The day before the Collector’s Gala, Thanatos was patrolling the showroom floor. Collectors had been dropping off their artifacts all week to be put on display. The glass cases had to be locked and sealed with magick after the usual technological security protocols were put in place.

Over the epochs, so many artifacts had been stolen from places, despite all of their magickal protections, with some mundane modes of thievery. When one relies solely on the complexities of magick, one tends to make trivial and detrimental oversights, which thieves who think themselves Indiana Jones take full advantage of.

Death would never allow himself, or his company, to be disgraced by such mindless mistakes. Thus, every precaution was taken on nights like this: ample security guards, cameras, motion lights, weight sensors, heat detection, and other anti-theft systems. These measures are taken long before they apply the aura detectors, magick blocks, force fields, protection symbols, devil’s traps, and hex charms.

Thanatos is not a nervous or paranoid man. He is observant and prepared.

With his deadly reputation, no one had ever tried to infiltrate one of his Collector’s Galas. In the event someone ever did, his reputation as a fierce and powerful businessman would be soiled, so Thanatos made sure many would die before that became possible. If anyone stepped onto the property with even so much as a thought of stealing from one of his clients or himself, they would incinerate so suddenly, no one would ever know that they had been there. Not even a speck of ash would remain to be swept up by the janitorial staff.

A grating and familiar voice broke his concentration. “Thanatos.”

Death turned around to see a short man. Everyone was short compared to Death.

The man with shoulder-length blond hair approached him. The man was dressed in expensive turn-of-the-century French attire, and he sported an ornate cane for fashion purposes only. It was tucked under his arm.

“Alec. What can I help you with?”

With his top hat in hand, Alec gestured towards the offices, “I was hoping I might have a private word with you.”

“If this is regarding your night clubs, I’ve told you before I’m not interested.” Death made to brush the Vampire Prince off.

But, Alec quickly added, “Though, I hope to change your mind on that particular subject, I hope to speak to you about a more private matter.”

Thanatos then knew that Alec wanted to speak with him about his sire, Victor Devereaux, and Death’s curiosity got the better of him. He publicly supported the Devereaux House, and was well aware of the drama Alec was concocting. Perhaps this was his chance to belittle some sense into Alec. The prince was young and rebellious, and would soon learn the error of his ways.

Thanatos nodded and led the way to his office. Alec followed with the pretentious sound of his cane echoing off the stone hall.

They entered through a large wooden door, which Thanatos magickally unlocked with the slightest flick of his wrist, without so much as missing a step. The walls were lined with shelves of books, and Death moved behind the desk, gesturing Alec to sit before him.

Alec rested his cane on the arm of the chair and placed his top hat in his lap.

Thanatos’s decorum forced him to have to wait for Alec to situate himself before he could finally sit. He leaned back and steepled his fingers.

Death said, “Say what you’ve come here to say.”

Alec readjusted in his seat, reading his mental notes with haste, “Thanatos, I’ve come here, as you are a man my father and I both greatly respect. I trust you are aware of the rift growing between my father and myself?”

Thanatos didn’t bother to restrain his boredom, “Yes. I am.”

“I am beginning to worry that this chasm is going to mar my reputation as a businessman.”

“You don’t say?” Thanatos said as patronizingly as he could manage.

Alec clenched his jaw to regain his composure. “Yes. His personal feelings about my business operations are starting to sway my investors to withdraw. He is slandering my name. I was hoping as a friend, and a business partner to my father, you might be able to mitigate our private disagreements so as to have our differences not affect my future in the business world.”

Death chuckled, “Alec-”

“Mr. VanGarrett, if you would,” The prince interjected.

“Alec,” Death sneered. “Everything. Everything is business. I am not a friend of your father. I am not your friend, and I am certainly not a family counselor. If you are concerned about your private affairs affecting your businesses, perhaps you should clean up your private affairs.

“Because in business nothing is private. Your investors and your clients are going to care about what you do behind closed doors, because how you handle your house is how you handle your business enterprises. Your father knows this, and has been trying to teach you this lesson by disowning you from his family, because he doesn’t want your private affairs to sway his investors, and clients to withdraw from his businesses.”

Alec’s face was beginning to twist with rising rage.

“I do not apologize if this reality I am explaining to you is harsh.” Thanatos continued, “Reality is harsh. The sooner you learn that, the better. Your best bet, as a businessman, is to repent and seek your father’s forgiveness. That is your only way to secure the success of your future. Your sire is the Vampire King. To go against him is to go against the entirety of your client base.”

Alec stood, his hat falling to the floor, “The new wave of the vampire community is exhausted of the old regime! My father and his merry men are tired and antiquated. We want a free market, we want industry, and freedom from our oppressors!”

“Calm yourself. Just because you can’t do whatever you want doesn’t mean you’re oppressed, Prince Alec. Your sire-”

“My sire is painting me a monster because I challenge him and his failed ways. He is trying to destroy me because my ideas frighten him.”

“I know about the girl, Alec. Everyone does.”

Alec’s nostrils flared, “That story is much more nuanced than he tells it. Victor is lying!”

Death smiled, and corrected, “His royal highness, Vampire King, Victor Devereaux, if you will…”

Alec took a breath and nodded in frustration. “Very well, I’ll prove it to all of you.”

Thanatos stood as Alec picked his hat up off the floor

“Very well. We’ll see who the free market supports. Will you still be at the gala tomorrow night?”

“Yes. I appreciate the opportunity to meet other collectors and expand my collection.” He nodded as he took up his cane and made his way to the door.

“You’ll be happy to know your father will not be in attendance,” Thanatos added, as a minute gesture of peace.

“That does brighten my spirits, although I assumed that he wouldn’t be present, given that all he’s collected for decades... is dust.”

Alec exited the room, and Thanatos fell back into his chair. Alec was a punk and a trouble maker, who no one took seriously, but Thanatos wondered for a brief moment if thinking that way was a mistake.

He opened up the bottom drawer of his desk where he hid a small decanter of Macallan scotch, but next to the crystal container was a small velvet bag he vaguely remembered. It had been so long since he used this office, he was uncertain of its contents.

He opened the bag and sprinkled the loose items into his palm. Jet. Black. Teardrops. He looked around the empty office to make sure that it was indeed empty, and no one else but him had seen the prized little gemstones.

He had been casually looking for these little tears whenever he strolled through one of his vaults or reliquaries. He had hoped he had just misplaced them, never wanting to accept the idea they had been stolen or lost, even though that could have been the reality.

Thanatos released a sigh of relief, then an inward snarl at himself for this idiotic misstep. Why would he leave them here in this old office of all places? How careless and irresponsible. Death of all people should know better.

He entertained for a small moment, that he would have never done such a thing, that someone else had placed them there for him to find. But, he quickly dismissed the paranoid thought. It denied fault and responsibility, and if Death was anything, he was responsible. He was responsible for everything.

There was a knock at his door, and he quickly replaced the tears into the velvet bag, and shoved the bag into his pants pocket.

“Come in,” He barked.

His secretary opened the door, and blinked at him through her cat eye glasses, “Sir, the head of security would like you to sign off on his work for the day.”

“I appreciate it, Patrice.”

Death grunted, closed the desk drawer with his foot, and exited the office.

***

Death walked through the streets of New Bedlam from the venue to his office building, which he could see towering over all the other edifices and rooftops. His office building was the tallest skyscraper in the city, and it was all white, just like his suit and just like his Lincoln.

It was a monolith. It was a symbol, a reminder, that Death is pure and that Death is looming, and that Death ruled all, and no other god could obtain his domain, nor could they escape it.

Except maybe the Fates.

He did not enjoy the power they wielded over him and his world, controlling the ins and outs of his job, taking lives whenever it fit their power-hungry agenda.

To him, their manipulative works were a threat to the balance of things, over which he kept an ever-vigilant eye. Keeping the balance of things was his true nature.

And the Fates were threatened by any of the ancient gods whose power surpassed their own, like Eros, or himself, or his brother Hypnos. Those three sisters saw anything that existed before them as a danger to their reign, and they would see to the submittance or non-existence of anything potentially detrimental to their plans.

Fate was everywhere, and it could control you without you ever even knowing.

Death would not be controlled. He would not allow himself to be strung up like a marionette. He would only play their game long enough to win it. But, he made sure not to think on this for long and to resign himself to boiling that frustration down into a constant discomfort in the back of his mind.

Amongst the hustle and bustle of the congested sidewalk, a homeless child bumped into him.

It startled him and shook him from his thoughts. The child with a slight limping gait apologized with fear in his eyes, and he quickly ran off with a pack of other dirty children.

Thanatos grunted. The homeless children were beginning to pour out of the rundown communities like Rippertown. Most of them were demons, but an increasing number were humans.

The real currency of the Netherworlds was not demonics, but power, which humans had little of, and as a result they were literally on the bottom of the food chain. Wealthy demons and vampires kept them as pets and cattle. They were expensive to buy and to keep, and if they escaped, they ran away into the sewers or the woods. Both hiding places were dangerous and would also end with them becoming something’s lunch, but they did it anyway for the dim chance of freedom. Somehow, more and more had managed to survive, and they were beginning to run amuck.

He’d have to find a solution to fix the problem before it got any worse. Perhaps adoption. The upper class demons would enjoy the ego stroke they’d receive for adopting a human, and, yes, the human would quickly perish, but death comes to all creatures. It is the balance of things, but that way of handling the issue appeared more humane than leaving them to die literally in a gutter.

Thanatos pushed open the glass doors to his skyscraper, and admired the clean lines and open floor plan of his offices. He went straight to the coffee shop on the first floor. Death prided himself in the care he gave his employees. He provided them with a living, along with living arrangements, life insurance, a great deal of accidental death and hazard insurance, along with many other perks to their job, which included the coffee shop. It was identical to the one across the street. To be honest, it was good for his employees and for him. They took shorter breaks, given that they didn’t have to leave the building, and he, of course, profited off the coffee shop as well.

“My usual,” Thanatos ordered the cashier, who nodded nervously and told the barista they needed the boss’s order on the fly.

Death stood there with his hands in his pockets as he waited for the baristas to steam the milk and ready the espresso.

It took much longer than it should have for him to notice his pockets were empty.

He double checked his breast pocket, his back pockets, his front pockets again, but the little velvet bag was missing.

The barista handed him his warm paper coffee cup. With a large smile he took the coffee. Calmly, without raising alarm, he strolled back through the grand entry. The moment he pushed through the double glass doors and his shoes hit the sidewalk outside, he dumped his coffee in a trash can and sprinted down the pavement. He wove in and out of the crowd as he heard them ask in shock as he ran, “Is that Thanatos?”

When he reached the spot of his mugging, he brushed back his hair and composed himself, as he tried to recall which way the group of children had gone.

Thanatos tugged at his suit jacket and his sleeves as he looked over the street and the crowd. He turned down the alleyway he suspected the children had disappeared into, and he saw that the solid steel cover to the sewer was slightly askew.

He stepped up to it, noticing the Grim Enterprises logo stamped into the steel. With the flick of his wrist, the drain cover slid away to reveal a rusted ladder descending into the dark pit. He snarled, and took off his suit jacket, laying it on a nearby Grim Enterprises dumpster.

Thanatos descended into the New Bedlam underground.

His white shoes sank into the muck when he finally hit bottom. It was rank with the blood of Alec’s nightclubs and the general waste of the Netherworlds. Rats with glowing eyes scampered past him on pipes and rails, and bioluminescent scum grew on the damp stone and lingered on the opaque surface of the water.

He waded ankle deep through the canals. However, whenever he found a drier walkway, it was disrupted by the giant blocks of ancient temples felled in the bygone days of the Netherworlds, forcing him to to continue traversing through the mire. Eventually, he heard the laughter and cries of children echoing off the walls, and Death crept like a shadow closer to the congregation.

He could sense how many were demons and how many were human, and his senses landed on his thief, whose gait was slightly gimp, whose aura at first glance was purely human, but something tasted off. Thanatos could taste the death of all things, and this human boy had no expiration date.

The boy was only pretending to be human, and this thing had no death date. Everything had a death date. Every ocean. Every star. Every god. The only thing without a termination date was Death himself.

At that realization, he quit lurking in the shadows and stepped out into the mass of children, like a dragon descending onto a town of villagers. They scattered, human and demon alike, except his thief, who unlike the other children, had no internal instinct to run from his own mortality.

Death came upon him like a Titan, and took him by his throat. He could feel the boy’s heart racing underneath his grasping palm, and he knew the pulse was a lie. He wasted no time removing his velvet bag from the boy’s pocket, and instead of pocketing it again, he teleported it to a secured vault where it belonged. Never again would he make such a mindless mistake.

“What are you?” he asked the gasping child, whom he promptly dropped onto the damp sewer floor.

“What the hell are you talking about?” The child responded with strength and aggravation. “Look, I stole your stones, because I was aiming for your wallet. I had no idea. I was just going to sell them to buy us all some food.”

“You were just going to sell them,” he mocked. “Do you have any idea what those stones are? Do you even- It doesn’t matter what they are. What matters is what you are. Tell me.”

The child was looking for a way out, but Death had him cornered, so our hero stood his ground. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Death lowered himself to the child’s face. “You’re not human.”

The boy laughed in his face. “Yes. I am.”

Death smiled and looked away. “Maybe you think you are,” he looked back up, “but you, my boy, shouldn’t exist, and we are going to find out why you do. You are coming with me.”

He grabbed the kid’s arm, and took him away.

***

Our hero was strapped to a stainless steel slab in a dank basement. When he tilted his head back he could see the old wooden stairs leading to the floor above them.

“What is your name?” asked the towering man in the white suit.

Our hero had to think for a moment before he answered, strangely, as if only just remembering it himself. “Damien.” The creepy old lady he had met in the swamp had told him his name was, “Damien Warrick Parker.” The way he said his name- it was as if he was saying it for the first time.

“And where did you come from?”

“I come from the water,” he sang, then quickly corrected, “the swamp.”

“The swamp,” The man in the white suit echoed in disbelief.

“Yes!” Damien protested Death’s questioning and patronizing tone.

“And why were you in the swamp?”

The swamp witch had told him that when she had found him, he had just survived a terrible accident. His brows pulled together, “I don’t know. I woke up there.”

The creepy witch had healed him, and had told him it was time for him to leave the swamp.

“Where were you before the swamp?”

He had no recollection of where he had been before. “I don’t remember.”

“I find that hard to believe, thief. Do you know where you are now?”

He had spent days wandering from town to town, sleeping in abandoned houses and shacks until he found other children like him- lost, and hungry, and wandering. They had made homes in the sewers and begged for money when they weren’t picking pockets and digging in dumpsters. The demons in that world ate strange food.

Damien rolled his eyes. “Enlighten me.”

At this blatant disrespect, Thanatos laughed. It was further proof the boy was not a boy, “The Netherworlds. My world.”

“Oh,” Damien quipped, “you’re the douche bag on the front page of the papers?”

“Yes,” Death snarled, “That douche bag is me. I am Death, and I am the ending of all things, and you, Mr. Parker, have no ending. I don’t believe it is a coincidence that you happened to be the one to steal something very important from me. Do you think it is a coincidence?”

“The universe is never so lazy.” Damien sighed as if he had said that line a million times.

“My sentiments exactly… The Fates sent you.”

Damien wrinkled his nose, “Huh? You mean like the goddesses, the Moirai?”

“Yes. Exactly. You apparently know nothing else, but you somehow know who the Fates are?” Death scoffed.

Damien offered unconvincingly, “Amnesia can be selective?”

Death gave him a condescending hmph, and began to move up the table, trailing his long white fingers along the stainless steel.

The metal slab on which he was laying became cold as Death faded from view. He began to shiver uncontrollably, and a familiar but unnamable fear sank into his bones.

Damien began to tug at the restraints as an inner voice shushed and cooed him, and another one said Hey, look at me.

His heart slamming against his rib cage, he tilted his head back to see the blond man with mismatched eyes looking down at him. The blue and green eyes were lifeless and cold. Damien looked through them, and past them, and saw nothing. He saw the dark nothingness of lifelessness after death.

Thanatos put his hands flat on the table on either side of our hero’s head.

Here we go...

Damien steadied the tempest in his chest.

“Let’s take a quick peek, and see what’s going on inside that head of yours.”

Death put all ten fingers on the sides of Damien’s head. He wiggled through the hair until his fingernails scraped the boy’s scalp. His touch turned our hero’s blood to ice.

That cold second passed like a decade in a grave.

Don’t scream, said the distant voice in Damien’s mind.

Then ten icey fingers penetrated into his brain like spikes.

And he screamed.