Off Track

Part 8: Death

I inhaled hard from my cigarette at the doors of the station and then crushed the damn thing under my heel. I side-eyed Picker next to me. I wouldn't have had to even deal with that puddinghead and his mucus in the first place if I'd just...behaved.

But no, I had misbehaved again, and now I was grounded. Over two-thousand years old, and yes, I was grounded.

Literally. As in, I couldn't fly. I was the freaking Grim Reaper. By nature I had to collect souls, be evil, sabotage things, and ding-dong ditch old people. Let me tell you, that took a whole lot of flying.

And here I was instead. A train. A freaking train. Me, taking a train! When was the last time an angel, fallen or not, took a train to get from one place to another? Never. Never, was the answer.

This was so embarrassing.

I shouldered the door into the train station and stalked inside. The PA system was score music to the horror film I'd walked into, announcing different trains arriving, echoing off the high, arched, glass ceiling above. I ignored the cheerful voice and honed in on a flashing board ahead.

I had a list in my pocket. It told me which souls I had to collect within the next couple of hours. I eeny meenie miney mo'd which train I'd get on. Mixed it up a little. There had to be at least one dying human to eat in every one of those towns. My gaze settled on the train towards Edgewood on the flashing board and an odd sensation crawled up the back of my neck.

That was when I knew something bad was about to happen on the train to Edgewood.

I glanced at the ticket line.

"Pass," I muttered.

Please. I'd get on without a ticket. The last time I tried to wait in a line, it was at a fast-food place, and, well, let's just say I "lost my temper" and murdered a few people.

It happens!

At six foot five, I towered over everyone in the station, who mostly moved around like chickens with their heads chopped off. Others moved so slowly that I had to plow through them. Talking, trains rolling to a stop and picking up, yapping on phones, and babies crying. There was too much noise. Made me wish I'd bought headphones like the sloth with the black hair chugging along in front of me.

A bottomless hunger for souls curled in my stomach and it was like I was walking through a food store. Although caffeine and alcohol didn't affect my body the way it affected humans because of my fast metabolism for human drinks and food, I decided to get coffee to try to somewhat curb my growing appetite.

I waited irritably in line and shifted my weight from one heavy combat boot to the other. Suddenly, my tongue rubbed against a small piece of food trapped in one of my fangs. Growling, I casually took out a container of floss from my cloak, coiled it around my gloved finger, and began to floss.

I heard a sniff. My attention swung down to a little girl with pigtails. She clung to her mother's leg, gawking up at me as if I were a skyscraper monster, with these huge green eyes that threatened to explode with waterworks at any moment. I realized that she could see my fangs and promptly shut my mouth on the floss, yanking the wax string from my closed lips in one quick pull.

On a good day, kids and I got along. They were cute and funny. Most kids could see my identity because they were more susceptible to magic, whereas adults could only see me if they were about to die. I tended to spare kid's souls more frequently than I did adults. Why? Because I could. Anyway, Faith had been one of those young souls I'd spared. This little girl actually reminded me of her when she was a little twerp.

I lifted my hand and gave the little girl a small wave.

She started wailing. I rolled my eyes and decided the coffee shop wasn't a good idea after all. Before I exited the coffee shop, I locked eyes with someone else. The guy with the black eyes and the headphones, who I'd been walking behind before, had been staring at me during my entire encounter with the little girl.

What the hell are you looking at?

I parked myself in the area where train six would hopefully soon appear, daring anyone to stand near me with my body language. I glared at a no smoking sign ahead of me and cupped my hand near my cigarette to light it. As I lit up, the hair at the nape of my neck prickled.

Besides my heightened sense of smell, taste, and hearing, I was in tune with a couple of senses that humans weren't. That feeling at the back of my neck? That was the universe telling me someone was about to push up daisies. Either that, or that something horrible was about to happen.

I couldn't help but smirk. Maybe the train ride to Edgewood wouldn't be as much of a snorefest as I predicted it would be.

I narrowed in on a girl wearing a skirt, blouse, and heels a ways ahead of me. She was five-foot-seven, seventeen, and fidgety. I think I'd winked at her earlier for staring at me (I had that effect on people) and successfully freaked her out.

Keeley. That was her name. Her thoughts were scrambled and racing, mostly fluffy, dramatic stuff about her boyfriend. Pass. Anyway, something about her reminded me of Faith, just like the little girl in the coffee line. The softness in this chick's face was somewhat like Faith's, I decided.

Get your shit together, I thought to myself. Stop thinking about Faith. Emotions are overrated.

"Excuse me," Keeley said to an older man, snapping me from my thoughts. She'd spoken in a real fidgety way that gave me secondhand embarrassment. "I'm trying to get to Edgewood."

Edgewood. Interesting, the girl was going to the same location I was. Coincidence, convenient, or a strange fate?

The man answered her dismissively and that caught my attention. Anger radiated from him like infrared, and he only hid it marginally from the girl. The man didn't look too old for a Rosetta stone tablet but had wrinkles that told time like circles in the middle of a tree trunk. Deeply rooted between his unkempt eyebrows was a tight frown.

His jacket was too small and made him look stiff, like he were in pain or favoring a sore muscle. Something was off about this guy and I would find out. I entered his thoughts, but was soon too distracted to listen to them by a series of unfortunate events. First, there was a huge group of sorority girls that had begun to squeal about some electric music concert as they passed by, second, the intercom had gotten marginally louder and listed delayed trains, and lastly, there was an increase in chattering amongst nuisance humans as they swarmed towards an arriving train. All of these noises combined momentarily disturbed my focus on the old man.

I tore myself from the overwhelming wave of noises. The older man, who I'd pinpointed as Frank, had lifted himself from his bench and was hobbling away, and the girl, Keeley, was already gone. Before I'd been torn from the old man's mind, I'd discovered something that began to explain that foreboding sensation I felt earlier.

Frank was going to kill someone on train six to Edgewood.