Chapter 1

I was texting a client when the first email arrived. My eyes widened, and a frown creased my brow as I opened the message from the unfamiliar address. At first, I assumed it was from one of the members of my online support group. The group had been a constant in my life for the past seven years, ever since my grandparents died. So, while I was shocked to get an email, I hadn't thought anything of it until I started to read it.

Hello, Andy.

My name is Azrael. I heard you were a woman of quite extraordinary abilities. My associates and I would very much like to speak with you regarding your skills. If you could please give me a call at the number provided below, that would be much appreciated.

Sincerely,

Azrael

The Memitim

Sure enough, after the signature, there was a phone number. I told myself that this had to be a joke. I knew that if they had been a referral from one of my group members, they would have been given my work email and not my personal one. Shaking my head, I took a deep breath and wrote back. I provided Azrael with my work email and told them that any business inquiries should be sent there. I knew that the message could've been spam, but I also knew that there was a chance that it wasn't, and I decided to take that chance.

* * *

For the next several days, I spent my free time indulging in one of my more morbid hobbies, researching why people died around me. I knew people got sick and died, but they seemed to be doing it at an alarming rate around me. During my research, which I had started after my grandparents' deaths, I found some lore about a subspecies of humans called Reapers.

Reapers were said to be born to human parents but were not exactly human themselves. Their voices and touch were also said to be poisonous, bringing illness and death to those unlucky enough to be exposed to either.

With nothing else to go on but the information I'd found in my studies, I decided to experiment and stop talking and letting others come into physical contact with me. I learned ASL so that I could still communicate with the world somehow, besides writing out what I had to say on a notepad. As an extra precaution, I insisted on all of my appointments being held virtually, if at all possible. I did this to increase the distance between myself and others. The only appointments that couldn't be done that way were my twice-yearly dental appointments and my yearly physicals. Even then, those doctors and their staff wore gloves at all times and had interpreters on hand to translate.

It wasn't perfect, though. The isolation was starting to affect my mental health. Total isolation wasn't healthy for humans, and I was as close to complete and total isolation as I could get without moving into a log cabin in the middle of nowhere. Because I isolated as much as possible, I came off as standoffish to my neighbors. Something that a few of them took as license to start rumors about me: they spread rumors about my sanity, and several of them had started and entertained rumors that I was a drug dealer. The only neighbor that didn't seem to talk about me was the kindly old woman who lived in the house next to mine, Mrs. Gordon. While the elderly woman had been an unwilling audience to the gossip, she never spoke of it, except to inform me about what was being said.