Reaper (25 page)

Nothing.

There was no one there. Not in the Never and not in the living lands. No Walkers, no Lady Walker, nothing.

Perplexed, Wendy began to sit up when the pressure forced her back to the grass, a heavy weight that pinned her down from her collar to her hips, shoving down with so much force that Wendy struggled to breathe.

Spaces between worlds
, Nana Moses’ voice whispered in the back of her mind.
Creatures and creatures again, drawn by your Light
.

The world began to grey around her, just as it had when Jane's ribbons of Light had twisted so tightly.

Reaching forward, Wendy concentrated on where the bulk of the pressure was, where Jane's ribbons had twined the tightest. She didn't know if this would work, but it was her only chance.

There. There it was. Her Light.

Wendy felt it, right there at the edge of her fingertips, banked and roaring deep inside her, a bonfire somehow swept into a little hearth that promised to burn the house around it to cinders. She could feel how the mesh of the binding had been twisted tight and knotted, a wrap around the heat, threatening to burst and break her apart in the process.

Tapping into the Light, wedging her fingers under the very thinnest of mesh edges, Wendy was able to bend the bindings on her power just a little. Not enough to break them, no, but the heat of her power blazing on the other side was just enough to wriggle a fingernail's width of space free. Not much, a miniscule amount, but enough for the moment.

With hands encased in Light, Wendy reached into the invisible, punishing mass and
squeezed
.

A terrible shriek ripped the air above her and for a brief, glorious second Wendy was able to breathe as the invisible pressure loosened. Then, before she could do more than gasp a few mouthfuls of air, it was back and gripping tighter than ever.

Marshalling what energy she could, Wendy squinted into the Never, hoping against hope that
this time
she'd be able to make her enemy out.

It wasn't some terrible monster from the deep, she realized, just a bird: an enormous, furious seagull with dirty, stinking wings, mostly camouflaged by the shadows and the night and gripping her torso with all its might. It squawked and tightened its immense, mutated talons around her chest. Where she had touched it, the essence smoked. The scaly leg burned from her touch.

The gull was a fighter, though. It wasn't going to let Wendy get away. When she tried to twist free, it flapped foul, sea-rotted wings in her face and darted downward, tearing a large chunk of Wendy's arm in a deep, jerking gash. For a brief moment Wendy thought that the awful bird had actually cut her corporeal flesh, but then she felt the hole where her outer essence should have been.

What little of her banked power she'd been able to grab was now almost gone. Wendy squeezed harder and was rewarded by the nasty beast pecking at her eyes and gouging her left cheek. Wendy buried one hand in the bird's chest, futilely yanking out only a handful of filthy feathers.

The world began to dim, and just as Wendy gave up, she heard a sharp, loud chittery growl and smelled a clean, evergreen scent. Forcing her eyes open, Wendy spotted a huge black shadow darting as a raccoon slammed into the gull, pinning it down.

The gull screamed and Wendy, at a loss for how to help, used the very last of her remaining power to
squeeze
the gull's leg again. The gull made an almost-human yell of pain and surprise and flapped off her chest, choosing to combat the raccoon over its weakened and torn-up prey.

Scuttling over the ground in fast, darting motions the raccoon and gull went at each other with a startling fury, the raccoon darting in and out of the fray with sharp, quick swipes, the bird doing its best to peck the raccoon's eyes out. The gull was strong but the raccoon was quick, and within moments the gull was missing great patches of feathers from its chest and neck. The air was filled with dirty white-grey fluff. The bird's skin was speckled with red.

Finally, realizing that it was outmaneuvered, the gull managed to take wing and escape. The raccoon, hissing furiously, leapt into the air after the gull and tried to snatch it back down, catching only a few tail feathers for its effort.

The raccoon, clutching the feathers in one paw, waited until the gull was long gone before it sauntered over to Wendy and began grooming its paws and face.

“Hello again,” Wendy said, coughing painfully. She thought about trying to sit up, but even the idea of moving made her woozy. “I thought you were done with me. Decided to stick around for some more giggles, huh?”

Wendy ran her hand along the raccoon's back, luxuriating in the strangely slippery feel of its dense fur coat. The raccoon, dropping the feathers, preened under her touch and Wendy got the impression that if it could purr, it would have. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I appreciate your help.”

The raccoon flicked an ear at her:
Chips? Crackers? Tacos? Chocolate chip cookies?

“I still don't have a snack for you,” Wendy apologized, chuckling helplessly at the situation until a sharp spike of pain along her temples made her stop. “At least, not one you can eat in your current, you know, dead state. I'm really sorry. Though…I don't know…maybe we can salvage some nommables for you later?”

She coughed again and this time was dismayed to feel a thick bubble break at the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were dry and hot in their sockets.

“I really am running a temperature now,” Wendy told the raccoon. “Whoo-nelly, I feel sick.”

A normal Reaper might last weeks or days but a natural would burn up in a matter of hours
, Emma's voice reminded her. How long had it been since the binding? And how long since Jane had tried to remove the binding?

Wendy shivered. Time seemed to be speeding up, and not in a good way.

“I know you're hungry,” Wendy said aloud, staggering to her feet. “Believe me, I know. I promise, when I can I'll…” She coughed again and wiped her wrist against her damp lips, ignoring the pink tinge in the faint streetlights.

“Actually,” Wendy told the raccoon, rubbing the back of her neck, “now that I come to think about it, maybe I'll take that shower, after all. Eddie's not going anywhere, right? Right. Cool off a touch, then go fix him right up.”

The raccoon said nothing, merely bounded across the yard and through the kitchen wall, leaving Wendy to follow. When she entered the house the raccoon was waiting patiently on the stairs. It flicked an ear at her and darted to the second floor, leading the way.

S
tumbling upstairs, Wendy staggered into the bathroom and slammed open the cabinet door, pawing through the jumbled morass inside until she found the old thermometer. It was ancient and probably hardly worked, but if all else failed she'd go looking for a newer one in Dad's bathroom. She was alarmingly dizzy. Small grey spots were beginning to swim at the edges of her vision. How
hard
had that gull hit her, anyway?

Using the old thermometer seemed to take forever. Wendy squinted at the readout and then shook the thermometer.

102.9
.

That can't be right
, Wendy thought. Her temperature had skyrocketed far too high, far too fast.

And that was going-to-the-hospital temperature, wasn't it? Wendy wished she could ask her mom what to do. Mary had been an EMT for years; she'd know how to handle this.

Slumping to the bathroom floor, Wendy rested her cheek against the cool tile. Her mind was a tangle of thoughts and worries and missing her mother. She'd never really had the time to mourn Mary; she'd been in the hospital, unconscious, until the day after they'd buried her.

“What did Emma
do
to me?” Wendy asked the floor tiles, absently rubbing a spot of dried gunk under the cabinet door lip, cleaning like Chel might if she'd known it was there.

Rolling over onto her back, Wendy dug in her pocket for her phone. She pulled out her old tongue ring, stared at it a moment in confusion, and then pocketed it again. She knew she was forgetting something important about the ring, something about where she'd seen it last, but right now contacting Emma was more important. It seemed silly to think that Emma was working against her. It seemed crazy.

Wendy laughed at the absurdity of calling the only doctor she knew over a panic about a little fever. “Be all like, ‘Yo, Emma, I gots a temp, guuurl, and it's all yo fault. Now whatchoo want me to do ’bout it?’ Oh yeah, she'd looove that.”

The raccoon said nothing, but it leapt down off the toilet and nudged the hand holding her phone.

“Oh, hey,” Wendy said as image after image of travelers at a nearby rest station appeared clearly in her mind. They were holding their phones up, obviously trying to get reception.

“That's a great idea. Sicker than snot? Smartphone to the rescue!” Wendy patted the raccoon on the head. “You, little guy, are one smart…mammal…thing.”

The raccoon said nothing but preened under her petting and licked its snout again.

“Here we go,” Wendy muttered, pulling up Google and checking WebMD. “High temp,” she typed, rolling so that her other cheek now lay against the melting tiles and cold floor while she waited for the page to load.

“Have to save Eddie,” she said. “Have to cool off, have to save…Sarah? And Piotr. I can do this. One step at a time. No problemo. I am Wendy, hear me roar. Or whimper. Whatever.” She coughed. “Did I save Sarah? I didn't, did I? She got…she got sent on.”

Squinting at the screen was making her dry, raspy eyes water, and the salt tears stung. Looking away eased the discomfort; Wendy was dismayed to realize that glancing back caused stabbing pain behind her eyes.

“Light sensitivity, fever,” Wendy muttered, shading her eyes and trying to read the WebMD article in quick, snapping glances. “Skin tight? Yeah. No sweat? Damn it, yes.”

Heat stroke.

Wendy thumbed her phone closed and flipped it upside down, setting it face down on the tile. She waved weakly at the light switch and, to her surprise, the raccoon hopped up on the countertop and scrabbled at the switch with its paws until the light, blessedly, turned off.

“Did not know you could do that,” Wendy said and pressed herself as flat to the floor as she could manage. It kept the world from spinning quite so rapidly. “Well, you learn something new every day, huh?”

Now only the dim light coming in from her father's bedroom window down the hall lit the bathroom; Wendy used this weak illumination to twist the cold knob and flip the stopper, resting her hot forehead against the cool fiberglass while the tub filled and the world melted and spun.

“Gonna throttle Emma when I get my hands on her,” Wendy whispered to herself. “Gonna show her.”

Stripping her jeans and shirt seemed to take forever; by the time she was done the water was lapping the overflow hole. Easing into the icy tub, Wendy grabbed for the towel rack for support and sent the towels sliding to the floor. She thought about picking them up but instead welcomed the cold water slinking up her legs and caressing her hips, tummy, chest.

Once she was sunk up to her shoulders, Wendy tilted her head back and reveled in the cold shiver that ran chilly fingers up the base of her skull to her temples. Groaning, Wendy sank again as deeply into the bath as she could, until only her nose was above the water. When she opened her eyes the bathroom ceiling was distorted and wavery, but Wendy had a feeling that it wasn't just the water causing her vision to drift.

Surfacing, she stared at the wall and nodded; yep, she was definitely beginning to hallucinate. Her father had last painted the bathroom when she was ten, maybe eleven. Wendy was positive that she'd remember if he'd decided to spray paint pink stripes and swirls above the toilet, especially ones that had the disconcerting habit of forming into glaring, malevolent faces in her peripheral vision.

Finally dragging her eyes away from the faces in the walls, Wendy was stunned to realize that the air was steaming above her. “Didn't I run cold water?” she whispered plaintively.

Ice melting in a Styrofoam coffee cup, watering down the bitter liquid flung on the side of the road
.

“No. No-no-no, I know what to do,” Wendy said, sitting up so that the water sloshed over the side, drenching the tiles and towels. She waved at her raccoon and chuckled maliciously, grabbing for the driest washcloth to wipe her hands. “I really will ask Emma.”

It took her three tries to punch in the number correctly. It rang and rang and rang, and just as Wendy was certain it was going to voicemail, Emma's familiar cool voice answered. She was annoyed. “Wendy, I'm about to eat for the first time all day. What is it?”

“You. Bitch,” Wendy slurred.

There was a pause on the other end. “Excuse me? I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. You bitch.” Wendy was shaking now in the water, her teeth chattering. “You haul me out to the middle of nowhere, strip me down, and bind me up without even asking permission—”

Immediately Emma's voice dropped and grew further annoyed. “Wendy, please, we discussed the reasons behind this already.”

If she'd been in the same room, Wendy would have slapped her. “And then you have the nerve—the nerve!—to tell me that you don't think I'm good enough to be Reaper material? You come into
my
dreams and try to push me around? What the hell, Emma? Who
does
that?”

“What?”

“But I can handle that, you know? It's just stupid high school buffy crap all over again, just from an adult. So I can handle you thinking you're better than me because you're all hot and older and a smarty-pants doctor. Eddie thinks you've got good legs. Who cares? I've got legs too, you know. But it's not—”

Wendy broke off to cough. Her entire torso twisted under the shuddering shape of the wracking coughs, and her throat felt like razors were shredding her insides apart. Every inch of her flesh ached.

“Wendy?” Emma's voice was no longer pitched low or cool. She actually sounded
concerned
. “Wendy, what's wrong?”

“What did you
do
to me, Emma?” Wendy whispered, scooping up a palm full of bathwater and drinking it down. “Jane couldn't take off the binding.
What did you do?
”

“Wait-wait-wait,” Emma was nearly pleading now on the other end. Her voice had gone high and quiet. “You saw Jane again today? When?”

“I hate you,” Wendy said baldly. “I hate you so much. You guys…everyone, all the ghosts, they say I killed my mom but it was really you. You did it. ’Cause if Mom had her cord transmuted the way Eddie's cord is probably transmuted then she'd be alive, right? Yeah. She'd have walked around those Lost like it was nothin’.”

Wendy coughed again. “You're the doctor, Emma. Emma
line
. Emmaline, thinks she's soooo fine. You could have saved her. You could've taken her after Piotr put all the pieces together again and you could've put her head back on straight. She just had to go back in her body. No biggie, right? You knocked Eddie out of his easily enough.”

“Wendy?” Emma said softly. “Wendy, I don't know what you're talking about. Did you take something today? Are you drunk? Did you drink alcohol in conjunction with—”

“I'M SICK!” Wendy screamed into the phone, making the raccoon jump and flee the bathroom. “Don't you get that, you crazy bitch?! I'm…I'm running a fever. I'm staring at the walls and the walls are staring at me and the bath was so cold but now the water's warm-warm-warm.”

There was another long pause. Wendy thought that perhaps the phone had cut out, that Emma had hung up on her, when Emma quietly said, “Have you taken your temperature recently, Wendy?”

“One-oh-three-ish,” Wendy said stiffly. Then she laughed crazily. “And I'm getting hot-hot-hot!”

Cursing quietly on the other end, Emma quickly began speaking with someone else. Wendy shook her head. Silly Emma. Silly, stupid, back-stabbing Emma.

“I'm coming over right now,” Emma said, returning to the phone. There was a strange echo in the background now; Wendy thought it might be the sound of Emma's running steps echoing around the hospital's concrete parking garage. “Stay there. Stay cool if you can. Dump out the bathwater, run a cold shower. Get ice packs if you can manage it.”

“Why should I listen to you?” Wendy demanded. “You got me into this mess.”

“Because, one, I'm a doctor, and two, I put the loosest binding possible on you, Wendy. You should
not
be reacting this way. You said that Jane tried to remove the binding? Are you sure?” Emma broke off and quietly cursed. “Where the hell is my car?”

“Elise has it,” Wendy giggled. “Jane had her feet all over the dashboard too.”

“She…what?!” Emma made a noise somewhere between a growl and a gurgle. “I…I just don't…”

“Emma?” Wendy whispered. “I think I'm gonna be sick.”

“Jesus. Look, just lean over the side of the tub,” Emma demanded and Wendy did so. The sick splattered across the tile was nothing but spit and bile; Wendy realized that the only thing she could recall eating all day was one of Jon's cookies.

Setting the cell on speakerphone and resting it on the toilet lid, Wendy carefully straightened and flipped the stopper on the tub. The water began to drain as she crawled out, easing over the side of the tub as slowly as she could manage. Her knee slid on a tiny puddle and Wendy cracked her funny-bone painfully on the side of the toilet. She moaned.

“Wendy? Wendy, are you still there? Wendy, are you okay? Answer me, damn it! WENDY!”

“Mmmhmmm,” Wendy whispered. “No more bath. Tired.”

“Wendy, okay, I want you to listen to me. Are you listening? Wendy, tell me you're listening.”

“Listening,” Wendy obediently repeated, taking the phone between her chattering teeth. It took all her energy to straighten up and rest against the wall, but she managed. It was time to crawl.

Tilting away from the bathroom wall, Wendy lifted one leg and then the next, then an arm and then the next, forcing her rebelling body to shuffle down the hall until she reached the relative sanity of her own room. Her comforter was half on/half off the bed, her gothic Hello Kitty throw pillow peeking from beneath the dust ruffle. Wendy hooked a finger into the black tassel and pulled the pillow close, jerking the rest of the comforter off the bed to wrap over her shivering, naked form.

“I can't hear you,” Emma was shouting into the phone. “WENDY! SAY SOMETHING!”

“Sorry,” Wendy whispered, watching colors pulse against her eyelids, a kaleidoscope of red and green and blue. “I don't really think you're a bitch. I'm just mad.”

“Listen closely, Wendy. I'm getting a taxi and I'm coming over, okay? Where are you, Wendy?”

Wendy pinched the bridge of her nose. “I'm glad I'm a Lightbringer. I'm glad I'm not a Reaper. I'm new. I'm different. I'm my own.”

“Where are you?”

“My room. Upstairs. End of the hall.”

Emma's voice dropped; she was relieved. “Great. Fabulous. I'll be there as soon as I can but in the meantime I want you to try and take the binding off yourself, okay? Do you think you can do that?”

“You can take a binding off yourself?”

Emma hesitated. “You can try.”

“You still don't think I'm good enough,” Wendy accused her, voice breaking. If she weren't so dry, she would have cried. “You still think I'm trash.”

“Wendy, I never said that.” Emma was almost pleading now. “Please, just try to take off the binding.”

It was worth a shot. “How?”

“Thank heavens, she finally sees reason. Fine, okay, here's what you do. Try and slide into the Never. You won't be able to do it, but try anyway. This will make seeing into the Never easier, yes?”