Reaper Read Free

Cap?” Piotr nudged the cap in Jamie's hand. “It is a good name. We could find you a matching star-spangled shield for your enemies.”
    Jamie shook his head so that his hair drooped over his eyes. He'd needed a trim before he'd died. “I can't do that, Cap's already taken!”
    “Ah, so, true enough.” Piotr positioned himself between the boy and the tiny twisted body the EMTs were now lifting out of the back of the car. A small, grimy hand, still clutching a Captain America baseball cap, flopped over the edge of the gurney before an EMT considerately tucked it and the cap back beneath the sheet.
    “They took my mommy away,” Jamie informed Piotr, leaning past him to watch as the EMTs loaded his body into the back of the ambulance. “The airbag went poof and she bounced all around. She's got a broken head and arm but I think the rest of her's gonna be okay.”
    “That happens,” Piotr said, nodding. He glanced around for Jamie's Light but the telltale rays were nowhere to be seen. “You weren't buckled in?”
    “I was,” Jamie said and then blushed. “I dropped my cap,” he confessed. “Mommy turned to yell at me for unbuckling my belt and crash ! Bash ! Boom !” He made a series of drawn-out grinding and crinkling noises to outline exactly what had happened to the rusted Mustang he and his mother had been riding in. Then he frowned. “It was loud.”
    “I see,” Piotr said, and he did. This wasn't his first time sitting at the side of the road while the police cleaned up glass and oil. It wasn't even his thousandth.
    “Well,” Piotr said, realizing with quiet relief that he was on Rider duty once again, “I know a very nice place we can stay for a while until your Light appears. Will you come with me?” He rose to his feet and offered Jamie a hand. It was nice to be doing good work again, he mused as the first of the police cars drove away. It was wonderful to not feel so aimless and lost.
    “My Light?” Jamie hopped to his feet and tucked the bill of his cap into the back pocket of his jeans before resting cool fingers in Piotr's open palm.
    “I'll explain on the way,” Piotr promised. As he walked and talked he saw Jamie's steps grow more confident, and his pace sped up. The after-death double vision must be fading, he realized. The living land was receding for Jamie, the Never pressing to the front. Soon Jamie would only see the grey and brooding Never as the bulk of the bright living world entirely faded away.
    Piotr explained how sometimes, if you concentrated, you could faintly hear the shrillest, loudest living noises through the bulk of years, but they were muted, hardly more than faint whispers in the Never. He spoke of phasing through walls, thin in the Never, that were solid in the living lands, or how if a building or object were witness to enough powerful emotion, even after it had been destroyed in the living world a solid wall could remain in the Never, blocking passage.
    The trip toward the abandoned steel mill Piotr's old clan had dubbed “the Treehouse” was much shorter than he remembered. Underfoot the road shimmered and shifted between buckled concrete and warped bricks, the striation of the roads that had existed before being layered on top of one another like packed sand on the beach.
    They were almost to the Treehouse when he heard the scrape of stone on stone, the tumbledown sound of gravel shifting nearby. Immediately on edge, Piotr grabbed Jamie's wrist and yanked the boy behind him. When Jamie began to protest Piotr shushed him sharply, shoving a finger against his lips so hard he knew he'd bruise the next day.
    “Walker,” Piotr whispered, realizing only then that while he'd explained what Jamie would have to expect from being dead in the Never, he hadn't had the time to explain about the bogeymen that were the Walkers. Now was an inopportune time to learn.
    “Stay back,” he murmured, and fumbled at his hip, unsheathing the old bone dagger one-handed. Jamie