Death seated at her kitchen table, made a sweeping gesture. “Go right ahead. If you do not mind, I will wait for you here.”
Jules nodded absently and then headed for her room to change. Once there she pulled off her shirt and wiped herself quickly with a rag in the bathroom, getting the last bits of blood off of her skin. She couldn’t resist looking at herself in the mirror, despite her haste; there wasn’t even a scar on her neck though her body seemed to be covered with hideous bruises. Bruises?
Stripped and redressed, she balled the shirt she’d been wearing tightly inside of the much less obviously bloody jeans and shoved the whole ball into her bedroom trash. Then trooped back to the kitchen, just as the water started to boil.
Jules rushed for the stove, moving the water off the heat and turning it off. Trying not to look at her waiting Death; who, she’d noticed in passing as she entered, had removed her hood.
“I’m not dead am I?”
“No.”
She couldn’t help but smile triumphantly as she gathered sugar, lemon, honey and tea bags onto a tray along with the two steaming mugs of water. Anything to keep from turning around and having a companionable cup with the thing that was sitting behind her; it might not be Death, but whatever it was it most certainly wasn’t human.
“Not that I’m not ecstatic with joy about that. But why aren’t I dead?”
Tray laden she turned, eyes on the cups, concentrating perhaps a bit too hard on keeping the water in them from sloshing out. Jules heard it sigh as she placed the tray down and started taking things off of it.
“In truth Ms. Harper I do not know.”
Finally, Jules took the last mug off the tray and set it before her guest. She hadn’t realized she was still grinning like a fool till she felt it leave her face as her eyes watched that pale, pale hand grasp the handle and traveled up the arm slowly to look on their face.
No one ever told her Death would be this beautiful.
Long locks of pure white pooled over her shoulders and gather gleaming and pristine as new fallen snow in her hood. Skin so pale, but kissed with the most delicate hints of pink. A face so smooth, elegant and serene it could have come fresh from some artist’s bench. Beautiful indeed and surreal, would even be disturbingly creepy – if it wasn’t for the eyes. Large, expressive and hazel, those eyes were warm and full of a life the rest of her seemed untouched by, they warmed her features immeasurably.
“Tell me, Ms. Harper. What do you see?”
The question caught her off guard and recalled her back to the tasks at hand. Namely, making her cup of tea, she stirred in lemon and honey. “I see someone that’s not going to freak my Daddy out when he comes home from turning over the North field, though he might fall all over himself over you.” Jules found herself winking reassuringly at Death. What a difference a pretty face makes. “Do you have a name?”
Death blinked and Jules noted that despite that fall of white hair her eyelashes were black. “You are the second person to have asked me that today Ms. Harper.”
“Call me Jules, will yah? Ms Harper feels way too formal for some reason, it’s creeping me out.”
“Jules then, I suppose you could call me Mitei.” She took another sip of tea, “I am sorry, but I can not explain why you are not dead right now.”
Well, she cuts right into it don’t she? And here I was thinking we were going to have a nice companionable cup of tea first. Jules sipped her own cup thoughtfully.
“Are you really Death, Mitei? The Death?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look entirely human”
“I am not human at all.”
“Then what are you? Is death a species? Are there others?”
Mitei laughed. A warm rich sound that filled the cozy little kitchen and chased the last of the chill from Jules’ bones. “If I have a species it is - unknown - to me. There are none like me. However there are ‘others’ of a sort.”
“What sort?”
Mitei considered a moment, her eyes reflective as she sipped her tea, “perhaps you should come to my office and find out. Where are we?”
“Derry Township, Pennsylvania.”
“Here,” Mitei reached into her robes and pulled forth a small white card. “Please drop by this office. I will answer as many of your questions as I am I able then.”
Mitei stood and Jules watched as her hood rose of its own will and shadows engulfed that shockingly pretty face. Again Mitei was nothing more than a tall figure hooded and robed in a manner that should have seemed out of place in this age, but didn’t.
“I think I will be going now Ms. Harper. It was a – rare – pleasure to meet you.”
“It’s Jules –“ But it was too late, Mitei took a step and vanished before her foot could even touch the floor.
***
Leo had had more than enough. He started to roll out of the hospital bed but the upraised metal sides were in the way. It only took him a moment to find the switch that lowered them but the delay irritated him even more.
Three days! The hospital had kept him an extra three days! His bare feet thumped onto the cold linoleum and he began pulling instruments off of his fingers and chest; they had at least stopped the intravenous drip but had refused to release him. His recovery was too fast to be explained, they had wanted to keep him longer for observation - but all he wanted was to get out of the cold white room that they’d shoved him into and go home.
Four days since he’d met Death and given her a name. Four days since Mitei had healed him and three days since he was supposed to walk into her Los Angeles office. Moving quickly Leo found the clothes they’d fetched for him from his condo and climbing into them. There was a new beeping noise added to the cacophony of the equipment he’d grown so used to over the course of the week and Leo was certain it was summoning nurses and doctors to dissuade him from leaving.
Leo pulled on his coat and managed to be heading around the corner when they descended on his room. Zipping the coat, he began following the signs for the stairs; the last thing he wanted was to get waylaid while waiting for the elevator, though he reconsidered when he realized what floor he was on. Sixty-two flights of stairs seemed to be a bit much to ask of himself after his long period of enforced bed rest. So he took the stairs down only a couple of flights before ducking back onto the floor and trying to follow the signs back to the elevators.
Why is every hospital laid out like a maze, he wondered as he turned into yet another hidden side hallway and finally located the elevator. He must have found one of the less used elevators because this one was completely empty; likewise the side corridor that it dumped him into and he was able to slip out into the night without anyone remarking on his departure, though he was forced to walk around to the main entrance to find a cab.
Leo settled into the backseat and tried not to think about the cost of the ride let alone his hospital bills. Though he was pretty sure that his insurance covered it and to think how he’d laughed when he first saw that the insurance covered gunshot and stab wounds. Despite the dire forecasts of his classmates and professors he hadn’t really believed that there was a likelihood of being stabbed by a student in his school. He smiled to himself, he’d been right after all; he hadn’t been stabbed by one of his irate students. He’d been shot by someone else while one of his students had been involved in a gang war.
Suddenly tired, he placed his head in his hands, he didn’t want to think about work. Not a single colleague had shown up at the hospital. Despite the fact that they must have known that he was in stable condition when he had called to let the department head know he wouldn’t be in for a while, despite her carefully sympathetic tones and polite inquiries into the nature of his illness he hadn’t received one get well card, or even a brief phone call. He sighed into his hands, resolving to take some serious time off before calling them again about his recovery.
“Mr. this the place?”
Leo raised his head and blinked in the sud
den light of his complex, “yeah. How much do I owe yah?”
The cabbie tapped the meter and Leo paid the man. He must have spent too much time gazing at the complex because the guy drove away without giving him change, or maybe he thought it was his tip. Leo ran a hand through his unruly hair and headed for home.
***
Mitei watched Leo move up the front walk of a small condo from beneath the spreading branches of a magnolia tree. Hands thrust deep in the pockets of the suit jacket she was wearing this evening, hazel eyes glued to his retreating figure she noted that he was almost as tall as the form she’d been trapped into. As he paused at the door she pulled pale hands from her pockets and gazed at them in the moonlight. They were elegant, graceful and pretty damned hard to get rid of.
Her head rose at the sound of clinking keys, she watched Leo find the right one and fit it to the door lock, he hesitated in the act of turning the key and Mitei took a step towards him - vanishing before her form cleared the shadows of the magnolia.
***
Leo gazed into the darkness of the complex. For a moment he had thought he’d seen a tall figure moving beneath his neighbor’s magnolia but as he stared into the darkness nothing moved, only his lonely mind playing tricks on him.
Usually when he returned home he was flooded with a sense of peace and wellbeing. He’d carefully furnished the place according to feng shui principals himself, trying for just that reassuring feeling. But when he opened the door and heard the money chimes ring on his entrance, heard the distant but constant sound of running water, he didn’t find it peaceful. Leo’s home had never been particularly inviting, he’d been drawn to the simplistic and spare designs of minimalism. Up until the moment when he opened the door after his long hospital stay the clean lines had always been soothing. Today everything felt cold.
He pulled off his light jacket and hung it in the entranceway closet before turning on the light. Warm yellow light poured into the entranceway from the raised living room. He cast off his shoes and ascended the stairs noticing for the first time how his sock clad feet seemed to slip a bit upon the polished wooden steps. The living room felt a good deal more inviting thanks to the soft yellow light of a few lamps but one glance at the low sofa turned him towards a second flight of stairs and the bedroom. He didn’t feel in the mood to sit there this evening, with a cup of tea and a good book or more likely, with the dawning realization that he had somehow isolated himself.
Leo began unbuttoning his shirt as he ascended the stairs and let it fall carelessly behind him. There was no one to see or care how messily he kept his home, so why was it he had bothered to keep it so clean? Leo’s mind wandered back over the years trying to remember what had happened to his friends. He’d had them once, good ones, bad ones but he’d had them and any one of them would have come to see him in the hospital – except, except, for some reason, they had all fallen away, vanished like melting snow over the years. Oh - Marda had moved to New York and Scott had decided to pursue a career as a pastor but none of that explained the vast distance that had grown up between them seemingly overnight.
A spray of ice cold water in his face jarred him from his musings. For the next few moments Leo lost himself in sputtering curses and fumbling at the taps, leveling out the temperature. Then he focused willfully on showering, blanking his mind and letting the familiar ritual of bathing himself sooth away some of the questions. He lingered with his head beneath the spray hesitant to leave the blanketing warmth of the shower.
Eventually the hot water began to taper off and the encroaching chill forced his hand. He toweled off briskly and stepped from the bathroom in the first breath of humid air rubbing at his damp and dripping curls with the towel.
***
Mitei paced. The room was not large, about ten paces by ten paces it was not terribly small either. Sparsely furnished, featuring mainly a low platform bed on her right, now left, now right again, two matching bedside tables and a decorative screen along one corner. The space was actually rather nice, though spare, a lamp on one of the tables gave off a soft light and several candles arranged on the other lent the room a soothing scent, the only sounds being Mitei’s pacing and the distant patter of a shower in the connecting bathroom.
Mitei approached the bed; it was swaddled in white linens and slightly lumpy despite being carefully made. A questioning poke revealed the feather mattress she had suspected. With a sigh she lowered herself to the bed and slipped her feet out of the expensive Italian shoes, tucking them beneath her body. All the pacing had not activated the Path as she had hoped and real Italian shoes are not in the least bit comfortable. With a casual gesture Mitei pulled the List from the air and unrolled it, scanning it carefully in the golden light. Nothing had changed since she had first found herself in this room; the List was still completely blank. With a clench of her fist she crushed the scroll; things like this never happen, she thought as she stared at the crushed parchment.
Originally when Mitei had started Death Incorporated it had become obvious to her that she would need to alter the Path (that invisible, undeniable and unstoppable force that brought her to the dying with each step) in order to include the corporate office. Mitei had only needed to alter it long enough to pass along the appointments to the employees and then later, as the effects of finally having assistance had begun, to return her to one of the offices when there was free time.
Always to an office, places as close to a home as Mitei had ever had. Each staffed with a secretary, who for whatever reason, seemed to enjoy fussing over her and making the chilly and imposing spaces homey during her rare breaks. Altering the Path had not been at all easy and she was still unsure how she had finally accomplished the task but in the end had managed to get the desired effects and for more than three hundred years, Mitei had not found herself somewhere completely unfamiliar during free time.
At least that was the way things had worked until she found herself in someone’s bedroom. Worse yet, that person was home, in the shower, and not on the List! Mitei hurled the List away from herself and did not bother noting its’ disappearance in midair, focusing instead on the new spectacle of her own pale flesh. Raising both hands to eye level she gazed at their delicate beauty. The hands were nice, pale and lovely but they were not her hands. Not that she had ever really had a body before; she had always been given a solid form by each of the dying, nor had she had much of a preference for one form or another. Excepting when at the office with the human workers for whom Mitei had learned to control her form, choosing most often the appearance of a rather ordinary mousey woman, polished only with money and power.
Now, trapped in the form that Leo Kaylor had given her, Mitei found she was incapable of changing form at will. At first she had not tried too hard, after all there were not any humans on the List and the rest of the planet did not really care what she looked like. Eventually, however, the attitudes in the offices had started to shift, the workers had started to shrink away or stare and Mitei, assuming that the drain of the strange events that had originally triggered the troubles her inability of changing form had simply been a symptom of had long worn off; had decided to return to her normal appearance. Disturbed by the lack of results more than she had wanted the offices to know, Mitei had taken to wearing the hooded robe to all the meetings.
Mitei flopped back onto the bed, wallowing in the enfolding comfort of the soft feathery goodness. Things were most certainly different in the new body; after the secretaries had finally managed to impress upon her the need to take pleasure in the world around her, Mitei had begun to partake of a few of the things that they had suggested, coffee, chocolate, a warm bath and so on. Everything had been nice, each helping to awaken her to the world of sensation that the mortals around her wallowed in with every breath. However until she had been trapped in this form everything had seemed somewhat ridiculous, though seeing her partake of a cup of coffee or a chocolate treat had helped to ease the employees in her presence. After she had spe
nt a few hours running around in new Italian shoes on tender new feet Mitei had found whole worlds of new comfort in the warm bath Kathleen, the secretary at the London office, had insisted on drawing for her.
Finally, the soft sounds of the shower stopped and Mitei rolled to one side and faced the bathroom door. Time to find out what exactly is going on.
***
Leo wrapped a towel about his waist and stepped into his bedroom; eyes misted with steam from the shower he made his way to the corner closet behind the screen by memory rather than site and began rummaging in the untidy pile of clean clothes hidden by the screen. Selecting a pair of boxers, he shimmied into them one handed as the other toweled some of the heavy moisture out of his hair and noted the reflection in the full length mirror on the closet door. Reaching up Leo probed around the fresh scar on his chest, lumpy with the soft pink color of new flesh and the wince of pain that probing around it caused him proved its tender quality. Almost completely healed excepting the sensitivity and the small tares where the staples had been holding the wound together before Mitei had healed him. Looking at the scar was a reminder of how close he had come to dying four days ago.
Death had been in the room that day, literally, Leo shuddered as he stepped out from behind the screen, noting the reclining female form on his bed.
“Ah - Mr. Kaylor.”
“Hello Mitei, this is definitely an - unexpected - surprise.” Leo said, ducking quickly back behind the screen and selecting a pair of jeans at random from the pile, if Death had come for him again he intended to go to it in pants this time, “uh, am I dying again?”
“No, Mr. Kaylor. Though I am here to see you, I suppose.” Mitei’s voice seemed vaguely amused as Leo zipped and buttoned the jeans.
“Well then,” he stepped out from behind the screen and slung the wet towel over it, spreading it carefully so it would dry without getting his clothing moldy, he could hang it up properly in the bathroom later, after his guest had left. “I suppose such a happy event of my not immediate death deserves a drink.” He considered a moment, “though it’s probably not a good idea for me to be drinking yet, so how about coffee?”