Ridill

My mother was a magical girl. She got pregnant at 28, had me at 29, and killed herself a few days shy of her 30th birthday. When I was born, they tested me for abnormalities. I was lucky. Other than being unusually compatible with the Reaper transformation, there was nothing wrong with me. Since it originated from the fairies, the contagion works best on women. Reapers like me, born to magical girls, are stronger than average, though, and apparently that held true even for a man.

I never had a chance. They started training me from the time I was an infant. On my eighteenth birthday, they stuck me in the room with the Progenitor, and by the next morning, I was no longer human.

I made it seven years without fucking up too badly. I was barely making ends meet, but I was stable. Then, three years ago, the Allaheim Incident occurred, and I found Ridill half-buried in the rubble that remained. She was still bright and lively back then, fully corporeal and filled with childlike innocence and wonder.

"Do you have a wish?" she asked me.

It was late by then, and I was one of the last Reapers on the scene. I brought her home with me, intending to take her with me to work the next day to turn her in.

"This is where you live?" she asked when I lay down to sleep. She was in an iron cage on my bedside table.

I ignored her.

"Don't you have any family?" she asked, looking this way and that. "Any children?"

"No."

"Oh. That seems lonely."

I don't know. Something about that struck me. And in the morning, rather than take her with me to work, I put some food in her cage, uncertain what fairies even ate, and left her there.

When I got home, the food was gone. She shone brightly, clutching the bars of the cage and watching me with rapt fascination. "Do you have a wish?" she asked again.

"I'm a man," I told her.

She paused, frowning slightly, then shrugged and brightened even more. "Well, it happens sometimes. Do you have a wish?"

I never got around to reporting her.

***

We returned home without incident. I'd killed six girls in total that day. We'd eat well this month. Ridill was silent the entire time, listlessly obeying my instruction to wait in the alley while I reported in, then climbing back onto my shoulder without a word when I came back.

I started cooking more spaghetti without asking her if she was alright with it. Ridill ate it beside me, glow absent and her fading body even harder to ignore for the lack. At last, she asked, "Does... Does it hurt?"

"Huh?"

She prodded my shoulder gently. I looked down, saw the hole in my coat, and realized what she meant. "No. I heal quickly," I told her.

"Is it very dangerous?"

I considered that. I regularly lost body parts. That wasn't exactly safe. However... "It's not too bad. I'm hard to kill." An understatement. Research had given me the unflattering compliment of being as sturdy as an Australian magical girl.

Ridill gnawed at her lip unhappily. "Isn't there any way we could coexist?"

"Magical girls keep coming over to take more humans, and people aren't great at ignoring the continents stolen from them," I said. The question regularly came up with new recruits, and the answer was ingrained in me now. It usually only took one deployment to the remains of North America to stop asking.

I didn't call her a parasite, but it was how I thought of them. When they weren't Ridill.

"Like those girls today?"

"Yeah. Numbers are still being run, but we think they got out with more than a hundred people." I stared into the empty bowl of faintly greasy red tomato sauce remains. Every human lost to them was a human whose life would never be the same. We had no way of rescuing them. When we deployed to magical girl territory, it wasn't to bring back survivors. It was to kill them in hopes of reducing their ability to repopulate.

"Is your wish to eliminate us?" Ridill asked, her voice even quieter. "I know you have one. I can feel it."

"No." It'd be nice if that were my wish. That would have at least been a wish I could respect. "People've made that wish before. It doesn't work."

"No, I wouldn't think it would," Ridill agreed. She apparently had some sense of what her magic could and couldn't do. "It would probably just..." She glanced at me.

"Yeah." Make things like me.

She suddenly stood, tiny wings twitching like a cat's tail to maintain her balance. "But you know, Abel, that wouldn't happen to you. So please, can't you –"

"No." I rose and took our bowls to the sink. "Stop asking. That's something I can't and won't do. Ever." No matter how much it hurt her to hear, I wouldn't use up her life on a wish she couldn't possibly grant.