The Sin Collector Read Free

years old.
     
    “The day you reach twenty your body will cease to move forward in time. Your features will stay locked in place, never changing. Only our eyes give us away. Only the eyes can reveal the true age of the soul. Not just for a Collector, but with even the most mortal of men.”
     
    I couldn’t imagine I’d ever looked Jimmy in the eyes long enough to stir suspicions. It had to be someone else. I needed to go through the request slips, to be one hundred percent sure of who wanted this information. I didn’t want to wait but I knew asking for the request sheets could add fuel to the fire if he was already suspicious. I finished deleting the search history and returned to my desk. I hoped that my face did not look as terrified as I felt. It must not have because Jimmy mumbled thanks and walked past me without any hesitation. I waited all morning for Jimmy to go to lunch so I could sneak into his office and look at the request forms. Finally, at one, I couldn’t take it anymore and I knocked on his door.
     
    “Hey Jimmy, you didn’t go to lunch and I…” he cut me off mid sentence.
     
    “I have a lot of work to do if I am going to get these orders done. I brought my lunch today. Now please no more interruptions.”
     
    I shut the door and tried to stifle the swearing that was pouring out of my mouth. Crap crap crap. Now I would have to wait until work was over, and Jimmy left and then proceed to break into my own place of employment. The idea was not sounding like fun. In fact, the idea had me yearning for the evenings of ceiling tile counting. I sat like a statue reasoning with myself the rest of the afternoon. It was possible that this was all just one monumental coincidence. I had seen many strange things in a hundred years. One tiny coincidence could definitely be possible. Maybe.
     
    Finally, at seven-o’clock Jimmy emerged from his office, as he usually did to lock up. Except tonight, he didn’t have his jacket or bag. This isn’t happening. I screamed in my head.
     
    “Go on ahead Lily, I still have two more orders to process, I’ll lock up behind you.”
     
    I stood motionless by the door, helmet and jacket clutched in my hand. I nodded and slowly walked out to my bike. What the hell was I going to do now? I knew Jimmy would be expecting to hear the roar of my bike start. I put on all my gear and drove to the pub two blocks away. I would wait and periodically check the lot for his car. I sat in a back corner booth and ordered a bottle of beer. I hated the taste of beer, so no need to drink it, but it helped to have something in my hands to focus on. I stared at the label, running my fingers over the raised lettering. I was really putting a lot of pressure on this beer prop. It was going to distract me enough so that I didn’t run around screaming like a lunatic on fire. Times like this I felt truly alone and weary of the world. If only I had others like me to call, to brainstorm this out with, I would be freaking-out less. We were always alone though, each one of us upon their twentieth birthday woke up alone.
     
    “Once a Collector reaches their true potential at twenty years old they begin to solely take sins. Having two Collectors living together in close quarters would be like trying to force two magnets together with the same polarity. It’s simply too much sin, even for us. If I am absorbing your years of Collection and you are absorbing mine, it becomes too much and we repel one another.”
     
    As I had never met another Collector since I had come of age, I didn’t know what this process actually felt like. Olexander had merely said the contact would be very painful if two Collectors were in the same room longer than just a few moments. There were days though that I longed for the pain. I would relish the agony if it meant for a few moments I didn’t feel like the last person alive after an apocalypse.
     
    It had been two hours so I went back to my bike and circled to the