Into the Tiger's Hour

Chapter Eight

For Jonas Foster, the day he stepped off of a curb in the Downtown District of Brandenburg, Virginia was the day his life went haywire.

Until that day, he'd found a pattern to his life and stuck to it. Although he was one of the few in the world with the appellation of death mage, and the only one he knew of who worked as a professional hitman, Jonas liked things to be quiet and orderly. His fascination was with the cycle of life and death, the turning of the Wheel in willworker parlance, and it was there that he found his personal meaning.

It was a life only in the loosest definition. Jonas had no friends, few acquaintances and no living family. When his brother had been shot down by the police, twenty years back, Jonas had listened to his mother's warning to "get out of Mississippi." He'd done so, holding fifteen dollars and with his scant clothing stuffed into a burlap sack, and he'd never gone back. His mother had died shortly after from a heart attack, and what he'd known of his father had been a "good for nothin' drunk who got what was comin' to him." The man had died on the train tracks, and when his arm was recovered, it was still clutching the neck of a broken liquor bottle.

He'd found a job as a hospital janitor when he'd moved north to Wyoming and discovered his nature as a willworker when he'd been present at a patient's death. Being able to sense the approach of death, knowing the amount of life force someone (or something, in the case of plants and animals) had left, feeling the remnants left behind when someone passed away... It fascinated Jonas even as it made everything that was commonly considered "necessary" paltry.

Relationships were impermanent. Friends caused complications. People as a whole were shells that held a set amount of life force until time, accident, illness or violence drained it away. That he found interesting to watch; the intricacies of interpersonal connections were boring.

And, like all death mages, Jonas Foster had a keen awareness of the importance of life lines. He watched his own constantly, watched the length change based on his daily actions, avoided some instances that would've caused it to be abruptly cut short and found it highly interesting that a line so many ignored--New Agers and kooks aside--told so much about the turning of the Wheel.

He hadn't looked at his palm the day Diamanta Rothwell saved his life, bolting across the street to tackle him to the sidewalk seconds before a city bus would have crushed him. But the fork that he saw after picking himself up--ignoring her softly spoken questions, the pale hands scraped by asphalt that reached out to him--had shaken him to the core.

One branch was short, clipped clean. And the other wound down his hand in a tangled link, a chain of events that he'd never imagined possible.

~~

Diamanta Rothwell was twenty-eight when she saved Jonas Foster's life. A fae, a healer and a woman who genuinely loved life and all it had to offer, the pale beauty was Jonas's opposite in almost every way. White where he was black, kind where he was cold, engaged where he was detached--it was that difference that had caused her to drop her day's purchase of freshly baked bread and oranges, run headlong across a traffic-clogged street and throw herself against him to keep him from harm's way.

And she never thought to demand a thank you from him. Never, in fact, imagined that she would see him again. Nor did she feel any anger over Jonas's abrupt departure from that corner filled with horrified people, still trying to comprehend what they'd just seen. It wasn't in Dia's nature to be angry, to hold a grudge or to expect gratitude for anything.

She had grown up in Brandenburg, adopted by Bertram and Kamilah Jumoke when she was orphaned at a year of age, and had known the world to be a kind place filled with enjoyable people. The occasional brute, the few who tried to reach for her to damage her, those who gave nothing to the world but only took... Those she excused as souls in pain and her crystalline eyes would well with empathetic tears at the thought of their lives.