The Reaping of Norah Bentley (17 page)

“I’m not that worried about it. It’s not like it’s going to kill me.”

He glanced up at me, his eyes smiling back at the dry attempt at humor, but he was trying to force his mouth into a disapproving frown. “No; it won’t,” he said. “But it can still hurt you.”

“That’s true.” I couldn’t stop a wince when he brought the cold, damp sleeve down on the center of the cut. “Very true,” I added through clenched teeth.

Eli nodded and stepped back to the fountain to rinse out his shirt. “What did Sam want with you?” he asked.

It was an obvious question; one I should have expected him to ask but for some reason hadn’t given any thought to how I was going to answer. Should I tell him everything Sam had said? Tell him I knew the truth about would happen to him? To us? About what
had
to happen, about the laws of the universe…

I felt sick all of a sudden, my stomach all twisted and trying to shove its way up into my throat. I leaned the side of my head against the cold, smooth wood of the bench and closed my eyes, trying to keep the park from spinning around me.

“Norah? What’s wrong?”

I opened one eye and looked over at his blurred figure. He’d stopped messing with the shirt, draped it over the edge of the fountain and turned to look at me. “What did he say to you?” Without his splashing in the water, everything seemed unnaturally quiet. Even the wind seemed to have calmed down all of a sudden.

“…He told me the truth,” I said.

“The truth about what?”

“About everything,” I said. “About you, about what’s going to happen to you if…if you don’t…You know.” I stared at my feet as I spoke.

He left the fountain, came and sat down beside me, quiet at first, stiffly perched on the edge of the bench. But then he sighed, a motion that relaxed his whole body and slumped it back against the weathered wood.

“He gave you the system speech, didn’t he?” he asked.

“The what?”

“…Life is a system, people live and die every day, all of that?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s right, of course.” He stared forward, his brow creased in thought, his eyes narrowed like any answer he was searching for might be tangled in the moss hanging from the trees. Like he could see it, if only he stared hard enough. “But I don’t know,” he said after a minute. “Sometimes it doesn’t seem right. Like the system doesn’t make any sense.”

I stared toward the trees, too.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“I don’t understand it anymore now than I did when I was human,” he said. “But now I have a hand in all of it. I’m a part of that system.”

“Sam said there was a reason behind it though,” I said, more to convince myself than him. “Behind what you do, I mean.”

“But they never tell you exactly what that reason is. They just say it’s not your job to know.”

“…Which doesn’t sound especially comforting.”

“It’s not.”

I wanted to say something that
was
comforting, both for his sake and for mine—because every word he was saying might as well have been mine, might as well have been torn straight from my heart. But I’m not sure the words I needed to say existed in any language known to man.

“What is Sam, exactly?” I asked. If I couldn’t understand
why
the system worked, I at least wanted to understand how it did, who was working it. “He’s not a grim reaper; he told me that.”

Eli shook his head. “No, he’s not. Sam is one of the archangels of death. He was never a human like me—he’s always been in-between, has been doing what he’s doing now since he existed, as far as I know,” he said. And then, almost as an afterthought, “Maybe that’s why he doesn’t get it.”

“And you work for him?”

“Something like that. Remember how I told you there were thousands of reapers, all designated to different regions of the earth?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, Sam was put in charge of this region. He oversees the assigning of reapers, makes sure they carry out their job.”

“And if they don’t?”

He smiled weakly. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we? I don’t think it’s ever happened before. Not until now.”

“What about Purgatory?” The word settled in a lump in the back of my throat, and I had to swallow several times before I could explain: “He said something about that.”

Eli took a long time answering.

“Sam likes throwing that word around,” he finally said. “I think he’s bluffing.”

I shook my head, incredulous. “And if he’s not?”

“I think if he was going to banish me anywhere, he would have done it by now,” he said. But he wasn’t looking at me as he spoke, and his voice was quiet, like someone telling a lie they were afraid might be overheard.

“How can you be so calm about all this? What if something terrible happens to you?”

“I stopped caring about what happens to me a long time ago,” he said. “There are more important things, now.”

My face burned with frustration. “Well
I
care about what happens to you,” I said.

He didn’t say anything to that; he just sat there, picking at the corner of my coat, absently running his fingers through the grooves of the black corduroy.

“So that’s it, then?” I said softly. “We’re just going to see what happens, or what? What are we going to do now?”

He looked up at me then, and I wasn’t prepared for the certainty in his eyes, the way he was suddenly looking at me like I was the only thing he’d ever been sure of. And he couldn’t look anywhere else, I guess; couldn’t stand to look at the uncertain world we’d found ourselves in. So he just looked at me instead, stared into my eyes for the longest time with that effortless smile on his lips, and then he finally said,

“We’re going to sit here on this park bench for a little while longer, I think. Maybe all night, if we can get away with it. And when the morning comes, we’ll face it.”

I stared back, and suddenly I felt his strange certainty passing to me, floating in the breaths between us. I sipped it cautiously at first; but soon I was inhaling it, each breath I took more desperate, more greedy than the last. And he just kept giving it, never looking away from me, and then taking my hands in his and holding them still. His arms weren’t moving, but somehow he was still pulling me toward him, and I didn’t fight it. Because I realized then how perfectly my head would fit in the crook of his neck, how the closer I got, the safer I seemed to feel. So I relaxed against his chest, slowly steadied my breathing in time with his.

Everything seemed so simple right then. his words seemed like the only answer I’d ever needed, the only one I’d ever need. Right then I wasn’t scared, and for once I didn’t feel like running away. It was crazy. Because if running away from something ever made sense, this should have been the moment— lying there in the arms of the only person on earth who could kill me. But in that moment, I would have given anything in the world to stay right there.

“You’re making this very difficult for me,” I said with a quiet sigh. I lifted the hand he’d draped over my waist and held it in both of mine, turning it over, studying the lines running across his palm and dragging the tip of my finger over them. His body shivered underneath me at the touch, and he slid his fingers through mine and stopped their wandering, took a deep breath.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You’re making it hard to listen to the other thing Sam said.”

“Which was?”

“He told me to stay away from you.”

“…Stay away from me?” He didn’t look very surprised; a little amused maybe. He rested his face in my hair and breathed in deep. When he exhaled, his warm breath blew a few strands of my hair out of the way, so that his lips were against my neck, vibrating the skin when he spoke again: “You know you can leave, if you want to,” he said.

“No, I can’t,” I managed in a slip of breath. “Especially not while you’ve got your lips against my neck like that.”

My body rose and fell with his deep laugh.

“Sorry,” he said. His lips moved against my neck one last time, closed together in a timid kiss and then quickly pulled away.

“I didn’t say you couldn’t keep them there,” I said.

He laughed again, quieter this time, but didn’t move back. When he spoke again, his voice was a little more serious, a little less confident.

“You really can leave,” he said. “If you want to.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m serious.” He pulled his fingers out from between mine, but didn’t seem able to draw his hand completely away. It rested heavy against my outstretched palm. “I can’t promise I won’t follow you,” he said. “But I’ll at least try to give you a head start.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere, actually.”

“It might be easier if you did.”

“I don’t think anything will make this easier.”

“Well safer, then.” His voice broke a little toward the end, and he lifted his hand and brushed a sweep of my hair behind my ear, exposing the scratch along my cheek. The cold night wind burned against it. I tried not to shudder.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m not afraid.”

It was a lie, yeah. But it was a lie I think we both needed to hear just then. So the words came out easily; maybe the most convincing lie I’d ever told. He didn’t call me out on it, at least.

“Besides,” I went on, “you said we were sitting on this bench until morning. We’ve still got at least a few hours—you better not be backing out on me. Because I really don’t want to go home right now.”

He was perfectly still for a moment, and then his arms tightened around me and he pulled me close again. I leaned my head against his shoulder, and he brought his lips to my temple and let them rest there.

“At least until morning, then,” he whispered.

#

Morning came way too soon, in a trumpet blast of sunlight through the trees. I felt the warm rays beating against my eyelids, pleasant at first but then with a burning vengeance, until I was forced to open them to the blinding light.

As soon as I looked up at Eli, though, any reluctance to wake up vanished. His face was a kaleidoscope of sunlight and shadows, his eyes two shining oceans of blue amongst it all, squinting just a little as he looked down at me. I’d never been a morning person, but it’s amazing how much easier it was to wake up when the person I most wanted to see was already right there beside me. I could get used to this. I tilted my head back against his chest and he kissed the top of my head.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Morning.”

“You seemed like you slept well.”

“How do you….” I looked up at him again, questioning. “You didn’t sleep, did you?”

He shook his head.

I thought for a moment, and then ventured, “Sleeping is more of a human thing, huh?”

“Yes.”

I sat up then, twisted myself out of his embrace and turned back to face him.

“I keep doing that,” I said.

“Keep doing what?”

“Forgetting you’re not human.”

He smiled a little. “I wasn’t so much different looking, when I really was human. And I still feel like I am too, sometimes.” His smile turned shy. “Mostly when I’m with you,” he added quietly.

“But you don’t get tired?” I asked. Because he
looked
tired; he’d held up his hand to block the sun, and without its borrowed light his eyes didn’t shine like they normally did, and his face seemed to be pulling every shadow of every nearby tree and bush and lamppost onto it. He was reclining so far back into the corner of the bench that it was hard to tell where he ended and it began.

“Not the same way a human gets tired,” he said.

“You look tired, though.”

“But I don’t need sleep.”

“What do you need then? What is tired like for a grim reaper?”

He laughed, but it was more movement than sound, his shoulders just barely lifting up out of the bench for a second and then dropping back on their own.

“You’re very inquisitive this morning,” he said.

“Yesterday you said you didn’t want to keep things from me,” I said. “So I figured I could get away with it.”

“I did say that,” he said. “And meant it, too. I’m just not sure how to explain this to you.” His eyes grew distant for a second, and then he said, “I guess it’s sort of like being spread too thin, when you’re a human. Like you’re being pulled in five different directions, and you can only go one, but you can’t stop thinking about the others. And it exhausts you. Makes it hard to think clearly, because the whole time you’re trying to focus on that one thing, you’re wondering what’s become of the things you’re trying to forget. Does that make any sense?”

I didn’t answer right away, because I was busy thinking about everything that had been pulling me lately. The current that had pulled me out to sea. Helen, always pulling me where she thought I should go. Luke, who’d pulled me across that chasm that had split between us and then left me dangling over the edge of it. It
was
all ridiculously exhausting.

And then there was Eli too, who had pulled me, soft and sure, into his arms last night.