DOUBLE UPLOAD! Chapter 32 and 33 are new!
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The feels are real.
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This was going to seriously suck.
“Woo! Ditching the parents! Ditching the rents!” Aunt Sarah bounced up and down in her seat on the hayride, doing a little dance. She shook my shoulder playfully. “Whoop! Whoop! Aren’t you excited?”
“Not particularly,” I said dryly.
Aunt Sarah had bribed me with a huge caramel apple to go on the haunted hayride with her.
I was now thoroughly regretting being a sucker for caramel apples.
“It smells like shit,” Andrew muttered when we hit another bump in the trail. He took the words right out of my mouth.
The hayride had two carts hooked to a huge tractor. The railings were painted a dark orange and the tractor had a pumpkin painted on the side. I sat all the way in the back of the second cart and my Aunt and her boyfriend sat to my left. The carts were practically empty, but my eyes were trained on a hooded man with his back to us, leaning back against the cart in front of us, his long arms draped over the top of the railing. He had appeared out of nowhere, of course, but nobody seemed to notice except for me.
He’s up to something.
Aunt Sarah pouted. “You guys are downers!”
On cue, the tractor driver stepped on it and we lurched forward.
Death took a casual drag of his cigarette, letting out a lazy puff of smoke, which hit Aunt Sarah, Andrew, and myself directly in the face.
“It’s that guy, “Andrew whispered. “The smoker.” At first, he seemed to nervous to say anything about the smoke, but then when Death did it again, Andrew opened his big mouth. “I’m pretty sure you aren’t supposed to smoke on a hay ride, buddy!”
Aunt Sarah beat me too it and smacked him on the chest. "Stop,” she hissed. “He could be crazy.”
She had no idea.
“I’ll knock his lights out,” Andrew muttered bitterly.
“Good luck with that, Polo-boy,” Death snarled.
Andrew shrunk into his seat. “How the hell did he hear that?” he muttered shakily to us, then tried to control the tremble in his voice when he replied to Death with, "Aren’t you a little too old to be riding this thing alone?”
Death turned sharply around, his voice pure ice. “If you bitch anymore, your girlfriend might start thinking it’s that time of the month for you.”
Andrew finally shut up.
Aunt Sarah turned to me. “Do you know that man?” she asked softly.
“No,” I said steadily.
The hayride passed a filthy sign that hung over us reading, "Welcome to Hell," in crooked red letters.
Stereotypical scary music began to play through old speakers and the tractor rolled to a stop in front of a small stage, cutting its engine. The small stage was set up to look like a little girls room, with a small pink bed beholding a frilly pink comforter, pink walls, and a prominent closet door that nestled at the far end of the girl's room.
It was an incredible coincidence.
The room looked just like mine when I was a child.
Lying on the bed on the stage in front of the hay ride, pretending to sleep, was a girl around my age, dressed as her part as an innocent child, with her blonde hair up in pigtails, curling gently like a halo around her pillow, and a bright pink dress to her knees, which matched the frilliness of the comforter she lay on. In her hands lay a giant teddy bear that resembled my childhood teddy bear and favorite cuddle buddy to this day, Mr. Wiggles.
As I observed the stage there was a solid knock on the girls closet. “Momma, is that you?” the actress promptly asked. A masculine cackle of a laugh answered. The girl squeezed the bear to her chest, now visibly afraid. “Momma! Momma! Help me! It's here!”
The “Mom” aka a beefy guy dressed as a woman threw open the girl’s bedroom door, holding an unlit cigarette between their over-caked lipstick lips. They wore a huge unflattering dress with flowers, a blonde wig drier than the hay beneath my butt, and crooked heels, an obnoxious shade of orange, which drew attention to the fact that this "Mom" had some unsightly hairy legs.
“Whadda ya want from me, Suzie!" the Mom's falsetto voice shouted out. "This is the fifth night you have woken me up!" To my disgust, the guy actually picked at his crotch.
“Momma! I'm not lying! There’s a monster in my closet! It knocked on the door again!” The girl screamed in response, clutching her teddy bear to her chest.
"Yeah, yeah, whatever! I'll check for ya', kid." The Mom stomped across the stage like a T-Rex and threw open the closet door, sticking their head in to look around the closet. "See? No monster! You watch too many movies!”
“Momma” then turned around to face her daughter, shaking her head and putting her hands on her hips. “Oh, Sam. What am I going to do with you?”
A guy in a clown outfit stuck his head out the closet, covered their mouth with their white gloved hand and shook with silent laughter, then held out a knife that looked pretty damn real to me.
The girl on the bed screamed. "It's there! It's there!"
I found myself looking over at Death in the other wagon. He turned his head towards me at the same time, and time seemed to roll to a halt as he sat up a little straighter. I don’t know why I gave so much thought of it right then, but I started to think about how Death knew so much about me, and I barely knew anything about him.
The clown leaped back into the closet before the mom could turn around.
With a growl, the mom left the closet door opened and stomped over to the daughter. "I've had it up to here with these imaginary monsters, Sam--!”
Suddenly, with a menacing laugh, the clown came charging out of the closet and stabbed the mother over and over again with the knife. They then gripped the daughter as she screamed and dragged her across the stage. The lights went off. The music went off. Silence.
Death angled himself so that he was facing me, facing our wagon, tilting his head to the side a bit inquisitively. “Are you going to come over here?” the position told me. Waiting, like a lion hiding amongst tall grass for its next meal. I wondered if Death was trying to read my thoughts. I pressed my fingers against the necklace around my neck as assurance that he couldn’t.
I didn’t even know what Death looked like, besides his hair and his body type. I was in the dark, when it came to Death, and that’s exactly what he wanted. He wanted to know more about me, than I knew about him. He was the dominant one, the one who came out on top. That’s how he worked.
Sure, I knew what Death looked like as a child, but did that even begin to give me an idea of what he looked like now? Was he handsome? Young looking? Didn’t people age differently when he was born? Was he tan or ghastly white, like a ghost?
Now that I was thinking about it, the only time I even saw his skin, when it wasn’t a memory, was when he held his hand out to my forehead and made me go to sleep. His skin was an olive color, pleasantly tan. I saw a man with markings on his body in my dreams, but didn’t know for sure if that was Death. I didn’t know what those dream meant, period; I just knew that they felt too real to be made-up.
I knew a little bit about the face Death took frequently, David Star, or Ahrimad. I knew a little bit about Death’s mother, and how much he looked like her as a child. I knew a minimal amount of information about his father, except that he appeared to have a violent tendency in one of the memories of Death’s. I knew Death had a scar over a damaged eye and piercings. I didn’t know why. I knew he did a lot of bad things in his life to get where he currently was. I didn’t know what.
Death flicked his cigarette. The thing flew in right past my head, missing my eye by an inch. My hands rolled into fists. Why did I even have to know about him, anyway? Why did I need to understand him? It? Was he even a he, if it could take the form of anything? A cat? A woman? There were no excuses for what Death was.
Death was an ass.
When I finally ripped my eyes away from Death, shattering a strange connection between us, I realized that Aunt Sarah had been staring at me again. I smiled at her, and after a moment, she smiled back, but it was force. I dropped my attention to the ground, and the moment I looked away from her, still watching her from the corner of my eye, Aunt Sarah’s eyes shifted sharply towards Death, expression incomprehensible, then she jumped back into a conversation with Andrew as if nothing had just occurred.
She knew who the hooded man was.
"HE-HE-HE!" a voice bellowed from behind me. It was the clown from the stage. With the loudest shriek I had ever let out in my life, I catapulted across the wagon and fell onto another stack of hay, plastered against the wooden rails of the wagon.
Aunt Sarah and Andrew burst into fits of laughter and the tractor lurched forward.
A snicker sounded directly behind me. “Care to sit next to the bad boy, princess?” I turned around, coming face to face to Death on in the other wagon. He leaned dangerously over the railing towards me. I imagined how I would have reacted if I never encountered Death before. Maybe I would have shifted away from him, or screamed. Instead, I just stared at the shadowy area where a face should have been. “I’ll keep away those pesky clowns for you,” he added, his voice dropping to a low, husky tone.
“Your personality does tend to repel everything with and without a pulse,” I said.
“Ouch.” He tapped his gloved fingers against the wooden raining. “And to think I was going to let you sit on my lap--”
“Stay away from my niece,” Aunt Sarah snapped from behind me, suddenly pulling me up away from the edge of the wagon and placing me on another haystack. She situated herself so that she was between him and me.
The hooded man let out a low, short laugh, turning away from us. “Me-ow. Way to kill the mood.”
Aunt Sarah was radiating heat. “I asked you nicely, Fallen.”
Death slowly turned back over his shoulder.
An awful sensation began to rot in my gut.
“I mean it,” Aunt Sarah continued. “Stay away from my niece.”
“Well, well, well…” I could hear his smile. “A Catholic demon hunter. How…gross. I knew something was a bit off in the Williams’ family tree. I’m afraid I can’t stay away, Auntie Sarah. She’s bound to me by a deal.”
“I don’t care how she’s bound to you.” Aunt Sarah took out an ancient looking cross, holding it between to hands in her lap. I was absolutely in shock, unable to process what was happening. “If you know what’s good for you, don’t try anything. I’ve been doing this a long time. Your connection to her can be destroyed, and believe me, I’ll find a way to break it. I’ll only be damaging you in the process.”
“Here’s the thing,” Death began coldly. “Virgin Girl over here died, now Virgin Girl over here owes me, and it’s about time for me to collect what she owes: her soul and herself. You can’t change what is set in this kind of stone, only I can. If Faith chooses not to conform to me by the time that I have given her, then she will fall to the ground dead because she would have therefore disregarded the agreement which saved her life, and there is nothing you, nor any God or holy object can do about that.”
Aunt Sarah’s attention on Death shattered for a moment, enough for her to give me a look that read, why didn’t you tell me about this?
An awful sensation began to rot in my gut.
I would die if I didn’t sign his contract.
“My niece and I are getting off this ride,” Sarah said. “If you follow us, I’ll send you straight to hell.”
“Go on, send me there,” Death dared. “It’s a little nippy outside, anyway.” He started to smoke another cigarette. I was noticing he was smoking a lot, lately. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted Glenn to do that god damn back ground check on her family,” Death muttered under his breath.
“Leave my niece out of what you want, or I’ll stick this cross so far up your ass, you’ll be singing Church Hymns,” she said. “If you’re after the book, through my niece, you’re wasting your time. She knows nothing about it.”
“If you think I’m going to listen to you because you’re threatening me with a six inch cross, you’re mistaken.” Death’s laugh was pure silk and cynical. “I can name a few things off the top of my head that I have that are much longer and much more powerful than that silver toothpick. You know damn well I’m more powerful than the Fallen you’ve taken down, or else you would have tried something on me. So why don’t you just cut the bullshit, human?”
Sarah went silent.
Death stood up to his incredible height, stepping over the railing with his long legs into our wagon. The cart went over a huge bump, but his balance was perfect and he didn’t waver. His cloak whipped around in the wind as the tractor accelerated up a hill, and the sound of a crash and a fake scream boomed from the trees above.
“I have feathers on my back that are a hundred times older than you, and I’m known in the Underworld as a hardhearted bastard, so don’t—“ he stopped, holding up a finger. “Wait a Satan-second, what did you say about a book? What book? Do I look like I read books in my spare time?”
“Okay, what the hell is going on?” I gripped my aunt by the jacket. “You’re a demon hunter? Can we just--how?” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Never mind. At this point, nothing really surprises me. Angel of Death, this is Aunt Sarah.” I introduced them dryly. “Aunt Sarah, this is The Angel of Death. He’s a psychopath.”
“Hi,” Death said a bit boyishly, then cleared his throat. “I mean, yo.”
I frowned at him, and then turned to Aunt Sarah. “Is this for real?” I demanded. “How long have you been doing, well”—I motioned to the cross—“this…?”
“Not now, Faith. He’ll take the opportunity to attack me when I’m not concentrating.” Aunt Sarah looked up at Death, gripping her cross tightly. “What is it you want, then, if you don’t want the book?” she asked, transfixed on the hooded man.
Death pointed at me. “Her compliance and soul?” he said in an obvious tone. “It's kind of my forte. Didn’t I just go on about this?”
“You’re lying. You want the book.”
“What book?” Death and I demanded, at the same time.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about with this “book”, woman," Death said. "And I’d hate to burst your bubble, but those things don’t work on me.” He motioned to the cross in my aunt’s hand. “I wear a—“
“Pendant?” Andrew chimed in, still sitting at the end of the hayride with an odd-looking crystal dangling from his hand. I had forgotten he was still on the hayride because he had grown so silent. “You mean this pendant?”
Death clutched at his neck, then muttered a foreign, dirty curse.
“Don’t look so surprised,” Andrew said with a cocky grin. “I plucked it off of you when you were pissing in the bathroom earlier and watching Hell Boy on your cell phone.
“Hell’s horns!” Death hissed crossly. “I knew someone was watching me piss.”
“I wasn’t watching you, watching you,” Andrew said.
“Did you pluck anything off my penis, too, while you were at it, Boy Toy?”
I suppressed a laugh.
“I’m not gay!” Andrew snarled, and then inhaled slowly in and out. “You picked the wrong guy to add to your list, asshole. I knew whom you were the moment I saw you. Sarah and I have studied your markings in dozens of books. I know the legend of the Grim Reaper.”
“You too?” I asked Andrew. “How the heck are you a hunter? You can’t even step in mud without having a panic attack!”
Andrew ignored that.
“If you know my legend,” Death began in that low, cruel voice of his, “then you know I’m not a very nice angel.” He fake lunged at Andrew, making him nearly fall backwards over the railing. “I’m not afraid of you, or your girlfriend. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a hot date with Faith Williams. Have fun.”
He vanished.
Andrew frowned. “Have fun? Have fun with what?"
“He has a what with me?” I demanded.
On cue, the tractor came to a stop in front of a large sign that read “Haunted Corn Maze” in crooked lettering.
A massive shadow dropped from above us. Startled, I pressed against the railing as the hayride tipped from the weight of the outsider. The shadow let out a low, intimidating growl, its breath foul enough to melt plastic.
“A hell hound,” Sarah answered, eyes wide in shock.
My heart pounded in my chest. “What the heck is a hell hound?”
“They’re summoned by a superior evil to drag someone down to hell.” Aunt Sarah slowly took a step towards me. “Get off this cart and run as fast as you can, Faith. We have more of a chance to fight this thing off than you do."
“What?” Panic struck me hard. “I’m not leaving you!”
Another “hell hound” dropped down from the trees, and then another. They seemed to be waiting for a command, growling, but frozen in their spot. Aunt Sarah and Andrew seemed calm about the situation, whereas I was not. They each had a gun and a cross in their hand, which was unsettling as hell. All my life, I had seen them a certain way, and now they were demon hunters?
“Run, Faith!” Aunt Sarah shouted.
I had no other options. With my heart in my throat, I jumped off the side of the hayride and winced as my ankles took the weight of my body on the ground. I ran towards the haunted corn maze, which appeared to be lit by a few floodlights. It was terrifying to enter it alone, but I knew who was waiting for me within it: the only person who could call off the hellhounds.
I was going to end this once and for all.
I would sign the damn contract and end this insanity.
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