Reapers (14 page)

Although they had eliminated this
threat, Kara felt defeated. “I just wished we could have saved at
least one, just one soul. We couldn’t even do that! What’s the
point of being guardian angels if we can’t even save one miserable
soul?”

David reached out to her again. “Kara,
don’t torture yourself; this is not your fault. It’s nobody’s
fault.”

Kara brushed him off.
“Don’t—”

A scream echoed down the
street.

Startled, the group froze and waited,
listening, watching each other and waiting to hear the sound again.
Had they imagined it? But the scream came again, a terrified girl’s
pleading scream.

Before Kara knew what she was doing,
she ran toward the sound.

“
Kara, wait!” cried
David.

But Kara was focused only on the sound
of a girl’s scream. She had to save her. She needed to save at
least one mortal to relieve the guilt and shame she felt for
killing all those innocent people. She had to do this, no matter
what. Save the soul…

The gray, billowing smoke
crowded around her, and Kara could only see darkness and the soft
light that spilled from the many fires that marked the strip like a
runway. She tore down the street, praying she was heading in the
right direction.
Don’t
die
, she pleaded.
Please don’t die
.

Another series of the strange sharp
pains she had felt earlier erupted between her shoulder blades, but
she ignored them. Her only thought was to save the girl.

Her M-5 suit had taken a real beating,
and she was beginning to tire. She had to find the girl
soon.

She didn’t know when the view had
changed. She just kept running. The gray smoke snuffed out the
buildings. She didn’t know if she’d gone too far. The endless
buildings that rose all around her all looked the same.

She realized that she was shivering,
not from the cold, but from a panic that consumed her with a
desperate need to make amends for the shame of the
massacre.

I have to save
one.

She halted in the middle of the street
and listened for any sign of the girl. And just when she thought
she had failed, she heard a faint whimper.

Kara bolted in the direction of the
whimper. Her M-5 suit still enabled her to run at supernatural
speed. She turned right at the next block and headed down what
appeared to be an alleyway. A giant wall of smoke materialized in
front of her, and she tore through it. She couldn’t see more than
ten feet in front of her. The rest was lost in shadow.

“
Hello? Are you here? I’m
here to help you,” Kara’s voice cracked, and she didn’t care to
mask her desperation.

“
Just—just say something,
so I can find you. I can get you to safety, if you’ll only tell me
where you are—”

Something collided with Kara from the
back and flew into the air. She went sprawling on the ground and
rolled over. Her blade fell from her grip. The blow would have
broken her back, if it weren’t for her M-5 suit.

She was disorientated. She felt
something brush the side of her leg. A girl lay beside her. She was
still and cold. Her eyes were black and lifeless.

Kara felt a presence
nearby.

She looked up at a black-robed figure
who loomed over her.

Chapter 9

Reapers

K
ara stared, transfixed both in awe and in fear. The creature
stood seven feet tall and wore a flowing black robe that rippled
like tendrils of black smoke. Underneath she could see fragments of
a body that was corrupted by shadow and darkness. Its face was
hidden behind a heavy hood that was as dark as night except for two
glowing red eyes. It exuded an aura of fear.

It held a great scythe in the rotten
flesh of its exposed hand. Kara screamed when she looked at the
blade.

The gleaming red blade was covered
with the faces of thousands of souls. Horrified, Kara could hear
their faint cries and could feel their pain and suffering. It was
as though they were begging her to set them free. Panic gripped
her. She couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t look away from the
screaming souls.

Although it didn’t speak to her
directly, she could hear the reaper’s voice in her mind. It was a
voice like blackness, the voice of death itself.

Come to
me
, said the voice.
Come to me.

Then the darkness and
death came at her. Kara felt her essence breaking as
coldness washed over her like a thick fog. She
could feel her mind clouding as the blackness came nearer. The
creature had some sort of hold on her, and she was transfixed and
couldn’t move.

The Reaper leaned closer. Its robe
enveloped her in swirls of black smoke that felt like gangly
fingers gripping at her. It was so close to her now that she could
see a haggard face beneath the hood. Its exposed rotten flesh was
coated with the faces of pleading souls.

Kara tried to scream, but her voice
wouldn’t come. She couldn’t look away.

Its wet, gaping hole of a
mouth contorted into a grin. The reaper lowered its scythe, aiming
it toward her chest, slowly angling it, as it decided where to cut
her. Red and black mist coiled from the scythe and reached out to
Kara. She could feel it burning her M-5 suit. Tendrils of mist
insinuated their way into her body. She thrashed and kicked, but it
was no use. Her strength was failing, and her eyes began to blur.
Her angel essence was being drawn out of her body into the reaper’s
scythe. Soon she would join the other captive souls. The reaper’s
hideous dark hide seemed to ripple with excitement as it prepared
to strike.

And as the reaper raised
its scythe above its head, ready to strike her down, ready to
finish her completely—it hesitated.

It lowered its scythe and
pulled back.
It cocked its head to one
side, as though it was contemplating whether or not to kill her.
Something about Kara had stopped it.

The hesitation was all she
needed.

With the connection lost, Kara’s
energy returned. She rolled away and jumped to her feet. With a
quick move of her hand she threw her blade directly toward the
reaper’s face. But the beast was unimaginably fast and easily
caught her blade, inches before it hit its face. He tossed it
aside, and in one giant step it was on her again.

“
Kara! Duck!”

Kara fell to her knees.

Two silver arrows and a soul blade
perforated the reaper’s chest. Kara spun around, hurdled over the
dead girl’s body and landed near her fallen weapon. She grabbed her
silver-blue blade and turned to see David, Jenny and Peter running
toward her.

The reaper seemed mildly surprised at
the three weapons sticking out of it. It barely glanced at them.
Wrapping its rotten, emaciated fingers around the two arrows and
the blade, it pulled them out easily, as though they were nothing
more than a nuisance, and tossed them to the ground. Black liquid
oozed from the three small wounds and spilled out over its hideous
rotten body. It turned and faced its new foes.

David hurled a red orb through the
dark sky, and it crashed against the reaper’s body in an explosion
of red light. The creature disappeared in the explosion of light.
But when the light dissipated, the reaper stood
unscathed.

Incredulous, David swore loudly and
hurled a glowing white orb.

The orb hit its mark and exploded at
the reaper’s feet, showering it in brilliant white light. For a few
seconds the reaper disappeared into the giant ball of white light,
but when the light dispersed, the reaper stood unharmed yet
again.

“
Our weapons didn’t make a
mark on it! What in the souls is this thing?” cried David, his eyes
wide.

He pulled out a second soul blade from
his jacket and brandished it in his hand skillfully. They
waited.

Even though Kara couldn’t see the
reaper’s face, she knew it was smiling, mocking them. It stood
still and waited for another challenge. Its robe billowed in the
wind, as if it, too, were calling them to try again, teasing
them.

Even from a distance, Kara could feel
it radiating death. She could still hear the cries of souls, like
the howling of wind before a great storm. The reaper grasped its
scythe with both its rotten bone-thin hands and waited.

Jenny opened and closed her mouth at
the sight of the reaper’s scythe. She tried to speak, “Are those…?”
she began, but she choked on her own words.

She tried to speak again, “Oh my god,
are those…?”

“
They’re souls.” Kara’s
voice didn’t seem her own.

Her heart ached at the trapped,
anguished faces who pushed and slipped like blisters along the
gleaming red blade. It was a horrible sight, and she wanted nothing
more than to kill this creature before it captured any more
souls.

She could see that the souls in the
blade were still alive. She realized that the reaper didn’t kill
the souls it captured. It trapped them and kept them close, like a
serial killer who kept trophies from his victims. Reapers kept
their souls.

“
This is
so
wrong.” Peter’s face
paled when he saw the faces in the creature’s scythe. If he weren’t
a supernatural entity himself, Kara was sure he would have thrown
up. They all would have.

The reaper cocked its head to the
side, measuring them one by one, as if deciding whom to kill first.
Kara was sure that it took pleasure in their terror and fed on
their fears.

The reaper turned back toward her. Its
red eyes were barely visible under its heavy hood, but she could
feel it watching her.

“
What’s it waiting for?”
Jenny nocked another arrow in her bow and aimed it at the
reaper.

“
Maybe it’s full,”
suggested David.

As if in response to Jenny’s question,
the reaper struck the ground with its scythe. A piercing cry rose
from the demon as if all the souls trapped in its body and scythe
cried out together. Its robe billowed around it like coils of smoke
in the wind until it was completely hidden in a tornado of
black.

And then it vanished.

Kara squinted as her eyes adjusted to
the dust and debris and waited for the winds to die
down.

She blinked. The reaper was gone. Only
the cold, lingering feeling of death remained.

“
You think we scared it
off?” asked Peter as he wiped his glasses on his shirt.

“
I doubt that.” Kara moved
toward the spot where the reaper had been last. The only sign that
anything had actually been there was droplets of black blood.
Strangely, she
felt
that it hadn’t been afraid of them, but that it was
curious.

David looked disgusted. “Well, I’m
glad it’s gone. It smelled like death.”

“
You all right, Kara?” he
said as he noticed the dead girl near Kara’s feet.

“
I’ve been
better.”

Kara smeared the black liquid on the
ground with her shoe. It began to bubble and sizzle. Then it smoked
like burnt toast, and with a last pop it evaporated.

David moved carefully toward the spot
where the blood had been. “Never seen that before. Usually when
demons bleed, their bloods stays here. But this just—”

“
Evaporated,” said Peter
as he leaned over to search for any last remains of the creature’s
blood.

“
This is no mere demon.
These reapers…these creatures are something else entirely. It’s
like their essence can’t stay for very long in this world. Not even
a single drop can stay.”

He stood up. “Maybe they
can’t either. We might not know much about them, but at least now
we know that they’re like other Netherworld creatures. I mean, they
can’t stay in the mortal world for too long. My guess is that the
reaper left suddenly because it
had
to. Like it had already stayed too long and was
beginning to weaken.”

“
So it took off,” said
Jenny hopefully. “If that’s true, then we can use it against them.
We need to trick them into staying longer so that we can finish
them off once and for all.”

Kara watched the optimistic looks on
her friends’ faces. But deep down, she knew these creatures were
different and more complicated than any demons they’d faced before.
They were powerful, much more powerful. But she didn’t know how to
word it properly.

David stood next to Kara. “I saw what
it did. I saw what it was doing to you, but then it stopped. How
did you make it stop?”

Kara had been wondering the same
thing. She had felt the creature’s indecision, as though it had
sensed something within her that it didn’t want to kill. What? Why
did it spare her?

“
I don’t know,” said Kara
quietly after a few moments, and then she added under her breath,
“I have no idea, but I’m going to find out.”