He kept screaming. “I want to stay here!” He threw himself onto the floor. I realized what he was doing and grabbed him by the back of his shirt before he slipped through the tiles.
I hauled him to his feet and opened the passage with my scythe. The bright light had him completely mesmerized. “Only good things from here.”I think.I didn’t know what Heaven was like. Never would. “Time to let go of this life,” I told him. “In ya go.” I gave him a smile right before he snapped out of it.
“Wait! No!”
I gave him a push, then a kick. There he went. I watched as the passage closed, swallowing him whole. I groaned. “I need a fucking nap.”
Right when I was about to fade the hell out of this human hospital, my Reaper senses started tripping again. Someone else was dying here… What the bloody hell? This hospital wastiny, in the middle of nowhere. How many people could die in this small town?
I slipped through the door, stepping back out into the hallway that was quiet and empty. I walked to where the dying man was instead of fading,wonderingwhy I wasn’t fading to get to him instead of walking the hall. Wait, a second… as I got closer I felt the guy’s aura more. This wasn’t a dying man, more like a dying werewolf. A lot of vampires, werewolves, and otherworldly creatures lived in the human world, so it wasn’t weird for us to come across them dying while working, but this one wasn’t meant to die today. Some lives were cut short by unexpected tragedies, or rather hiccups in Heaven’s perfect plan of life and death for humans. I could tell what kind of death everyone was having. This was one of those hiccups, but most of the time when a demon died prematurely it had something to do with another demon taking him out.
Curious, I faded into the werewolf’s room. He was already dead; a nurse was unplugging him from some sort of machine. Nothing looked wrong with him on the outside. I watched as the foggy soul stretched out of his body. Humans were the only ones that actually came back as ghosts, everyone else looked like this floaty-cloud-blob thing like this werewolf here. Hissoul was angry too, screaming and roaring at me while I pinched a part of the fog between my fingers and opened a passage to the flames.
“Looks like you weren’t so friendly in life,” I told him before tossing him inside.
Still, it was weird I couldn’t sense how he died. I should be able to… I guess it didn’t matter. He probably deserved it.
I staggered forward, a dark tunnel clouding my vision. “Shit,” I hissed, grabbing my head and reaching out with my other hand to grab onto something. I let my scythe dematerialize as my vision came back into focus, but the drowsiness stayed. It wasn’t a normal tiredness either, it was the kind that swallowed me up. It was a dark abyss I could never escape— my curse. The sin and curse of sloth.
I couldn’t focus as the sleepiness took all my senses, all coherent thoughts, leaving nothing but the bone-deep feeling of slumber. I couldn’t even fade from the hospital. No humans could see me but the idea of being stuck hereasleep…
There it was, I felt it seeping further into me, digging deeper.
I started tipping forward.
In my head, I could hear my asshole siblings yelling what they always did when this happened,Reaper down! Reaper down! Reaper—
Two
Isabella
"That’s a good girl, Isabella.”
“Kill, kill, kill. Absorb, absorb, absorb."
I heardthatperson’s words as I rounded the corner of the hallway at Shelly Valley Hospital, the place I’d been working the last few months. This one mistake, this one occurrence filled my head with memories I wished to forget.
The werewolf’s eyes seared into my memory as he accidentally bumped into me when I was talking to a patient. I turned around and grabbed his arm to see if he was all right—then he was on the floor—dead.I hadn’t known he wasn’t human until he was already dead, or I would have never touched him.
I was a nurse, and I stood there while my coworkers—some of them friends—screamed at me to do something. They shoved me aside and hauled him onto a bed, trying to revive what I killed. I backed away and hurried out of the room with one of our doctors yelling at me. Only, Ihadto go back to that werewolf. I had to erase the evidence of my tainted magic, or else—the monster would find me.
“Breathe in the darkness, pour out the light.”
“I don’t need your good, I want your bad.”
“Hurt or be hurt.”
“Harvest it all for me—”
I sucked in a breath and ignored the voice inside my head that would forever haunt me. I turned on my heels, whispering an enchantment to hide me from everyone’s view as I made my way to where the werewolf was. A cold waft of darkness wrapped around me. My worry turned to terror. I’d been found because of this idiot werewolf. I didn’t want to kill anything, but I was angry that because of this careless werewolf bumping into me, he lost his life and I’d been found.
That wasn’t fair, Izzie,I told myself.
The werewolf hadn’t known he’d die, and I hadn’t known he was a werewolf when I turned around and grabbed—
“What the—”
I almost fell over a large someone crumpled up on the floor… At least I thought it was a someone. I spotted long legs peeking out of the black clothing covering up his entire body. I poked his body with my shoe. He didn’t budge.
