What are you going to do about that vampire in your basement? You can’t keep ignoring them. At least make them pay rent or something.

Timeline/World: Story – Gather and Deliver
Current Date: January 28, 2024

Character: Vitus
Race: Angel of Life
Age: 25, physically about 16
Current residence: Cerulean Fields, In-Between
 

---

I don’t really know what I’ve just witnessed. I mean, I never truly see the faces of anyone around me other than the mother-to-be and that of her beautiful newborn—though I’ve had to deliver souls to triplets recently and that was something else entirely, it was a big job—but I can still hear everything that’s going on around me. The faces of everyone else are slightly blurred, as though the Powers that be decided it was easier for us to find our target by only being able to see their faces clearly.

As though somehow, the woman in the process of pushing a baby out of her own body wasn’t enough for us to know she and the coming baby was our target. Though, to be fair, I’ve been in a situation where there were several mothers in the same room all in the birthing process, so there’s that, I guess. Anyway.

The mother was struggling a little and I’d made it a little early. Normally, I prefer to make it to my destination a few moments before the soul is truly needed just in case. I’ve been there when mothers have given birth to newborns that were almost stillborn and yet, with just a little nudge from us and their souls being brought into their bodies, the child took breath. At other times, the whole birthing process happens so quickly that you barely make it in time, despite having had all of the necessary information on hand to make it at the marked moment. At times, things just change.

While the mother was pushing, breathing, and pushing some, people I have to assume might have been her boyfriend and her brother, or a cousin, or someone else—they were close to her age, so any male related to her, just clearly not her parents—were arguing in hushed tones in the corner of the room. Not a very welcoming sight when the mother is in the process of giving birth. I’ve never understood partners and family who are in the room but aren’t at her side.

They were going on about a vampire in a basement and what could be done about it. How it couldn’t be ignored anymore and how they should have been made to pay rent or something of the sort. It startled me in such a way that I did nearly miss my cue for the new life, but I didn’t. Right as it came out, the little one was gifted its soul and took its breath.

I don’t know that the two are related, though. The taking of the soul and that first breath. They’re always just right there, one barely a second after the other and it makes it seem as though they’re related but I think that a body can live without a soul. It just will not live a very fulfilling life, but it can live without a soul. Thanasis has told me that he’d been sent to gather souls a handful of times but when he got there, there were no souls to gather and no traces of another Gatherer that might have gotten there before him.

This is one of those things that isn’t really covered in our learning. We’re told that the souls are the gateway to life and that makes it imperative for us to deliver them in a timely manner. The souls being the gateway to life doesn’t mean that they are the thing that brings life—babies in the womb are alive, in the end. Just, I guess, in a different way than they are once they exit that womb.

Anyway. The hushed arguing stopped the moment the baby offered its first cry—a lovely baby boy from the glimpse I got—and thankfully went to see the new mother and her little one. I don’t know how I would have felt if the two had kept on arguing about this mindless problem they were going on about.

Now, I don’t know about vampires. I know that there are humans, I’ve heard rumours that there are other things than humans out there, but I’ve never seen anything of the sort, and I’ve been everywhere over the years since my graduation from the academy. I’ve seen nearly every major nook and cranny the planet has to offer and while I might not have gone to the most remote places, I know that Thanasis has been to places where I have not and he hasn’t seen anything other than humans, himself.

I’ve heard of vampires through storybooks. Vampires, elves, mermaids. All things fantasy. To most, I suppose that we would be considered fantasy in our own way with our decorative wings—they can be used for flight, but we don’t need them for flight at all—and the unnatural glow of our eyes and the tasks we do, but we’re still human in shape, in the end.

I didn’t stay much longer than that; once the soul is delivered, I know that there is another for me to pick up and deliver and my window was very short, so I had no time to waste.

Final Word Count: 862

Don’t look at me or speak to me, I’m not in the mood.

 
Timeline/World: Story – Gather and Deliver
Characters: Vitus
Race: Angel of Life
Age: 24, physically about 16
Current residence: Cerulean Fields, In-Between
Final Word Count: 778 words
 

---

When you’ve known someone for years, someone you work with or have worked with before, it’s hard to imagine them acting in any different way from what you’re used to. Shanie is a bubble of positive energy and love. She was that way the moment she came out of the Academy. She was a quiet little soul in the beginning, but I think we all were.

When you’re reborn and you land here, you remember how you passed. You remember your last few moments. It takes time to wrap your mind around that kind of thing and I’d like to think that most of us manage that fairly well. I can’t imagine that they’d let us out of the Academy if we weren’t well-rounded people. Being a Deliverer takes a certain gentle touch and if you can’t be, I don’t know what happens to you.

All the people I was with at the Academy when I first got there managed their way through all classes well, at least, as far as I remember. I didn’t know all of them personally, there were a good few of them, but the ones I allowed myself to grow close to—a few friends really—all did very well. I wonder maybe if we’re not stripped of our title and then become one of the people who are just in transition, waiting for their next pathway to open.

We’re not usually paired up to work, we do pick up the souls that the Gatherers locate—and I’ve often picked up souls that Thanasis had gathered since we tend to work in similar areas most of the time—and we head in to where little ones are being born, we deliver that soul to them and then we head back to repeat the process over and over again.

We do still spend a bit of time around others either in the mornings or whenever it is that we’re scheduled to start working since the life and death cycle never really stops in the end.

On that particular morning, Shanie looked like she hadn’t had a whole lot of sleep and whenever someone approached her, she’d snap at them, telling them to not look at or speak to her, she just wasn’t in the mood. I wasn’t one of them. I’d seen her respond in this way to two other people while I’d been gathering my equipment for the day and I just kept my distance, it was the safer option if you ask me.

By the time I was done with my day, exhausted by the sheer number of souls I’d had to deliver but pleased by how many precious babies had come into the world, Shanie had already come and gone. There’s a little lit tag on the small lockers we have at the place where we start our working day. It’s hard to explain what it really is, other than just a sort of office building and in that building, there are several rooms with lockers where we keep small items we need for our work and, when we’re tagged as being on the job, the little light on the locker goes from red to green. When we log off, it goes back to red and when they’re empty, they’re out altogether.

She didn’t come around the following day or the one after that, or if she did, she was on a completely different shift. When you start working, your shifts are all over the place. As you work longer and longer years, those shifts start to settle a little and, well, you’ll never truly know where you’ll go until you head in. The only thing you really do know is your hours and they tend to at least give those to you a couple of weeks prior so you can sort of fix up your sleep schedule to adapt to the change if there’s any.

I guess that I’ve been lucky enough so far—and here long enough—that I mostly only work day shifts. I still have mixed hours, some days I start early, others I start later but, all in all, I can’t complain. Most of my days off align with Thanasis’s own and that’s just something I’m stupidly happy for.

At this point, I mostly just hope Shanie’s okay. I’ve never seen her in that kind of mood and while we’re not the closest of friends, I’d still like to think that we’re friendly enough to one another that it’s just worrisome to see her acting the way she had. I don’t know that she’d come to me if she wanted to talk, but that’s okay, really.

Asking for trouble isn’t working. We have to go look for it.

 
Timeline/World: Story – Gather and Deliver
Characters: Vitus
Race: Angel of Life
Age: 22, physically about 16
Final Word Count: 741 words
 

---

Some people call this place Limbo and I suppose it could be. Here we have angels of life, angels of death and other odd assortments of people who have died but still have their bodies; they go on about their daily lives, living here as though it was the most normal thing in the world and I guess that, after a while, it is. The city is pretty big, I mean, there are thousands of us angels of life and just as many angels of death and then there’s the rest, so this place is big. There’s an ocean of sorts on one side but no one swims there; you swim in that water, you forget everything.

At least, that’s what I’m told. I don’t go near the water.

Reading the book that Thanasis had found had been eye-opening. There had been no divide between the gatherers and deliverers before but that was hundreds of years ago—even maybe thousands. The book itself hadn’t been very clear on the dates but the information was there and it was co-written by a pair that was well-known. Though I should say that I knew one of the names as being well-known and Thanasis knew the other. Somehow, the book was written by very high-placed people, one on either side of the divide. The book states that they were paired and often working together and that things had simply gone from there.

This is knowledge that isn’t given to us when we’re told of the Great Founders. All we’re told is that he was a strong man who believed in doing what was right and good, and then they feed us bullshit about how he would never think to share half of the power with the ‘vermin’ that are the angels of death but, somehow, there still was some sort of peace treaty that was signed at some point.

The book is a rare copy. I don’t know what Thanasis had to do to get his hands on in. We keep it in a safe, under lock and key. It gives both of us hope that things might eventually work out though neither one of us is holding our breath.

The place where we live, there are a lot of different people living there. There are gatherers and deliverers, there are those in between and it seems to mostly be a safe place. No one here judges us if we’re walking side by side or heading somewhere. We can go to the little market not far from our place and no one gives either one of us the stink-eye for being out together—though I would believe that none of them truly know how ‘together’ we are.

At our last market visit, however, we came across this group of youngsters—they were about the age we were when we both died, so not that young but still young—who seemed to be trying to escape from Limbo. Now, you have to understand that most who come to be here don’t know why they’re here. This is a sort of halfway place for most but us angels. This ‘halfway’ place can be someone’s residence for as short as a few months to years. Most I’ve come to meet were here when I came and still are. Most seem content with being here.

Others, like that group of three whose path we crossed, they’re not. They don’t like this place, they’d prefer to be anywhere else but it’s hard to be anywhere else when most of the city seems to be blocked in by mountains on one side and the water on the other. We only briefly crossed their paths but I still heard one of them say that asking for trouble wasn’t working and that they’d have to go look for it. It made me shake my head. I mean, I get wanting to explore the world as it could just be really different from all you’ve ever known but in this place, this just isn’t happening and if they think that looking for trouble will get them thrown out of this place—though so many believe that you get sent out on the water if you’re caught breaking the law—they’re in for a rude awakening.

In a way, though, I suppose they’ll get exactly what they’re looking for. Those who are sent out to the water never come back.

Have you read it?

 
Timeline/World: Story – Gather and Deliver
Characters: Vitus
Race: Angel of Life
Age: 21, physically about 16
Final Word Count: 638 words
 

---

I used to think that dying and being reborn into this job—something that doesn’t happen to everyone, on select few—would spell the end of politics, the end of ads in your mailbox about weight loss, the end of a loss of things. It isn’t the case.

I died, sure.

I was reborn as one of the thousands of angels of life. We deliver souls to those drawing in new breath. We’re supposed, by some unspoken law that isn’t a law, keep away from the angels of death. Those they call the gatherers. The ones who pick up the souls of the recently deceased so that we may have souls for those new births. In a way, it makes no sense that we’re supposed to keep apart when one cannot be without the other.

There are no proper laws about not being friendly—or anything more—with what most people call the enemy. If not for the ‘enemy’, not a single one of us would be here, in the end. Gatherers are the ones who picked up our souls but kept it attached to our bodies so that we could be reborn here. If not, we would have been reborn on the mortal plane, a new body, a new life, new memories to make.

That’s why I allowed Athanasios into my life; that’s why I let him into my personal space and why I know I wouldn’t make it very far if he were to walk away but I don’t think he will. We complete one another in a way I’d never really found before in my life. I get that a lot of people might roll their eyes at this one and point out that I was just a kid—I was, I died at sixteen—and that I was too young to have found my one person but I just know he is.

We share a small apartment. There aren’t just Gatherers and Deliverers living in this plane, there are other things as well but we were all brought here into this in-between. We still need to eat, we need to rest, we feel physical and emotional things. We’re alive, in a way. We just no longer age. There are rules about when someone retires and just, that’s a long way away for me unless I fail in my duties and I’d rather not get into that.

Back to the problem at hand: politics, pointless ads, useless stuff.

There still are politics going on here, not quite the same as within the mortal plane, of course not. There still are ads for gyms, for diet fads, for new products, it’s all in there. Normally I let him deal with the mail because I just hate it all but when I came home on that one particular night, he’d been out for the count and deeply so. I know they’ve been working him really hard cases lately and I worry about him.

Not far from his hand—he’d actually fallen asleep at the table—was a note sitting on a book. A note asking me if I’d read it.

The book was new as far as I was concerned, I’d never heard of it but that wasn’t all that unexpected, we didn’t usually have much time for reading but now and again, we found little discoveries that made us pause and make time.

I think that this one was going to be one of them, it wasn’t a new book per se but it was one for me. The back of it seemed to talk about the history of things and there was one mention about the growing divide between Light and Dark, Life and Death. That gave me some vague hopes, maybe, just maybe there used to be a time when there was no divide.

We’ve heard these rumours before.

Timeline/World: Story – Gatherers and Deliverers
Characters: Vitus
Race: Angel of Life
Age: 20, physically about 16
Final Word Count: 659 words

---

You have no idea how hard it is to keep my mouth shut in situations like these. Lying to my superiors, lying to the woman who took me away from my last dying breath so I could be reborn, it hurts. It mostly hurts when I lie to her because she’s the one who taught me everything I know about being a Deliverer.

When they start asking if anyone has heard the rumours about Gatherers and Deliverers spending time together, I just have to shut my mouth and hope they bypass me completely on the prodding questions. It’s not like it’s unlawful, there are no laws stating that Gatherers and Deliverers cannot spend time together but it is viewed very poorly as though somehow that is a capital sin.

What they seem to not understand is that one cannot exist without the other. Without Death to pull the souls from the bodies, we have no souls, as Life, to deliver to newborns. The Great Room is never empty; at least, I’m told that it has never been empty. There have been times when it has been close but never enough for panic.

Athanasios has told me that they’ve talked about that rumour on his side of things too. I can only hope that means that we’re not the only ones spending time together during what little ‘down’ time we have. It’s easier now that we live in our own place. When we still lived in the common areas, all eyes were on us, there was no privacy, and crossing paths is not unheard of but we usually ignore one another.

The thing is… I just can’t ignore him. I used to find unsigned notes in my lockers and I was a little confused but last May, he actually gave me a whole bouquet of flowers. I was so surprised I ended up just sort of blushing and thanking him. We’re sort of friends. We kept on crossing paths even early on so we forged a sort of friendship but I think he might feel like there’s something more and I know how warm he makes me feel.

I’d been in love when that car hit me dead on—no pun intended. At least, I think I’d been in love. She’d been a sweet girl I’d met a few months back at school and we’d been trying this dating thing and she made me feel nice and warm. Thanasis though, he makes me feel so much more than just that warmth but it worries me. This thing about not mingling with Gatherers is frustrating.

I don’t know what to do. I can’t really talk to my guide. She’s one of the strongest believers that we shouldn’t have anything to do with Gatherers. That they’re vultures and evil and—well her words on the subject are never pretty and she preached that whole thing to me from the moment she picked me up. Warning me that they’d try to sway me away from my path, that they’d try to defile me, that they’d do evil, unspeakable things to me.

As it stands though, I’ve crossed paths with a lot of Gatherers and all of them were pretty nice. Some were aloof and others were warm and welcoming; then there’s Thanasis. To be absolutely honest, I would love for him to do ‘unspeakable’ things to me. I can’t explain it. I just want to experience, with him, all those things I never could experience before in life. I’m just afraid that if I say anything, it might make him flee.

The one thing I know about Gatherers is that they’re as they are because their lives were not good ones or their deaths were usually suicides but I want him in my life and I’m going to have to find a way to make it work. I don’t care what it takes. Nothing can take my title of Deliverer away from me.

Chapter 1

“I don’t honesty recall how it started.” The teen rests his face in his hands, not wishing to I look upon the man sitting across from him.

“We’ve been over this before, you have to speak truthfully if you want to make some progress. I cannot help you if you lie to me.”

“I don’t want to be here. Do I have to do this?” His voice is muffled by his hands still resting over his face. He still refuses to look up to the other man, well aware of what he would see.

“Yes. Now from the beginning.”

Sighing, Athanasios closes his eyes and leans back into the almost plush couch. He presses his palms into his closed lids and mutters under his breath before letting his shoulders go lax. “My father used to beat me. I killed myself.”

“Not that beginning, young man, this is about—”

“You told me to start at the beginning, I am. Do you want me to talk or not?”

Sighing, the older man shakes his head but goes silent, motioning for the teen to go on.

~

When he was nine years old, his mother died. His father told him she had died in her sleep but he knew better, he knew she had taken all of the pills she could find in the house and swallowed all of those down as quickly as she could so all of the pain could be forever-gone. She had told him about her plans before but those plans had always involved him. She had always promised that she would take him with her when the pain became too much.

She hadn’t.