Welcome to Gaia! ::

March in Maine was an unpleasant experience; bitterly cold, old snow on the ground, the streets turned to slush and salt and cars rattling around corners. At the best of times, Maine had a tendency to be something of a creepy place. It had too much open space between homes, too many skeletal trees, too many lonely white guys. As winter blew through, it only got worse. You could see long distances between the branches, but those hollow spaces were filled with shadows, dark and foreboding. And those big houses in the woods may be beautiful, may be cozy, but they were also isolated; twenty minutes to the nearest supermarket if you were lucky, and frequently, you only got glimpses of the people who served as your neighbors.

These were probably all the reasons why they’d chosen this location for their little enclave. An old church that had been there around as long as America had been, it theoretically was still in use, but mostly it served as their home base: six reapers who were probably not working within the confines of acceptable Halloween behavior.

The woods around their encampment were full of traps, dark and wicked. It had taken Ollie, lean and focused, the better part of an hour to work his way through clutching branches and snarling dogs, to quietly lose a tracking trap that had tangled around him like a net. In his younger days (not that twenty seven was really that old, but…) he would have charged past it all with no regard for stealth or quiet, with no concern for if they saw him coming and had time to prepare. These days, though, he was less about the hack and slash and more about the slow approach.

His job wasn’t to take them down. His job was to observe, to sit perched quietly on the roof of the church and listen to what he could of the ceremonies, carefully recording everything he could understand in a small book he kept tucked into the back of his pants. The position had probably been given to him at first because he was small, because he was dark. Over time, he’d kept it because he was good at it.

And he liked it.

Head down and face tucked into his scarf, trying to be still and not to shiver under the weight of his coat, Ollie dutifully wrote out the words as he heard them: his own personal phonetic code, easy to read back aloud to someone later. This time, he wasn’t going to get the chance.

He’d assumed they were all inside, working on some dark ritual, whispering secret words, but apparently one of them had crept outside. They caught the glint of his pen in the moonlight and raised the alarm, cutting the ceremony short and turning their focus instead on the spy among them.

The embarrassing thing is that he probably could have taken them. After ten years as a hunter, he was well-bonded with his weapon, fierce and fearless. He threw all of himself into everything he did.

But tonight, in an attempt to escape with what knowledge he had gleaned, Ollie threw himself off the roof, instead.

He felt the snapping bones in his neck, the crunch of his back. Could stare up at the reapers as they curled around him. And all he could think, as the reapers clustered around to finish him off, was how embarrassing an end this was.