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Just for the record, funerals suck.
My grandmother’s wasn’t that bad, but then again, she was old and it was sort of expected. But the funeral for Julia’s parents was a nightmare. Everyone cried, saying they died so young, so tragically. Little did they know her parents weren’t supposed to die yet, so tragic was an extremely appropriate word to describe the situation.
The weight of the blame lay on my shoulders. If I hadn’t ordered the reaper away from my grandmother, the sequence of events leading up to the disaster wouldn’t have happened and her parents would still be alive.
Guilt bit at me, silencing any support I could give Julia. Instead, I sat in the pew holding her hand and stared at the floor, blocking out the priest and the eulogies. Tears burned my eyes and throat and at the end of the service, Julia yanked me from my reverie with four simple words, “It’s not your fault.”
Her whisper drew across my skin like a knife and I met her gaze. “Yes, it is. Everything that’s happened since my grandmother landed in the hospital is my fault.” My father, her parents, Isabel, and now possibly millions of people.
I had no idea how to stop the reapers and Lazarus’s only offering was to gather the reapers together so I could address them. Maybe he was right. Maybe if I spoke to them I could avoid the upcoming disaster.
The thing that kept me from agreeing to this was that stupid nightmare. An angry mob of reapers wanted me dead and that wasn’t something I could defend against, even with the knife on my hip or my limited martial arts training.
When the service was over, Julia made me stand with her in the procession line as the litany of distant relatives, acquaintances, teachers and school friends passed by offering condolences that would never erase the pain. She held up better than I did, perhaps because for her it was all still too surreal.
After the funeral, folks gathered at her house, and she and I slipped out back away from the din. I took a seat on the swing set and she joined me, swinging lazily back and forth, the creak of the chains offering little in the way of communication.
“I’m ready to go back to school,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I just want things to be normal again.” My sentiment produced a quiet laugh and I shrugged in response, but she was right. Nothing was ever going to be normal again no matter how much I wanted it to be.
“Maybe school will be good for us,” she said after a while.
“And maybe it’ll be a disaster,” I mumbled under my breath. The proverbial hourglass was emptying faster than I could account for and if I didn’t come up with a logical strategy, it wouldn’t matter anymore. I’d be just as dead as Julia and the rest of the town and the bloodline would finally be severed.
Lazarus approached from my yard and he took a seat on the end of the slide. He had been scarce since the confrontation with my mom earlier in the week and I didn’t know what he wanted with us now. He started to speak and then shut his mouth and studied the clouds in the sky. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he finally said, and glanced at Julia.
“Thanks,” she replied.
“Did you find out anything?” I asked.
He sighed. “I was able to convince a handful of reapers that the orders that Promethis gave them were bogus. They are still skittish about any sort of mutiny and wanted to know where Death was,” he said and met my gaze. “Do you know where he is?”
“He’s in Purgatory being guarded by Leviathan.”
His eyes widened and his complexion crossed from rosy-cheeked to pallid. “Leviathan?”
“Yup. That’s what killed Isabel.”
“Are you sure he’s still...intact?”
I loved the way he put that. Intact. As if the man wasn’t alive. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“That doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Isabel said as long as he’s alive, I’m in danger. If my father was dead, the job would default to me. I’d be Death if he was already dead. Is that wrong?”
Lazarus stared at the ground. “No, that’s not wrong,” he said.
He left it at that even though I sensed more. I didn’t push it because right now I was tapped out and any more bad news would darken my already gloomy mood. But the sun was shining and I needed some fresh air away from all this. “Want to skip out and go to the beach?” I said to Julia.
She glanced at her house and the debate was brief, she turned back to me with a nod and stood, ditching her dress shoes and leading the way through the path in her back yard. It wound between the houses, coming out near the high school and Long Sands road beyond.
The tide was out, leaving a considerable stretch of sand and we trotted down the stairs, heading across the grey pebbles to the hard packed sand and the swell of waves beyond. I left my shoes and socks at the edge of the rocks and relished the cool caress of the sand. I knew the water at this time of year was numbing, but I didn’t care, it reminded me that I was, indeed, alive.
Julia had more tolerance for the cold than I did and she stepped in to her calves, crossing her arms and shivering from the chill. I stayed in the shallow water, knowing if I ruined another pair of dress pants in the salty water, my mother would pitch a fit.
After a few minutes of watching her shoulders shake, I bent and rolled up my trousers, wading in next to her and ignoring the numbing sting. As I stepped beside her, she turned her tear stained face in my direction and a little piece of me died.
The pain in her eyes shot through me and all I could do was pull her into a warm hug, holding her through the onslaught of sobs. I couldn’t even tell her it would be okay because even if we made it through this weekend, the end of the school year loomed and beyond that was the great unknown.