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It was a requirement of everyone in the Night Church. A permanent mark that could not be removed. It was supposed to prove an unbreakable attachment to the god of that faith.
Now it was the only thing that made the girl look like she was connected to them. She did not wear the dark clothes and red streamers and angel wings. She wore ratty jeans, stolen sneakers, and a leather vest buttoned up over her bare skin. She had no other clothes, and she would rather die than wear the clothes of a reaper.
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.
