Reaper (11 page)

Lily nodded, understanding, and dropped back a few steps, letting Piotr once more lead the way. Again Piotr felt the guilt gnaw at him. He wasn't nervous. It wasn't what she thought. Piotr rubbed his fingertips against his palm. Part of him was grateful for Lily's concern. Another part of him was uncommonly furious that she was poking her nose in yet again.

Silently Piotr berated himself for an ungrateful fool. His friends cared greatly about him; they only wished to know that he would be fine dealing with his love.

He wished they didn't have to be there, but Wendy deserved to know what she was facing. That was all. She'd illuminated so much about him, about why he was the way he was, why he drifted through the Never like an unmoored raft, tossed by the waves of chance.

Wendy needed this warning about her family. He owed her that much.

“Perhaps just Piotr should meet with the Lightbringer first,” Lily suggested as the three of them finally reached Wendy's front yard. She looked meaningfully between Piotr and the house. “Entering her abode in this manner, without warning or request to enter, seems somewhat rude.”

“I used to feel the same way, but Wendy made it clear many times that her door is always open to me,” Piotr replied simply, dodging the suggestion. He approached the tree beneath her window and prepared to pull himself up into the branches. Part of him did want to go into Wendy's home unaccompanied but another part of him quailed at facing Wendy alone. It was better this way, with Elle and Lily by his side. “Let's go.”

“Y
ou have to leave,” Emma said abruptly, pushing to her feet and glancing quickly over her shoulder at the dark hallway leading to the back of the house. “Both of you. Get out. Now.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Wendy protested. “What about Eddie's cord? What about the fact that you all have a bunch of Reapers traipsing around the city without even a—”

“Your mother was an idiot!” Emma snarled, grabbing Wendy by the shoulder and shoving her a few steps toward the door. They passed through a set of matching corgis relaxing by the couch; their chill was minor compared to the heat of Emma's touch. “I don't care how good a Reaper she was, or how talented she was, she never should have been allowed to watch this town by herself!”

“Now, now, Emmaline,” Nana Moses soothed, running the tips of her fingers along the armrest, “relax yourself, girl. Look at her. Stop, breathe a moment, and
look
at her.”

Emma's head dipped down, her chin resting briefly on her collarbone, and she shuddered. When she raised her head again the frantic panic was replaced by cool, measured consideration.

“Why is being a natural, whatever that is, so bad?” Wendy asked, glad that Emma was calmer now, though the narrow-eyed speculation was equally unnerving.

“Do you want the truth?” Emma asked. “Or an excuse?”

Surprised at the underlying venom in the question, Wendy cocked an eyebrow at the doctor and wrapped her arms around her torso. She felt stripped to her bones all of a sudden, exposed to her core by the harsh question. Emma had been condescending before,
but not hostile. Her unexpected chilliness worried Wendy. “The truth.”

Emma rose and moved to the tapestry on the wall, running her fingers along the bumps and whorls of the thread and fabric. Eddie followed her, joined her, his eyes tracking the places she touched. When she squatted down to prod a particular branch, he looked closely at it.

“Only a small percentage of the women in our family are capable of being Reapers,” Emma said softly, running her thumb over a long, arching branch. “But there is a lot of power inherent in working with the dead. It is important that power like that isn't squandered, is used appropriately. Do you agree?” She flicked a glance at Eddie and rose, meeting Wendy's gaze with icy equanimity.

“Maybe,” Wendy replied, eying the pair of grinning corgis in the entryway. “Depends on the power, I guess. Depends on the girl.”

Clicking her teeth, Nana Moses chortled. “Smart girl.”

“We prune branches of our family tree that can't—or won't—follow the rules.” Emma tapped a branch. “These family members were cut off in the 1890s.” She tapped another. “These were cut off in the 1750s.” Then, crouching lower down, she ran her finger along a long, black branch outlined in silver thread. “These…this family cut themselves off.”

“As in, they defected and quit?”

Emma's smile was sharp; it stretched too widely and showed too many blindingly white teeth. “As in, they let a natural-born Reaper, their daughter, live.”

Standing up to join Eddie and Emma at the tapestry, Wendy struggled to form the right question, her mother's admonitions echoing in her head.
You never ask the right questions
, the White Lady jeered from her memories.
Don't take everything at face value!

“‘Let’ her live?” Wendy asked pointedly.

A creak behind her alerted Wendy to Nana Moses’ standing up. She shuffled to the tapestry and rested a withered, spotted hand on the fabric. “We kill naturals, Wendy. Kill ’em dead.”

“Kill
ed
,” Emma correctly quickly, voice pitched low, eying the dark shadows of the hallway once again. “Past tense. Obviously, we don't do that anymore. It'd be barbaric.”

“Why?” Wendy rasped past a throat that felt parched and tight. She licked her lips but her tongue felt thick, furry in her mouth. Only Eddie's calm presence beside her kept Wendy from bolting then and there.

“Ever been fishin’, girl?” Nana Moses asked, leaning forward and peering at Wendy closely. Up close her eyes were bloodshot and the whites of her eyes were aged yellow, but her expression was searching, sharp.

“Not really,” Wendy said. “Dad tried to take us once, but Mom had to bail halfway through and go to work.”

“I have,” Eddie said, patting a thigh to entice the dogs closer. They gladly crowded round to receive his attention. “What about it?”

“You know about deep sea fishin’?” Nana Moses tapped the middle of her forehead. “Down deep, where it's so cold and dark that man can't go, there're fish that live without ever seeing the light of the sun. And there're fish that light up their own sort of sun and dangle that light in front of ’em, fishes that go fishin’ for other fish, if you will.”

“Angler fish,” Emma supplied. “They can, for the most part, protect themselves handily.”

“Usually, yes,” Nana Moses said, “but sometimes those lights, they call more than just the little fish for the angler fish to eat up. Sometimes those lights catch the attention of deeper, darker things.”

Wendy shivered. “You're saying that I'm like an angler fish,” she said. “That the Light is my way of calling ghosts to me so I can send them into the Light.”

“No, girl,” Nana Moses said sadly. “A regular Reaper, trained the way we've been trainin’ em since time began, those girls are like angler fishes. You? You're a whole new creature, like if some deep sea fisherman dropped a spotlight at the bottom of the ocean. Maybe
one or two fish would swim up to a regular angler. You? You'd get half of the ocean floor in one go.”

“By the end of the training period, regular Reapers have an ultimate hold over their powers,” Emma clarified. “But naturals don't have to take things tiny step by tiny step. They learn everything all at once. It's just handed to them, so they don't have nearly the control.”

“I have control,” Wendy protested, stung. “Mom made me practice on Shades all the time!”

Nana Moses snorted. “Shades! Pah! She was draining your Light, girl, the safest way she knew how. Never had you reap Walkers, did she? Or a normal spirit? Or even, Good Ones forbid, a Lost?”

Unwillingly, Wendy remembered…

…
the stutter-flash of the ambulance's lights, the crumpled school bus half-on, half-off the road, and the small mob of Lost spirits milling around as the firemen and police officers and EMTs tried to separate the living from the dead. Wendy, moving as a shadow amid the chaos, sending the Lost on, feeling the tug deep inside of herself, the cramping pain and achiness that accompanied sending on Lost after Lost after Lost. Thirteen in all, and in the end, her mother's body, crumpled on the February-slick pavement, red curls plastered against her cheeks as Wendy knelt down and wept at her side
.

Emma snapped her fingers in Wendy's face and Wendy jerked back, simultaneously annoyed and embarrassed that she'd let her mind wander like that.

“No,” she said, swallowing rapidly and fighting the pinprick of tears in the corners of her eyes, “I didn't reap a Lost until after my mom was…until after she collapsed.”

Uncomfortably, Wendy remembered her first reap. Her mother had made her spy on the ghost of a grandmother pushing her granddaughter on a swing; even now Wendy clearly recalled the feeling of her filthy, scabby knees encased in itchy hose and wishing that she were anywhere but there at that particular instant. She remembered the warmth of that first reaping, the overwhelming burning sensation that kindled in her core and demanded to be released, the last
words of the grandmother, that desperate request for help for the child.

How old is that little girl now?
Wendy wondered.
Hopefully her stepfather never got custody back
.

“I only sent on one normal ghost before that,” she whispered. “It…it was my first reap.”

“Your mother knew better,” Nana Moses said with a knowing nod. “Knew what might happen if she let you work with the Walkers or the Lost. What eventually
would
happen, most like, no matter her precautions.”

“Which is?” Wendy asked testily. Her mother had slapped her after that reap, had told her that it was time for Wendy to grow up.

Cover your back
, she'd hissed as Wendy pressed the hot, stinging flesh of her cheek with one hand. It had been the litany of her childhood and adolescence from that point onward:
You give the dead seconds of your life every time you send them on; give them nothing else! Protect yourself, Wendy, watch your back!

“What could happen? Well, girl, normal Reapers build up their powers slowly. A normal Reaper can only send on so many souls in a night. Too many and she gets drained, tired, sloppy. She leaves herself open to attack, you understand me?”

“It takes years to extend your powers to a larger capacity,” Emma added. “I'm one of the best Reapers in this house and I can only send on a dozen or so a night. And it takes more energy and skill to send on Walkers or Lost.”

“Mary could send on fifteen or sixteen a night when she was your age,” Nana Moses added, “but she was truly something special. Even then, though, she'd have to rest up for a day or so to replenish her stores.”

Nana Moses tapped Wendy on her shoulder. “That's why we split cities into sectors, girl. Because it's nearly impossible for a Reaper to keep a city under control on her own. The fact that Mary managed it alone for so long was a miracle, honestly. I'm not surprised that she went the way she did. It was just a matter of time.”

Wendy blanched. There had been times, when Piotr and she had been separated, when she'd been hiding out from her family and friends, that she'd taken down two or three dozen Walkers an evening, easily. Sure, she'd been worn out at the end of the night, dropping into bed with subsequent nightmares as if diving off a pier into deep water, but she'd never really felt completely drained, just tired.

“Naturals…don't have that limit?”

“You tell me,” Nana Moses said and then shook her head. “No, don't say anything, girl, you're no good at lying. Look at you. A dozen regular ghosts is nothing to you, yeah? Two dozen? More?”

Emma shook her head. “How many of those were Walkers?”

Flushing, Wendy shrugged. “I don't know. A lot.” She tried not to brood on the mass of Walkers at the hospital, how they'd overwhelmed her so easily. If they'd been normal Walkers—untrained and hungry—she would have taken them down easily…but they'd been something more.
How many special Walkers would I be able to handle at once?
Wendy wondered.

“Naturals burn hot, Wendy,” Emma said softly, warningly. “If a regular Reaper is a candle in the darkness, you're like…”

“A bonfire?”

“Worse. Like a nuclear explosion.” Emma frowned faintly and crossed her arms across her chest, staring at the tapestry moodily. “And nuclear explosions, even small ones, blow out windows for hundreds of miles. They draw attention.”

“So more ghosts come to see me. I'll reap them, no fuss, no muss, right? If I don't let myself get surrounded like my mom did, I don't see what the big deal—”

“Control is more important than you're realizing and, more importantly, time adds up,” Nana Moses interrupted. “You lose a second of your life for every spirit you send on. You're young and I know it doesn't seem like much to you now but, speaking from experience, every heartbeat counts when you reach the other end, yeah?”

“I understand the risks,” Wendy said softly. “If a spirit needs
me, I'm willing to give up some of my life to send it on.” She shrugged. “Apparently it's what I was born to do.”

“Oh really? Do you understand that the brighter someone like you burns, even if it's only for a brief instant, the further your Light goes? There are spaces between the worlds, girl, spaces where deep, dark things exist. I wouldn't call it livin’ exactly, but they stay there and bide their time. But if some light reaches ’em, well, they start heading in the direction of that light, yeah?”

“You're dangerous,” Emma said coldly. “Even standing here, right now, in my house, you are dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Wendy rolled her eyes. “Seriously? Look at me! I'm not dangerous.”

“The more we use our powers, the more ghosts can sense us,” Emma said sharply. “It's feedback that Lost souls are especially sensitive to. We're like…candy to them. And they haven't eaten in years.”

Wendy thought of the Lost spirit Specs, the feeling of his fingers stripping her soul from her flesh, of him holding her Light in his hands, and the vertigo of Piotr taking her from Specs and pressing her soul back into her body. Wendy shivered. “I figured that one out on my own.”

Emma raised an eyebrow. “Oh really?”

“Hush girl,” Nana Moses said. “You had a point there. Finish before I get any older.”

“Sorry Great-Grandmother.” She turned to Wendy. “We're at our most vulnerable going from solid to ethereal. If you're not fast enough, that moment between solid and not is the best time to take down a Reaper.”

“I know that, too.” Wendy thought it was best to wait and let Jane explain the mob of Walkers that had followed her into the hospital lobby. “If you don't shift into the Never, though, they won't necessarily—”