Anya

Another day, another hit. I frowned at the address on the paper. It was too near the site from yesterday. “You sure this isn’t just residual energy?” I asked the technician.

She gave an irritated click of the tongue, checked the monitor, and nodded. She jabbed her finger at the jumbled mess of numbers displayed. “That is not just residuals,” she declared, as though I had any chance of deciphering it. Well, maybe I’d be just as annoyed if someone questioned my ability to do my job.

“And no more witnesses!”

Oh wait, she did that every damned day. I grunted and headed out.

When I reached the address, I looked around, seeking out the telltale signature of a magical girl. I couldn’t sense anything strong enough to follow. Whoever she was, she wasn’t transformed anymore. That made it more difficult. At least the rain had died down to a drizzle.

“You okay, Miss?” 

I spun around, hand going to my jacket instinctively. It was a girl with long, black hair tied up into pigtails. She had on the local high school’s uniform. My eyes narrowed. She didn't have the pink ribbons or the golden axe, but I still recognized her... or rather, I recognized the way my mind shied away from her. Identity-obscuring magic was so annoying. “I’m fine. You?” Even though she was a magical girl, she wasn’t the one I’d been sent after. We generally didn't kill children if we could avoid it, magical or not.

The girl tilted her head, squinting at me suspiciously. She clutched her phone to her chest like she thought I'd steal it, but she still asked, “Are you looking for someone?”

“Maybe.” I scanned my surroundings, keeping half my attention on the enemy in front of me. I didn’t have identity-obscuring magic. It’d been dark and raining pretty hard yesterday, but she might still have caught sight of my face.

A woman in a business suit strode out of a dark alley. There. I flashed the girl a tight smile. “Sorry, I gotta get going.”

Magical energy exploded from behind me as I turned to chase my target, and I sighed. I looked back at the now-transformed girl. There it was. The pink ribbons, the golden axe, and the same damn uniform with so few alterations I had to wonder if she'd made her wish to an exceptionally lazy fairy. “Can this wait?”

I got an axe to the gut for my trouble. The girl had a triumphant grin on her face. This was why I hated kids. I grimaced and grabbed the weapon, jerking it out of the girl’s hands, ignoring the way it tore even more of my gut out. “That’s dangerous, you know,” I muttered. This much would heal easily. Painful and annoying, but I was running on full and more than capable of shrugging it off. I shoved my own energy into the weapon, and it shattered. My energy was fundamentally incompatible with hers.

Then another surge of magical energy gave me half an instant’s notice before a sword crashed down from above and sliced off my arm. “God damn it!” I staggered back. My target had joined the fight. “Can none of you wait till we’re in private?”

“We’ll erase their memories after, Reaper,” the woman said. “It needn’t concern you.”

I dodged her slashes and snatched up my arm, shoving it into my coat's pockets to reattach later. “Like hell it doesn’t. Who do you think has to kill all these people? That comes out of my wallet!”

“Let us kill you if it’s that much of a bother!” the girl shouted. She’d reformed her axe and was attacking me alongside the older magical girl. Unlike the woman, she was emotional, making her swings easy to dodge.

I growled and held out my hand. A scythe appeared in it. “Kids should stay out of it.” I waited for an opening and slammed the flat of my scythe into the girl. She flew across the street and crashed into the building.

The woman hesitated, glancing in the direction the girl’d landed. The moment cost her. I spun, and my scythe decapitated her.

All around us, the streets were dead. Our unintentional audience had already run. Selfish. How was I supposed to know which people had seen me and understood I wasn't human and which hadn’t? Now I’d have to either pay or eliminate everyone. I pulled out my arm and pressed it against the wound.

A high-pitched scream caught my attention. I dropped my arm and grabbed the axe before it could cut into my shoulder. I redirected it and drove my knee into her face for her trouble. There was a magnificently disgusting crunch, and she fell limp. I sighed and resumed attempting to reattach my arm.

A hand clutched at my ankle. I looked down at it, irritated. “Make yourself useful or leave.” How many times would I have to encounter this same girl? She had no skill beyond sheer tenacity. My arm finished attaching, and I flexed it experimentally. It’d do. I kicked the girl away and got out my phone. “Hey, mind getting me numbers on witnesses?” The system could, for a small fee, identify potential vectors. Not worth the extra cost if I knew identities, but for a situation like this? I didn't have much choice.

I jerked the phone away from my ear as the tech started shouting. Once the sound died down, I said, “They attacked me. What do you want me to do?” I glanced at the still living magical girl. She was struggling to stand. Tenacious indeed. “Speaking of, Number 89’s here again.”

The tech sighed heavily. “You have the worst luck, Abel. Sending metrics now. You’re in luck. Low response rate among nearby surroundings… well, other than the magical girl about to attack you. Why not just kill her?”

“I'll get to it soon enough. No point speeding things up.”

I dodged another swing of her axe. No preternatural instincts required for that one. Her sobs were loud, hoarse, and ugly. My phone beeped, and when I glanced down, I had a fully populated map of witnesses I needed to kill.

It wasn't like we liked killing people, okay? It's just that a Reaper's magic is a type of memetic contagion. So long as the person didn't understand or didn't believe what they saw, it'd be fine, but the second they accepted it? Best-case scenario, we'd have a new Reaper in our ranks. Worst-case, we'd have a typhoid Mary situation, and half the city would turn or die anyway.

And this power is a cancer. Once it takes root in you, your days of being human are over. So yeah, we had to kill witnesses.

"Wait! I'll - I'll erase their memories, okay? That's fine, right?"

I stopped. Glanced at the magical girl. She was leaning heavily against her axe. "Why?"

She glowered at me. Injured and exhausted she might be, but she still hated me. "Because it's wrong to kill people!"

I wish she'd consider that I was a person, too, once upon a time. But fair enough. I wouldn't really like anyone who'd killed my friends either, I guess. I held my phone back up to my ear. "You hear that?"

The tech grunted, and I decided to take it as acceptance. "I don't like this," she added after a moment.

"But legally, we're in the clear?"

"...yeah. Go ahead. Just don't tell anyone if you can help it."

Which was how I found myself leading a short girl who hated my guts around the neighborhood. Each time my phone pinged a person as contaminated, she pressed her hands to their head. A few seconds later, they staggered away, all knowledge of Reapers gone.

"What's your name, anyway?" she asked after a while. We still had a dozen more witnesses to hunt down.

"Abel."

"What?" She sent me a startled look, the first time she'd looked at me with anything less than hatred. "You're a guy?"

Oh. She had called me 'miss' earlier, hadn't she? I shrugged. "Yeah."

She stared at me for a while longer, aghast. I wasn't sure what she wanted from me. I wasn't buff with a beard and a deep voice. So sue me.

Or don't. Really. I don't have any money to take.

At last, she mumbled, "Anya."

I nodded slightly. I doubted I'd ever need to know her name again past this, but there wasn't much sense in saying so.

"You killed Theresa," she said abruptly as we finished erasing the last witness's memories.

"Which one was that?" I asked half-heartedly. I hoped she wasn't about to attack me again. We were out in the open, and I really didn't want to hunt down even more people.

Anya's lips trembled, but after a moment, she bit out, "Yesterday."

"Ah." That one had been strong.

Anya's shoulders shook. "That's it?"

I didn't reply.

"She was my mom!"

I stopped. Turned to study her. They did look superficially similar, but I couldn't say I'd have guessed it if she hadn't told me. "Sorry for your loss," I tried, even though I was pretty sure no one wanted to hear that from their mother's murderer.

"Why?"

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. "Because that's my job."

Humans and Reapers are fundamentally incompatible. A Reaper cannot procreate with a human.

Magical girls and humans are just as incompatible, but they can. And worse, they will. It's not a matter of if, but when a magical girl will make the shift from something cute and containable to something that will follow its biological instincts. "Did you turn at the same time?" I asked, not because I wanted to know about this girl, but because I did hate killing people, deep down, and it'd sure as hell make it easier on me if the people I killed were the type of evil to knowingly let their daughter go down this path.

"Just about," Anya said sullenly. Her hatred seemed to have faded. With it went her transformation.

Damn. I let the faint hope die and left it on the street, unburied.

A car pulled up beside us. I watched as the rear door opened and a tall, willowy blonde stepped out. "Anya! You're alright!" Her gaze switched to me, expression shutting down. "You are?"

I tensed.

"He's just an acquaintance," Anya said without missing a beat.

"He...?" The blonde's eyes narrowed. Then she huffed and held out a hand. "Whatever. Come on. You'll be staying with me for a while."

Anya took the hand and climbed into the car without a second look, leaving me to make my way back to the city's center. I entered the tall, obscenely normal-looking concrete building amid five thousand other concrete buildings and submitted my report.

"Welcome back. No casualties for once?" Officer Chou said without looking up from his computer.

I shook my head. "No."

Still not looking, he slid an envelope across the desk. "Payment for a successful removal." As I reached to take it, he spoke again. "Feel free to use the child, but don't forget you'll likely be the one to kill her once she turns of age."

I gritted my teeth. "I know." 

I left.