21. Clay
21
Clay
The ogre sobs on his knees in front of me.
“Please, please, you have to do something. You can’t reap me. I have kids. My family needs me. My sentence is almost over.” He attempts to wrap his arms around me, but they go through me.
You can only touch yourself in the void.
I ruffle my hand through my hair. “I’m sorry, Wytle, I really am. But I cannot heal you. I come when a soul calls my spirit. It is your time. If you don’t let me reap you, you will be trapped in the void until, eventually, your body wastes away, and then you will be lost. No afterlife. No eternity.”
“But this isn’t right. I didn’t do anything.” Fat tears slide down his green face.
“I know,” I whisper. “That is the case with most souls I reap from the prison.”
Other Reapers won’t come anywhere near here. The risk of getting caught is too high. But I can’t bear to let these spirits suffer, their souls degrading into nothing.
Especially not when I know most of them are not actually criminals but instead victims of a corrupt justice system.
Wytle, the ogre still sobbing for the family he’ll leave behind, was stabbed in the showers this morning. He’s in the medical ward, hooked up to a few machines. There’s not a lot of physical intervention happening, though. It seems more like comfort measures.
An IV sticks out of his arm, and there are electrodes on his temples, chest, and, strangely, the side of his neck. I think a few more are on his back, but I can’t see them because of his positioning.
Most of the souls I reap from the prison have similar setups. I’ve seen a couple of times where they’re hooked up to some sort of dialysis machine in an attempt to save them, but it never works.
I am still called.
“Are you ready, Wytle?” I ask quietly.
“I’ll never be ready,” he whispers. “Will I see my family again?”
“I can tell you where your soul will go once I finish my job. I won’t know where your family will end up, but if they’re anything like you, there is a high likelihood you’ll all end up in the same place.” I shuffle awkwardly from one foot to the other.
This is the hardest part of my job.
I cannot guarantee that anyone will see their loved ones again. But typically, families have similar morals and end up in the same place, save for a few outliers. I hope that is the case for Wytle here.
“My Reaper form can be frightening, Wytle, so you may want to close your eyes for this next part. You won’t feel a thing.”
The children always look on as I work.
The adults aren’t that brave.
As soon as his eyes are squeezed shut, shadows burst from my chest, my fingers and nails begin to elongate, and my form grows and twists into the monster I know I am.
I shift out of the veil and work quickly to separate the male’s soul from his mortal flesh. The gold strands are obscenely bright, hinting at a life well lived, and the memories that rush through me as the thread begins to burn into my flesh confirm it.
Wytle Krundle was a good male.
He loved his wife, his children, and his brother fiercely.
He was arrested for working under the table at an Authentic-only warehouse. Of course, the owner of the warehouse was only slapped with a small fine.
Ten years.
He was sentenced to ten years, and he’s been here nine.
When the final strand is untangled, I throw myself back into the void and watch as his body droops and dies. The machine the electrodes are attached to begins to scream.
“You’ve lived a good life, Wytle,” I tell him as I pull my shadows back within me, and my form shifts back to the one I prefer. “Head on now to the afterlife.”
As soon as he’s gone, my eyes drift back to the scene surrounding his body. A male and a female rush into the room.
“Shit, we were too late,” the male says. His blue scrubs are covered in spots of blood. “The readings are blank.”
The female steps further into the room’s light, and my breath catches my throat.
I know her.
At one point, she was my best friend. Valeria. She’s a Keres.
Keres, like Reapers, can rip souls from their bodies. They’re exclusively female and do not have the finesse that a Reaper does. They typically only touch black souls or ones who died violently, and they have been known to consume them.
What is she doing here? Is she a simplynatural now?
“A Reaper got to him,” she says, sniffing over the body. “Again.”
“How do we keep missing this Reaper?” the male asks, crossing his arms. “I’m getting tired of explaining this away.”
“This one moves silently.” She waves her hands over the body, and I watch a haze rise from it. The red threads of his mortal flesh stand on end, exactly where I left them after separating them from his soul. “Look at the finesse. The threads have been immaculately untangled. He didn’t cut any.”
“Why does that matter?” The male, who is clearly Authentic, leans over the body, trying to touch the threads. Of course, his hands go right through them.
Only death spirits can handle the threads.
“If he were a typical Reaper, he’d cut the threads. It sends the body into distress, and we’d have heard the monitors and caught him. But because he was gentle, the body barely felt its soul leave, and the prisoner passed peacefully.” Valeria speaks in the slow cadence typical of simplynaturals, but her eyes aren’t as cloudy as I’ve seen on most of them in public. She’s more like one of our teachers.
“Any idea how we can stop him? We cannot keep losing souls like this.”
Valeria raises an eyebrow at him. “We’d have to never leave a body alone to stop him from reaping it. The call of a soul ready to move on is impossible to ignore. And I cannot travel into the void to trap him.”
She’s right about that. Since Keres cannot handle pure or children’s souls, they are not permitted to travel to the void. Their brute force and consumption of souls sends them straight into whatever version of hell exists for their spirit.
“Well, come on, then. We’ll get someone to bring the body to the Nidhogg while we tell the Warden what happened.”
As the two leave the room, a chill rolls down my spine. Nidhogg are brutal, vile spirits. They’re also nearly extinct.
I don’t wait around to watch the show.
When I return to the Academy and step out of the void and into my room, I flop back on my bed in exhaustion. My bones ache, and my body feels wrung out. While Wytle’s soul was not as painful as others, it still exhausts me when I reap.
And what happened back there? Why is Valeria working with them and checking for souls? What does it matter to the prison?
This is the first time I’ve paid attention to what the spirit looks like before death and stuck around to see what happens after they move on. While I don’t know what is really going on at the prison, I do know it may no longer be safe to reap there.
I don’t want to leave those souls there on their own, but I can’t risk getting caught.
Not now that I’ve got something to live for.
The memory of Stella’s kiss still lingers on my mouth. It felt so right to be in her arms, to have her body against mine.
I have felt a tug towards her since the moment I saw her, but when we kissed, it was like parts of us were woven together. The tether I feel pulling me towards her at all times has become more insistent, sometimes feeling like it will burst out of my chest if I do not heed its request.
But that’s a lot to say to someone I’ve only kissed once. I cannot imagine that’d go over well. “Hey, Stella, just so you know, I think our souls are tied to one another, so I’m never going to leave your side because if I do, I think my soul may rip from my flesh and leave my body behind.”
Yeah, she’d run screaming.
Exhaustion from the day catches up, and I curl up, imagining what it’d be like to have Stella beside me. Picturing her in my bed has the tether slacking as if in relief.