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Isabel took a seat on the couch after wandering around the living room, enamored with the knick-knacks my mother had on the end tables and the little shelves peppered on the walls. “Your mother and I met once,” she said and sighed, meeting my gaze.
“How are we related?”
“I’m your father’s great, great grandmother.”
My legs suddenly felt like liquid and I collapsed on the couch. That meant she was four generations older than me and yet she only looked a couple years older.
“I’m not as old as those other reapers, but you’re right. I’m much older than this form I took,” she said and looked out the window. “I’ve been a reaper for over two hundred years.”
I blinked, staring at the carpet in front of me and then my gaze snapped in her direction. “If you’ve been a reaper that long, how did you meet my mother?”
“Your mother had a close call once and I was dispatched.”
“You mean my mother almost died?”
“Yes,” she said but didn’t elaborate.
“Was she supposed to die?”
Isabel inhaled and she looked away from me. The silence settled over the room like a suffocating blanket.
“Was she?”
“Not exactly,” Isabel said. “It all depended upon your father and the choices he had to make.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“There is a choice, but not a palatable one and there has never been an ancestor of the royal bloodline that has chosen the alternative,” Isabel explained. “You will be put in the same position when the time comes.”
I stared at her, my mind whirling with the facts and the conversation with my father surfaced. “He said there was no choice,” I said and even as the words spilled out, I got it. His choice was clear-his life, his future, for ours.
“Did he really die on September 11th?” I asked, thinking about the facts my mother told me.
“Yes, and you and your mother were there that day.”
I raised my eyebrows. I was two at the time and had no recollection of that day at all. My mom said she watched the news from our apartment while I played with the toy fire trucks my father had given me. Why wouldn’t she tell me we were there?
“She has no memory of the events, Nicholas. We erased the horror of that day, replacing it with what she believes is the truth.”
“What about my memory?”
“You don’t have one because you died in your father’s arms.”
Sounds swirled, taking over the silence of the living room. Thunder and screaming, dust and blood rained over my world and my breath hitched. In the rubble knelt a firefighter, his face covered with grit and tears and in his arms the broken body of a small boy. His gaze rose to mine and shock saturated my body at the familiar blue-green glow that stood out against the soot.
“Nick?”
It wasn’t so much her voice that brought me back to the present, it was the cold touch on my arm and I blinked the disturbing vision away and looked at Isabel.
“He traded his life for mine, didn’t he?” The weight of his sacrifice crumbled any resolve I had and tears blurred my vision.
“Yes, he did. Just like his father did before him, but your father chose to tempt fate and ignore his destiny before making that decision.”
“Why?”
“Because he wanted a life with you and your mother as opposed to taking the role of the Angel of Death that his royal bloodline demanded. Your father didn’t believe your grandfather’s ultimatum. He chose to ignore the responsibility, and the ramifications of his ignorance rippled through the underworld. September 11th was the result of that decision and your father was presented with one last option. Take the position or the bloodline would be severed, plunging the world into anarchy.”
“If I was already dead...”
“Not only does death have the power to take life, he has the power to breathe it back into the dead. He revived you and your mother and made sure neither of you had any recollection of that day.”
“How did he die?”
“The minute we cleared you from the building, the section he was in collapsed under the weight of the debris, crushing your father.”
“Were we the only ones he saved that day?”
Isabel smiled and shook her head. “No. He saved a number of people before he died and after he took his rightful place as the Angel of Death, he shepherded those not on the list to safety.”
“If he erased our memories, how did my mom know about him?”
“Your parent discussed your father’s future before you were born. He told her about his lineage and that he had a choice and he wanted to stay with the two of you. Of course she thought the entire thing was his overactive imagination until the night of September 11th, when the torch was passed and he violated all the rules by going home and explaining the crux of the responsibility. This birthright is passed from generation to generation and someday you would be standing in his shoes. She begged him not to go, until he told her it was his life or yours. While your mother loved your father with every fiber of her being, she loves you more. He broke protocol explaining everything to your mother. No other living human knows about the royal bloodline or the fact that it is passed on from generation to generation, and she made him promise to explain it to you long before you had to make the same grave choices.”
“She doesn’t know I died.”
“No. She doesn’t, but she knows you will when it’s time to take your father’s place.