Love You to Death (Part 7)

For the next two months Kiera and Connor did what they could to save as many people as they could on Connor's list.  Every time, Connor feared that Death himself, grim, was going to show up and demand they stop, but it never happened.

The next name after the car accident victim had been the last one in town, but that didn't stop Kiera and Connor from jumping in the car and driving dozens of miles away to the next town over where Connor's next four weeks worth of marks resided.  Kiera took a half day if she needed to in order to make the trip, and Connor managed to get a job where he worked remotely all the time so that life's work wouldn't get in the way of death's work.

Except, it wasn't death's work anymore.  This was now life's work, too.  Whenever they could, they were saving someone instead of helping them pass on.  There was the little girl playing on the jungle gym at the park, who would have slipped and fell funny and broken her neck had Kiera not been there to steady her.  The girl's parents had glared, but Kiera had smiled, imagining this little girl would now live a happy full life when otherwise she would have been gone and her parents would have mourned and who knew what would have come of that.

There was a suicide they prevented.  That one was dangerously close.  They had gone to the location and at first seen no sign of anyone, only to have Kiera look up on a whim and see a man standing near the edge of a building, at which point Connor rushed inside and took the elevator up to the roof to try to talk the man down while Kiera called 911.

There were some where they weren't so fortunate, too.  One person just collapsed and it turned out they had had an aneuyrism.  Nothing could have saved them.  Connor helped them make the passage to the afterlife while Kiera cried quietly.

Another person had overdosed on some drug that Connor and Kiera could not identify.  The dying person had already taken the fatal dose at another location hours before wandering to the only place Connor knew to find them and collapsing from a fatal seizure.

Overall, they managed to save half of the people they set out to save.  And as that first month passed and the second took Connor further away still from the place where Kiera lived, the place he had grown to call home, he started to wonder, despite how good he felt saving people and being with Kiera, he started to wonder how long they could keep this up.

But what kept him going most of all, and what filled him with hope, was that nothing bad seemed to be happening as a result of what they were doing.  Not only that, but Kiera's name had stopped appearing on the list.  He had even stopped looking for it.  He felt like maybe, she was finally free.  Maybe she had escaped Death's grasp for good, or at least for the next several decades until she was old and ready to go.  Maybe fate hadn't been about letting her die, maybe it had been about saving her so that she could save the lives of so many on his list, and in the process, save him.

It was when he was finally starting to come to peace with all of this, that he had another dream.


This time, she was standing on a beach, looking away from him, wearing a thin white dress, the breeze blowing through her hair.  He could taste the salt, feel the rays of the setting sun, and as he reached out to touch her arm, she turned and looked at him.  And she didn't look sad, she just looked... resigned?  Or maybe ready.  Perhaps ready was a better word.  "You have to let me go," she whispered.

Connor awoke with a start once again.  He had only had a similar dream that one other time, and fortunately, he had been able to calm himself and get back to sleep without Kiera being any wiser about what had happened.  It seemed that this time he wasn't going to get off quite so easily.

As he gasped for breath and then started to take longer, deeper breaths in an attempt to calm himself, he heard a familiar voice beside him, the same voice that had just spoken to him in his nightmare of a dream, say softly, "Connor?"

He turned and saw her face in the pale beams of moonlight that seeped through the blinds.  She looked worried and sad, no where near as peaceful as she had been in the dream, and yet, he was so much happier to see her here and alive than as what had seemed to be her as a ghost in his vision.

"I just, had a bad dream," Connor told her, looking away.  Even though it wasn't a lie, he felt like he was lying by not telling her everything.

She must have felt it too, because she touched his cheek and gently drew him back to look at her.  "What kind of bad dream?" she asked, just above a whisper.

Connor shuddered, but he knew he couldn't lie to her.  "It was, a dream about you," he said.  "I think, I think it was about you dying."

Kiera was silent for a moment and then said simply, "I'm not dying, Connor.  You've saved me three times, we've saved others, and my name is no longer showing up on your list.  I'm not dying.  Not anytime soon, anyway."

Connor shook his head, showing his uncertainty and gently shaking her hand away at the same time.  "How can you be so sure?" he asked.

"I don't have to be sure," Kiera noted.  "You can check your list."

Connor shuddered again at that thought, fearing she would be wrong, that her name would be on the list, that the address would be here and now and he wouldn't have time to save her this time.  But if that's the way it was going to be, he at least wanted to know, he at least wanted to... say good-bye... properly.  So he flicked on the light on the nightstand, pulled out that nightstand's drawer, and took out the folded sheet of paper that he put there every night.

When he unfolded it to check in fear for Kiera's name, what he saw shocked him in a way he hadn't expected.

24 hours ago, eight names and dates had remained on this list.  Now it was completely blank.

Kiera must have heard him gasp because she was leaning over his shoulder, looking down at the paper, too.  When the glanced back at her, he saw her brow furrow in confusion.  "What's... what's that?" she asked.

He shook his head slowly.  "It's nothing," he said.  "Literally nothing.  There were eight names here before and now there are none of them."

"What does that mean?" Kiera asked earnestly.

"I honestly have no clue," Connor confessed.  "I've never seen this before."  He sighed and turned slightly in bed to look at her as he lowered the paper to his lap.  "But then again, I've never seen a name get crossed out and the person survive before I met you either."

Kiera smiled slightly at that, taking it as the slight reassurance and comfort it was meant to be.  "Well, maybe we should just accept it as a sign that you won't have any work to do for a while," she suggested, "and try to get back to bed."

Wearily, Connor nodded.  He put the paper back in its place, slid shut the drawer, and turned off the light.  He felt a little better in one way, though much worse in another.  Kiera's name was not on the list.  But what did it mean that no one's name was on the list?  Was he fired?  Or worse, was death hiding from him?  He tried not to think of that too much, and though you wouldn't call it peaceful, he did manage to drift back off to sleep eventually.


The next morning, a Saturday morning, Kiera and Connor both tried to pretend like nothing had happened.  They both had known that the next name on the list wasn't due to pass until the following weekend anyway, so they had already been planning to relax and enjoy this weekend.  Connor was making eggs in the kitchen when a knock came at the door.

"I'll get it!" Kiera called out.  Connor was facing away from the front door, but he glanced over as she rushed by down the hall and gave him a little smile.  Moments later, she was back, the smile stripped from her face.  "Um, Connor..."

He looked over at her, gripping the pan his eggs were in, and said, "Yes?"  His face fell as well as he saw her.  And then when he turned just a little more and looked beyond her, he nearly collapsed.

Right there, standing in his living room, was a man, or perhaps better said, a being, that he hadn't seen in a decade.  This man was tall, with a dark beard and dark eyes, and a long thin scar across his face that Connor was sure no one had ever had the courage to ask about.  He was dressed in all black, naturally, and his face was very, very serious.  You didn't have to see this man more than once to remember him.  Connor knew that he was standing face to face with the Grim Reaper, Death himself, and the way Kiera was shuddering, she must have known it, too, without even having met this Death at all.

"Hello, Connor," Death said, remarkably calm.  "I think it's time we talk."