Death Eater

Edinson Grippen took in the sights of the city as his taxi took him down a busy street. Office buildings on either side of the vehicle stretched far enough into the sky that even the clouds had to acquiesce their ambitious reach. The driver came up to a light and took the opportunity to chat his fare up.

“You new here?” he asked with an accent that announced the city as his birthplace.

Grippen looked back down and smiled slightly, meeting the driver’s eyes that were reflecting in the rearview mirror front from the front seat.

“That easy to tell?”

The driver snorted before fixing his attention back on the road. “Barely get anybody these days that looks up at the scrapers the way you do, all doe-eyed and shit.” He took a right at the light, narrowly missing a cyclist taking the crosswalk at the wrong time. “These fucking guys, I swear to God…” he muttered, before rolling his window down and yelling in the cyclist’s direction. “Watch where you’re going, idiot! You almost fucking died!”

Grippen looked at the indifferent cyclist as he continued to cross the street, never turning around to acknowledge the driver or his advice. Under normal circumstances, Grippen wouldn’t correct the man about his statement. But today was no normal day. Or the next few days, for that matter, so he decided to share the good news with him.

“That man wasn’t in any danger of dying,” Grippen said calmly.

“Oh, yeah?” came the driver’s incredulous reply. “And how do you know that?”

“Because I didn’t smell any oranges before you made that turn.”

The driver’s gaze snapped up to the rearview mirror as he took them into a tunnel. “I’m sorry, what? You didn’t smell any...oranges, so that idiot lives to fight another day?”

“That is the long and short of it, yes,” came Grippen’s reply.

“And if you had?”

“Then he’d be dead.”

The driver had to pry his eyes away from the man in the backseat to focus on the road again. He chuckled to himself-more to calm his nerves than anything, then tightened his grip on the steering wheel as he mentally struggled with the fact that he had a fucking weirdo sitting behind him.

“Change of plans,” Grippen said suddenly, as he began sniffing the air around him. “When you come out of this tunnel, take a right at the light. Go down three blocks before making a left. I’m going to need you to stop at the apartment complex there and let me out.”

The driver’s knuckles had gone white from his death grip on the steering wheel.

“How the fuck did you know there’s an apartment in that area? Who the fuck are you?”

A larger smile took to Grippen’s face this time. “My name is Edinson Grippen, and I’m getting a whiff of citrus from that direction. You are in no danger, so please just follow my directions, if you would, mister…?”

“Frankie,” the increasingly nervous driver said.

“If you would, Mr. Frankie,” Grippen said in the sweetest voice he had.

Frankie promptly shut up and began following Grippen’s directions the moment they exited the tunnel. It wasn’t long before he pulled up to the apartment complex that both he and this man that claimed to be new to the city knew about. He parked on the right side of the road and looked up to the dilapidated building on his left. Frankie had grown up in this apartment complex when he was a child. The place was deathtrap, and he wondered to this day how it managed to stay open. Grippen’s previous words came to the forefront of his thoughts, and he swallowed the knot in his throat before asking him a question he was terrified of knowing the answer to.

“Do you...smell them better now?” he meekly asked. “The oranges?”

Edinson Grippen took a deep and slow breath through his nostrils, his eyes closed, and face locked in an unmistakable moment of pure bliss. He exhaled through his mouth before suddenly slamming both palms of his hands against the plexiglass barrier between him and the front seat.

“Yesssssssssssssssss,” Grippen hissed at the man, the excitement of pending death sending chills throughout his entire body.

Frankie took one last look at the man in the mirror and regretted it. Grippen’s eyes were two dilated pupils in a sea of glowing amethyst.

“Keep the meter running, pleassssse,” Grippen said as he exited the vehicle. “This’ll just take a ssssssec.”

Grippen firmly shut the door and leaned against the taxi and waited, his glowing eyes affixed on the building in front of him. A building that was quickly filling up with smoke by the second. Soon the entire building was engulfed in flames. Windows were being broken or lifted, the heads of the people still trapped inside poking out, trying to inhale anything other than smoke. Grippen began uttering a silent prayer of thanks for the meal he was about to receive.

Just then, a man hanging out of his window some stories up suddenly leaped, taking his chances with a hard landing over a fiery death. Grippen knew, however, that there was no choice or chance for him. He landed head first on the concrete walkway just near the grass, his head bending at an awkward angle, the rest of his body doing its best impression of an accordion. Grippen finally stood up from leaning against the taxi and made his way across the street towards the growing inferno.

Sirens could be heard in this distance at this point, but it was already too late. More and more people with any strength left began hurling themselves from their windows to their deaths. The scent of oranges was overpowering everything in the vicinity for Grippen, while his amethyst eyes showed him the reality of the situation; everyone in this building was either dead or dying. He stopped amid the broken bodies of the flightless and scanned the height of the scorched apartment. The heat of the building would’ve been felt by anyone else nearby, but the chill of death surrounded Grippen, shutting the primordial energy out entirely. Purple flames of death burned brighter than the ones that were orange, and whorls of brightly colored “soul smoke” seeped from the windows and brickwork itself to flow upwards and in the opposite direction than that of their gray counterpart. “No reds,” Grippen said to no one in particular. “Good souls, all. But no matter, I’ve waited long enough. I must feast.”

Grippen outstretched both arms and violently lifted his head to the sky. His mouth opened well past the point of a normal human’s, a bass filled hum emanating from the now gaping maw. The purple flames in the building reacted to the call and flew out of the building from all sides, coalescing into one stream headed directly for Grippen’s mouth. He inhaled the flames eagerly, his throat working to swallow the death essence as quickly as it came. His eyes now burned with power, a light purple smoke rising from each socket. His hands clenched and unclenched as he continued to absorb the flames until nothing was left but a regular burning building.

Frankie sat in the car with a puzzled look on his face. He watched Grippen the entire time as he walked towards the complex, stretched out his arms and looked straight up like an idiot. But even with the fact that Grippen was clearly on some rare and powerful form of narcotic, and close to racking up $150 in fare, Frankie had seen enough death for one day and was ready to go home. He let his window down and tried to get Grippen’s attention without sounding confrontational.

“You bout done over there, buddy?” he said with a voice tinged with concern. And for the second time today, he regretted his actions when it involved this man.

Grippen finally let his arms down and slowly turned to face Frankie’s way. What the cab driver wasn’t aware of before, he was now. Grippen’s mouth still hung open unnaturally, only now it glowed with a purple fire that urged Frankie to void his bowels and flee. The impossible grin that formed on Grippen’s face didn’t help, nor what came after.

“Frankiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeee,” Grippen drunkenly slurred, his eyes glowing alight once again at the sight of the driver. Even though he was across the street, the frightened man heard his name spoken all around him. The hairs on his neck instantly stood on end.

The light in Grippen’s eyes was purple, but it might as well have been green as far as Frankie was concerned, because it was definitely time to go. “Don’t worry about paying, buddy. This one’s on the house. You take care and never call another taxi again in your life, you got it?”

Regaining a semblance of his composure, Frankie calmly rolled his window up, fastened his seatbelt and took off down the street. Before he rounded the corner, he ripped the rearview mirror clean off his windshield and stuffed it in the glove compartment.