My school locker looked like it hadn’t been used for a century. Spider webs filled the corners, dust mounted up the books which I had last seen before I became a familiar. It was a miracle how I even got a C plus average. It was only a month before graduation but my attendance record wasn’t getting any better.

A bell rang, signalling the end of second period. I was late, yet again. Randomly, I pulled out two books and slammed the locker shut before students started crowding the hallway. I didn’t think I could ever get used to being in the midst of a lot of people, so I hurried to my next class, which happened to be Advanced Spanish.

I had no love for the subject, just to be clear. The Guidance Counsellor thought it would be fun torturing me when I couldn’t decide what to fill my required units with.

“Aramis!” Lindsay caught up with me, half-running with her broad shoulders hunched. Another totally failed low-key attempt. She was much too tall to ignore. “I was waiting for you yesterday. What happened?”

I kept walking with my head down, not making eye contact with anyone, stopping only when we reached a quiet corner at the foot of the stairs to the second floor. A couple of senior girls passed by, throwing mean stares at me when they thought I couldn’t see them.

In five months, I had transformed from invisible to official school weirdo. I guessed the vacant position Vincent left needed to be filled. Who better to replace him than his personal assistant? Although, I doubted anyone could even remember that Vincent Sinclair ever set foot on this school. To these people, the Sinclairs didn’t exist.

It was a mystery, still unsolved. Not that I cared much about Vincent’s popularity rating.

“Weren’t you going to tell me something important?” I changed the topic before she could go on fussing about my absences.

It was bad enough that I had to explain to Dad why I wasn’t at home so early last morning. More so, why I was dog-tired and beat up when I got home. I needed a break from everything that reminded me how stupid my ideas were. To think that I almost got possessed. Would normal stuff ever going to happen to me anymore? Suddenly, having a bad hair day didn’t sound so bad now.

“Don’t you ever watch news?” she muttered, apprehensive as she drew a tablet PC from her gray Jansport backpack. She began tapping on the screen, scrolling down until she found a video from a local TV station. “Look at this.”

She handed me the tablet, playing the news about a nineteen year-old boy from Fountain Springs who killed his fourteen year-old sister by smothering her in her sleep. The strange rise in the number of homicides, deaths and other crimes, not only in Pennsylvania, but all over the world was being speculated upon by psychology experts. They blamed it on cyclic depression or something.

Just recently, several reports of gruesome suicides in the Arctic had been televised. I didn’t even know people lived there. But I was sure of something—it wasn’t all just a coincidence.

Lindsay paused the video just as the boy’s face was flashed on the screen. His face was familiar. Brown, slightly reddish hair, freckly longish face, deep-set eyes, short, slight build.

“He’s in our year,” I mumbled thoughtfully, a bit surprised that I hadn’t heard the news in school. But then, I wasn’t in school much and whenever I was, I never talked to virtually everyone.

“Jim Lowry,” Lindsay pointed out with worry in her shaky voice. “Marching band flutist. I remember talking to him once or twice back when I was still in Glee Club. But he doesn’t seem like someone who could kill anyone.”

I breathed out warily. “I still don’t see how this has to do with me. Besides, you never can tell what people can do these days.”

“That’s not what I was worried about,” she whispered as though she was afraid someone was hearing us.

She distractedly pushed me farther into the corner, my back hitting the wall. Frantically, she blew up the picture so we could get a closer look of the boy’s eye. Jim Lowry’s irises were a light hue of brown but on the edges, blotches of black moved and churned like ink in water. Goosebumps crept all over me.

I had seen it only once before and that was when Carter got possessed by a Swarth. Maybe the same happened for Jim. Was the Soul traffic really that bad?

Lately, I hadn’t been able to go to Centralia. The Bind had prevented me from doing so. I hadn’t seen that many wraiths at night either, but if they were causing the mysterious deaths all over the world, then something big must be happening in Death’s realm.

Wraiths could possess and influence people’s actions. Usually, they get attracted to those who are about to die because they feed of the life-force of their victims. Where there’s death, there are wraiths. But there had been circumstances that they picked people indiscriminately. Especially, when there were too many of them lingering in our world.

“Lindsay, do you know where this Jim Lowry lives?” I asked, staring right through her, my mind racing.

“No,” she answered, her forehead creasing. “But the lady in Registrar’s office probably does. I could ask her… tell her that I want to go the sister’s wake.”

“Great,” I said, hurrying up the stairs. “Text me his address when you do.”

Lindsay shot me a panicky look as she watched me from the foot of the stairs. “Aramis, wait! What on earth are you planning to do?”

“Tell you later!”

It was last period when I received a text message from Lindsay. I couldn’t believe she did it. Makes perfect sense. Everybody trusts her.

There wasn’t much of a second thought when I decided to cut class, yet again. No one minded that I stormed my way out of the room while the Physics teacher was explaining some equation about throwing a bowling ball and a tiny pebble from the top of the tower. It didn’t make any sense to me. The point was, both objects would hit the ground eventually. So why worry yourself? I bet they would be throwing a party the second I was out.

People seemed uncomfortable around me these days. No idea why. I take a bath every day. Sometimes twice. Perhaps it was death that reeked out of me. Maybe, somehow, they could feel that I was not completely one of them. Their instincts were right.

I started walking out of the school and into the empty roadside, looking right and left before running toward the sparse thicket of trees that lined the other side of the road. In the shadows, I kept my head down, draughting to get to my destination faster.

I didn’t enjoy draughting one bit this time. The fear of Alessandra resurfacing again prevented me. And though I had sworn never to lose control ever again, I knew she was still inside me, waiting.

It was almost five when I arrived in a neighborhood near to the woods. The sun was already setting. It seemed to me that nights were longer than days. That couldn’t be good.

I stopped to catch my breath, immediately realizing that I didn’t have to. Instead, I scaled a tree and caught on one of its low branches, hauling myself over it so that my legs dangled as I sat.

Fountain Springs appeared to me as a quiet neighborhood. It was still early but the residents were already inside, their windows lit with warm glows. I waited until the last horizontal line of orange had bled into the horizon, pushed down by the darkness, before getting down from my spot.

I was on my way, taking Broad Street while checking the exact house number in my phone when I had a strange feeling on the back of my neck. It was the feeling of being watched. Pausing on my tracks, I looked behind me. As expected, there was nothing but cricket noises and imaginary tumbleweeds.

Shaking the thought off my mind, I made a turn to Fountain Street, keeping an eye on the house numbers as I made my way.

Fountain Street, Fountain Springs. People didn’t like fountains here. Not even a little.

“Two hundred—ah, there it is,” I said under my breath, slowing to a jog in the end of a block turning to Catherine Street.

It was a two-story house painted in a sickly pale green against dark-brown window frames. A small, narrow porch led to the house’s front door but I wasn’t going to walk in there. Actually, I had no plan in mind. I wasn’t thinking at all. At first I thought I could get some information out of this. Maybe I would catch a wraith or two. Then what?

This was just one case of the possible thousands, millions of wraith activities today. What could one wraith-hunt do?

Maybe, deep inside me, I was still hoping. I couldn’t save Vincent now but I could save someone else. Possibly.

Having arrived to that assumption, I sneaked across the loan after making sure that no one was around. I kicked off the ground and grabbed onto the overhang of the roof. Quietly, I heaved myself up and hid in the shadow of an attic window. It was much safer because people rarely looked up at night. They would rather concentrate on not tripping in the dark.

From what I could see, the lights were still out—nobody home. Maybe the wake was held in a memorial chapel somewhere in town. Someone was bound to get home soon, though.

Looking up at the skies, I deliberated if I should break in or not. I had already been grounded and yet I was planning another recipe for disaster. Getting arrested was the last thing I needed. I never thought I would say this but I surely missed my Nysmic clothes. It would be nice being invisible again.

Unwillingly, I tried the window and it creaked open. I had hoped it wouldn’t. But since I went pass my curfew trying to find the house… Might as well get in.

I slipped into the window, legs first. My feet landed on something that gave out a crunching sound. Glass, perhaps.

No alarms blared. No machine generated female voice saying Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! So I guessed I was safe.

With my heart racing up to my throat, I closed the window, catching a glimpse of movement in the cluttered garage of the house across the street. When I looked closer, there was no one there. No wraiths either. I sort of expected to see a lot of wraiths hovering over the house. Not that I was complaining.

I went back to business and carefully inched forward as soon as my eyes had adjusted to the dark. The soles of my sneakers made rustling noises as I made my way. I accidentally toppled a stack of boxes, bringing an avalanche of discarded belongings as it went down. I cringed and waited for the noise to stop, giving myself a whack on the head.

So much for stealth.

Soon, I found the door and twisted the knob without meeting any resistance. I pulled the door slightly, just enough for me to get through as I prevented the avalanche from spilling into the rest of the house. Once the door was closed behind me, I stopped holding my breath.

I didn’t waste a second and darted along the unlit hallway. There was a door to my right. A pink floral board hung on it. It read, Janine.  I opened it, bewildered as I stepped inside the frilly pink room.

The walls were striped pink with several framed pictures of a girl about a few years younger than me. To my right, the white four-poster bed was draped in pink lace. Cuddly stuffed animals cluttered the mattress, all of them in pink. Instead of books, countless of dolls in cute outfits were propped on a carved pink shelf and they all seemed to be staring at me with their frozen sweet smiles.

In an instant, I got out of the room panting, closing the pulling the door shut before going back to business. Honestly, I thought I had never been this terrified in my entire life.

Immediately, I continued the search, my way lit only by the dim light from a nearby street lamp passing through the windows. There was another door at the end of the hallway with ‘biohazard’ and ‘keep-out’ signs hanging lopsidedly in front of it.

Now, that’s more like it.

I took a deep breath before opening the door, praying so hard to god to not let the rooms in this house be designed exactly the same. This was probably Jim’s room so I wouldn’t have to worry.

The door opened with hardly a sound. I peeked in, my breath getting caught in my throat at what I saw. My eyes widened, my whole body trembling. In the dark corner of Jim’s room were wraiths—nine of them, maybe more. They had turned Jim’s room into a hive.

None of the creatures moved, standing closely to each other as though they were inside a railway train in a rush hour. Only, they had no feet under their tattered semi-transparent bodies. Under the black membrane that served as their skin, tiny indescribable creatures writhed and squirmed like maggots, wanting so much to get out.

The creatures’ heads were deformed like balled clay, rutted and bald except for the few bristly strands that poked through the dark skin. The part of the face where the eyes should be was flat, as with the slit-like noses just above the lipless set of rotten teeth. Some of them had lips but was they were either mutilated or sewn shut.

Looking closer, I spotted something else—a creature somewhat human but more terrifying than the wraiths. It had the face of a man but quite contorted, pale and sunken with cracks and green veins visible through the thin skin. Black slick dripped from the creature’s encrusted short hair, sizzling in the air and dissipating into vapor before it could reach the wooden floor. Its bony shoulders moved up and down ever so slightly—the imitation of human breathing—as it seemingly slept while standing up.

My stomach churned. I stepped back, finally realizing what the creature was—a Swarth. A male one. With wraiths, I was hard to tell the gender since they all looked pretty much as gruesome as each other.

Without closing the door, I headed straight to my escape route—the attic. I couldn’t possibly take on more than five wraiths on my own. What more a Swarth?

Fear tightened my airways as I struggled to get to the last door at the end of the dark hallway as quietly as I could. The path before me seemed longer than I had remembered and I was running out of air. Once I saw the door, I flung it open.

CRASH!

A pile of junk poured out of the attic and fell over me. It took a few more seconds before the clanking of metal and glass finally faded out. I just started wading through the knee-high flood of stored supplies, plastic, boxes and canned food when I heard a shriek that made my whole body shake.

One shriek then turned into a macabre chorus of shrill voices singing in different pitches. There was nothing else inside my head but ‘Oh god. Oh, god! Oh, god!’  when I practically hurdled my way to the now open window.

Wait. Did I leave that open? I didn’t have time to remember. By sounds of their wails, the wraiths were already on my tail so I kept crumpling and toppling over things before finally reaching my point of escape.

As I was about to step over the ledge, I felt a hot breath on my nape. The putrid smell made me gag and I knew right then, that I was dead. Slowly, I turned around, holding my breath, watching my feet so I wouldn’t step on something that would make any noise.

Just a few inches to my face was the Swarth, hovering in front of me, huffing like a rabid animal. His eyes were wide and hollow like a pumpkin head in Halloween, lit with a dull hue of amber. Black blood trickled from the side of his mouth and I winced at the sight of its inside—writing creatures.

I let my left hand fall to the side, thinking of summoning my Cataclyst before stopping myself. Alessandra might resurface again if I did that. My scythe was just as useless, but it wasn’t like I had any choice. I was about to reach for the nonexistent insignia on my neck when a hand held my arm.

“Do not move,” whispered a familiar voice from behind me. “Stay quiet,” she hushed.

The Swarth tilted its head to the sound of the stranger’s voice and hissed. It started hovering closer to my face, sniffing and panting but more of in a curious way. It didn’t attack me or anything… Because I was wearing Helcium!

Ha! Take that, ugly! Right. I almost forgot. How stupid of me.

Seemingly satisfied, the Swarth turned to the opposite direction and drifted back into the hallway. I could only breathe as soon as I was sure that it was gone. The hand that held my arm was already gone but I heard the voice again from outside the window.

“Come with me,” said the small voice.

For a second, I dithered to follow and began trying to remember whose voice it was. But then, I saw two wraiths heading my way. No time to think now.

I slipped out of the window and jumped down on the grassy lawn, breaking straight into a draught. The figure of the girl flitted through the shadows of the nearby houses with inhuman speed that could only belong to an immortal. Hurriedly, I followed her to the small island of trees not too far away from the neighborhood, forcing my feet faster when I saw some of Jim’s neighbors open their doors to see what the noise was all about.

“Wait,” I called out to her but she didn’t even glance back at me.

We did a beeline deeper into the shadows, weaving through the trees. As soon as we were in utter darkness, she slowed down and paused as if deliberating if she should face me or not. A few silent moments later, she turned to me, her pale face vacant.

The girl couldn’t be more than fourteen, basing on her looks. Slender. Petite. With immortals, appearance and age are not always two congruent things.

She had straight red hair—and I mean burgundy red—that flowed past her shoulders, framing her small heart-shaped face. Her big, doll-like dark eyes had a tinge of naivety in them in contrast to the grim air about her.

I blinked twice just to clear the haze in my eyes. The hair and the eye-color might’ve changed but I finally recognized the girl in front of me. All this time, I thought she was dead but by some kind of miracle, she was here.

Very much alive.

“Apple!”

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hola! I just want to thank you people! Reapers now have 50% of the votes. I couldn't be more happy! I'm really touched. Oh, BTW. I won't be able to update this weekend so maybe next Tuesday. Until then!

Romance Romance fall into my hands,

~shim