Sins of the Soul

It had taken him a very long time to learn to cage his demons.

All the souls he’d claimed. The memories he’d buried. The parents who’d raised him, the sisters who’d loved him, gone so long he could only remember their features if he pulled out the faded miniatures he’d found in the back of a curio shop after years of searching. They were there with him now, looking at him with such hate and loathing.

And then they fell away, one by one.

Time had no meaning. He only knew that there was no bottom to this endless well. His body tumbled and turned in air that wasn’t air. No gravity. No resistance. Water. He was in water so cold it should have been solid ice.

Clenching his fingers, he tried to feel Naphré’s hand in his. But he felt nothing, not even his own fingers curling against his palms.

Did he have her? She was his anchor, his buoy.

“Naphré!” A scream that echoed to the vast and infinite dome of the black sky. A scream that was heard only in his own mind as the water slammed them against rock—was that the boulder they hit?—and she was torn away. Lost.

And then he was alone. Alone with the promise of death. Once, he would have reached for it, welcomed its kiss like a lover. Once, he had believed it was all he deserved.

“Naphré!” Her name echoed back at him again and again, until the sound coalesced with the roaring of the water.

A river.

He had to find her. She could drown. She could die. And if she died in Izanami’s realm she would be lost to him.

Fear suddenly became part of the journey. He didn’t want to lose her. He’d only just found her.

Naphré.

Again, he lost all sense of time. He knew it passed because the deep ache that warned him he needed a sugar hit was coming on him, doubling him over. Pain, sharp and bright. In his cells.

In his heart.

The pain of memories surging at him like a swarm of locusts. The face of the woman he had thought was his mother, her eyes rheumy, her skin parchment-thin and folded in neat wrinkles at her neck and chin. She smiled at him and beckoned him near, then she rested her hand on his head and said, “You are a fine gentleman, my Alastor. Remember that in the years to come. You are your father’s son and heir.”

His father’s son? Undoubtedly.

But not the father she referred to. Not his heir.

He was son to another. Heir to a different sort of title entirely. Killer. Monster. Soul reaper.

And he was truly a monster, because he reveled in his new role.

How was he to reconcile the monster with the man?

More images. Dead whores in St. Giles. Dead sailors in the Rookery. But not by his hand.

“Father, why have you forsaken me?”

His human father. An old man when Alastor was yet in swaddling. Still, Alastor had loved him, loved them both, the elderly people he thought were his parents. Loved the sisters who had helped raise him, so much older than he, with children of their own.

And he wasn’t about to love again. Not ever. Never. Except his brothers.

Again, he tumbled, again and again, more memories flashing. Lokan laughing. Lokan dead. No body for them to hold. Only his blood soaking the ground, and the mark of the Asetian Guard burned there.

Naphré.

Again, he flexed his fingers and this time he felt them, felt his nails dig into his palms.

And knew with soul-searing certainty that he hadn’t imagined it. He’d lost her somewhere along the way.

He couldn’t lose her. She was his salvation.

The second the thought formed he thrust it away.

There was no such thing as salvation. There was only what he was. Sutekh’s son. Sutekh’s minion. Sutekh’s soul reaper for eternity.

His thoughts were wandering to dangerous places. He needed a sugar hit and he needed it now. Forcing himself to move through what felt like setting concrete, he got his hand into his pocket and closed his fingers around a candy. He focused only on that, the hard little shape of it, and somehow he removed the wrapper. He felt the familiar shape of it and smelled English toffee caramel. The candy was his own, brought with him from Topworld, safe to eat. Somehow, he got it into his mouth and the sugar hit him.

He closed his eyes. Did he sleep? Or was it only a blink?

And then two red lights gleamed in the utter blackness. Which was odd in itself because he could see as well in the dark as the light, but he couldn’t see a bloody thing here.

Except those two lights.

No, not lights. Eyes. Red eyes, glowing like coals. A flash of teeth so white they shot off a glare. Sutekh. Come for him. Alastor saw him as a hellfire demon, though Sutekh had worn the guise of a man the day he came for his son. The day he blew in like a storm and ripped him from everything he knew, showed him that he wasn’t the good son, the gentleman his parents had raised. He was a monster, a demon in his own right.

How many years until he stopped seeing himself that way?