I shrug, trying to play it off. “What does that even mean?”
“I know it’s hard because when you became a Reaper, Veltuur stole your memories. It’s how they keep you enslaved to them. Without knowing your past, you can’t accept it, and therefore, you can’t escape from them.”
“But you remember,” Rhet growls. “Every Reaper remembers something.”
Dread starts to build inside me. Everything had been erased after I’d become a Reaper. Everything except the blood that I now know belonged to the man who abused me for years.
There’s a pause, and with it, my anger builds. I can tell by the remorseful incline of Aulow’s head exactly what she is going to say before she says it and a voice is already screaming inside me that I can never do what she is suggesting. He doesn’t deserve my forgiveness.
“Reapers must make peace with the person they killed. That’s how they make peace with their past. It’s how they move on.”
The room starts to spin, and suddenly I am slammed back into the quivering body of that thirteen-year-old girl. I am alone and scared, shivering with fear and rage. I am naked and raw, a puddle of blood surrounding me. Blood that I unleashed. Tainted blood from a man who I was supposed to be able to trust but couldn’t.
But I do not regret the decision I made that day. I decided that he would no longer overpower me, at whatever the cost.
“I have made peace with my past. It happened. I can’t undo it, but he won’t ever hurt me or anyone else ever again, and that is all the knowledge I need to be at peace.”
The disdain in my voice makes Aulow wince, even from behind her persistent smile.
“Says the child with a crow,” chides Rhet.
I meet his gaze. “What is that supposed to mean? What does my crow have anything to do with it?”
A hand cradles either of my shoulders, pulling my vision back to Aulow and the speckles on her cheeks. It is difficult to remain combative when looking at her serene expression, but Rhet’s words are like seeds planted inside me. They haven’t sprouted yet, but I fear they are about to.
“Taking the life of another, even someone who did horrible, awful things to us or those we love, haunts us.”
The words stop flowing from her, as she gives them time to sink in. When the pause lingers longer than the others though, I realize she wants me to figure the rest out on my own. Fear quickens my blood. Whatever truth remaining is something so awful that she is hoping she won’t have to be the one to say it.
But I don’t understand what I am trying to figure out. They are claiming that I have yet to make peace with my past, but I did what had to be done.
These two Guardians do not know me, and they certainly do not know what it was like living as I did. The constant state of shame and disgust. Going to bed every night in sheer terror that he would come for me, or one of the others, and feeling guilty when I had secretly hoped it would be someone else’s turn.
What I did, killing him, was the best thing that ever happened to me, to the other children in the orphanage, and to him. My only regret is that he didn’t suffer longer.
So, they are wrong. I have made peace with my past, or rather, there is nothing to make peace about. Unlike what Aulow suggested, nothing haunts me. I sleep just fine at night. And yes, I have a crow, but so does every other Reaper so…
My eyes widen with sinking realization.
“No,” I breathe, soundlessly. “You are wrong. I chose my crow. It didn’t…”
A memory fills my vision, the one of my first night in the Veltuur woods. I was standing before the trees when Leumas told me to go forward and choose my crow. I am certain he said it was me choosing. But, though I have never questioned it, the more I replay the scene in my mind, the more I remember that walking among the trees felt a lot like fate guiding me to the knotted gnarl of a trunk, drawing my attention up to a single crow waiting in the branches.
“No.” The word comes out as a gasp of air, and I start to pant.
In the dim light of the hut, recognition and empathy bloom in Aulow’s face, but it is not enough to heal the slash ripping open my chest.
“You’re saying…” I try to put my scrambled thoughts into words between shattered breaths, but each one hurts more than the last. The effort to speak at all makes me nauseous. “The man I killed…he is my...my crow. The same crow I have been with…been working with for three years. The same crow that…sleeps over me at night and—” My breaths become too ragged for me to continue.
The room starts to spin again, and I am unsure how long my legs will hold me, how long my lungs will keep me conscious.
“Breathe. It’ll be okay,” Aulow says sweetly, rubbing both of my shoulders, likely as much to soothe me as to keep me steady. “You will be rid of him as soon as you’re able to make amends for taking his life.”
The world snaps still.
“Make amends?” My teeth bare as I unleash the wolf inside me. “I did nothing wrong!”
“You killed a man,” Aulow says calmly, a voice of reason and sympathy. “Do you feel no remorse for that?”
“No! He deserved it!”
A tidal wave of ice burns through me, so cold that I am left shivering, but so hot I am sweating. From its depths, I’m drowned in a silent rage, wave after wave of fury rolling through me. I was just a child. I didn’t deserve any of the things he did to me, but he did deserve death. I don’t ever,
