The Netherworlds: Curse of Fate (Book 1)

The Pickpocket (part 2)

Our hero was strapped to a stainless steel slab in a dank basement. When he tilted his head back he could see the old wooden stairs leading to the floor above them.

"What is your name?" asked the towering man in the white suit.

Our hero had to think for a moment before he answered, strangely, as if only just remembering it himself. "Damien." The creepy old lady he had met in the swamp had told him his name was, "Damien Warrick Parker." The way he said his name- it was as if he was saying it for the first time.

"And where did you come from?"

"I come from the water," he sang, then quickly corrected, "the swamp."

"The swamp," The man in the white suit echoed in disbelief.

"Yes!" Damien protested Death's questioning and patronizing tone.

"And why were you in the swamp?"

The swamp witch had told him that when she had found him, he had just survived a terrible accident. His brows pulled together, "I don't know. I woke up there."

The creepy witch had healed him, and had told him it was time for him to leave the swamp.

"Where were you before the swamp?"

He had no recollection of where he had been before. "I don't remember."

"I find that hard to believe, thief. Do you know where you are now?"

He had spent days wandering from town to town, sleeping in abandoned houses and shacks until he found other children like him- lost, and hungry, and wandering. They had made homes in the sewers and begged for money when they weren't picking pockets and digging in dumpsters. The demons in that world ate strange food.

Damien rolled his eyes. "Enlighten me."

At this blatant disrespect, Thanatos laughed. It was further proof the boy was not a boy, "The Netherworlds. My world."

"Oh," Damien quipped, "you're the douche bag on the front page of the papers?"

"Yes," Death snarled, "That douche bag is me. I am Death, and I am the ending of all things, and you, Mr. Parker, have no ending. I don't believe it is a coincidence that you happened to be the one to steal something very important from me. Do you think it is a coincidence?"

"The universe is never so lazy." Damien sighed as if he had said that line a million times.

"My sentiments exactly... The Fates sent you."

Damien wrinkled his nose, "Huh? You mean like the goddesses, the Moirai?"

"Yes. Exactly. You apparently know nothing else, but you somehow know who the Fates are?" Death scoffed.

Damien offered unconvincingly, "Amnesia can be selective?"

Death gave him a condescending hmph, and began to move up the table, trailing his long white fingers along the stainless steel.

The metal slab on which he was laying became cold as Death faded from view. He began to shiver uncontrollably, and a familiar but unnamable fear sank into his bones.

Damien began to tug at the restraints as an inner voice shushed and cooed him, and another one said Hey, look at me.

His heart slamming against his rib cage, he tilted his head back to see the blond man with mismatched eyes looking down at him. The blue and green eyes were lifeless and cold. Damien looked through them, and past them, and saw nothing. He saw the dark nothingness of lifelessness after death.

Thanatos put his hands flat on the table on either side of our hero's head.

Here we go...

Damien steadied the tempest in his chest.

"Let's take a quick peek, and see what's going on inside that head of yours."

Death put all ten fingers on the sides of Damien's head. He wiggled through the hair until his fingernails scraped the boy's scalp. His touch turned our hero's blood to ice.

That cold second passed like a decade in a grave.

Don't scream, said the distant voice in Damien's mind.

Then ten icey fingers penetrated into his brain like spikes.

And he screamed.