Never again.
The reapers approached, smiling the way they’re taught to do. Smiles of false welcome, of false acceptance.
There was no trace of real acceptance in the Night Church. You were collected by them, you belonged to them, but there was no approval of who you were.
“Sister Margaret,” said the taller of the two men as he walked toward her. He held a broad-blade machete in one muscular fist, carrying it casually with the tip pointed toward the ground. “Praise be to the darkness that we found you.”
“Stop right there, Jason,” warned the girl. “Y’all turn around and be on your way.”
They continued to smile at her. The shorter man had a hunter’s hatchet tucked through his belt. Sunlight gleamed along the wicked edge as he drew it.
“We bring love and greetings from your mother, Sister Marg—”
“Don’t call me that,” snapped the girl. “That’s not my name no more.”
“What name do you want us to use, sister?” asked the woman. She was young, no more than three years older than the girl. Maybe eighteen, but already there were combat scars on her face, and her eyes were ablaze with righteous anger.
“I don’t have a name no more, Connie,” said the girl. “I left all that behind when I left the church.”
“That’s not true, little sister. Your mother sent us to bring you home, to bring you back into the peace and love of the Night Church.”
“I know you, Connie. You don’t open your mouth ’cept when a lie needs to come out.”
Sister Connie’s smile flickered, and her eyes went cold. “And you can’t help but carve more sins onto your own soul.”
Sister Connie drew her blade — a slender double-edged antique dagger that had been looted from a museum in Omaha. The girl had been there when Connie had found the weapon four years ago. Six families had been living in the museum, and they had refused to join the Night Church. The reapers had cut through them like scythes through ripe wheat.
The girl, only eleven at the time, had killed too. It had not been the first time she’d ended the day bathed in innocent blood.
The memory burned in her mind as she saw that knife in Sister Connie’s hand.
“C’mon, Sister Connie,” said the shorter man, “it’s too hot to stand here and play games with this brat.”
“Hush, Brother Griff,” said the young woman. “We were told to give our little sister here a chance to recant her wicked ways and come back to the church.”
The girl laughed. A single, short bark of harsh derision.
“Come back? What kind of sun damage have y’all had on what little brains ye got that my ‘coming back’ was even a possibility? Mom doesn’t want me back and we all know it. She wants me dead and left to the vultures. Anything any of y’all say different would be a goll-durn lie.”
Jason, Griff, and Connie stared at her with a variety of emotions playing on their faces. Anger at her sass, shock at the bald intensity of her words, confirmation of their private thoughts, and something else. A cruel delight that the girl knew only too well. The anticipation of wetting those blades as they opened red mouths in her flesh and sent her screaming into the eternal darkness.
None of them answered her, though.
The girl said, “Y’all don’t have to do this. We can all just walk away.”
The three reapers began to spread out, forming a loose half circle around her, hands flexing to find the perfect grip on each weapon.
The girl sighed. It was so heavy a sigh that it felt like a piece of her heart was being pulled out of her chest and flung into the wind.
“I tried,” she said, though even she wasn’t sure to whom those words were directed. “Dang if I didn’t at least try.”
She drew her knife.
They moved first. They moved with lightning speed.
Perhaps in their excitement they had forgotten just who it was they’d been sent to find. There were three of them. They were all older than the girl, larger and stronger than the girl, better armed than the girl.
It should have ended there.
Brother Jason lunged first, raising his arm and chopping down with the big machete. The blade cut through the air where a girl-shape had been a millisecond before. Jason’s swing was so heavy, backed by all of his weight and muscle, that the blade chopped deeply into the highway blacktop, sending shock waves up his arm.
The girl spun away from the blow, twirling like a top but staying so close she could feel the wind as Jason’s weapon whistled past. She continued her spin and flashed her arm out, silver glinting in her hand, and then the dry air was seeded with red.
Jason made a confused gagging sound that was more surprise than pain as he dropped his knife and clutched his throat. A throat that was no longer constructed for breathing.
“Get her!” screeched Sister Connie, and thrust out with her knife. But the girl darted away, ducked under the swing of Brother Griff’s hatchet, slashed him across the top of one thigh, and then shoved him toward Connie.
Griff tried to keep his balance; Connie tried to jerk her knife back.
Griff suddenly screeched like a gaffed rabbit and dropped to his knees. The movement tore the knife from Connie’s fingers. She stared in horror as blood bubbled from between Griff’s lips.
“No…,” he said, his voice thick and wet.
But the moment said yes, and he fell.
That left Connie standing there, her hands empty, her companions down, and all of it happening so fast.
They stood there, face to face no more than six feet apart. The wind blew past them, making the streamers on Connie’s clothes snap and pop.
Connie tried to say something, tried to frame a comment that would make sense of the moment. “I—” was all she managed before the girl cut her off.
“Run,” said the girl, her voice raw and ugly.
Connie stared at her. “W-what…?”
“Run,” the girl repeated. “Run!”
Connie stood there, blank-faced and unsure of what was happening. An easy and certain kill had somehow become a disaster.
“Griff and Jason were good fighters. Not y’all, Connie. Y’all were never no good,” the girl said quietly. “But me? Heck, I was taught every dirty trick there is by Saint John of the Knife.”
Connie paled. She knew all about the girl’s training and her level of skill, but hearing of it again and seeing the proof of it demonstrated in the silent bodies of Griff and Jason chilled her to the bone. Her lips quivered with sudden fear.
“No…,” she said. “Don’t.”
“Run away,” said the girl who was no longer Sister Margaret. Her arms were red to the elbows with bright blood. “Run away and tell my mother not to send any more of her killers after me. Tell her to leave me alone. Tell her to forget I exist. Tell her I died out here.”
“I… can’t…”
“You better.”
“I—”
Connie’s protest was interrupted by a low groan. She looked down to see that Griff’s eyes were open. His dead eyes.
His dead mouth opened too, rubbery lips pulling back from bloody teeth as he uttered that deep, terrible moan of awakening hunger. He reached for Connie with twitching fingers.
Connie gave a shrill cry of horror and sprang back.
Right into Jason.
He wrapped his big arms around her and dragged her back.
Connie fought against him, driving her elbow into his stomach, head butting him with the back of her skull, stamping on his feet, and all the while trying to free an arm so that she could wave the red cloth ribbon under his nose. He snapped at her, trying to bite her hand, trying to bite her face.
The girl knew about those ribbons. The reapers soaked them every few days in a noxious chemical mixture that made the gray people react the same way they did around other dead. When the chemical was strong, the dead totally ignored the reapers.