The Innocence of Death Read online

  “Police,” I corrected. It occurred to me, with that small lapse, that I had no idea how all these creatures knew English. Or so much about the human world. The vocabulary. Heck, even the technology in the hospital had looked relatively human. Not to mention we were driving in an honest to goodness car. If the Elsewhere had Guardians to keep people separate, surely they didn’t cross over much, did they?

  “Right, police,” Yolanda nodded. “Anyways, the Guardians keep things separate. They have a pretty good grip on things. Of course, there are places where they have no authority at all. The ones whose magic is still connected to the mortal realms, for one. Or whose magic is old enough to stretch back before the split between the realms. There aren’t many of those about anymore.”

  “Er, does everyone have magic here?” I asked, alarmed. How was I meant to defend myself against a world of magic?

  “No,” Yolanda snorted. The normally chatty troll kept quiet long enough to tell me that was the end of that conversation. I thought about pressing the issue—it seemed rather relevant to my survival—but I didn’t want to alienate the one person who was actively helping me. Instead, I busied myself with looking out the window.

  I nearly threw myself back into a state of panic.

  It was almost like the real world. The mortal realms, I mean. There were trees and plants and walls and roads and even buildings that looked vaguely familiar. But it was so much more, too. The trees were taller and seemed more aware than anything I had ever come across. The plants were vibrant colours that never existed in nature. The buildings were all from a world that was hundreds of years gone. They looked like a reconstruction of a medieval period, but everything was in perfect order and I doubted had ever been subject to the ravages of time.

  We were moving too fast to see any real detail, but I did see a massive shape off in the distance that could have been a dragon. There were shapes that looked like people, but with wings stretching behind them, or curling horns sprouting out of their heads. Some shapes didn’t look like people at all, but more like Yolanda or Graveltoes. There were things walking on four legs that looked like no animal I had ever seen. I wanted to take it all in, to ask questions about everything. We kept driving, though.

  For the rest of the drive, I had my nose pressed to the window. Maybe I was still hallucinating. Maybe I was in a hospital in a coma and would never wake up. Maybe all of this was real. But whatever it was, it was amazing.

  “Is everything like this in Elsewhere?” I asked as we turned off the main road.

  Yolanda looked out the window and gave a casual ‘huh’. “Not everywhere. Some places are much nicer. There’s the Icelands, of course, for beings of Winter. And there’s the Lakes, for the water creatures. I like Death’s lands, myself, but I’m biased.”

  I was about to ask what Death’s lands were like, but I saw for myself. It was as if we had suddenly leaped from one place to the next. The colours shifted, changed to a more silver and grey and blue spectrum. There were still plants and trees, but it was as if they were magnificent ghosts of the things. Yet they were still possessed of a certain vitality, pulsating with a shadowy power. I did not see any houses along the road. There were no creatures moving about, no animals, no sign of civilisation at all. Like the lands were holding their breath.

  Beautiful, yes. But deadly and haunting.

  “The Lands of Silence,” Yolanda sighed, like a weary traveller returning home. “Welcome to your new home, Cal.”

  This was going to take some getting used to.

  Death at the Office

  The rest of my day and the next one after that seemed completely normal by comparison. Well, when I say completely normal, I mean in the sense that if such a thing had happened to me back in the mortal realms, I would have thought I won the lottery. Why? Because I was shown where I would live and work. I was shown to the door of a very large house that held my living space and my offices. There was even a sign outside the door: Cal Thorpe Marketing. If I hadn’t been freaked out at the whole situation, I would have been frozen in shock.

  The house itself was far larger than anything I could have even considered affording in the city. It was done in the imposing Victorian-gothic style, with stones, slate roof, carved reliefs (oddly, these were of humans rather than gargoyles) and crawling ivy to match. Only, the ivy was a silvery grey, the reliefs all showed images of people dying and the house looked like it had never been lived in before. To be honest, it was not really my style, being a bit too looming and obviously magical. I was now working for Death, though. It seemed fitting.

  At least the interior was modern.

  The inside was split into two separate sections. The front of the house held my offices. They were done in the most modern minimalist fashion, with greys and whites everywhere, the furniture of black leather, the decorations of steel and glass. My desk, though, was curiously old fashioned: heavy, solid wood with hand-carved detail and drawers that locked with skeleton keys. I had all the newest computers to play with and Yolanda fairly squealed over her alcove and desk, set slightly away from the reception area.

  The living space was a study in contrast to the office. Where the office had been modern, the living space was old fashioned. Dark, heavy colours, swooping bookshelves, wooden furniture that one person couldn’t lift on their own. It was a little oppressive, to be honest. It needed a bit of colour, maybe even a steampunk motif. Thank goodness, though, someone had thought ahead about plumbing, heating, cooling and every other modern convenience.

  The weird part was that all of my belongings from my apartment back in the real world were there. They had been unpacked and put away exactly as I would have done, down to the towels in the linen closet. There was even human food in the kitchen—all the best products, except for the overabundance of salted snacks. Yolanda helped me sort those out.

  After a day of puttering around, exploring the area and seeing where, exactly, my toothbrush had been stowed, I was permanently wearing a confused and stunned expression. I shuffled into my office, wearing slacks and a sweater that had been brought over and put in my closet.

  “You look funny,” Yolanda said, swivelling in the oversized office chair behind her desk.

  “Do I?”

  Yolanda nodded. “Yes. Are we going to start working, now?”

  I looked around. This was the whole point of my being here. To work. To market Death. I could stall by doing research on Elsewhere, about the creatures I was likely to interact with, but that would be denying the obvious. My life had changed. I didn’t even recognise myself in the mirror. It was time to get over that and start doing what I did best.

  “Alright,” I said, cleaning my glasses on the edge of my sweater. “I want you to set up social media accounts. Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr. Not Facebook. They’ve had enough problems recently without adding Death to the mix. Are there any others you can think of?”

  “WhoWhere,” Yolanda said. I blinked. “It’s an Elsewhere-specific service. Like The Book Face and that one a few years ago…”

  “Myspace? LinkedIn?” I asked.

  “Google!” Yolanda grinned. I struggled to wrap my mind around the two concepts merging into one and failed. “I will set them all up.”

  “Um…great. Do we have access to pictures? For the profiles. And I’d like to get following some of his friends or associates before we do any posting. Is there anyone I can interview that has worked closely with Death? Or friends? I’d like to get a sense of him and what he does. How he interacts with people. I need a strategy and I need a sense of Death to work out what I need to do.”

  Yolanda screwed up her face in thought. “I do not know his friends. I do not interact with him, only work for him.”

  I scowled. “There has to be somebody. Marketing campaigns are personal things. I’m selling a person, dealing with his public appearances, online interactions, making sure people like him. Or, well…want to work with him, or recognise him. He said he needed image help. But why
? What have people been saying about him?”

  Yolanda shrugged, looking a bit wary. “There are a couple of associates I could, ah, call in…”

  “Do it,” I nodded. She blinked and hunched her shoulders, but nodded, turning to the computer and smart phone on her desk. I left her to it and went to my own desk, pulling up the same social media sites I had mentioned to Yolanda. My old life didn’t exist anymore, so I needed to start from scratch. And no good marketing agent didn’t market himself.

  I spent the next two hours figuring out my social media platforms. The side of social media that existed for those magical or supernatural beings, either living in Elsewhere or back in the mortal realms, was more vivid than I had expected. Setting up new profiles and getting connected with people was far easier than I anticipated. Though, I did get a fair number of emails from the various platforms, asking if I were who I said I was. I suppose being considered dead or missing or whatever the mortal realms thought of me set off all sorts of scam alerts.

  I had to take new pictures of myself with my phone and scowled at the result. It would have to work for now. I trolled—no pun intended—the platforms for information about Death and made a few notes.

  Basically, everyone was terrified of him.

  I noticed this because the pictures where Death showed up were at almost ritualistic formal events, and everyone’s expression was tense. Or, I think they were tense. It was hard to tell when half of them didn’t have humanoid faces. Death didn’t appear in the comments or tags at all. Unlike the human side of things, people made no jokes about Death or death or about murder or anything of the sort. They just sort of pretended he didn’t exist. I suppose that even among the semi-immortal, Death was the one great equaliser.

  I was so engrossed in the new platform WhoWhere—which, surprisingly, did exactly what Yolanda had said—when someone knocked on my door. Loudly. I jerked, flew backwards into my chair and held a hand to my heart. “Don’t do that!” I scolded Yolanda.

  She looked sheepish, but cleared her throat and stepped aside. “Cal, this is Mercy, from the Order of Silence…she’s an, ah, associate of Death.”

  I stood up as quickly as I could manage and plastered a smile on my face. I hardly noticed the features of the person who glided in. “Welcome! How good of you to come. Please, have a seat.”

  Mercy moved forwards and I finally noticed her beyond the haze of my excitement. She was exactly what I had expected immortal, magical beings to look like. She was tall and slender, with no small amount of muscle under her medieval-style dress. Her skin was the colour of rich earth and her hair was a shade of white you saw in television. Her face was sharp and solemn, and her eyes shone an iridescent blue. She was beautiful. Inhumanly beautiful. I felt my knees wobbling and the purely male part of my brain sat up to attention.

  Mercy moved forwards until she was standing before the chair opposite my desk. She appraised me a moment, eyes piercing. Then, moving more gracefully than most professional dancers, she sat.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” I said, sitting as well. Yolanda hovered in the background, shifting from foot to foot and looking extremely uncomfortable. I didn’t know why. “So, you work with Death?”

  “I…contract with him as the occasion calls for it,” Mercy said. Her voice was like a whisper of silk over sin and I shivered. “My primary work is with the Order of Silence.”

  “Er…the Order of Silence?” I asked.

  “It is not for you to know, mortal, no matter your role here,” Mercy sniffed. I swallowed before I started salivating. Part of me wondered if I should be so eager to talk to this woman, if perhaps there weren’t something else going on. That part was really, really quiet.

  “Okay,” I agreed readily. Perhaps too readily, given my need for information and my lack of understanding about this new world, but there was plenty of time for me to poke around later. “So, what do you do for Death?”

  She raised her chin, revealing the smooth lines of her neck. “I am Mercy.”

  “It’s a beautiful name,” I agreed. She frowned, the movement not marring her looks at all.

  “You do not understand,” she scoffed. Yolanda widened her eyes at me and tried to make some sort of gesture with her hands. I stared at her for a moment, understanding something like “bird flies around and dies.” I never was very good at charades. I blinked twice, pushed my glasses up my nose and turned back to my conversation with Mercy.

  Mercy flicked her eyes to mine and held my stare. The blue seemed to shift colour ever so slightly, the more I looked at it. Each shift was slight, subtle, enough to keep me engrossed. It was mesmerising at first, then a pressure started building behind my eyes. The shades of blue shifted faster, making my head pound as my brain tried to compensate. Nausea built in my stomach. I tried to move away, tried to blink, speak, anything, but I was completely frozen. And I could feel myself needing to beg for release. If I didn’t, I would surely endure more pain than I had ever endured before. I would break; nothing would be left of me but a shell.

  Mercy blinked and curled her lip, disdainful. The gaze broke and I sucked in a deep breath, my eyes watering.

  “I am Mercy,” she repeated. “It is not my name, human. It is everything I embody.”

  I managed to swallow down a whimper, but barely. Instead, I sat back in my chair and folded my hands in my lap to keep from trembling. I looked at Yolanda in desperation, hoping that she would have some sort of explanation. The troll woman shuffled forwards, dipping her head respectfully to Mercy as she came within the woman’s line of sight.

  “She is Death’s swiftest,” Yolanda said, keeping her eyes fixed firmly on the floor.

  “Swiftest what?” I asked. My voice came out in a sort of squeak.

  “Assassin,” Mercy said. Her voice held the impersonal, emotionless tones you would expect of a stranger passing you in the street. My panting attraction and lust shrivelled up, only to be replaced by a healthy dose of fear.

  “I…ah, I see,” I said. Mercy raised her eyebrows and blinked slowly. “Death can’t do all the work, I suppose.”

  Mercy coughed out a small laugh. I could see the disdain on her features. “Foolish human, Death does not kill.”

  Maybe it’s just the fact that I was human and completely new to this situation, but I was a bit stunned by this revelation. “Uh, what? He’s Death! Of course he kills.”

  “No. Mortals kill. Disease kills. I kill. We are tangible. We can affect the world, bring about change,” Mercy explained slowly, like I was a child. At this point, I was grateful for any help I could get. “Death is an act. An event. A facilitator.”

  I nodded. I reached for my keyboard, typing out my notes furiously. Mercy watched with that same disdain. “And that’s why he hires you.”

  “—and me!” a new voice called. A person, just as stunningly beautiful as Mercy, appeared in the doorway. Where Mercy was cold and distant, this man was effusive and almost absurdly cheerful. His colouring was almost the opposite of Mercy’s, too, with pale skin and dark brown hair. And, unlike her medieval style of dress, he wore the latest style: slim slacks, a white t-shirt and scarf over that, draped artistically across his shoulders. The odd thing, though, was that where Mercy had eyes that nearly glowed, this man wore a ragged, faded blindfold over his eyes.

  “You started without me,” he complained, striding in with the same grace as Mercy. He paused beside her chair and gestured to the one in the corner. With a burst of air, it flew over to him and settled down. There was no hint that he couldn’t see because of the blindfold.

  Yolanda shifted farther away from the pair of them and muttered something under her breath. “What?” I asked and she blushed. It was an interesting thing to see on a troll. Her cheeks turned a bright shade of green and if she had been remotely human, I would have thought she was going to be ill.

  “Don’t worry,” the newcomer said, flicking his hand dismissively. “Trolls and aurai don’t often get along.”

 
“Aurai?” I was beginning to feel like a child thrust into a college astrophysics class.

  “Air spirits. Not quite angel-class, but more than mere faeries,” the stranger smiled. He leaned forwards and extended his hand. “I’m Justice.”

  That explained the blindfold.

  “Ah, Cal,” I said, shaking his hand. His skin was like ice, and tingled with electricity. I tried to discreetly shake my hand under cover of my desk, but I’m fairly certain I failed. “You…you’re an assassin too? With the, what is it, Order of Silence?”

  Justice threw back his head and laughed. Mercy regarded him with something akin to the look usually reserved for severely decayed bodies. It was the most emotion I had seen from her since our meeting. And no less terrifying. “The Order? Please. Those superstitious old bats are so boring. The only good thing about them is dear Mercy here.”

  “You disrespect the oldest keepers of Rituali in Elsewhere!” Mercy said, her voice heated even if her face didn’t show it. Justice made a noise in the back of his throat.

  “If you must know, Cal, I don’t attach myself to anyone. I work for Death occasionally, but sometimes I work in the legal system. I float around, mostly. Meting out people’s just desserts.” He flashed his teeth in a predatory smile. I decided that of the two, Mercy was probably my favourite. Justice scared the living daylights out of me.

  “Oh, ah, how interesting,” I said politely. Marketing, Cal. Public relations. You must keep on these people’s good side. If they had one. “So, I asked you here to get a sense of Death. You know he brought me on to be his marketing agent. And to do that, I need to know what he’s like. Er, you know.”

  Both Mercy and Justice gaped at me. Mercy stared with her eyes boring into me and Justice just looked like a fish. “You want to know what Death is like…?” Mercy said slowly, as if trying to confirm what I was saying. As though the words coming out of my mouth were absolutely insane.