Page 134 of The Dearly Departed

Yet …

What else were they supposed to associate me with? The Grim Reaper represented death, just like a plague doctor, ushering the inevitably damned toward life's next journey into the one hereafter. Was that not what I'd spent my adult life doing? Whether in malice or kindness, every occupation I had embodied the end of life.

Reaper.

The angel of death.

Are you proud of that, Leonard?

Is this what you hoped for when you wanted me to be empathetic?

Gerald led us through the dining room, then the kitchen, where we came to a door I’d never seen before. He looked over his shoulder and offered a grin and a waggle of his brows.

“Ready?”

“Open the damn door,” I muttered with a roll of my eyes.

And he did, and in that moment, anguished, pained cries from my brothers reached my ears. The breath in my lungs stilled as I fought the urge to throw Gerald down the stairs, but the gunman at my back wouldn’t miss the opportunity to shoot me dead if I did something so reckless.

"Oh, will you listen to that?" Gerald exclaimed as we walked down the stone staircase into a room empty of all else apart from my brothers, hanging from the rafters in the center of the room, and a wooden chair off to the side. “Like music to my ears!”

They were dressed as if they’d been working when they were captured. Black shirts, black slacks, and dress shoes to match. The toes of those shoes dragged against the basement floor, their wrists bound by rattling chains above their heads. Ike's face dripped with blood while Shawn seemed to have fared a bit better, with only a bloody nose and an ugly bruise that blossomed across his cheekbone, his sweat-drenched hair hanging in his eyes.

Isaac wore the expression of someone angry and ready to fight someone to the death, but Shawn …

He looked defeated and downtrodden, with exhaustion and sadness in his eyes.

But those same eyes widened with panic as I came into view, his mouth falling open in a look of pure terror.

"Wha-what the fuck is that?" Shawn stammered, his voice increasing in volume with every syllable until he was screeching with fear. "What the fuck is that?!"

Ike didn't seem to care about the tall figure in the plague doctor mask though as he fixated on our father. "What the hell are you doin' here?" he demanded, startlingly calm, given the predicament they were in.

"Isaac, my boy," Gerald said, greeting my younger brother with outstretched hands. He clasped his bloody face between his palms. "Look at what they did to you. Are you hurt?"

"Jump off a fucking bridge, you fuck," Ike fired at him before spitting a wad of bloody phlegm into Gerald's face.

Gerald dropped his hands and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. "I deserve that," he conceded, dabbing at his face. "It is very unfair of me to have done what I did to the two of you when, really, you had nothing to do with any of this at all."

Shawn's frightened gaze hadn't yet fallen from me. He stared, whimpered noises raking through his throat as he trembled against his binds. I was riddled with guilt, doing that to him, and if it wasn’t for the man at my back, I would take the mask off then and there. Just to keep him from being scared.

He's going to be scared either way, I reminded myself. When he finds out what I do, what I am, he's going to be terrified. He's going to hate me.

"Joel," Gerald said in a commanding tone, "you can leave now."

I stood up straighter, sensing eerily that he had somehow read my mind.

"Yes, sir," the man at my back said, turning and heading back up the stairs.

"Can you please make sure you lock the door behind you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you, Joel."

The basement fell silent, as if we were all collectively waiting for the click of the lock sliding into place, and when it did, Gerald clapped his hands with flourish and excitement.

"Are you boys ready for this?" he asked Shawn and Ike.