Reaper (12 page)

Nana Moses snorted. “Beacon, girl. You can avoid all you want, but if you reap enough souls in a row, eventually they'll find you.
They can smell you, and the stronger you are, the louder that siren song, even if you haven't reaped in weeks or months. The more you
practice
—especially the more you practice on the stronger ghosts like Walkers—the brighter you burn. No matter how you cover it up.” She hawked and spat again, point made.

Eddie and Wendy exchanged a worried glance. By the end of the previous school semester Wendy had been reaping so many Walkers and spirits that the ghosts
had
begun hunting her down and bothering her during all hours of the day or night, at school and home, begging her to send them into the Light even if they found her on the toilet or showering. They hung around, staring and weeping, until she gave in. More than once Wendy had wondered how they'd found her no matter where she was. Now she knew.

Eddie leaned down and buried his hands in the corgi's fur, allowed it to nuzzle his cheeks and neck soothingly.

“Okay,” Wendy said slowly, licking her lips. “So what can I do? What if I just stop using my powers completely?” The thought of all those needy souls pained her, especially the Shades, but she'd done it once already. If she kept her reaping to only the most extreme cases…

“Our records state that if a girl is a natural…” Emma clasped her hands together nervously, “even one who never uses her power, the ghosts will eventually find her even if she can't
look
in the Never anymore, much less reap.”

Startled, Wendy glanced at Eddie. Seeing into the Never had become second nature to the point where she didn't even have to concentrate anymore; it was like glancing at a twisted black-and-white photograph just beneath a bright and sunny snapshot. “That's possible? Not seeing into the Never?”

“Oh ayep,” Nana Moses said shortly. “Once there was a natural-born Reaper who had her eyes put out for being a witch. Couldn't see into the Never, but the Never could sure see into her. And how.”

Wendy swallowed thickly. “What happened to her?”

“Well, she did the best she could to stay out of everyone's way,
but because she didn't use her powers often enough she lost the ability to control ’em.”

“Family legend states that the Light began seeping out of her pores,” Emma added. “You could practically see it in the living world.”

“That's how it works,” Nana Moses agreed. “You use the Light or the Light starts building up. Without a pressure release it'll start to burn. It's bad for a normal Reaper; it's terrible for a natural. All that excess, a normal Reaper can last weeks or even months, but a natural? She'll burn up in days, if not hours.”

“Sounds painful,” Wendy said, wincing.

“Her family, though, they weren't willing to do what a thousand year tradition told ’em to…told the rest of us to mind our own business and kept her alive.”

Peering at the wall, Nana Moses tapped the tapestry at the branch outlined in silver. “This was her family, this whole big branch. Wiped out in one night.”

“What happened?” Wendy asked nervously.

“Her family caught and brought her ghosts to reap, but eventually she couldn't anymore. No more will to keep struggling on. She burned herself from the inside out and that Light called every ghostie for miles around.”

Nana Moses rubbed a hand across her eyes. “The records say that they were found the next morning. Their shells were untouched—scattered on the ground of their cottage like garbage—but their souls were shredded like cheese, and every spirit in the area was glutted with power. Most of ’em were able to combat the Reapers that came to send ’em into the Light. All of ’em became Walkers after their feast; most escaped. Some are undoubtedly still out there.”

Wendy shivered and Emma nodded, smirking. “I'm glad to see that you're finally starting to understand.”

“They ate the natural, too?”

“Not a trace of her left, not even bones or hair,” Nana Moses said. “Takin’ her in gave those Walkers the ability to reach into the
living world some. To touch us in our human shells the way we can touch any ol’ spirit. Like so.” She poked Eddie in the shoulder and he winced.

“Ouch! Come on, Nana Moses, that stings!”

“It's just…” Wendy hesitated, uncertain how to explain her confusion. “If a natural is so strong, if she's got the Light on all the time, I don't understand how they could overwhelm her. You're so warm that you just hurt Eddie simply by poking him. When I'm the Lightbringer my Light burns; if this blind chick had such an excess of Light that she couldn't even turn it off in the end, then why didn't her Light hurt them, too? Why didn't they burn up just getting close to her?”

“It did a little,” Emma patiently explained, “but ghosts attracted to a natural, especially ghosts like the Lost or the Walkers…they are nearly mindless. They're already dead. More pain is nothing to them. All they are is desire—desire for the Light, desire for the bringer of the Light—and, given enough of them, they can easily overwhelm her and all the Reapers around her.”

“Feeding frenzy,” Nana Moses clarified.

“You saw what happened to your mother. Now imagine it a hundred—no, a thousand—times worse than that. The soul of a natural Reaper in the hands of spirits, or worse, is bad.”

“Deep water things?”

Nana Moses chuckled. “Exactly. There are beasties in the darkest depths of the Never that would turn every curl on your head white. Banshee. Dvergar. Gwrgi. Or worse. Balderkin.”

“Great-Grandmother!” Emma hissed. “Shhh!”

“Bah,” Nana Moses sniffed. “If it's my time, it's my time. I'll be glad to go.” She waved a finger under Wendy's nose and then poked her painfully in the shoulder. “But you, girl, you need to keep your fool self out of the hands of beasts like that. A Walker munching on a natural is bad enough. A Bad One having a snack on the likes of you is worse. The Bad Ones are bad business.”

“Then what the hell am I supposed to do?” Wendy cried, nettled.
“I can't live my life in a box, and if I don't use my powers there'll be buildup, right?”

“Yes,” Emma said. “Which is why I want to train you.”

Wendy blinked. “Excuse me?”

“I wish to train you,” Emma repeated slower and louder, as if Wendy were mentally deficient. “To most of our family, you will be seen as an abomination, as a freak, as a base creature that should not be allowed to be. If we can prove to them that you are none of these things, that you may indeed be an asset to the clan, then they will leave you be.”

“Fabulouso,” Wendy snapped, “but what's in it for you?”

Nonplussed, Emma pursed her lips. “Who says that I need to gain anything from helping you?”

“Call it a hunch,” Wendy replied shortly. “Maybe you have my best interests at heart, but you're still the type of girl who wants to maximize her profits. Two ghosts, one Reaper, that sort of thing.”

“Fine. I don't like living in California,” Emma replied. “Very few of us do, to be honest. It's expensive here, and the drivers are rude. The medical staff at every hospital I've encountered are unaccountably arrogant. It smells.”

“So?”

“Your mother held this territory by herself for nearly fifteen years. No help was needed from any Reaper to keep the Bay Area ghost-free.” Emma smoothed the hair back from her temples. “Only someone extremely talented or extremely powerful could hope to follow in her footsteps. Mary was talented.”

“And I'm extremely powerful.” Wendy shook her head. “But if you leave me here to handle everything on my own, I might get eaten unless I learn some control, forcing you to come back all over again.” She snorted. “You're a real piece of work, you know that? All of you.”

Emma shrugged. “There's also the matter of Eddie here, of course.” She looked him slowly up and down, an inscrutable expression on her face. “His cord issue intrigues me on a professional level.”

“Um, thanks?” Eddie said, shifting a step further away from Emma. The dogs crowding around him shifted as well.

“I want you two to allow me to help discern what happened to him,” Emma said, raising an eyebrow. “If it is possible to separate a soul from the body in this manner…well, the research opportunity for the family is invaluable, not to mention the medical opportunities it provides.”

“You want to experiment on me?” Eddie squeaked.

Emma rolled her eyes. “Hardly. I merely wish to ascertain how this particular malady of yours came to be. Imagine the medical aid I could give the wounded; disconnect the cord and slap an at-risk patient out of their shell before surgery and pop them back in as soon as they're safe. There's absolutely no risk of the patient waking during surgery if their soul is standing beside you. Most likely, there would be even less risk of accidental death.”

“You should worry more about the actual dead and less about the living,” Nana Moses harrumphed. “Medical opportunities, indeed.”

“Grandmother approves,” Emma said.

“She would,” Nana Moses retorted.

“I would what?” asked a voice, and Wendy realized why Emma had been glancing nervously down the hallway their entire conversation. A woman, no more than sixty, with an elegantly coiffed head of stark-white hair stepped from the shadows. Her satin night-apparel was more pantsuit than pajamas, though it gaped enough at the neck for Wendy to make out an intricate pattern of faded Celtic knots and dense runic whorls completely unlike any she'd ever laid eyes on before.

“We woke you,” Emma said apologetically.

“My bones woke me,” the woman replied, flicking her attention to Eddie and Wendy only briefly before noting Nana Moses at the back. She frowned. “Mother, you should be sleeping at this hour.”

“And you should be dead,” Nana Moses quipped. “Funny how these things work, huh?”

“Mother,” the woman sighed, “your humor is falling quite flat this morning. Our guests might think you're serious.”

“People think funny things without me saying a word. But you've got a point. It's late. I'm going to bed,” Nana Moses said, waving a hand in Wendy and Eddie's general direction. “Come get me at dawn, Emmaline. Bring coffee.”

The woman stiffened; her expression hardened, turning into not so much a scowl or a frown as a narrowing, an inward disapproval. Wendy had the feeling that this discussion was a familiar one for the two of them. “Mother, your heart—”

“My heart won't stop if I have a cup of coffee, Elise Anne,” Nana Moses snapped, clapping a hand against her chest in mock aggravation. “Not after all these years. It might stop if I
don't
have a cup, however. Keep your nose out of it.”

Wendy, watching this exchange, was troubled. Why did the name Elise seem familiar to her? The woman herself was striking enough that Wendy was sure she'd recall if they'd ever previously met, but it was her name that was striking a quiet chord deep within.

Elise tried again. “Mother—”

“The day I let my youngest boss me around is the same day I give up this mortal coil. Enough, young lady. You mind your business and I'll mind mine.”

Chastised, Elise graciously inclined her head and stepped aside, allowing Nana Moses to bully her way past. “G'night!” The old woman crowed, stopping only long enough to add, “And Eddie? You come visit me any time.” With that, Nana Moses thunked away, moving down the hall Elise had just come from, muttering to herself under her breath the whole while.

Then, out of the blue, it came to her. Wendy could clearly remember her mother once, during training, chastising Wendy.

Mom
, she'd whined,
I can't do this. Shifting through a tree? It's impossible!
Her mother, shaking her head and rolling her eyes, had
slid through the tree easily and turned on the other side with an exasperated expression.

You're lucky I'm not Elise
, Mary'd said, shaking her head and gesturing for Wendy to try again.
Moaning like that would've gotten you twenty laps and all night practicing. Do it again
.

Stalling, Wendy'd asked:
Who's Elise?

No one…important to us right now. One day you'll see
.

Now she had her answer.

Waiting until Nana Moses was well down the hall and out of earshot, Elise smiled thinly and turned to Eddie, snapping for the ghost dogs at his feet to disperse. They quickly jogged over to kennels in the corner and slid through the walls, settling on the remnants of blankets with both real and ethereal bones to chew on.

“I see your ride is finally here.”

“Yep,” Eddie said, edging toward the door.

“Then, as you've long overstayed your welcome, it's best you left, yes?” Elise smoothed one hand over her hair and glanced at Wendy. “We shall talk soon, Winifred, but it is late and, like my mother, I think it is time to return to bed. You may let yourselves out.”

“Sure thing,” Wendy agreed readily, glad to finally be on her way.

“I'll see them to the door, Grandmother,” Emma said.

“As you wish.” Elise patted Wendy on the shoulder before turning away and Wendy had to bite her lip to keep from hissing in pain. Elise's touch was intensely hot, as sharply painful as if she'd just finished running her hand across a stovetop. If Elise noticed the pain her touch caused, she made no mention of it. She merely strolled back into the shadows as if nothing were amiss at all.

Emma guided them to the door, forcibly guiding Wendy out with hardly a glance. “I'll be in contact,” she promised in a breathy whisper, barely allowing Wendy past the archway before the door clicked shut and locked behind them.

I
nsulted, Wendy made her way across the dimly lit yard to find that Eddie was already waiting for her at the Charger, leaning casually against the driver's side and staring at the stars. “Some adventure, huh?”

“You've really been with them this entire time?” Wendy could hardly believe it. “How did you stay sane?”

“It wasn't all that bad.”

“Color me surprised. With people like Elise around, I'd have figured you for walking home long before now.”

“She's just a tightass, no biggie. I've dealt with worse. Speaking of worse, give me the quick and dirty about your mom.
She
turned out to be the White Lady? How the hell did
that
happy crappy go down?”

Speaking quickly so she didn't have to dwell on the past few months, Wendy unlocked the driver's side as Eddie slid through the car door and gingerly settled into the passenger seat. Starting the car and backing out of the drive, Wendy explained how her mother's soul had been ripped apart by twelve Lost souls at the bus wreck the previous February. Called by her pain, Piotr had helped put her back together again, and was then drained of the memory of the event by the newly created White Lady. Since Wendy had sent the guilty Lost into the Light, the White Lady decided to gather up twelve other souls to mend her soul completely. The final step in returning to her body was devouring Wendy's Light.

“But wouldn't that hurt you?” Eddie asked as Wendy stopped at a stop sign at the edge of Emma's neighborhood.

“It would have killed me,” Wendy said quietly; the retelling had
brought her to tears. She wiped a hand across her face and fumbled one-handed in her purse for a Kleenex to blow her nose. “It almost did, actually. Mom was so conflicted at the end. Being shredded by the Lost like that made her go insane, Eds. She kept going back and forth between Mom and the White Lady, trying to warn me one minute and then the next saying that she had you captured and if I didn't give up my soul then she'd kill you.”

“But she didn't,” Eddie protested. “It wasn't her.”

“Yeah, she eventually admitted that. Later.” Done with tears, Wendy coughed to clear her throat and straightened in her seat, all business now. “Of course, now the question is who
did
knock you out of your body? Do you remember what happened at all? And how did you end up at Emma's?”

“Not a clue. One minute I'm minding my own business and the next there's this immense…I don't know…pressure? Around my chest. I came to in the hospital, standing outside my body. Mom was freaking out and there were doctors swarming everywhere. It sucked big time.”

“I'd imagine,” Wendy said. “But you obviously kept it together long enough to find help.”

“Help found me.” Eddie scrubbed his hands across his face. “I'm sitting there by my body, waiting for it all to be over and the Light to pick me up the way you always said it would, when Jane pokes her head in my room. Doing rounds, I guess. She's always up at the hospital these days.”

“Jane?” Wendy frowned. Jane had claimed that
Emma
had found and helped Eddie. Wendy wondered why she was being so humble about aiding her friend. Though, if Wendy thought about it, “helping” wasn't exactly the coolest thing in the world for someone like Jane to do.

“Jane. She takes one look at me and says, ‘Hold up a sec. You're not dead. Like…really not dead.’”

Eddie sighed and leaned forward, motioning with his hands. “I
was all, ‘Nope! Care to help a guy out?’ and she gave me a funny look and told me to follow her. Took me straight to Emma and Elise—they were downstairs in the lobby—and Elise decided that they'd take me home with them. Emma finished writing some kind of letter to give to you, and we bailed.”

“I'm so sorry,” Wendy groaned. “I should have been there. You must have been…”

“Terrified out of my ever-lovin’ mind?” Eddie asked. “Yeah. You could say that. And I kept falling through stuff when I didn't want to.”

“I'm sure you've figured this out by now, but staying cohesive and moving around in the Never is a matter of willpower. Once you can wrap your mind around that, life—well, death anyway—gets a lot easier.”

“Emma showed me that. I guess your mom taught you?”

Wendy stiffened, using the excuse of piloting the Charger to think over her reply. “Piotr, actually. Mom and I didn't spend a lot of time in the Never together.”

Eddie was silent for an equally long moment, digesting this. Then he sighed and said, “Right,” clasping his hands in his lap and grudgingly asking, “How is old Pete, anyway?”

“I wouldn't know,” Wendy said. “He dumped me.”

Eddie jerked in the seat as he lost his concentration, and he started to sink through the cushion. “What? You're kidding me!” He scowled thickly, grabbed the dashboard, and pulled himself back up. “What happened?”

“It's complicated,” Wendy said, merging carefully onto 680. It was early yet, not even dawn, but already the early morning gridlock had begun as all the Silicon Valley bigwigs who lived outside the valley commuted in to work.

Grinning, Eddie poked himself in the chest. “I think I've got time.”

“He wanted to figure out where he came from,” Wendy said, shrugging and sitting forward in the seat to try and get a better vantage point on the traffic.

“Um, Russia?”

“Yeah, but according to Mom and his friend Lily, Piotr's been dead a lot longer than even he realizes, Eddie. Maybe he was from Russia once, but he hasn't been there in at
least
five hundred years. Probably more.”

“Weird,” Eddie said. “I didn't know ghosts didn't have to stick around the place they died.”

“They can travel just like we can.” Wendy merged into the center lane. “And speaking of traveling…nice job, leaving my gift before you bailed to go spend Hanukkah with your family. I would've liked you to be there.”

“So you did get the buckle and my note.” Eddie scrunched in his seat, blushing. “I didn't want to ask.”

“It was an amazing gesture, Eds. Of course I read your letter. And I can't imagine what you had to go through to get that buckle.” Wendy didn't want to tell him that his buckle was now at the hospital, grasped in his shell's hands. Her futile gesture seemed silly now.

Turning his face to the window, Eddie was silent for a long moment before replying. “I didn't do that much, actually. After Dad died, Mom threw me in therapy and the counselor kept suggesting that I find something to be angry at other than my dad for a bit. Because I was in denial.”

“And you decided on the buckle that didn't save him?”

“No. I just wanted a piece of the car; even the gas cap would've worked. I asked around and it turned out that my Uncle Arthur knew the guy at the lot Dad's car ended up at. Once the CSI-types were done making sure there was no foul play, he went and got me the buckle.” Eddie shrugged as if it was no big deal, but Wendy knew that the retelling was bothering him.

“Then what?”

“Well, I yelled at it; hours screaming at that dumb buckle for not saving him. I threw it. If you look closely you can even see the corner where I took a hammer to it once. And then, one day I realized
that it wasn't the car's fault. It was an inanimate object. It was no one's fault. It was an accident. It wasn't fate or kismet or karma or any of that stupid crap. Figuring that out…it was like a light had flicked on in my head, chasing away all those nasty, grimy shadows. I didn't need the buckle after realizing that. Not really.”

“Yeah?”

“I relapsed once or twice. It wasn't overnight. But it was like that one realization was a lancet hitting some big boil I didn't know I had. I still needed time to heal but it didn't ache anymore, yeah? I wasn't all this pent-up rage walking around pretending to be a person.”

Merging onto the 101 was simpler than merging onto 680 had been. It was busier but calmer here. Wendy began to relax. All the talk of the accident that had killed Eddie's father was making her nervous about her own highway driving, especially during the early morning rush. “Okay, I understand that. But then why give the buckle to me?”

“Because I love you.”

Wendy, startled, hesitated over her reply. Eddie had said he'd loved her before, but never so plainly. Normally he flirted up a storm and approached the subject with winks and nudges and playful laughter. This was bald and fresh and raw; completely unlike her best friend.

“Eddie—”

“No, look, I said in that note I wasn't going to bug you with it and I'm not, okay? So don't panic. It's just…” Eddie licked his lips, pausing over what he was going to say next, “It's just that it's the truth, okay, all unvarnished and out there. I love you. And it's all well and good to write that down in a letter that I wasn't even there for you to read, but it's completely different when I tell you face to face, you know?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and took a deep breath. “I love you. I love you. I love YOU, Wendy. You're the only person in the world who went through what I went through that night and,
even more importantly, that night—what happened to Dad—that was what shoved you into this ghost-thing. If it hadn't been for that accident maybe you would have no idea why your mom collapsed, you know? That car flipping over made us both completely different people. And, as much as it sucks to say this, because we've been through a lot of crap in the past year, maybe it made us better people. Overall, at least. Maybe. And maybe we'd both be a pair of jerks if we hadn't gone through that. Maybe we wouldn't even be friends; people grow apart, it happens all the time, you know?”

“Eddie—”

He sighed loudly. “Don't. Just…don't. I don't want your pity and I don't want your ‘I love you like a buddy’ or ‘we talked about why this would never work out’ speech. I know you're not interested in me and you've probably still got the mega-hots for Petey the Russian Ghosty. I just wanted you to know. It's important to me.”

Wendy quirked a smile and decided that if Eddie wasn't ready to really talk about this weird thing between them, then she wasn't either. “Actually, I wanted to know if you wanted me to drop you off at your house or if you're coming home with me. Or I can run you by the hospital if you want to check out your amazingly sick abs in that flimsy little hospital gown.”

Eddie laughed. “Pervert.”

“Hey, like you wouldn't peek. Your mom has you in a delightful pair of Superman Underoos by the way.”

“Okay, now I know you're joking.”

“Piotr wanted me to go with him,” Wendy said suddenly.

“Yeah?” Eddie's voice was carefully neutral. “And?”

“I said that I couldn't. I couldn't just walk out on Chel and Jon and Dad like that. So we parted ways. That's all that happened. It's that simple. And that complicated.”

“So no big dramatic fight? No cheating on you with Zombie Cleopatra?”

She snorted. “Hardly.”

“Damn.”

“He's gone, Eddie. And just because I thought—in the past—that you and me being together wouldn't be the best of ideas, that doesn't mean that I don't really care about you. I love you too, you stupid…head…guy.”

“Couldn't quite make that one work, huh?”

“Shut up.” Wendy shook her head. “The point is, I don't know what I want. Maybe that'll be you. Maybe that's someone like Piotr. I don't know. But I do love you. Not entirely as a friend. Not entirely as something more. It's love though. I'm just not ready for serious right now.”

“What about Piotr?”

“What about him? He left, I stayed, you're here, and it's not like love is this all or nothing thing, right?”

“It is, in fact, complicated,” Eddie agreed.

“I have to be reasonable, Eds,” Wendy pressed. “Piotr's dead and when we find your silver cord you'll be one hundred percent alive. Maybe then, after I've figured out where your cord is and how to get you back in your body, then we can talk about…us. This. Whatever this thing is.” She see-sawed a hand back and forth between them.

Eddie snorted. “Oh, you did not just tell me that I might win out your heart because the first place guy skipped town and happens to be dead. I'm insulted!”

“No!” Irritated, Wendy pounded the steering wheel. “Stuff your pride and
listen
to me, Eds. Before, I always said no because you didn't get where I was coming from. You had no clue what it was like to live in my world. Right?”

“Right…oooh. I get it.” Eddie smacked himself in the forehead. “Dummy, Eddie, dumb-head! You didn't want to be with me because I kept telling you to quit Reaping and give up on your mom.” He frowned.

“And now?”

“And now…the shoe's on the other foot and wow, do I feel like
an ass. I'm so sorry about that, by the way. You're not going to give up on me the way I wanted you to give up on your mom, are you?”

“Of course not. And thank you for admitting you were acting like a jerk.”

He paused for a long moment. “Why didn't you belt me again? I would have deserved it.”

“Because you were just alive.” Wendy shrugged. “You couldn't know any better. You hadn't been there.”

“No kidding. Time…everything is different over on this side. Sometimes it's so slow and sometimes it's like everything is whizzing by. So what day is it anyway?”