The Reaper's Mistake

Chapter Two

The hospital keeps me overnight, which feels excessive for a person who apparently walked away from a crash that flattened the front half of my car. They run the scans twice. Both times the doctor comes back frowning at the images as they've personally offended her, like she expected to find something broken and is almost annoyed that she can't.

"No concussion," she says, on the second visit, flipping through my chart with the particular briskness of someone who has fifteen other patients and forty other opinions she'd rather be having. "No fractures. Your blood pressure's fine. Honestly, Ms. Winters, given the state of your vehicle, I don't have a good explanation for why you're sitting here asking me when you can go home instead of why you're not in surgery."

I don't have a good explanation either. I have a man who wasn't wearing a coat in the rain, and a leather book that opened itself, and the particular quiet of an intersection that had apparently decided to stop existing for a minute so a stranger could look at me like I was a mistake he needed to correct. I don't say any of that. I say, "Guess I'm lucky," and she gives me a look that suggests she doesn't believe in luck quite that specific, but she signs the discharge papers anyway.

My roommate Priya picks me up the next morning in her ancient hatchback, the one with the seat that won't stop sliding backward on left turns, and spends the entire drive alternating between hugging me at red lights and lecturing me about seatbelts I was, in fact, wearing. I let her talk. It's easier than trying to explain the parts I can't.

"You're being weird," she says once we're home, once she's set me up on the couch with tea I didn't ask for and a blanket I definitely didn't ask for. "Weirder than 'I just survived a car crash' weird. What aren't you telling me?"

"Nothing." The tea is too hot. I drink it anyway, because it gives me something to do with my hands that isn't picking at the edge of the blanket. "I'm just tired."

She doesn't push, which is its own kind of kindness, and eventually she goes to work and leaves me alone with the apartment and the low hum of the radiator and entirely too much time to think.

I spend the day doing normal things. I do the dishes that piled up while I was gone one day. I answer three texts from my manager, who wants to know if I'll be back for my shift tomorrow, and I stare at the message for a long time before I type back a yes, because rent doesn't pause just because a stranger who wasn't wearing a coat told me I should be dead. I watch half of a show I don't remember the plot of. Normal things. Small things. The kind of things that are supposed to make a life feel like it belongs to you again.

None of it works, exactly. There's a version of the night that keeps replaying underneath everything else I'm doing, quiet but constant, like a second show playing behind the one I'm actually watching. The stillness of the rain around him. The way the sirens seemed to physically offend him. The particular, specific way he said that isn't possible, not loud, not dramatic, just quiet and certain, a man encountering a fact that refused to rearrange itself for his convenience.

I tell myself it was shock. People see things after accidents. Adrenaline and fear and a concussion the scans somehow missed, maybe, a hallucination built out of trauma and rain and a body trying to make sense of nearly dying. That's a normal, boring, medically explainable thing, and I hold onto it the way you hold onto a railing on a staircase you don't trust.

It holds for exactly one day.

I'm walking home from my shift the next evening, later than I meant to be, because closing duties always run long and my manager has never once in the history of our acquaintance let me leave on time. The streets around my apartment are quiet in that particular Thornwick way, wet pavement holding onto the last of the day's rain, streetlights doing their best against a sky that's already mostly dark.

I feel him before I see him. That's the part I can't explain to anyone, later, the part I don't even try to explain to myself. Not a sound. Not a shadow. Just a change in the air, a stillness dropping over the block like someone turned a dial, and when I look up he's standing across the street under the awning of the closed bakery, watching me with the same flat, assessing patience he had that night in the rain.

He isn't wearing a coat this time either. Late autumn in Thornwick, cold enough that my own breath is fogging in front of me, and he's standing there in the same severe black like the temperature simply hasn't been invited to apply to him.

I stop walking. My heart is doing something complicated and fast in my chest, not quite fear, not quite anything I have a clean word for.

"You're following me," I say, because it's the only sentence I can find.

"I'm observing you," he says. His voice is exactly as I remembered it, flat and precise, no warmth in it at all. "There's a difference."

"There really isn't."

Something flickers at the corner of his mouth, not a smile, nothing so generous as that, but the faint architectural suggestion of one, gone again before I can be sure I saw it. He steps off the curb, unhurried, and crosses the empty street toward me with the same soundless walk from that night, like his shoes have opted out of an agreement the rest of the world signed onto.

"My name is Rhen," he says, stopping a careful distance away, close enough to talk, far enough that it doesn't feel like a threat, though everything about him still manages to feel like one anyway. "Rhen Ashcroft. I owe you an explanation. I'd rather give it somewhere with fewer witnesses."

"I don't know you."

"No," he agrees. "But you will."