we saw in Purgatory? Why would they even care about me? I never knew they existed until yesterday.” Her heart raced and a light sweat beaded on her forehead and lower back.

“Those ‘things’ have always been here. But now that you’ve been to Purgatory, the reaper in you has been awakened. You’ll be able to see past their disguises to what they truly look like. Angels and demons look mostly human, but there are some subspecies of demons and other things that are…not. I don’t have time to draw you a family tree here… Just try not to attract attention to yourself.”

She was torn between wanting to curl up on the couch and sleep until dark and getting pissed off. She realized as an afterthought that she didn’t much like being ordered around.

She was also not particularly brave. She hadn’t ever needed to be. As long as she stayed out of crowds and away from people, she could pretty much avoid having to deal with her fear of auras and what they might mean. Most of her fears up until now had been more abstract anyway. Now she was about to come face-to-face with God knew how many bogeymen.

Ruth threw the ridiculous collection of stuff into her backpack with a little more than the necessary roughness, and then stuffed her purse in, too. Perturbed by his bossiness, she grabbed the spray bottle without another word and headed for the back door.

Deacon appeared between her and the door.

“Let me go first…please.”

“No problem,” she said curtly.

Better for his face to get eaten off first than mine.

Deacon walked outside into the beautiful May morning and stood on the bottom step, looking over at the trees. He closed his eyes and spread out his arms, palms up. His palms glowed faintly as light emanated out in tendrils, drifting toward the line of trees. As the light faded, he opened his eyes.

“It’s safe. Let’s go.”

They walked over to the car, where he opened up all four of the doors of the Continental.

“Bottle?” he asked.

She handed it to him, and he set about dousing her car with his homemade concoction. He used the entire bottle, which left her with a soggy carpet and a dripping interior.

Nice.

“It’ll dry. Then only the salt will be left. Don’t worry about it—it won’t hurt anything.” Martha Stewart he was not.

Ruth was skeptical as to its effectiveness, but considering the potential alternative, she wasn’t going to bicker over salt stains.

She drove them to Good Springs Cemetery, and he got out. Walking around to the driver’s side, he bent down and leaned in close through her window.

“I’ll be back before dark. Make sure you are, too. And stay inside the house. Get some more salt while you’re out. A lot. And put it in an unbroken line along all your window sashes and across all of your doorways when you get back. We’ll talk more tonight.”

He lingered longer than necessary in the window and for a second, she thought he was going to kiss her again. After a moment’s hesitation, he turned and walked through the Good Springs archway. He didn’t even look back as he grabbed hold of the first headstone he came to and swirled and shimmered in a mini tornado until
poof,
he was gone. Just like that.

Ruth rolled up her window and locked the doors. All of them. She was not ashamed to admit that she was more than a little scared. As far as she could tell at the moment, there wasn’t anything to actually
be
scared of in her immediate vicinity.

It’s the things you can’t see.

She backed her big-ass car out of the cemetery and headed into town with the radio blasting so that she couldn’t think too much.

Chapter Nine

Deacon didn’t dally in collecting his things from home. He changed, reloaded his backpack, and then went straight to the hospital to begin his usual rounds. He worried about leaving Ruth, but he was eager to lure in Kylen…and the last thing he wanted was for his former friend to be anywhere near Ruth.

The pull of the detached souls he’d missed the day before had already begun to fade. Sometimes the feeling lasted for days, others only hours. Because the more stagnant souls were harder to track down, he took the easy way out and checked the newspapers when necessary.

Use it if you’ve got it.

Technology was wonderful. Back when he had officially been installed as a reaper in the mid-1800s, finding missed souls had been damn near impossible. For one thing, the world was much less populated and hiding a body was an easy thing for enterprising criminals. It was usually a matter of dumb luck to stumble upon a sleeper. Everything moved slower back then—the news, the transportation…life.

He quickly learned not to let things slide. When he felt the tug, he went.

These days, with so many reapers and so few uninhabited places, it was rare to come across a sleeper. They were something of a hobby that he only actively pursued during downtimes if business was slow. Finding them was like combing a beach for pirate booty with a metal detector. Slow, laborious and rarely
fruitful. Of course, there hadn’t been too many slow times in the business of death since he’d become a reaper.

War after war had kept them all occupied. But World War One was the last war that he’d actively participated in. He put a lid on that memory and stuffed it back down where it belonged. This was no time to indulge in bitter memories.

Deacon strode the halls of the hospital. While he should track down the stale souls first, the pull here was too strong to ignore. He entered the room of a middle-aged female patient who lingered near death, clinging to life at the precarious mercy of tubes, wires and machines. The quiet whoosh of a breathing machine mimicked the beat of her long-dead heart. It wouldn’t be much longer.

He sat in the chair across from her bed, watching her white glow pulsate, and waited.

Impatiently.

God, he was a dick sometimes.

Was he really too busy to sit for a few minutes and wait for this woman to pass?

The real problem with any sort of downtime was it was the perfect opportunity for way too much
introspection.

It wasn’t like the future of the universe depended on him or that he was the only reaper who could do these things.

That would be ridiculous. Reapers weren’t some sort of Santa of Death, delivering the sweet or terrible hereafter one night a year to everyone on the
planet. Death came often and in a variety of ways. It amused him that the normals still thought, after all these millennia, that there was one Grim Reaper.

As he’d told Ruth, there
was
a Grim Reaper, but he was more of a figurehead now. Grim had been the first reaper. When Eve persuaded Adam to eat the forbidden fruit and they gained knowledge, God decreed that mankind and all of his creation would suffer for their indiscretions and eventually die. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all that.

But something had to be done with their souls.

Purgatory was formed. Grim was designated as the middleman, ferrying the souls there to be sorted, naughty and nice, and then sent on to their destiny. It all worked splendidly. Until the population got out of hand.

Now, Grim had lots of help.

The reapers had needed to grow exponentially with the proliferation of mankind. And today? With nearly seven billion people on the planet? Yeah, they were busy.

Then there were the
other
creatures, as well. God was such a hoarder; he couldn’t part with his wonderful and terrible prototypes for man. Not to mention the results of various matchups gone haywire. A whole new class of monsters and abominations emerged from
their
unholy unions and aligned with one side or the other.

Good or evil.

The results were wraiths, shifters, vampires, gremlins, giants and all manner of creatures. God had once halfheartedly tried to destroy them with the
flood, along with the world’s wicked humans, in the hopes of starting fresh. But most of them were resilient, and when they survived his efforts, he promised them salvation…
if
they earned it through obedience and service to him.

Regardless, everything had a soul.

Except demons and imps, which were born of Hell. Lucifer’s creations.

And every soul had to be reaped, including the monsters. Each species had their own reapers—one or thousands, depending on their population. And each reaper had his or her own territory.

He liked Meridian because there was less reaper political drama here than…well most everywhere else he had ever worked. He deserved the rest. But the past few weeks had been anything but calm and restful… And now Kylen was back again.

He had stayed away longer than usual this time. Deacon had almost suspected his death, and wouldn’t that have been a relief after all these years. Especially if it wasn’t by his own hand.

But he was certain he would have known. Sharing energy formed a connection over time, and throughout the years Deacon and Kylen had taken many opportunities to heal and sustain each other with their light. Their connection was strong enough that if Kylen had passed, Deacon would have felt the loss. As long as Kylen had his soul, no matter how black it had become, Deacon would be linked to him even if he didn’t know exactly where the reaper was.

He rose to pace around the small hospital room, his anxiety over Kylen’s whereabouts growing. Kylen’s appearance dragged up memories better left alone.

Memories like the battle in Kosovo.

And Kara …

Deacon, Kylen and Kara had grown up together and graduated from the same training class in 1833. Deacon and Kylen had always been competitive with each other, and with Kara, their competitiveness switched to hyperdrive. They’d both vied for her attention, but as soon as it became clear which way the wind was blowing, Deacon backed off. Still, his feelings hadn’t changed.

Kylen and Kara had spent many good years together. Hell, the three of them had. But when they were pulled to that battlefield in Kosovo, everything changed. More than thirty thousand dead in a less than a month. It had taken nearly a fourth of that many reapers and a handful of valkyries, including Kara, reaping around the clock to take care of the souls of the departed.

And when Kara died on that battlefield, Kylen’s and Deacon’s lives were changed forever …

A steady, high-pitched beep rang out in Deacon’s ears, shaking him from his reflections and snapping his attention back to the task at hand. Hospital staff hurried into the room, administering various treatments on the woman, but Deacon watched as her soul floated up from the shell of her body and reformed beside the bed.

He rose and walked over to collect her, unseen by the nurses who bustled by him.

Hers would be the first of many souls collected on this long, long day.

* * *

Ruth drove west toward town, trying not to process or analyze things too closely. Even with the loud driving beat of AC/DC blasting through her speakers, it was impossible not to replay her recent experiences in her mind.

Huntsbury was a small-town suburb of Meridian, about twenty-five miles away, with a population hovering near five thousand. She could accomplish nearly everything she needed to there.

Her first stop was at the funeral home to sign the paperwork she’d arranged over the phone with the hospital before all this reaper craziness had ensued. Since her mother had already made all of the arrangements, and had opted not to have a graveside service, there wasn’t much else to do in the short term. Her mother would be in the ground the day after Memorial Day.

That mission completed, she headed to the grocery store.

Though she ordered pretty much everything else over the internet, she had yet to figure out how to do her grocery shopping online in a way that wasn’t cost prohibitive. The last thing she felt like dealing with right now were uncomfortable auras…and God forbid if she saw a white one. Now that she knew she was supposed to do something about that, she’d feel compelled to help in some way. Too bad, she wasn’t sure exactly how. But she was determined that this would go smoothly. No eye contact, no awkward conversations with well-meaning locals who knew about her recent loss. In. Out. No problem.

She played that mantra through her brain on repeat as she pushed a cart in from the parking lot toward the store. She decided to start in the produce section because even though she was more than willing to get the things Deacon had suggested, she also didn’t want to throw her diet to hell just yet.

Picking out some nice strawberries, grapes and bananas for good measure, she tossed in lettuce, hothouse tomatoes and avocados as a pure act of rebellion. She never bought avocados because they were so high fat, but hey, a girl had to live a little.

Very little,
she thought. She was pathetic.

Making her way around to the meat counter, she considered some steaks for grilling. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of something odd through the glass window leading into the cold cutting room of the butcher shop. The butcher was covered in blood, which might have been expected, but all of the skin on his face, neck and hands was rotting off in black fleshy chunks. His cheekbones protruded through in shiny white contrast.

How the three ladies who were perusing the chops and pork butts weren’t running screaming down the aisle in a state of terror, she had no idea. As he discussed the merits of different meat cuts with them, an especially loose bit of flesh dangled from his jaw, flopping to and fro. Ruth almost lost her stomach all over the display case. As she backed away, the creature looked straight at her and took a step toward the glass, as if he was maybe going to speak to her.