Page 21 of Death and Divination
“Come back later and I’ll show you how the dialysis machine works. I’m here until tomorrow noon.”
“Trust me, you don’t want him to come back here,” I told her as I grabbed Nash’s arm and pulled him away. I kept a tight grip on him as we waited for the elevator, worried he would run back to the blonde if I let him go.
I should have let him stay with the nurse. Maybe he would have forgotten about me and our bargain if he went back to her. Itreallywasn’t jealousy over the nurse that kept my hand on his arm; it was that I didn’t want to endanger any of the patients here by having a reaper present. Yeah, that was it.
“Please tell me you didn’t kill anyone while I was in with Sylvie.” We boarded the elevator and I pushed the ground floor button with one hand, still holding onto him with the other.
“I don’tkillpeople. I ease their souls from their body so they can journey to their afterlife.”
“Tomato, tomahto. That sounds like killing to me.”
“There’s a difference,” he insisted.
“Howis there a difference?” We got out of the elevator I was still holding his arm as we walked across the lobby. He waited to respond until we were in the parking lot, and I wasn’t sure if that was because he didn’t want anyone to hear or because he needed to seriously think about the question.
“I sever the cord. I release the soul which has already separated. I facilitate, but I don’t initiate.”
I spun around to face him, realizing that I was just as close to him as the blonde had been.
“What happens when you don’t cut the cord? Is that when people miraculously live? You refusing to do your job means someone doesn’t die, right?”
He looked down at me with that cool, confident expression he’d always had over the two years I’d been seeing him, but behind it all was confusion, as if he were out of his element and in completely new territory.
“I’ll admit there have been times when I’ve delayed, and that delay has allowed human intervention to work its magic.”
“Is that what happened with Sylvie?”
“No.” He looked down at my hand on his arm, then back up at me. “She was resurrected. Her soul had fully separated, and I refused to cut the final strand. I didn’t reap her soul. I returned it to her mortal form. I gave her new life. And what I did is forbidden.”
Forbidden? “But as long as you take another life, it’s all good, right? You said a life for a life, so Sylvie gets resurrected, and it’s all good as long as someone else dies?”
“The scales must balance,” he told me, sounding more like a reaper and less like a mortal in that moment.
It scared me. Sometimes he seemed human, and sometimes like this, he seemed otherworldly. And when he was a reaper, he was more terrifying than the demons, more frightening than a banshee’s howl.
I cleared my throat, wanting to forget about my looming death and discuss something else instead. “Tell me about your reaperness, or job, or whatever it is. Do you guys have pagers? How do you know where to go and who to go to? Do you clock in and get your assignments each day, or what?”
His eyes lightened just a shade. “It just happens. We go where we’re needed then we wait for the right moment and release the soul from its body. Normally, we don’t determine where we go and when, or who we come for. We get the order and we go.”
“Normally?”
He reached out and touched my cheek. “Two years ago, I came to reap a soul and saw you. Something changed and ever since then, I’ve been the only reaper to come here. It’s as if I’m bound to this area…bound to you.”
“Me?” I squeaked, torn between alarm that one of death’s minions had attached himself to me and flattery that he’d chosen me out of seven billion humans to stalk. It was so romantic. We were brought together by a near-death experience two years ago, bound tight by the opposing nature of our job duties, only to be separated by my death before we even had a chance to share a candlelit dinner and a romantic moonlight stroll.
Okay, maybe that was tragedy instead of romance.
“You.” His thumb stroked my cheek. “You’ve made a choice, a decision, and there’s no turning back now.”
My decision. My choice. Death down either path. I wondered when the rest of my vision would come into play—the blood on the oleanders, the smell of decay at the edge of a woods…golf balls. I guess it all meant I was going to die in a park somewhere, or on a golf course, taken out by a stray ball. Figures that the only time I unraveled the meaning of a death prediction, it was my own.
“No, there’s no turning back,” I whispered, trying to steel myself for what was to come.
His hand slid along my jaw, fingers brushing my lips. “We reapers are not…we’re not human. We’re not angels, nor are we demons. We exist to perform a specific function and that’s all we do.”
This…this was weird, because I was getting super turned on all while wondering if I was going to die in this parking lot right now. Was there an oleander bush nearby? Someone golfing?
His eyes searched mine. “Until I first saw you, my life was devoid of emotion, of anything but my purpose. But the moment I was in your presence, I knew happiness and pain, life and death.”
