No Angels: Death Chain Consequence

By R.J. Parry

An ancient reaper alters the DNA of mankind, creating reaper-human hybrids. Hell is under new management, and abominations are escaping from its pits. A Nazi with the powers of a devil has plans for world domination.

The only ones that can save us are an angel of death and the controller of the guardian angels.

But they are no angels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Aug 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524592868

R.J. Parry

Richard John Parry had many other lives before he started writing. He was a Royal Navy sailor then a call centre manager and then a postmaster. He now lives in a small town on the border of Durham with his wife and children. His dreams are all nightmares. The demons have flown, and his devils and monsters he’s sharing with you.

Book preview

Part 1

ORIGINS

CHAPTER 1

REAPERS

The demons of death are many and the notion on an omnipresent harvester of souls is an old one but it is vastly inaccurate. There are in fact millions of such spiritual creatures all over the world and they go by many names. Mort, death, the grim reapers, Shinigami and Yama. The creatures of this story simply call themselves reapers. They like their human cousins simply exist to do a job. Or at least most of them do.

Most go about their business of passing souls over to the other side with pride in their work but not all do. It is a solitary existence but a one they have grown to enjoy taking kinship in the souls they pass over. Valentar is a reaper who after five thousand years of existence doing the same job has had enough of it. Over his many years he has travelled the world reaping souls of the guilty and the innocent he has grown to detest his work. He passed over the souls of the Mongols of china, solders of the Aztec armies, slaves of Egypt, kings and paupers alike he would reap them all without discrimination.

However any job you do for a long time gets boring and this was no exception. Unlike you or I there was nothing Valentar could do about it, he could not retire or strike he could not swap to another line of work. A reaper he is and reaping he was made to do. If he did stop work he would be punished and a stern punishment it is. He would be thrown into the Neatherim. A place rumoured to be worse than any hell; it is another plain of existence devoid of all but the soulless wretches that have been sent there. You would then spend the rest of all eternity in a fit of pain powerless to do anything about it. It is a realm where the old devils were banished.

If you were to witness a reaper in the act of passing someone over with a reaping, you would be able to see that it is done in many different ways. Physically to our eye it appears different but it eventually boils down to the same thing. The reaper removes the persons remaining life energy, their soul as well along with their spirit.

You may not realise but the soul and the spirit are not the same thing. Also they sever the human’s guardian from him. (There will be more on guardians later) the soul is passed over with the guardian and the spirit will also pass over but spirit can quiet often return sometimes as a guardian or even a reaper.

Some reapers choose to grab the life force from the body with their bare hands. Others will draw the life force out like they are laying on healing hands, others would suck the life force with their mouths. Some reapers would even use tools to take souls; one such reaper even procured a cloak and scythe in order for him to appear like the traditional western death figure.

Valentar likes to think of himself as a bit of an old romantic, even though he was nothing of the sort.

He would kiss the life force from his victims, he would give one last lingering kiss on the lips and in doing so he would remove the last of their life force along with their soul and that of their guardians.

Of course humans are quite capable of dying without the aid of a reaper. When the human body gives up or is destroyed, reaper or no reaper the spirit will leave the body. It is down to reapers to pass these spirits on. Reapers have a sense when a death will happen; it’s a sixth sense of sorts. In times of war reapers would be drawn to the area of conflict working as fast as possible to pass over the souls.

In times of unexpected or mass death, whether it is war or some kind of natural disaster or plague many souls are missed and reform with their spirit becoming fully fledged ghosts. Once this has happened it is difficult for a reaper to pass the spirit over. It can be done but takes up a lot of time and effort on the reapers behalf and so most of them get overlooked and let to roam the earth until such a time that they just fade away.

You could mistake the reapers for a bunch of spectral murdering bastards but you would be incorrect in your assessment. They are vital to keeping the correct balance of life on earth. They need to ensure that the population of mankind does not outnumber population of the dead.

They are not simply randomly roaming the earth passing souls over to the other side. Many reapers are specialists in very specific types of death. Depending on the personality and temperament of the reaper they will find themselves drawn to a specific type of death. Some find themselves drawn to violent murders, others to accidents, some specify in only taking the souls of children and the yet to be born. A very strange breed of reapers they are, thankfully they don’t feature in this particular story. There are reapers who specialise in suicides matricide homicide genocide they have all sides covered if you pardon the pun.

Of course just because they are drawn to one shade of death in its wide and varied spectrum does not mean they are unable to reap anyone who they see fit to pass over to the other side. Valentar is a reaper that specifies in random death. The Unexpected deaths that don’t fall into any other category. If someone dies in the prime of their life while jogging down the street, it will be a random death reaper. It is one of the easiest types of reaping as it doesn’t matter who or where you did your reaping as random death was what you did.

Random death is perhaps the easiest and therefore the most boring form of death, from the reapers point of view that is. This was largely why Valentar was too bored but is the same reason he is able to cheat his way out of doing his work. The anatomy and history of the reapers is complicated and we will cover the relevant aspects in our tail as they become relevant to the telling of the tail.

CHAPTER 2

GUARDIANS

The world of guardians is a strange one. Sometimes people near to death have seen their guardian believing them to be some kind of angel. They are no angels. Angels are a much more complex creature from the seraphim. Guardians or watchers as they are sometimes known are essential to the existence of mankind. They were created in the early days of mankind by a higher omni-dimentional angelic being long since gone back to the seraphim. They were created to help protect and guide the human race to ensure the survival of man. They are created from spirits of the past. Quite often they can be the descendents of their living charge but not always. At the point that the reaper passes over the living into the world of the dead the guardian passes over to the other side.

In the early days of mankind it became apparent that the new human race would not last very long at all if they did not receive a little bit of divine help. Mankind appeared to be incapable of learning through the mistakes of their ancestors. A group of angelic’s of the seraphim were observing the new race and identified the potential for greatness. The ape men appeared to be showing the intelligence none of the other species had yet shown. Yet they simply kept repeating the same mistakes. For generations they would poison themselves on the same berries, they would be bitten by the same snakes, fall off the same cliffs. They would be doomed if not for some angelic intervention. To begin with several angels acted as guardians to a handful of humans in the part of the world that would eventually be known as Yemen. They would point out any dangers whispering into the ears of their charges keeping them free from harm. On some occasions they would physically guide their charges pushing them from the path of danger. After a few centuries it became apparent that the population of mankind was growing beyond the number that the angelic’s could manage. Then one of the angelic’s discovered that they could remove a slither of their soul and place it into the passed over spirits of the dead and they could return the spirits back to the human world to act as guardian. Who better to watch over the living than the dead? The dead are the ones who made the mistakes in the past and would therefore have a greater understanding of how to protect their charges. Not only did this work, the angelic’s observed, but the new guardians were better than the original guardian angels. It was decided that a group of angelic’s would work in the seraphim sending the spirits of the departed back as guardians. This would only work as long as the living population didn’t exceed that of the dead.

CHAPTER 3

DEATH CHAINS

As I mentioned Valentar had grown complacent and lazy. He would do as little as possible choosing to spend his time in a state of debauchery with the spirits of the recently passed. Valentar discovered that at the final point of the passing over process, that for a split second after the guardian passed over, the soul and spirit would separate. Eventually the spirit would move on but not if Valentar intervened. He had realised that he was able to force his will into the spirit with a splinter of his own soul. He could then control the spirit to do whatever he wanted them to do. This mostly consisted of performing sexual acts on him. A practice not usually entered into by reapers but an act he had taken great pleasure in watching over the years. He believed that all his time reaping the souls of the human race he had grown partly human. So many human souls had passed so close to his, he had been corrupted by humanity. Their human lusts and greed’s had influenced him. Indeed all reapers shared a look of the humans but inside they were nothing alike. They are eternal servants to a higher power. In fact man and woman alike he had from time to time passed people over before their time just so he could have his way with them. He did have preference for the female form but when you were millennia old you would try anything once, or more than once, if you happened to like it.

Valentar had shirked his responsibilities to the point that it had been noticed by his peers. He had been reported to their superior; in fact Valentar’s superior was the superior of all reapers throughout the world. His name is Nevets. Nevets is a reaper but he is much more than that. He can exist in the living world if he pleases to and can go beyond the spirit world into seraphim and possibly beyond. Nevets did not look human al all. Nevets resembled something from beyond any hell. His skin crawled with creatures and his innards squirmed with worms.

In an area of total darkness Valentar was surrounded by a number of his fellow reapers who were standing as witnesses to the proceedings. They stood in a circle with Valentar in the centre facing Nevets who stood head and shoulders above the rest of the reapers. As the proceedings took place shadowy spectres drifted around them like ghosts. The shadowy people drifted past oblivious of the reapers and the reapers acknowledged but ignored the shadow like spectres as they walked around them.

Nevets addressed Valentar with the tone a parent would use on a small child, it has been brought to my attention that you have not been fulfilling your duties to a required standard. Valentar remained silent. It was not wise to rile Nevets as he had been known to snuff people out of existence if he felt like it, guardian’s humans and reapers alike. Such was his power.

If you are incapable of completing the task given to you then there is always space for one more in the Neatherim fear grew in Valentars dark eyes and the other reapers reacted with shock to the word Neatherim, although no one had ever returned from the Neatherim, rumours of its horror was well known in the reaper community.

Nevets lunged in towards Valentar looking him dead in the eye. Valentar could smell the decay of this devil like creature emanating from his every pore. Nevets wrapped his huge hands around Valentars neck and squeezed, Valentar looked into the demonic eyes and he felt like his very soul was being torn from his body.

You are being watched Nevets dematerialised in front of Valentar and he disappeared into the darkness leaving Valentar relieved and emasculated all at the same time. Valentar had been expecting a punishment of some sort but none had come. He would not be so lucky if Nevets returned. The darkness that had surrounded the reapers began to lift and the reapers stood in a busy shopping centre and the shadowy spectres that walked among the reapers were nothing more than shoppers. Reapers existed on more than one plain of existence at a time. They can place themselves further or less into the world of man depending on whether they are wanting to be spotted by the humans guardians or not.

As the reapers returned to the world of man the humans passing by suddenly became on edge as the guardians became aware of the reapers presence.

Now you would think that not bringing death to the world would be a good thing, a mercy in fact. But you would be wrong. It is horror not to bring death where death is needed.

Death is mercy. It is mercy to a man whose body has been mangled in a car wreck and fades in and out of consciousness in a mash of blood and pain. Praying for death to come as he knows no help will find him and all hope is gone. When hope has gone all that can save you is death. But death has had a day off. And so he suffers till his body can’t sustain him and his spirit departs his body leaving his soul tortured for ever more.

Death is a mercy to the elderly lady who has had nine strokes and can’t tell the difference between her doctor and her husband. Death is mercy to the family standing around the bed of a loved one who will never wake up. Death will come as deep relief to the mind trapped inside a body that won’t work.

Death is essential to the management of mankind. Valentar had become somewhat reclusive, hiding away from the other reapers; they disliked him already as he had an air of snobbery and somehow believed himself to be in some way superior to all of the other reapers. In some ways he was superior as he had found a way to manipulate the dead. This was a claim no other reaper could make. This was something that the other reapers were partly aware of him doing but never mentioned it to him. Instead they would laugh about him behind his back, scoffing him and referring to him as the pervert or deviant. Valentar decided that he would use his talent of manipulating the spirits of the dead to fulfil his reaping duties.

He had been enslaving spirits for years now and was able to get them to do unholy acts upon him and each other for his depraved entertainment. It would not be too much of a leap to get the spirits to perform his reaping duties.

Valentar set about this plan right away. He just needed a suitable human to experiment on, a guinea pig the humans called them.

He walked into a bar and was greeted by the usual hum drum of working men having a drink after work. He was going to find the fattest or ill looking human to Passover when he heard what could only be described as an obnoxious voice. He looked in the direction of the annoying voice and saw a fat middle-aged man quite tall looming over a smaller younger man. The fat man was in mid rant at the smaller man about how Man U whoever he was, some pseudo religious cult Valentar believed, how Man U were a shoe in to win the cup. Valentar recognised the cup as a religious icon, the cup of Christ being one he had heard mentioned on more than one occasion. Valentar had seen many religions come and go in his time and had given up on keeping tabs of which religions were currently in vogue.

This fat man’s overall obnoxious attitude and big headed nature was all it took for Valentar to decide on his first reaping guinea pig. As Valentar entered the bar, the guardians of its inhabitants shot to attentions like soldiers on parade on edge at the presence of a reaper, Valentar made no attempt to hide himself from the guardians. He very rarely did. He liked to watch them panic. All the guardians alerted their charge, which is apart from the guardian of the fat man. The fat man’s guardian appeared to share the opinion of the fat man of the mighty Man U and was taking great joy in hearing his charges pointless ramblings. Before the guardian was aware of Valentar’s presence he had his lips firmly on the mouth of the fat man drawing his life and passing the guardian over. As the fat mans soul separated from the spirit, Valentar did his usual trick of inserting a shard of his soul into the spirit. He stared at the spirit in the eye. It looked back with vacant dead eyes. Valentar hypnotised the spirit with his own dark piercing gaze and muttering in the old language, he told the spirit what to do. vinichi da morto go now and may the wind forever be at your back.

The spirit walked from the bar and Valentar followed. Behind them the smaller man stood over the fat man’s body trying some kind of untrained first aid. Behind them a voice on the TV informed the pub that Man U had lost two nil.

Valentar followed the fat man’s spirit for several hours and had given up on the whole experiment actually working. The spirit stood outside of a residential house for nearly half an hour in a trance. Finally a woman came home and the fat spirit entered the premises.

The house was a less than fantastic terraced house with paint peeling from the fence broken and uneven flag stones and weeds growing almost to shoulder height in the small square of soil that passed for a front garden. The spirit entered the house and Valentar followed. The woman who was also quiet rotund went upstairs to get changed out of her work clothes. The fat man’s spirit followed. Valentar noticed that there were photographs of this woman with the fat man and he assumed that she must be his wife or girlfriend.

He follows the spirit up the stairs and up into the bedroom where the woman is pulling a t-shirt over her head. As the fat man’s spirit enters the room she pauses and looks in his direction as if somehow aware of his presence. This was of course a semi psychic response from the woman’s guardian. She looks and sees that there is nothing there and carries on getting dressed. The fan man has been stood staring at her for about a minute while she pulls on her baggy jogging bottoms and puts her hair back into a bobble.

The woman’s guardian becomes increasingly agitated. As she is about to leave the bedroom and go down stairs the fat man’s spirit leaps at her somehow knocking her off her feet. Valentar observed his creation at work from the doorway giddy with excitement. The woman had fallen back with the fat man’s spirit on top of her. The guardian tried to pull the spirit off her but all to no avail. The fat man placed his lips on his wife’s lips severing her life force and passing over her guardian. The rotund woman could then see the spirit of her husband staring at her with empty soulless eyes. That was the last thing her conscious soul bore witness to.

At the point that Valentar referred to as the window of interference, something happened and he could not believe his luck. The shard of his dark soul passed from the fat man to the rotund woman and at the same time as the soul transferred the fat man’s spirit utters the words vinichi da morto and he passed over himself.

This had worked better than Valentar had expected. His zombie reaper had passed on the reaping ability to its victim creating what he would think of as a death chain. The rotund lady spirit stands and exits the house. Valentar follows her and she goes up the street and enters a house where she finds an equally fat man sitting, watching the football on the television. He is resting a can of home brand lager on his gut. She similarly watches him for a minute or so and then she pounces, puts her lips on him and it is game over for the football loving obese waster. The dark shard of valentars soul transferred to him and up walked his spirit to find another unsuspecting victim.

Valentar follows this chain of death for around forty souls taking around two days. He observed that in most cases the zombie reapers would seek out someone they loved or in some cases just knew. The term ‘we always hurt the ones we love the most’, passed valentar’s mind and a smile crept across his face. On the odd occasion the zombie reapers would appear to target someone at random. Valentar speculated that perhaps these people did not have anyone that they cared for enough to seek out a loved one.

The death chain as Valentar had dubbed it, was working well and he decided that he would set another death chain in motion. He got the ball rowling with a smelly old bag lady that was sleeping in the shelter of a shop doorway. Again placing the tiniest slither of his own soul into the woman’s spirit. Like the time before he followed the death chainer to ensure that everything happened as he now expected. It did and he was then able to relax a bit and return to his harem of sex slave spirits. He never seemed to suffer any ill effects of having shards of his soul stripped away and over the course of the following year as he had 25 death chains in motion. He realised that it was possible that other reapers would see his creations and would object but Valentar decided to cross that bridge when he came to it. He now had all the spare time in the world; he spent most of the day naked and being slowly molested by the most beautiful humans that crossed his path. He had also discovered the beauty of television. It was a great way to wind away the hours. Now he had all day everyday to himself, life had never been better. Valentar felt incredibly pleased with himself

CHAPTER 4

JOHN

If you had to use one word to describe John Richardson it would be normal. He was painfully normal bordering on boring.

He had a basic manual job as a road maintenance engineer. John worked hard five days a week and had done this for twenty three years. Approaching middle to old age he realised his life could be slipping by and on the odd occasion he would crave a bit of excitement.

This craving for adventure never lasted long as in the real world he had a mortgage, wife and a job. So John’s thirst for adventure was limited to a few drinks with his mates and his dad on a Friday night, a meal somewhere nice with his wife on a Saturday and amateur league rugby on Sunday.

As it happened John was incredibly content. He had always been an admirer of the Buddhists in the ability to be happy with what you have and that all misery stems from the disappointment of things you want but can’t have. He had been married only five years leaving it to the ripe old age of thirty seven to finally tie the knot. His wife was five years his junior and he could not believe his luck the day she actually came up to him and started chatting him up. As he looked into her eyes for the first time he understood what love could be. As she looked into his eyes smiling holding his hand softly he felt his hard heart starting to melt. A weakness came over him that made him feel equally defenceless and elated at the same time. It was a sensation that he wanted to hold on to for the rest of his life. It may not have been love at first sight but it took less than twenty seconds for John to realise that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Dawn.

They were married within months of first meeting and as that lay together on their wedding night he smiled thinking those Buddhist’s are right. John was thankful and content, perhaps enlightened was too strong a description of John’s inner self but to put it in his own words he has life sussed out. John could not believe that he could have been happier if he won the lottery. What he had money cannot buy. So you can imagine how gut wrenching it was when in the space of five hours, he was informed of the death of both his father and his beloved Dawn.

He had been called away from work midday and was told that his dad had collapsed at home and was taken to hospital with a suspected heart attack. He raced to the hospital still smelling of tar and sweat from work. As he approached his family in the hospital hallway he could see in their eyes that he was already too late.

It was the look in his mother’s eyes that screamed the loudest. It was that look that said without doubt that your father is no longer with us. He ran to his mother and held her for what seemed like hours but in fact was only moments. He had not even noticed he was crying till he noticed the tears dripping from his face. As he thought about his loss again, momentarily distracted by his mothers comfort, his legs almost gave way. His mother held him up and then ushered him to a one of the seats. John’s dad had never had so much as a cramp in his years, he had never took a day off work all his life, a fact he was proud of and would always tell people if the opportunity arose, so for him to have a heart attack was unbelievable. He still coached rugby each Sunday and in his mid sixties he could still run rings around the younger twenty something’s. All these things would go through the mind of anyone in mourning, in John’s case however he was right. John’s dad did in fact have a heart attack, or at least that’s what it would look like. This heart attack was caused by a Death chain reaper tearing his soul and his spirit from his body.

As you can imagine the human body is operated by electrical impulses and they are controlled by the brain, the brain is in turn controlled by the soul and the spirit of the person. Remove the spirit and the soul and the body shuts down resulting in what looks like a cardiac arrest. The body can last for a short period of time without the soul as long as the spirit is strong; this normally results in a coma. Valentars death chain spirit came for his father in the middle of the night. It was the spirit of a former work colleague who was living out her final days in sheltered accommodation housing. Her family was not close and John’s dad had dropped in from time to time to check she was ok. The zombie like spirit of John’s father now roamed the streets looking for John. The mind of the death chain is like a clouded pool. Focusing on the task of the reap, but also knowing that in passing along the chain their own spirit will finally have peace. The spirit of John’s father is now simply looking for John to say goodbye.

As mentioned earlier one death chain would not be sufficient to fulfil all of valentars duties. At the time John’s father was added to the chain Valentar had twenty two different chains in operation. He was about to create another couple as many of them were getting towards the end of their time and he liked to keep no less than twenty in operation at any one time.

As each death chain fades away the slither of soul in each chain weakens. Eventually the chain breaks and the slither of soul returns to Valentar.

Valentar can feel the return of the slither re- entering back into him; a slight tingle passes through him, one of those someone walking over your grave feelings. Valentar of course would never have a grave, at least not in the conventional sense, when his time comes to an end he would simply fade to nothing or be sent to another plain. The reapers are not supernatural as such; they do exist in what we the living refers to as the spirit world. However they cannot fly they cannot disappear in a puff of smoke or teleport themselves, so all of Valentars death chains were all created around the same area. Most reapers find an area to work and clam a zone as a territory. Other reapers can reap in their territory but if you over stay your welcome in another reapers zone they can get aggressive towards each other. Reapers can’t actually kill each other but are able to injure each other quite badly, reapers do feel pain and as they do exist in a relatively pain free state most of the time any pain to them is agony.

Valentar is a nomadic reaper and was passing thru the part of the world he knew as Britannia. It was a part of the world he had a fondness for, possibly because of the damp changeable weather. He didn’t like to stray too far from his death chains, he was in the process of going north to the top of Scotland and he would eventually wait there for his death chains to fade and he would move on to Europe and start a fresh. Most of his death chains lingered around the north of England and the borders of Scotland. Valentar tries to spread the death chains around not putting them too close together but on this on occasion he had four all gravitating together in one small town of Sedgburg. It was in Sedgburg that John lived.

At the same time that John was coming to terms with his father’s loss another of Valentar’s death chains was about to impact John’s life. John’s wife Dawn was on her way home from work driving at around sixty five MPH. She noticed a crash in the distance on the other side of the road. Not wanting to be noisy parker but in the interest of safety she slowed down.

Now in the case of most death chains, the victim seeks out loved ones or those that they care about, but not always and not in this case. The car crash that Dawn could see was as the coroner would later decide was that the driver had had heart failure at the wheel and driven into the central reservation crashing the car and killing the driver. To the driver the events played out much differently. The driver was heading down the road going a little bit over the speed limit but nothing too crazy. He then felt a deep sinking sensation as though he was on a rollercoaster. Had he been in full control of his faculties, he would have removed his foot from the accelerator but he was not.

The death chain reaper had taken hold of his soul and his physical motor function had stopped working. His vision blurred and when it came back into focus he could see his grandmother sat on top of him with her lips pressed on his. He goes to fend her off in revulsion of her advances. He can’t quite work out where she came from and panic starts to set in. He sees over to the right of his grandmother someone he does not know trying to grab his grandmother off him. This was his guardian but of course humans can’t see their guardian and so the driver had no clue as to who this ghostly person was. Before his grandmother finishes of the reaping process he hits the central reservation and the front of the car spins sideways flattening forty feet of barrier.

When the car finally comes to a stop the driver is impaled through his neck shoulder and gut and the roof of the car has collapsed fracturing the driver’s skull. The last thing the driver could hear with his living ears was the thud and subsequent crack at his skull as it hits the tarmac as the car roles over and over. As the drivers disembodied spirit awoke he can see his grandmother standing over him somehow swallowing the guardian that had been fighting her. Not swallowing exactly but somehow absorbing the guardian through its mouth. As the driver looks on in horror the last remnants of the unknown figure disappears and the grotesque deformed somehow soulless version of his grandmother comes for him. He lifts his self to escape his grandmother’s advances at first not noticing the car crash. He makes a bit of distance between his grandmother when he notices the wreck.

At first he is relieved to discover he escaped the accident unscathed then he looked inside the car and saw his own mangled remains. The face of his corps is caved in on one side and at first he thought it was the body of someone else. On further inspection he saw the sections of barrier poking through his body in what looked like neat ten inch intervals. In the few seconds he was distracted by his remains his grandmother was upon him. She pushed him to the ground and started crawling up his body pinning him in place. If only I could faint and put an end to this torment he thought. come to granny she spoke except her voice came out slurred like someone who has had a stroke. cung to ganngy the driver is now manic trying to claw his way out from under her but she has him pinned in place. She bends down and puts her mercifully dry lips to his and he felt a sensation like nothing he could have expected and in a clear voice almost like it was an echo of another being’s sole speaking vinichi da morto.

The sensation the driver felt was a one of remorse. He felt a mourning first for himself and then for his grandmother who looked like she was fading from existence right before his eyes. Then it dawned on him it wasn’t his grandmother at all, he knew that because now he wasn’t him. He had a sense that he was now just a shadow, a spectre of himself he felt the urge to scream but could not make a sound. He looked around him standing up for the first time since his grandmother had dissipated. He had a stabbing emptiness in his heart as though all ambition had left him. As a last ditch attempt to save himself he looked around for help. His thought process was that if someone could get to his body they could get him to hospital, patch him up and his spirit would return to his body. This was as he knew a very slim chance of success but in his now panicked instinctive mind set what other options does he have.

He sees a car approaching and runs to it for help. As the car nears, it makes no attempt to slow. He jumps at the car but instead of falling on the bonnet of the car as he expected he went through the windshield and onto the body of the driver of the vehicle. The driver of this vehicle was of course Dawn, John’s wife. The longer the spirit is part of the death chain the less it remembers about its former self. In the confusion following his leap into Dawn’s car the purpose of the jump was now gone from the spirit’s mind. All that remained was the sense that this person who he did not know was somehow of great importance and that she could help him in some way. The memory of his mangled body and caved in head were now gone from his mind but the thought of this new person being able to help him remained.

As Dawn drove past the accident all memory of his old life was gone and all that remained was the reaper.

As Dawn’s car passed the crash she looked in shock at the accident realising there was no police or ambulance to be seen she was about to pull to a stop to offer assistance. As her foot touched the breaks to stop, the death chain reaper stuck his lifeless lips to hers and she hit the brakes harder than she had intended bringing the car to a sudden stop. Dawn’s nose hit the steering wheel spraying blood all over the windscreen and giving her that throbbing feeling inside her head. Her eyes fill with water and she can feel her nose has taken a short journey inside her face. She closes her eyes in an attempt to bring them back into focus but when she opens her eyes, she sees the spirit of the driver with his lips pressing on hers and she felt a sinking feeling in her very being and then she heard something that made no sense at all, vinichi da morto and that was that. Everything happened so fast. Dawn never even noticed her guardian attempting to save her from the astral attacker.

John now sat at home in his favourite chair with his head in his hands still trying to come to terms with his father’s sudden death. He considered trying to distract himself by putting the television on but could not think of a single program that would help. He went to turn on the radio but realised that the last thing he needed was jolly music and sad music would only make him feel worse. His tear ducts had done more work over the last four hours than they had ever done in his whole life. He paced around the house trying to think of things to do but nothing he could think of had any significance he went to cook something to eat but realised he was not hungry, he should have been hungry as he hadn’t eaten a morsel since breakfast and that was over eight hours ago. He tried to sleep but sleep would not come. His mind raced with memories of his dad and realised that all he had left were memories and there would be no new memories only the ones he already had.

All he could find to do was make himself a cup of tea. After the third cup of tea the phone rang, he was back in his seat and he ignored the call thinking it would be just another friend passing on their condolences, he knew they meant well but he was not in the mood to speak to anyone. He had explained to his family that he wanted to be left alone to come to terms with what had happened. His mother’s house was full to the brim with friends and other relatives and the genuine sympathy mixed with ghoulish acquaintances had been more than John could stand and so he made his excuses and left.

The only person he wanted to speak to was Dawn but he had been calling her all day but she must have either turned her phone off or she was out of signal. He had let the last for calls go to the answer phone and this call would be no exception.

As the phone rang and the answer machine kicked in unseen to John were the spirits of Dawn and his dad watching him from the shadows of his living room window. The spirit of his dad had followed him from the hospital and almost got him earlier but had missed him by a matter of seconds, as John had driven home from the hospital the death chain spirit of his father had lunged at him unseen as he pulled the car away from the car park.

The spirit had set off after John knowing in the back of his head the whereabouts of John’s house. The death chain spirit of John’s wife Dawn had walked the roads searching for her beloved husband. She moaned quietly and incoherently as she did so. John listened as the answer phone recording started, it was the voice of Dawn’s brother Derek.

His voice was unsteady and he stumbled over his words unsure of what to say. Now he was faced with a recording and not a person. hello John it’s me Derek. I err don’t want to tell you this on a machine but you need to call me back John picks up the phone. Yes Derek I’m here, this really isn’t a good time. Derek replies I know it’s not mate and the last thing you need is more bad news but Its Dawn. As John answered the phone the two death chain spirits approached him now both within grabbing distance of him. As John speaks to Derek they both lean in to kiss John and pass him over and remove his soul converting him into the next link in their death chain. Derek starts to speak again I wanted to come in person but the accident has caused a jam so I can’t reach you, I’m stuck in traffic, you need to get here as soon as you can. But John had dropped the phone at the word accident. Partly from the shock of what he was sure Derek was trying to tell him and partly because two spirits were playing a tug of war with his sole.

John’s legs gave way again similarly to how they had done when he found out about his dad. This time his mother was not there to stabilise him. He fell partly to the left as that was the leg that had given up first. He dropped the phone as Derek was mid sentence and on his five foot nine inches trip to the ground his head managed to make contact with the kitchen worktop and the bin. He landed unconscious face down on the kitchen floor. Now this is how events played out for John but for his Guardian it was another story entirely.

As John was making his third cup of tea his guardian was becoming increasingly nervous that he could sense there was a reaper nearby. Guardians can sense reapers like you can tell if someone is looking at you behind your back. A sort of unconscious awareness of someone’s presence.

His suspicions were confirmed and his panic grew fifty fold when he witnessed not one but two reapers. As a guardian, your soul purpose was to protect your charge at all costs. A guardian can go weeks without seeing a reaper. They are ever present in such places as hospitals but Johns guardian could not work out why two reapers would come for John. The guardian was in mourning similarly to John. John’s guardian had had a tremendously strong relationship with that of John’s dad’s Guardian. As he had also had a beautiful relationship with Dawn’s Guardian. Guardians have little use for names and in fact seldom speak in terms their charges would understand. Guardians communicated almost by feeling each other’s sole. The reason John and Dawn had had such an instant attraction to each other was partly down to how well their guardians had gelled together, almost instantly combined into one mind. John and Dawn’s guardians had loved each other just as much as John and Dawn had themselves.

Back to more pressing matters, John’s guardian was beside himself with panic. It is impossible for a guardian to defeat a reaper or at least he had never heard of such a thing happening, he could however fend off a reaper.

Guardians will always be defensive towards a reaper out of a pure sense of duty. Also if a guardian had ever witnessed a reaping of another guardian they will know that it is not always a peaceful affair. If the guardian is ready to die as is the case with the elderly then reaping is a quite pleasant affair, putting both guardian and charge out of their misery. Some guardians no matter how old or ill their charge is, refuses to be passed over. At this precise moment in time John’s guardian decided that if one or both reapers came any closer he would put up the fight of his life. As the phone rang John‘s guardian was going berserk, he was completely unaware of the conversation going on between John and Derek; he was too concerned with the slowly