Chapter 2 Grim
I should not have done that.
I should not. Have. Done. That.
Scythe clutched in one hand, glowing hourglass holding the day’s collected souls in the other, I stalked down the long hall leading to the Basins, the repository where, every twenty-four hours, I delivered my cache of spirits.
My boots made no sound against the dark marble floors. The quiet that had never bothered me before swelled like a scream, aggravating my thoughts, making my normally calm mind snap and snarl at itself.
As I drew nearer to the open archway leading into the main chamber, the tall walls seemed to cinch tighter. And why did the vaulted ceiling have to resemble the roof of some unending serpent’s mouth?
On either side of me, green Soul Flames guttered in their sconces, their quiet wafting like whispers.
Made me nervous. Paranoid. Like their hissing pertained to me.
What I’d done. Hadn’t done…
The librarian, my final mark of the night, would have gone so much easier if she hadn’t been able to see me. No one ever saw me these days. No one but the kids, and they weren’t my sector anyway. Not anymore.
But the librarian worked with children—something I hadn’t known. Not that I cared.
But that must have been why she’d been able to see me. The influence of her young patrons must help to keep her mind more susceptible to seeing the truth—the reality that everyone else in the world had convinced themselves didn’t exist.
“Grim?” called a familiar voice from within the main chamber, his German-accented words echoing out to me. “That you?”
“Who else would it be, Johann?” I droned with my low and caustic reaper’s voice as I entered the enormous circular chamber.
I’d made this exact entrance countless times over the years—the decades.
The centuries. It wasn’t so much that I’d lost count.
Since this wasn’t a gig I was planning on retiring from—ever—I’d just never bothered keeping track of the time in the first place.
Why bother when, for me, this was it?
“Well, let’s see,” mused Johann even as he kept scribbling away in the pages of his enormous book, feather quill scratching against parchment.
“You could have been Flora or Cedric. Could have been one of The Few, too, for all I knew. God forbid you could have been my old friend I wish never to meet again…”
A wizened, white-haired man who had also been here for centuries, Johann sat in his usual spot behind the scribe’s desk that occupied the center of the circular ballroom-sized chamber. A waterfall of snowy hair flowed down his back, while a mystic’s long beard draped his front.
“Demons can’t come to the Netherworld, can they?” asked Pluto, Johann’s annoying-ass raven, in his smooth and lilting Estuary English accent—the question rhetorical. “That’s why we’re here.”
I glowered at the onyx beast currently perched on his ornate bird stand near Johann’s desk, his vapid, brainless head ticking this way and that like he was trying to rattle the two thoughts he had into something not clueless.
Good fucking luck.
“True,” grunted Johann as he continued to scribble, “the fiend can’t enter the Netherworld portals, but that hasn’t stopped him from trying, now, has it?
And if there’s one thing I never say… it’s never.
Aside from that, when it comes to our corner of the universe, does one ever really know who or what to expect? ”
He had a point. And maybe I’d forgotten how, in so many ways, paranoia came with this… department.
“He’s talking about Mephistopheles,” said Pluto, speaking to me.
Like I didn’t know. Like I hadn’t been here long enough to get the picture better than him. Like I hadn’t punched the demon in question square in his fanged face more than once.
“I told you not to say that name!” bellowed Johann, his voice resounding through the chamber.
Pluto puffed on his perch, spiked feathers frilling out. “Shall I call him Phil instead?”
“Haven’t you ever heard the saying ‘Speak of the devil and the devil shall appear’?” groused Johann. “I can tell you firsthand and perhaps better than anyone… it’s true.”
“But demons can’t come to the Netherworld, can they?” asked Pluto.
Again.
At last Johann looked up from his writing to glower at the bird.
“Grim’s home,” the bird offered.
“He’d be just as useful to you stuffed, you know,” I droned to Johann.
“If only that were true,” he muttered. “We both know I need all the pairs of eyes I can get.”
Johann, once a doctor of alchemy, astrology, magic, and other weird shit, had a famed history with the diabolical. And the very literal demons of his past had led him here.
Tonight, along with robes of red, the doctor wore the fez Flora had brought him from Morocco.
“Quiet night, I hope?” he hedged.
“I had no complaints,” I grumbled, which I supposed was true enough.
Five large and decorative stone vats encircled his station, the swirling, misty, and glowing “waters” of each a different hue.
The Basins served as receptacles to which Flora and I delivered souls.
None of us knew where or what any of them led to. But then, it wasn’t our job to know.
After leaving my scythe to stand on its own in wait for my return, I marched toward the stone Basin with the white iridescent waters.
The hue of summertime clouds, the fluffy, pillowy kind that produced uncanny shapes, the hazy liquid within rotated at a languid pace.
Hovering over the White Basin, I unscrewed the silver raven-shaped lid of the hourglass and tipped the topmost contents into the liquid.
The mixture of sparkling souls, each a different pastel hue—powder blue, pale pink, seafoam green—flowed out, blending easily with the cloudy essence.
Next, I approached the Blue Basin, which radiated a strange coldness.
Within this Basin, the liquid stood utterly still, rippling only when I added what was due—three deep sapphire-blue souls.
Again, I spared a glance to Johann, who, paying me no mind, continued scribbling along—checking off the names the Basins whispered to him in tones only he could hear.
So far, so good. Meaning he seemed none the wiser that I didn’t have one of the night’s souls with me—the librarian.
Resisting the urge to cross bony fingers, I moved on to the Green Basin, which always maintained a steady swirl, like a slow-moving hurricane. In went the Basin’s matching deep emerald souls, a smaller stream that the vortex sucked up and swallowed.
From there, I moved on to the Red Basin, the murky, blood-hued contents of which flickered with silent bursts of lightning. The deep ruby souls I tipped into this vat never wanted to go in. They went anyway, yanked by a magnetic pull. Brighter bursts of lightning accompanied the influx.
Finally, I arrived at the Black Basin, my least favorite. Not that I had a preference. More like I simply held an aversion to this one. But only because it seemed to hold an affinity for me.
I didn’t always have souls for this Basin. But tonight, I had one.
The souls for the Black Basin always sank to the bottom of the hourglass, heavy with burdens and, I suspected, deeds that weighed them down and darkened their essence to the hue of ink.
After rolling back my sleeve, revealing nearly the whole of one bony arm, I extended the canister over the Black Basin.
The vat presented as a smooth onyx mirror, and like any reflective surface, it showed my alternate form—a muscle-corded flesh-and-blood arm riddled with black tattoos.
That form, I never took it anymore. Not unless I absolutely had to. A rare event since I’d become so efficient at what I did. At who—what—I was.
Again, I tipped the hourglass, slowly this time. Out rolled the lone onyx soul, which pierced the center of the black liquid like a marble.
Up splashed the murk, which, like whips of tar, wrapped and lashed my bones.
They tugged at me as if wanting to haul me in.
With a muttered curse, I yanked up, breaking the tendrils, which slurped back into the Basin, the contents of which at once went smooth again.
I backed away from the Black Basin, glaring at it while screwing the lid of the now-empty hourglass back into place.
“Well, that hasn’t happened for a while.”
I jumped—actually jumped—and, swinging around, glared down at four-foot-nothing Flora, who had appeared at my side from out of nowhere. She peered up at me, blinking vast green eyes, her red hair done up today in lilies.
An eight-hundred-year-old Scottish fairy, Flora presented as twelvish in human years, with enormous pointed ears, iridescent wings, a sprightly face dusted with freckles, and a gap-toothed smile that even I found adorable. Not that I would ever admit as much.
Today, she wore a knee-length forest-green dress cinched at the waist with a leather belt that had a gold leaf latch.
Matching bracers cuffed her wrists. Hands on her hips, she wiggled the toes of her bare feet—next to which sat her golden lantern, filled with the glowing firefly- and bumblebee-sized souls of the young.
Never once had I seen her in shoes.
Flora tilted her head at me, batting those large eyes. “Have you thought about asking one of The Few why that Basin does that with you?” Her gossamer wings flickered behind her—a sign of interest.
“No.” I latched the empty hourglass to my belt. Then, turning, I marched to my scythe, grabbing it on my way to my look-alike statue, one of the three—one for each of us—that stood sentinel around the perimeter of the room, between open archways leading to other sections of the citadel.
“It never does that with me,” Flora called after me in her too-sweet voice. “Look here. Grim, look!”
With a growl, I whirled toward her again. She stopped at the Black Basin and held a small arm out over the reflective void. Keeping eye contact with me, she wiggled her little fingers. “See? Nothin’.”
“Your soul is still locked in your body,” I snarled her way. “So… a little less accessible than mine. Aside from that, you never make deliveries to the Black Basin. You want to collect a few of the dark spirits? Then try that again?”
“Sure.” She folded her arms. “We could even swap beats for a night.”
“Yeah, no thanks,” I grumbled as I again turned away.
“Flora’s back!” said Pluto. “Gave Grim a heart attack.”
“Grim hasn’t got a heart,” said Flora, who hurried over to stroke the bird’s chest with a finger. “Or so he’d like us all to believe,” she added under her breath, earning another scowl from me.
“How’s me dapper bird boy?” she asked the raven.
“Dunno,” said Pluto, blinking at her. “You should ask him.”
Flora had come to the Hallowed Halls well after I’d entered this role—when I’d finally asked for help. Flora got the kids now. And that let me concentrate on everybody else.
The dark spirits in particular could be… unruly.
“Grim.” Johann this time.
Grinding my teeth, I halted again, because could it be he’d already tracked the missing soul?
“Turn around, please,” he instructed.
Glaring hard out the impenetrable shadows cast by my hood, I slowly rotated to find the old man squinting at me from behind his round spectacles, his pointy nose out of that book and his long pheasant-feather quill, for once, motionless in his hand.
This was it. He’d noted I was short. Which meant he was short.
And none of us who worked here in the Hallowed Halls could afford a single slipup. Not when the alternative was facing the consequences—the real consequences—of the actions that had led us each to these… roles.
“Something the matter?” I asked the old man.
“The matter,” he echoed, rubbing his chin. “Yes. There’s something quite the matter, I’m afraid.”
I spared a glance at Flora, who only blinked at me, her expression expectant. It was like she’d somehow sniffed out my being short a soul as well and was silently urging me in that goody-two-shoes way of hers to fess up.
“Well, what?” I barked, never one for admitting anything until backed into a corner.
Johann tilted his glasses down, then pointed a crooked finger at me. “There’s glitter on your robes.”
“Oy, gods!” said Flora, letting the words out as if she’d been holding her breath. “I noticed that, too! Wasn’t going to say anything, because it’s right funny considering who you are.”
Glitter?
I peered down at myself—patting my midnight robes. Which apparently provided the perfect backdrop for the dusting of golden glitter that covered my front.
“Fuck,” I grunted.
Flora snorted, then burst out laughing. I sent her a glare that, of course, due to my hood—not to mention my lack of a face—she wouldn’t see. Then I swiped at the onyx fabric with one bony hand, trying to loosen some of the sparkling dust.
“Pretty!” cried Pluto as a flutter of sparkling motes floated to the floor.
But more remained, the tiny specks embedded in the fibers.
“How in the Hallows did that happen?” asked Johann, and I had to stop myself from admitting I’d bagged a children’s librarian dressed as sunshine and rainbows that night because, oh yeah, screw me, I hadn’t.
“Don’t worry about it,” I snipped.
“Did somebody keel over in a craft store?” prompted Flora. “Then again, maybe you picked up a go-go dancer.” She bounced her brows at me.
Officially, I was done. Turning away again, I stormed to my statue and handed it my scythe, which the effigy clamped its marble skeletal hand around.
An instant later, with a low grinding of stone on stone, the sentinel shifted away to reveal the spiral staircase hiding beneath its plinth—stairs that led to my chambers.
“Grim,” called Johann again.
“What?”
“Cedric was looking for you earlier.”
Fuck. Not this old argument.
“I’m tired of repeating myself, Johann,” I snapped. “There’s nothing Cedric and I need to discuss.”
“I’m not getting in the middle of things,” Johann said. “I’ve nearly learned my lesson there. I’m just telling you he had something he wanted to discuss with you.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“You’d like me to tell him you said so?” asked Johann.
“Unless you’d rather tell him I said to fuck off,” I snarled, and past ready to be done with the night, I descended into the gloom.