Chapter 1

Screams were always what woke her, if you could call the hair’s breadth of a moment she closed her eyes, sleep.  Yes, screams, whether they were high pitched wails, childlike howls, or the piercing ones where the utterance of sound doesn’t cease until the offender needs to take a breath which were normally the most disturbing. She never knew if the offender needed a breath or if they just stopped screaming. 

 

Long wailing, high pitched shrieks serve as the alarm and the timer for the assignment.  The low-pitched guttural moaning are the ones that made her pause, and wait for a moment or two, because those were the cries of eminent death.  Those were the screams of those who’d already given up.  These were left to the Reaper to come and collect who was rightfully his.   Those were the ones she was meant to avenge.

 

The childlike wails cries, these were the ones she was meant to defend, as they had life in them yet, they had not given up nor given in.   Because they fought for life, she would fight for them. 

 

This outcry now, was an explosion of a wail, a moan of anguish, a disquieted bellow that she wouldn’t normally bother with.   She learned through the years that these sorts of utterances don’t coincide with her taken oath.   Sometimes, they belong to a person enjoying a sumptuous meal, or these were the sounds of the essence of satisfaction after sex.   Those situations left her embarrassed and unsatisfied with her vows and oath as a protector, so she’d long ago abandoned paying any attention to them.   

 

The bellow sounded again and roused her from her own lamenting, and the urge to take flight became too delicious to ignore. Her arms stretched out, and she leaned forward, the heels of her feet leaving the concrete parapet, lifting higher until her toes bent, and the momentum carried her off the ledge into the wind. The beauty of her form would entice those to be in awe if they could see her. She never jumped, merely allowed her ethereal form to fall and ride the wind, the same wind that carried these sounds to her ears.

The wails would guide her where she needed to be. In the blink of eye, she would find herself at the scene, and these scenes were never a pretty picture. She’d become numb to them all, but there was always a twinge of pain, hurt or suffering she felt, perhaps to never forget her long forgone humanity.

 

As she floated towards the ground, the familiar sense of reckoning was not there. She would, in most cases, have a feeling of what transpired to beckon her presence. The feeling was absent, and she felt nothing but a void. There was a feeling of loss, as there usually was, it is why she was called, but this was loss, not death. Bewildered, her mind told her dark eyes to observe everything before and about her. There was a new purpose to her journey.