Chapter One

 

 

Past littered halls, and up a set of stairs whose moans betrayed his silent intent, Marcus Kent arrived at apartment 1C. He blew out a breath and traced the dilapidated plastic letters marking the door. Straightening the limp C to its rightful place, he held it a moment as the letters gave him pause.

1C.

One century of soul collecting.

“How fitting,” he murmured with a derisive grin. He shook his head and removed his finger from the letter C. It held for a minute before slipping away to the dingy tiled floors. As it fell, so did Marcus’s smile, but never his hand.

He closed his eyes and trailed it against the door, its coolness a balm to the pain in his palm. After a dull century as reaper, he had yet to find anything more taxing than this burn—the painful reminder that in his hands was the power to sever the bond of life between a soul and its host.

Mid-stroke, he paused. A strange, muted song bled from the seams of the door, joining the far away cries of a distraught infant behind one of the many other doors down the hall. The broken melody, played poorly on a pianoforte, held neither tune nor rhythm. Keys were struck to the tempo of a fading heart, of an irregular pulse that made no sense at all.

Marcus opened his eyes and leaned closer to the door. Just under the muffled sounds of the song, he heard a woman’s cry. A masculine voice roared curses in between thuds and crashing glass. Marcus’s shoulders lowered with an exhale and his hand slid from the door. He shook his head. He would make sure this one was fast. With his fingers clenched into a tight fist, he crossed the threshold.

The damp smell of liquor and cigarette smoke laced with despair, fear, and anger burned his nostrils. It was the stench of violence, and rightfully so. Huddled in a corner just outside the reach of light was a woman barely covered in a tattered dress. Droplets of blood trickled from her lips, staining her pale skin and the torn white fabric. Black tears trailed from equally blackened eyes and fell to the broken bottles and fallen tables that adorned her surroundings, casualties of a passing whirlwind.

Marcus wasn’t there for her.

Across the room, eyeing the woman coolly over steepled hands was the storm. He sat at the only upturned table, cradling in his hands the last unbroken bottle of dark liquor. As if transfixed by the wisps of cigarette smoke that curled before his eyes, the man didn’t even breathe.

Marcus shook his head. Unfortunately, he wasn’t there for him either.

Trapped in the blackness of their minds, the toxic couple ignored the wave of song cutting through the room. But Marcus heard it. More, he understood it. He, too, had done anything in his power to keep from hearing his parents’ atrocious fights.

Rapt by the frenzied beatings, he glided over the shattered glass of downed pictures, past wallpaper barely hanging from the walls until he reached a door—the door, just as the last broken note rung in one final, desperate echo.

Reaching into his pocket, Marcus retrieved his list of souls to be collected that night. He read the first name as the others blurred in insignificance. He would get to them, eventually. The first name, however, he looked at for a long time.

“Abigail Archer,” he whispered to no one at all. He would remember her. The pain always made sure of that. Tucking the thoughts into the dark recesses of his mind and the list into his pocket, he walked inside.

The dark room, barely lit by a single hanging bulb, was immaculate, save for a brown coat sprawled out on the four-poster bed at the far end of the box-like room. A white, wooden dresser was set on the opposite white wall. Its top was bare and unpolished. A standing oval mirror stood in the shadowed corner, and beside it, white shades veiled the only window. Considering the rest of the apartment, the chalk white room was an entirely different world, a frosted asylum, apparently void of life. But there was life, and Marcus was there for it—for her, Abigail Archer.

Sitting at a worn upright piano beside the bed with a battered leather suitcase at her side was the young red-haired girl. Not ravishing, fiery red, no, but the dull, dimmed rays of a dying day. With her back toward Marcus, Abigail hung her head low. Her slender fingers rested on the yellowed ivories as if contemplating what broken key to strike next or whether to play anything at all.

Marcus flexed his hand at the sight of her, the fire of duty cresting in his palm. He took a quiet step toward her.

“Hello,” spoke a voice—Abigail’s voice. She uttered it low, in the barest of whispers, just enough sound to be heard.

Marcus froze. He turned his head away from her and cast a brief glance over his shoulder. His brows furrowed at the empty space. There was no one there. But that being the case, who on earth did she speak to? His gaze traveled back to Abigail slowly, confusion rusting his bones. She couldn’t very well have been talking to him. No, he must have been hearing things, or perhaps, she talked to the figments of her mind, he mused. Yes, she was crazy. Was the room not a testament to her mental state? He took another measured step.

Abigail spoke again. “Are you here for me?” She shifted slightly to get a better look at him.

Marcus’s heart pounded and shock swelled in his throat. She had said something to him! Not only did she see him, but she looked straight at him, without that singular gaze of regret, the glossy gleam of uncertainty, the never-ending look of questions that plagued his existence. She only stared at him, steady, waiting for him to validate her spoken words.

But worst of all was that he knew her. Marcus could only gape at this girl he’d never met, but whose semblance had haunted the last century of his existence.

After a moment, perhaps gathering her answer from his silence, Abigail reached for the suitcase and rose. Like a child embarking on her first steps, she paced uncertainly toward him. Stringy red hair veiled her downcast eyes until finally she stood before him, knuckles white as she grasped the suitcase handles severely. She pushed thick, black-rimmed glasses up her nose and lifted her lashes. Familiar green eyes focused on his, waiting for his next move, for his next words.

He said nothing.

She set the suitcase down beside her. “I hope this is okay. I didn’t want to wait until you arrived to find out what I could bring or how much I could to take, in case you were in a hurry. I got it all down to one suitcase. I managed to pack some extra sweaters and scarves in case it’s cold where we’re going. I have some photographs as well and...” She trailed off into the surrounding quiet, a contagious silence that afflicted Marcus as well.

“Sorry.” She chuckled lightly and pressed quivering fingers to her lips. “I tend to ramble when I’m nervous.”

Blankly, he stared down at her unkempt mess of hair, unable to think of something to say. What could he say? No, there were no words. Having seen more than he could bear, he decided against speaking. All that remained was to either take her or not, the latter not an option at all.

Yet, before Abigail could speak or move again, Marcus walked from the room. The world around him blurred to smears of color, shadow, and flashing lights as he rushed from the apartment, through the tunneled staircase, and out into the early night. Reaching the desolate street, he didn’t stop. The night had grown warmer, yet bitter cold flowed through his veins. He needed to get away from there, away from the toxic apartment, away from the threat of memories unearthing in his mind—away from her.

Blocks turned to miles, turned to a different borough all together, when he finally stopped at the hands of a wire fence twisting along the Hudson River’s edge. He gripped the barbed chords and looked to the rippled rows of black water sloshing onto the concrete barrier beneath him.

“So is this where it happens?”

He spun wildly. At seeing Abigail standing there, her suitcase in hands, he cupped his mouth. “You’re not here,” he murmured through his fingers. His hand dropped at his side. “You cannot be serious. How many souls would have been running in the other direction, begging for me to spare them? I left you with life you’ve barely experienced at, what—how old are you, seventeen? Eighteen? And you follow me still?”

Abigail bit her lip. “Nineteen.”

He shook his head. “Of course, nineteen. Of all ages, you’re nineteen.” He scoffed contemptuously and moved back, the hollow footstep shattering the awkward silence between them. “You need to go back.”

She sucked in a quiet breath, auburn brows joined in confusion. Her mouth opened and then shut. “Go back?”

“Yes, back to your home, to anywhere. I do not care where you go or how you get there. Walk, take a taxi, or fly for all I care! Just do not follow me.” He squared his shoulders and walked away. He would leave her there. The Timekeeper could reprimand him all he wished, but he would not take her. He just couldn’t. It was against...everything.

“But you’re death,” she called behind him. “You can’t send me back.”

He turned irritably, an angry retort on the ready. When his gaze strayed to her pitiful eyes, her face bleak as the patched clouds breaking up the moonlight above, he no longer remembered what he meant to say. Her eyes glimmered with unshed tears, and what Marcus saw there hurt him in ways he couldn’t understand.

He shook his head, and a strange gentleness claimed his words. “I didn’t touch you. And, yes, I’m sending you back. You being here, looking the way you do—” Marcus cut himself off and turned his eyes down to his open hand, to the call of duty burning at his palm. He curled it into a fist. “It just isn’t right. It’s unnatural.”

Abigail grew white. “Unnatural? You’re death, and you’re telling me this is unnatural?”

“You packed a suitcase for goodness sakes! You knew I was coming and you packed a bloody suitcase!” His voice rose with each word, the insanity of it all claiming his restraint. “Others would have hid, or run, or bargained. But you—knowing somehow that I was coming—waited, playing a pitiful song on a broken piano. Is that not unnatural to you?”

When she failed to answer, he added bitterly, “What? Is this some sort of vacation for you?”

An uncertain moment of silence passed, and then another. A chill of dread curled down his spine, running cold to his fingertips. Her silence was unnerving, as was the simmering hush of the waves. Nothing good ever came after the calm.

Crystallizing his fears, she lifted empty eyes shaded in sadness and, as if the most natural of answers to the most common of questions, replied, “Yes.”

The word crushed him. Of all possible answers, she uttered the worst one of all. Marcus blinked, defeated. Somewhere between memory and duty, between loneliness and penance, he moved closer. A pitied intimacy, he brushed a single strand of hair from her pale cheek, careful not to touch her skin. The pain in his hand at that instant threatened to bring him to his knees.

“Then I’m sorry, love,” he said for her ears only. Dropping his hand, Marcus stepped back and vanished into the darkness, leaving Abigail Archer alone by the docks, the melancholy song of lapping waves her only companion.

 

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 17.10.2011

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