2- Answers...

Upon entering her apartment, Quayleigh bolted her door and fastened the chain. She hadn't felt as if she had been followed. In fact, she was certain no one knew her to be a witness to whatever she thought that she had seen.

Quayleigh had been thinking about it almost the entire time she had been walking, but as she hung up her keys, and kicked off her shoes, she could no longer be bothered to worry about what she had or hadn't seen. She had more pressing matters to attend to.

Her apartment was a mere seven hundred square foot, open concept, bachelor pad. The kitchen, living area and bedroom, were all contained to a single area. The only individually closed off rooms were the bathroom, and two closest; one near the door, and one near the back wall, where a set of sliding doors lead out to a balcony, barely wide enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with another person. Garren had been kind enough to allow her to keep her twin bed and helped her find a descent used coffee table and loveseat at the discount furniture store on the other side of the city. Only in the past year had she managed to find a cheap area rug, nightstand, and table lamp. Garren had gifted her his old television when he purchased a new one a few years back, but unable to afford cable, she rarely turned it on as the antenna didn't pick up that great of a signal.

Moving into the small living space, that doubled as her bedroom, she turned on the light and held the small bag up towards it. Giving it a gentle shake, the cockroach inside scurried along the bottom, proving it was still alive, bringing a smile to Quayleigh's face. Setting the bag down on the coffee table in her living room, she moved into the kitchen. After washing her hands, she retrieved a glass and plate from under the kitchen sink. Placing a couple of drops of water into the center of it, she dried her hands before taking a pinch of sugar from the sugar bowl and sprinkling it into the water. Carrying the plate and glass over to the coffee table, she sat down and picked up the bag. Opening it up, she emptied the cockroach onto the plate and set the glass over top of it, trapping the bug with a sweet meal.

"I'll be back for you in a few minutes. Eat up little sacrifice, I need you well fed," she said as she watched it skitter around the plate. Leaving the bug to eat, she turned on the bedside lamp, turning off the large overhead so the cockroach would be more comfortable. This may have seemed a simple kindness, but it was a necessary step. Quayleigh had practiced this ritual for years, and knew well that a comfortable cockroach would eat, and a full roach made for a much better sacrifice.

While the little bug ate its last meal, Quayleigh had her own preparations to attend to. Closing the curtains on the patio doors, she stripped out of her clothing and headed into the bathroom. A short but hot shower was necessary to remove the grime of the day, and it always made her feel more relaxed before setting up, what was supposed to be nothing more than a children's game.

Everyone in the world knew that Death was real. Most, however, considered it to be nothing more than a simple thing that happened, over an actual being that existed in a realm that overlaid their own. Rarely more than a few people, globally, lived at any given time with the knowledge of Death as a God. For Death did not care for worship nor praise, the sounds of the living stung his ears, and begging annoyed him. After all, when humans begged for their lives, it was never to him they were begging. It was always some other God, imagined to be real, real because it is imagined, or long since forgotten, extinguished from the realm of the living with no way to return. Death was in a unique position though. Everyone already belonged to him. From the moment of conception, one marches down the road of time that leads directly to Death's loving embrace. There is no avoiding him. No cheating him. He is indiscriminate in his job. When your time has run its course, he will be waiting. So, what use did Death have for a religious following? Regardless of upbringing, belief, age, sex, or creed, every living being that existed, exists, or will come to exist, would inevitably meet him.

In that, Death did not care if humans treated him as if he was not real. However, every now and again, things would interfere with the natural order of events. Usually when humans thought they knew better than him. Premature deaths were little more than a nuisance, something his reapers were designed to handle. It was the life-savers that were by far the more bothersome. Sometimes it is simply for the best that a reaper be allowed to do his job, but humans enjoyed meddling in what they truly didn't understand. It wasn't that Death minded when a reaper's job was interrupted, such things happen from time to time, but once a job was complete, once the dead were brought into the correct realm of existence, there was always a small window of opportunity when the worlds were intimately connected, that problems could occur. These were interferences that Death had to become involved with, and that more than anything infuriated him. For aside from the rarest of cases where the dying would actually see and recognize Death, he was normally perceived as a loved one's last breath, a lingering chill, or absolutely nothing at all. Which made it near impossible to correct the problem.

Quayleigh, was one of those rarest of cases. She had been stabbed six times by her mother's live-in boyfriend when she was only nine, before he was shot dead by the police who had responded to the domestic disturbance call placed by the neighbor. For a few years that man had abused both her and her mother, and that fateful night, she watched him murder, and then she watched him die. Then, in a state somewhere between life and death, she watched as two creatures materialized from the shadows and walked through the apartment without anyone else seeming to notice they were there.

"Is he dead?" she asked as the largest of the two creatures passed over the boyfriend's body, heading in her direction.

"Yes," it groaned gliding silently over to her, blocking her view of the second who was standing over the body of her mother.

Unlike the second, whose appearance was masked by a heavy brown robe and thick grey smoke, the larger was not hidden from her view. It was an animalistic skeleton of ancient bones, held together by dehydrated ligament, tendon, vein, and stringy, shrunken muscle, covered in a tattered burlap cloak, shrouded in a thin grey mist. Hovering over her bloody body full of holes, its mouth filled with crooked fangs loomed closest, stretched out along its bone muzzle, bits of what may have once been lips, long rotted away, revealing the thatch of slender muscles that connected the lower jaw to the rest of its skull. Fur or hair or something else entirely fell out from beneath its hood, as two sets of brilliant lime green eyes stared down at her.

"Death," Quayleigh smiled as the pain faded in his presence, "thank you. Please make him suffer."

"Yes," it growled from the depth of the pit that was its stomach.

"Are you going to take me with you?"

"No," its answer was faint, barely the sound of a breath.

Reaching out her hand, drenched in the bright red of her own life, she set it against what she could only perceive as his cheek, "What's your name?" she questioned as her strength began to wane, the weight of her hand gently guiding him closer.

"I do not have one," he replied, his words masking the sounds of the police and paramedics, and his gaze prevented her from seeing what was happening around the room.

"And the other?"

"Tauluthet," its reply escaped a wispy gasp, accentuated with the crisp bite at the end. Tucking its chin to its chest, it rested its muzzle in the palm of Quayleigh's hand. Pressing down, holding it between his face and her brow, the weight of his head barely indistinguishable from the air, it was like a heavy fog, with the smooth texture of beach glass. She could feel the movement of his breath against her stomach, and the bones of his hands as they wrapped around her shoulders, so large that the ends of its fingers interlocked above the top of her head.

It was a sensation she had never forgotten, and often recalled with great adoration. She had reached out and touched Death, and it had responded in kind. She couldn't remember anything else about that night, nor had she learned why Death was even there. Yet after that night, her life had never been same.

Wanting answers, she had sought a way to communicate with Death, and stumbled across an obscure game played by children called Dear Reaper, when she was twelve. Like so much of folklore, the details of the game changed slightly between each telling of the tale, but the outcome was always the same. Contact was made through writing a question on a sheet of paper, starting with the words, Dear Reaper, and the offering of a sacrifice to open the door between the two realms. It took several months before Quayleigh had managed to gather enough information, as there weren't many stories to be found of this game, even in the darkest corners of the internet. Most were easily dismissed, outcomes were called fake, and even the ones that seemed legitimate lacked enough details to properly replicate. However, unlike those found in the tall tales, Quayleigh knew something that no one else did, one of the Reaper's names.

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Turning off the shower, Quayleigh dried herself off, wrapped herself in her towel, and returned to her living room. Opening her closet, she put on a clean pair of panties, before pulling down a cardboard box from the upper shelf. Setting it down next to the coffee table, she began to remove the items; a stack of blank paper scraps that had been drenched in an herb and oil solution and left to dry, a pen with black ink, a small metal bowl that she always rinsed with alcohol before wrapping it in a silk bandana before putting it away, a candle made from beeswax with a wick coated in a chemical that made it burn with a green flame, and lastly a long, slender hat pin, topped with a white bead made from a sea shell. Once everything was in place, she went to her fridge and retrieved a pitcher filled with blood that she purchased from a butcher shop located on the south end of the city. Filling the metal bowl half way, she returned the pitcher to the fridge, before grabbing the lighter from the counter and returning to her seat on the floor next to the table.

After years of struggling to find the resources and time, Quayleigh now preformed this ritual on the nights when she knew she wouldn't have to work the following day. Since moving into her apartment, she had perfected the ritual enough to give her the longest amount of time to communicate with the Reaper she knew as Tauluthet.

Dipping the end of the pen into the blood, she took a scrap of paper and wrote, 'Dear Reaper Tauluthet, I, Quayleigh, have a gift for you.'

Setting down the pen, she lit the candle, and picked up the hat pin. Lifting the glass from the plate, she quickly stabbed the pin through the head of the cockroach, and then dunked it into the bowl of blood. Setting the paper into the bowl, it floated on the surface, and she rested the drenched cockroach on the lower edge.

"My dear Tauluthet, I have a gift for you," she said as she looked into the flame of the candle. "Will you accept it?"

'Yes', the word, written in blood rose up through the paper as the cockroach twitched it legs.

Before the word had even finished forming, she had already picked up the pen and had begun to write on a clean scrap of paper, 'Where are you?'

Setting it on top of the other paper, the weight of each layer would slowly push the roach further down into the bowl. The communication had now begun, and would continue in this manner until the cockroach was completely submerged.

'Here.' Was his reply.

Rolling her eyes, she knew she had to rephrase her question and wrote, 'Did you see me today?'

'Yes.'

'Are you here now?' She wrote, dropping the next layer into place.

'Yes. Here with you.'

"That's not what I meant. Dammit, Tau," she grumbled as she wrote out her next question.

'Was it you in the store?' Setting the paper into place, she waited. Unlike normal, the response almost instant, she glanced down into the bowl to make sure the roach was still moving, a twitch of its leg confirming that the ritual was still active.

'Do not fear. I promise, Quayleigh, I will never hurt you.'

"Holy shit," she remarked, her heart shuddering at the words written across the paper.

'That's not an answer. Was it you in the store tonight?' The next questioned posed, and another lengthy wait followed.

'Yes.'

'How is it possible?'

'Cannot explain.'

"Of course you can't," she grumbled realizing the scraps were just too small for anything more than short responses.

'You are here, I want to see you! I want you to explain it to me in person. Will you do this for me?'

"Come on, answer me," Quayleigh anxiously awaited his response, the cockroach no longer visible under the layers of paper.

'For you, anything.'

She was relieved when his response finally came through, and attempted one last question, 'Tauluthet, can you come to me tonight?' But as she set the paper in the bowl, the head of the pin slid along the rim, and she knew that the session was over.

"Dammit!" Rubbing her face in frustration, she closed her eyes and tried to remember the face of the man she had seen earlier in the night. The prominent brow, the insight eyes, the slender pointed nose, and lightly tanned skin. She could remember his height, the way he carried himself, and the sound of his voice, but she couldn't recall his presence. She knew him to be kind, and the things he purchased, but not how it felt to be near him.

Cleaning up her coffee table and disposing of the insect and papers, she put everything back where it belonged before crawling into her bed. She had no idea where Tauluthet was, what he was doing, why he was here, or when he would show himself to her again, and this led to a very restless night.

For all the questions she had asked, she truly had no answers.