Page 1 of Death Trap

There was just something about this city that drew me to it.

No matter what craziness it flung at me with all the Halflings and full-blooded demons, I couldn’t stay away.

The scents of salty water and gasoline invaded my senses. A terrible combination, but I inhaled deeply, taking it all in. It wasn’t as bad when paired with the mist coming off the bay kissing my skin and the late summer’s sun caressing my cheeks. Even a passing seagull cawed as it hovered on the upward breeze, seeming to be enjoying the view, too.

These were the kinds of things I would never get tired of, no matter how many times I visited. Being able to experience them again brought a smile to my face. Fairport really was beautiful in the warmer months, especially near the water.

To my right, a colossal Navy ship was docked, its deck bustling with crewmen and women who were readying it for their next expedition out to sea. Just another thing I loved about it here. The history. It was rooted in the city’s foundation. You could feel it the moment you stepped foot onto the downtown’s cobblestone streets.

Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t here on vacation. Work had brought me back.

I tapped my shiny new watch on my wrist to wake it up from its sleep mode, and the picture of my next assignment flashed on the screen. A young female with blonde hair and a pretty face. According to the profile, her full name was Stephanie Gail Constantine. Cause of death was murder. Shot multiple times. For supernatural ability, she was a were-fox, one of the smaller breeds of were-creatures out there and not ranked very highly on the supernatural hierarchy ladder. Being able to turn into a fox at will might be cool and all, but it wasn’t nearly as dangerous as say, a vampire or shapeshifter. But unlike the profiles of my typical reaper assignments, this one had a green dot near the name, meaning this was one of my new job tasks.

Simon had put me in charge of gathering wandering spirits—or haunts as we call them—who had managed to find a way to the living plane on their own. With the veil between worlds thinned to next to nothing in certain spots, my watch was almost always flashing with a new haunt assignment.

That’s what had brought me here today. One thing I had learned while tracking and rounding up these haunts was that they liked to return to a place that meant something to them, like a childhood home or the place they’d died. For most murder victims, it was the latter.

Poor Stephanie had been part of a drug-selling deal gone wrong. Her body had been dumped in the harbor afterwards, so this was where I expected her to be.

As I scanned the area for any ghostly apparitions, I found nothing but the water lapping against the dock and the Navy sailors shouting orders from their ship.

I tapped the search function on my watch’s screen. The green light by Stephanie’s picture flashed rapidly, telling me she was close by. But when I searched the harbor again, there was no Stephanie in sight.

Huh.

I took a few steps right, and the light on my watch slowed a beat. I went left, and it did the same, but when I crept closer to the water by the docks, the light flashed fast enough to almost induce a seizure. That’s where she had to be. In the water.

Really? I didn’t feel like going for a swim now.

Examining the murky, dark water, I debated jumping in. What were the chances she would decide to come to the surface? Minimal.

Looked like I didn’t have a choice. I was going in.

After backing up for a running start, I clasped my hands over my head and dove in. Since I was still in my spirit form, the water couldn’t touch me directly, but the chill of it still hovered nearby, making goose bumps rise on my skin.

I swam on, glancing at my watch every now and then to make sure the search feature was still flashing quickly and I was going in the right direction. Visibility wasn’t great; the deeper I got, the darker and dirtier the water became. The blinking of my watch threw green light against the haze, but it wasn’t strong enough to penetrate the gloom.

It wasn’t until the familiar spectral glow caught my eye that I knew I’d found Stephanie. Standing at the bottom of the bay, she stared at a few bricks on the muddy floor. Like me, the water didn’t touch her, but her long hair floated around her face, as if the momentum of the water was manipulating it somehow.

Interesting. I wondered why that was. Maybe it had something to do with how she died. That was the only conclusion I could come up with anyway.

Even though she was slightly transparent—as most spirits were in the living world—she wore ripped jeans, a floral-printed tank top, and a cardigan. The same outfit she sported in her profile, which meant only one thing—they were the clothes she had died in.

“Stephanie,” I called to her, my voice echoing in the strange otherworldly protective casing I was in. “Hello, Ms. Constantine?”

She peered up at me and frowned. “Who are you?”

The amount of times I introduced myself a day… It was insane. But part of the job.

I sighed. “Jade. I’m here to take you to the afterlife.”

“Like Simon did after I died?”

That surprised me. “Simon was your reaper?”

“He helped me get out of the water and cross over, yeah,” she said and glanced at the bricks again. “But it looks like someone else found my body. I used to be here, wrapped up and weighed down by bricks.”

Her sorrow radiated off her like a wave, and my chest ached for her. Even if she had been an addict or just in the wrong place at the wrong time, no one deserved to be dumped and left to be forgotten like she had been. At least if her body wasn’t here now, that meant, most likely, the police recovered her and she’d had a burial after. It was the only positive I could find out of such a shitty situation.

---