Reaper (10 page)

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Bard shrugged.

He looked like he’d aged twenty years. His
face was ashen. His hair stringier, with a number of extra greys
frosting his crown. And the lines in his face were etched deeper,
like someone had carved into his forehead and cheeks.

“Let’s go.”

“What? Now? It’s the middle of the
night.”

“Got somewhere to be, Princess?” Bard
snapped. “You don’t get to choose when things happen. They just do.
Ok? So get up. There’s a new lesson tonight.”

Oz opened his mouth to say something but shut
it just as quickly. The faster he dealt with whatever Bard had in
mind, the faster he could get back into bed and resume his
non-sleeping self-hatred.

He blindly grabbed a pair of jeans and a
long-sleeved shirt from the closet and dressed while Bard lit a
cigarette, puffed it to ashes, then lit another. As Oz finished
lacing his shoes, Bard turned and walked purposefully for the door.
Oz hurried behind and in the brief light of the lampposts outside,
he caught the gleam of something metal protruding from the back of
Bard’s pants.

Oz chose not to ask about it. He didn’t ask
where they were headed either because he didn’t care. He knew he
was going to watch another person die less than twelve hours after
saying his final goodbye to Mark, and it covered him in a blanket
of numbness. They walked in silence. They didn’t go far.

The club district just outside downtown, Ybor
City, wasn’t a city, but more of a mishmash of Cuban-American owned
businesses, restaurants, and places to get trashed. The name was a
tourist-gathering idea. The “city” totaled ten blocks. Aside from a
couple of new bars and restaurants that’d opened since Oz’s death,
notorious 7
^th
Avenue hadn’t changed. Drunk girls
stumbled out of brightly lit clubs, backed by a skull rattling bass
line. Oz had hated the area when he was alive, and he hated it
now.

Bard stalked with his eyes fixed forward,
even as a group of young women stood side by side and lifted their
tops to flash the bouncer yelling at them from across the street.
They were getting close.

They passed the clubs and turned the corner
onto Fifteenth Street. The music quieted and the crowds thinned. A
row of restaurants lined the street with only a few patrons left
inside. At the end of the block,
Leonardo’s
patio bar was
packed.

Oz felt a tug in his gut. Here.

A young woman, maybe in her mid-twenties, sat
at the apex of a chattering crowd. She was pretty, but not
beautiful—the type of girl Oz would want to tuck into bed with a
kiss on the forehead and a teddy bear. At any other time, she
probably would have been satisfied with a table in the corner, but
now she commanded attention. She glowed.

She was their girl.

Bard strode through the “Do Not Enter” gate
at the back of the patio and, just as Oz was going to point out
that they would have to stand against the wall of the restaurant, a
couple carried their drinks from their table to the smoking area
outside the entrance. Bard sat at the now empty table without a
word. Oz joined him.

After twenty minutes of silently watching the
woman, there was still no discernible catastrophe. No forthcoming
death that Oz could see. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was someone
else. Maybe Bard was dicking around with him again.

“How much longer?”

Bard didn’t respond.

* * *

Bard kicked Oz awake; he’d passed out with
his head against the wall. The party wrapped up and people said
their goodbyes. The woman lagged behind to talk to an older
woman—an aunt, maybe—before hugging her and, swaying slightly,
making her way to the street corner. Bard stood. His movements were
more exact tonight. Slower. He even took the time to push his chair
in before going after the woman. There was something different
about this job. Bard was too calm.

It
was
her, though. Oz felt it with
every cell of his body. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that the
timing was off. He felt anxious, like he was late for something
important, but couldn’t remember what the something was.

A yellow cab pulled up to the curb. The woman
opened the door and climbed in. Before she closed the door, Bard
eased in beside her. Oz followed. The driver pulled onto the
road.

“Twelve twenty-five Osbourne Avenue, please,”
the woman said, slurring the ‘s’ in ‘Osbourne.’

The door handle dug into Oz’s side. One wrong
move and he’d fall out into traffic. “What’s going on?” he
asked.

“Shut up.”

The woman looked directly at Oz. “I’m sorry.
I thought this cab was empty,” she said before closing her eyes and
leaning her head against the back of the seat.

“She’s trashed,” Oz said.

Bard rolled his eyes. “Next time I’m bringing
something to stuff in that spew-hole you call a mouth.”

The woman’s eyes stayed closed until the
cabby announced their arrival. She paid him, and all three spilled
from the door onto her front lawn.

The woman wrestled with her bag to retrieve
her keys, swaying.

Bard pulled the knife. It was heavy and
curved, like the kind of knife used to gut large animals.

Oz froze. “What are you doing?”

The woman turned. Her gaze fell on the knife
and sobriety washed over her like the wave that follows a broken
dam.

She whimpered and tried to force her key into
the lock. Bard rushed after her. The lock disengaged and she
tumbled into the apartment with Bard on top of her.

Her scream slapped Oz out of his shock. He
bolted into the apartment. It was pitch black inside, but the glow
from the streetlight cast enough light for Oz to see Bard struggle
to pin the woman to the ground.

The two tumbled over and on top of each
other. Bard had the disadvantage of attempting to hold onto the
knife with one hand, while the woman fought back. Bard caught both
of her hands in his grip but she leaned up and dug her teeth into
the soft part of his forearm. She didn’t let go until he punched
her in the temple with the hilt of his knife.

A trickle of blood dripped from her forehead.
She lay motionless.

Bard straddled her hips, taking deep gulps of
air. He bled from the gnarled gash in his arm, but he ignored it.
He raised the knife above his head, using both hands to grip it.
The flash of a passing car’s headlights glinted in the blade. Just
before he brought it down, Oz lunged, catching Bard under his
armpits and drove him into the carpet. The knife skipped across the
floor into the kitchen where it twirled beneath a small table.

“The fuck are you doing?” Oz sat on Bard’s
back and drove his face into the carpet. “You’ve lost it,
Bard.”

Bard spasmed hard, attempting to thrust Oz
from his back. Oz tipped backward just enough for Bard to gain
leverage. His hand slipped from Bard’s head, which Bard immediately
rammed upward and into his jaw.

Oz’s teeth crunched and his head rang.

“You will not fuck this up,” Bard hissed and
threw himself on Oz. “It has to happen.”

Bard swung without discrimination. Oz held
his hands over his face. His stomach and chest took the brunt of
Bard’s punches. One final jab to Oz’s solar plexus threw him
forward. He was paralyzed on all fours, dry-heaving.

The girl groaned.

Oz tried to crawl but pain ripped down his
body.

Bard already had the knife back in his hand.
He delivered a final kick to Oz’s gut, and then he squatted over
the girl’s now gently squirming body. He plunged the knife into her
chest.

The girl shuddered once. Gurgled. Blood ran
between her breasts, down her stomach and pooled around her.

Oz vomited then fell to his side, unable to
tear his eyes from the blood seeping toward him.

Bard tucked the knife into his pants and
wiped his nose with the back of his hand, smearing red across his
cheek.

“Find a match,” he said.

“Fuck you.”

“Fine.”

Bard scoured the kitchen, ripping drawers
from their tracks and throwing open cabinets before he returned
with a palm-full of matches. He struck one against the coffee table
and held it next to her hair until it caught.

“Come out, come out, you stubborn bastard,”
he whispered.

In seconds, her hair was engulfed and
scalding down her face until her flesh was no longer
recognizable.

Bard threw a coaster from the coffee table at
Oz.

“Let’s go, unless you want to get burned up
with her.”

Oz half crawled, half stumbled, from the
apartment to the sidewalk, and coached himself to breathe. He
collapsed onto the curb. Bard lit a cigarette and stared into the
growing fire.

“It was a miraculous recovery,” he said, acid
in his voice, “The doctors were confounded. She should’ve
died.”

The way he said ‘should’ve,’ with contempt,
twisted Oz’s insides.

He was ten feet from the apartment, but the
heat of the fire had him sweating. Black smoke billowed from the
doorway and as it rose into the air, it morphed into something he
could almost recognize. Something with wings.

The Ba appeared in the doorway flanked by
flames. She didn’t glow like the others Oz had seen up until this
point. She was the opposite. A fog. The places where her eyes
should have been were cavernous nothings. Hazy extremities came
together to form a vessel.

Bard tossed his cigarette through her and
into the fire.

“Not today,” he said.

Her hands were still cupped when the shadows
inked from the asphalt and beneath the porch. They moved impossibly
fast. The flames hesitated for an instant and an overpowering
silence hovered. It was like someone had covered Oz’s ears. Her
final scream shattered the silence and the shadows slithered inside
her mouth where they devoured her from the inside out.

The echo of her scream hung in the air until
the roof of the apartment caved in.

Chapter
Ten

“Enough.”

Oz crouched on the ground, furiously rubbing
his face, trying to clear the image of that girl, and her Ba, out
of his mind. It was useless. His eyes burned once he finally
allowed them to open, and the first thing to enter the frame was
Bard’s profile—smoking and wiping the blood from his knife onto the
back of his pants. It left thick, red streaks along the fabric.

When the knife was tucked back into his
pants, Oz struggled to his feet and ran toward him. His knuckles
met Bard’s jaw with a sickening crunch. He reeled back, his hand on
fire, waiting for the return blow. It never came.

“You done?” Bard asked and shoved Oz off
before skulking away from the still-burning apartment building.

Sirens screamed in the distance. The sound
was becoming too familiar to Oz. Too frequent.

“Yeah. I’m done,” he said.

“Good. Now let’s get moving.”

“No.”

Bard stopped, but didn’t turn. He dropped and
stomped on the cigarette he’d been holding between his teeth.
“Okay, Princess. I get it. You’re pissed and scared. But that woman
had
to die. She should’ve died a while ago but it didn’t
happen. Some kink in the system. You kink the system, the balance
is thrown off and the rules don’t apply anymore. Bad things happen.
People die.”

“Like her?”

Bard turned to face him. “Yeah. Now let’s
go.”

“No.”

“What d’you mean, ‘no?’”

“I mean I’m done. I’ve had enough of this...
this...” Something between a growl and a scream erupted from Oz’s
throat. “I will not do this. All this death. I want to go back to
The Department. Now.”

Bard sighed. “Doesn’t work that way,
Princess.”

“The hell it doesn’t. How do I get back?”

“It won’t matter if you—”

“Tell me!” Oz trembled. He saw white and
yellow and orange and red. He wanted to kill Bard before he could
kill someone else.

Bard’s shoulders dropped. His voiced
hardened. “How’d you get there the first time?”

The ambulance and fire engine were in sight.
Oz knew what he had to do, but did he have the balls to do it? He
took one look back at the apartment building, little more than a
skeleton, now, and imagined the body inside. He fought the urge to
be sick again.

He ran to meet the ambulance as it turned the
corner. The driver eyed his destination and tapped the accelerator.
Oz closed his eyes, braced himself, and took one step off the
curb.

* * * *

Oz couldn’t see. He blinked a few times to
force his eyes to adjust to the dark, but there was no light. Maybe
Bard had tricked him. Oz felt a bubble of panic in his stomach. A
flash of light cut into the darkness.

“Sorry,” a voice said, “I was just looking
for another ribbon.”

The owner of the voice reached a long,
slender arm past Oz’s ear and snatched a small box from the
shelf.

“Thanks,” he said, and shut the door.

I’m in a closet.

After some fumbling, Oz fingered the doorknob
and opened the door. Outside, were the familiar clusters of grey
cubicles of The Department.

Up until this moment, Oz had never fully
appreciated the order of The Department. The identical cubicles,
the orchestral tapping of typewriter keys punctuated by the
occasional chair squeak, but especially the complete absence of the
physical evidence of death. It was clean. Structured.

He would never leave again.

Chapter
Eleven

Oz’s body was heavy. Bard gently swung Oz’s
arm around his neck and lifted him from the asphalt, cradling him
awkwardly. Bard felt the shadows lurking all around him. Oz was a
slacker and a weakling, but Bard wasn’t going to give the wolves
the pleasure of devouring another reaper. He hated them more than
his poofy recruit.