Chapter Twenty-Two
Ossy
After breakfast, it was all hands on deck. We scattered, but most of us set out to find souls. I was assigned to Hollowbrook, and so were five of the other guys. We each took a section of town.
As soon as I reached Main Street, I saw lost souls.
I thought Mary was exaggerating about souls coming to Hollowbrook to find reapers.
In my mind, there were only Mary, the man she followed into the field, and the three others.
After all, how would souls find a small town in the Midwest?
Mary had underplayed it. There were so many of them that even the living could see them.
What brought them there? Did they have some sort of instinct that told them where the reapers were? Was it Donn’s doing? In the past, I knew where a soul was rather than a soul knowing my location. But that had reversed.
A man from the florist’s shop screamed as he ran out the front door. He wore an apron that read Frank’s Floral Designs. He had a shock of purple hair mixed in with the blond. Gray was scattered in. He might have been in his 50s.
A soul followed him out. It was a woman with short, dark hair and a wicked grin. She wore jeans and an army-green T-shirt. She must be scaring him on purpose. If her laughter was any indication, she enjoyed haunting the florist. The minute she met my gaze, she cursed and went back into the store.
I followed her inside.
The living didn’t see me unless I wanted them to, but the dead sure did.
The living weren’t supposed to see the souls, either.
Most of the time, they were oblivious. On occasion, a soul would stay under our radar long enough for the living to sense it.
It seemed everything was more backward than forward since the reapers had left the Bureau.
Was Donn allowing souls to be seen?
The woman hid behind the counter, crouched in the corner, ready to spring up if she needed to.
She held her fingers like a gun. Even if she had a real one, she still wouldn’t be able to hurt me.
I didn’t think it was about hurting anyone.
She seemed comfortable with a firearm, so much so that holding one felt like muscle memory.
I could see through her to the cabinetry behind, as if someone had dialed her transparency down to about thirty percent.
My empathy for her grew as her chin wobbled and she sank to the floor, sitting on her bottom and leaning against the counter. “I don’t want to be dead.”
I sat next to her. I didn’t say anything else because she didn’t need me to. It didn’t matter what she wanted. She was dead. That was that. Nothing I could say would change it. She had to reach some form of acceptance on her own.
Oftentimes, people thought death was the end.
And in some ways, it was. It was also a new beginning.
Starting over in a new realm was beautiful for most people.
On occasion, we ferried terrible people.
They were serial killers, abusers, and narcissists.
Narcissism was a killer for a good afterlife.
The darkness sucked the politicians in the most, gripped by shadowy hands and fear.
It was how they would spend their next life.
I didn’t get to choose. As a reaper, my job was simple.
Bring them to the door so they could walk through.
I could sense things about people. I knew this woman’s entire life had been about protecting others.
She paid the price for it. But she wasn’t sorry.
Quite the opposite. She was happy to die for the cause.
She was good at protecting others. So good that she’d become a secret the government kept in its back pocket.
Her biggest flaw in life was following orders without question.
She’d done so blindly.
I knew her afterlife would be ideal. It was different for everyone. Most of the time, it meant something natural, like a forest or an ocean. Sometimes it was unique. One man’s afterlife was an endless arcade. Another woman wanted a library full of books, an endless supply of coffee, and cats.
She laid her head on my shoulder, and I let her. Her tears soaked into my robe, then disappeared. It took her a few minutes to stop crying. The tears seemed to help. “What comes next?”
“I’ll escort you into the afterlife.”
“What’s the afterlife like?” She kept her hands in her lap.
Reapers didn’t really know beyond what we saw when the door opened. I still wanted to answer as best as I could. “It’s different for everyone. It depends on what you desire. How do you want to spend your next life?”
“With my wife, Lisa. We have two dogs.” Her voice wavered, and her chin trembled. “The last thing she said to me was, ‘Nora, don’t you die on me.’ She made me promise, and what did I do? The one thing she told me not to do.”
Before I left the house, Phin had said something similar. “My partner told me to be careful this morning. I don’t like leaving him.”
“I don’t like to leave Lisa either.” She let out a watery laugh and shook her head. “I always do what she tells me not to do.”
I stood and held out my hand. She took it, and I pulled her up. “You’ll see her again if she chooses it.”
“I bet she’s so mad at me.”
I rested my hand on her shoulder. “Maybe at first, but then she’ll remember she loves you. That’s when she’ll embrace the pain of losing you.”
As I escorted Nora into the Between, my gaze caught movement outside the window. Donn strolled along Main Street’s sidewalks as if taking in the shops.
If there had been any doubt in my mind that the souls gathering in Hollowbrook were Donn’s doing, seeing him squashed it.
He had a reason for bringing all the souls to Hollowbrook.
He was forcing us to do our job, whether we liked it or not, and that wasn’t a bad thing.
Reapers wanted to reap. I could safely speak for both of us.
Phin and Morgana loved their jobs, too. Even Hale liked working for the Bureau, even though he wasn’t a reaper.
At least not technically. Bringing them to us worked out great, but that still didn’t explain why Donn was in Hollowbrook.