IMMORTAL REMAINS - A TIM REAPER NOVEL

Chapter 1

1919

It is a terrible thing to watch a child die. It is worse still when you carry the secret knowledge that a child's death is your fault.

I observed the scene around the little boy's bedside. It should have been easy for me as I had witnessed the conclusion of a life lived countless times in the past. This particular scene should have been no different than what happened in millions of hospitals and homes around the globe at all hours, every day and night. The dying time; a unit measured by fever and failing organs and seemingly endless final moments, each attuned to a fate set out by powers greater than mine from the moment of birth.

The grieving parents wore linen face masks as they hovered over the dying child whose face resembled some ghastly china doll. He might as well have been made of porcelain, because the flu hit hard and fast, smashing its way through his immune system, shattering any hope of a future into a million tiny shards. He was only nine years old and his body betrayed him. Disease kicked his hopes and dreams to the gutter. It stabbed his mother in the abdomen, in the very womb from which he emerged only nine short years ago, and she would never be the same. She would blame herself until the day one of my kind comes to claim her. The loss of her only child would poison her mind, her life and her marriage until such a point her husband leaves her for another less guilt-ridden woman because that is how this particular grieving family would play itself out.

I caused this.

These final seconds, like countless others occurring at the same moment only divided by human constructs like time and faith, is overseen by those who facilitate the natural order of things. Like me, we passively watch life's end unfold until our shadow-like hands gently brush the collective faces of our intended and we whisper the words of timeless, ageless and limitless ending.

"Come with me," I whispered in the little boy's ear as I brushed against his clammy cheek.

He let out a sudden sharp gasp; a gulp of air from a drowning soul. A full life was his birthright and I took it from him. I snatched it away. He emitted a last desperate breath and then my intended slowly exhaled; that final breath leaving his lungs like the air being slowly released from a balloon. His heart stopped beating within a microsecond and that's when tears began to flow.

This was the start of my punishment. The little boy was to be the last soul I would ever claim. There must have been some kind of symbolism in it having been a child, though I didn't have a freaking clue what meaning could ever be drawn from what I had just done.

His lifeless eyes stared up at the ceiling, they looked through it actually. And it was in the very next moment I felt his soul emerge from the same body that once skated on the frozen edges of the lake with his pals. The child's mother let out a haunted, painful wail as she drove her face into her dead child's now motionless chest and sobbed.

The flickering image of the boy stood before his mother and reached out to her; his near translucent hand passing through her flesh. The Angel of Death and Transformation appeared a second or so later – a rarity because he never showed up at death side, that's always a reaper's job. He fired a contemptuous glare my way and then his features softened as he knelt before the visage of the dead boy.

"Take my hand, child," Ezekiel said in a voice so filled with tenderness I couldn't believe this was the same Holy being that unleashed hell on earth in Egypt nearly three thousand years ago.

The boy reached out and the moment his hand touched Ezekiel's, Holy light filled the room. A host of angels sang His praise and the light diminished until there was only a crying mother hugging her dead child's body as the grief-stricken father looked on.