The Reaper's Curse #1 - Complete

A Fragile Hope

They help Alicia carry Oliver from that tunnel, his eyes fluttering but consciousness not reaching him. She stays by his side, gripping his hand and trying to keep her emotions at bay.

They set him down by the cart, one of the men quick to fetch the medical kit.

"I've got him, Alicia." Alicia looks up from where she kneels beside Oliver, a woman settling on the other side of him. Kendra, her name is, her skin as dark as night but her eyes as light as the sky. "Get someone to look at that wound."

Alicia glances down at herself, having forgotten that she's coated in gore. She peels back her stained shirt to look at the bite, red and angry. She's going to turn. She's going to become a Grey Blood while the grand duke continues to exile people, while her brothers are still within those walls unaware of what's happening, unaware of what she did to get them out of the slums. She's going to turn into a Grey Blood while the rebels are still in hiding and the queen is dead and these people would rather see Muovea burn than save it.

Alicia pulls her satchel over her head, dumping it on the ground before grabbing the gun from within. She reaches for a lantern, quick to light it and hook it onto the belt around her waist.

"What are you doing?" Kendra asks, grabbing Alicia's hand, stopping her movements.

Alicia just blinks at her, numb to the very core of her being. "Within that satchel is a book. Make sure Oliver gets it," she replies, taking Oliver's blade from his belt and standing.

"You can't go back in there, it's not safe."

Rolling her shoulder to feel the wound soak more blood into her shirt, Alicia finds she doesn't care. "I'm going to die anyway. It may as well mean something when I do."

Alicia's world becomes dark and cold once again as she traverses deep into the tunnels. She finds her way back to the collapsed tunnel, her boots trailing through the blood of Jackson and the gore of the felled Grey Bloods.

Alicia is numb still as she goes deeper, her lantern barely piercing the suffocating darkness. There are moans ahead, the calls of the dead as they meander through the tunnels, lost within the darkness.

She kills the first of them easily, plunging the blade into its rotted skull before heaving it back out and continuing onward.

She's not within her own body, her limbs move of their own volition. Cutting through the Greys, venturing further into the tunnels, unable to feel the cold of the sticky blood. Alicia isn't herself at that moment, she's the ghost that her ma honed her to be.

All she knows is she's going to die and everything she did for the past six years has amounted to nothing. All the pain she caused. Everything she took. The innocents she murdered. It all means nothing.

The lantern chases away the shadows before her, and Alicia stumbles into a room cluttered with crates. She sees more Grey Bloods within, roaming the room like they were simply put here to guard the place. It would certainly explain how they never activated the tripwire.

Alicia raises her gun, the shots loud in the small space as she picks them off one by one. Her aim is precise, her hands know exactly what to do. She thought she'd buried such instincts. She was only fooling herself.

Once they're all dead, she approaches one of the crates, using the blade to pry open the lid with hope finally flaring in her chest. Alicia pushes the top away, the clatter of it echoing in the space. She reveals an abundance of medicine, packaged and neatly slotted within the crate, ready to be shipped off to war.

But this isn't why she came. She continues on, following the tunnel deeper, the old ruins leading her to places that haven't been explored in years. Deeper into the unknown, she should be feeling the same dread she once felt six years ago, but she doesn't. The wound on her shoulder seems to make her immune to fear, to caring.