Katie And The Reaper (A Post-Apocalyptic Romance)

Chapter 2 - Katie age 15

Medical was in a house that had once been a retirement home.

Asleep in a death coma that didn't require any care or help, the reaper lay forgotten in a patient room used to store random things: a broken bed, shelves, lamps that had no current use. Katie broke into the room with a screwdriver, leaving the door hanging awkwardly. No time to be subtle about it. She angled the door closed behind her as best she could. Medical was empty, and no one patrolled the halls, but she didn't want to risk her flashlight drawing anyone's attention either.

He was on a special hospital bed, one for big patients. His legs still came off the end of it, dressed in his weird black leather-ish rock star pants and boots, with shifter strong chains connecting him to the bed. A thick belt over his thighs, waist, and chest strapped his big body to the bed. Plus cuffs and chains in wrapped tight in two places on his arms. Precautionary measures such as this against the ageless, daunting predator made people feel good, but Katie suspected it was all useless.

It was all Katie's fault. He had saved her from a set of mages, receiving a blow to the head that left him incapacitated. Stupidly, she'd planned to trade with them for books and information. The mages had seen her and taken a liking to her. Able to use gifted humans like herself as their own special brand of life-extending battery. Using a crew of reinforcements, the mages attacked him while hiding behind the iron and steel shields conveniently scattered around the junkyard of a meeting place. He'd only taken out the three in the open. Since he'd conveniently slumped unconscious in the truck she was driving she'd brought him home.

His coma made him appear dead. His heart wasn't beating. There was no brain activity. He looked like a freshly dead man. Well, not human. But definitely male. His injuries, a dent to his head, a couple of holes in his chest, had healed in the first week. They didn't gape, raw and ugly, but lordy, he was still such a mess when Katie pulled off the canvas sheet to look at him. No one had washed him. No bandages. Instead, he'd gone to medical, been, chained to a bed, stuck in a storage room. Ignored.

He gave off no life signs that anyone could see. Not any of the other's in Reservation, not her mom, not the two actual medical nurses. They didn't feel life in him, because he was hiding it. Even when he was upright, he didn't exude the same life-energy as other creatures. Katie saw and felt his life sign as a man-sized cold spot throbbing with power. That hadn't changed. He was still the same walking negative, existing in a force-field of panty-pooping fear compulsion. Get too near, and you were crapping your underwear, falling to your knees, pretty much crippled with fear. He could pull it back a bit, that fear shield, draw it close in like armor and throw it back out in a bubble. Katie had yet to meet anyone who realized he intentionally caused their fear. They thought the fear from within themselves.

That was how she knew he was alive even if he looked dead. That fear shield was still up. The cold spot still throbbed. He was just not present. His fear shield had kept anyone from attempting help, ended up with him chained down while guards pointed freaking anti-tank rocket launchers at him. She could see the gassy miasma of the thing, it filled the storage room.

Indestructible, ancient creature that he was, he shouldn't be in this position.

He must be choosing it.

She placed her hand on his white forehead. Like a man, but not. His skin was whiter than white, dipped head to toe in snow white paint. He had human features. Sharper. Beautiful. Exaggerated. Human, plus fae, plus more, with dramatically inhuman pointed ears, set high on his head above his eye-line and difficult to hide if he tried. He did not. The lobes were all pierced with blackened iron and tarnished silver, both metals which were supposed to cause agonizing pain to supernatural magic users. His heavy long hair was whiter than white, like his skin. It spilled off the bed in a course fall, straight as a horse's tail, dirty on one side with old black blood. White eyelashes, white eyebrows, one double pierced with a silver stud. Instead of pinkening with blood flow when he was alive, his skin would tint blue. Currently, the tissue around his closed eyes and eyelids, was a deep dark bruised blue. His full lips were pale, just the faintest blush in color. When he was alive, the blue was darker, inside a mouth of shark teeth.