Shiine hurried past the convenience store. It was the same store she always stopped by on her way home from school, but she didn’t feel like going there today. The reason was simple: A few days ago, someone had caught her shoplifting there.
Fortunately, it hadn’t been an employee. The security was notoriously lax. People said no one ever got caught; that was why Shiine had decided to steal. She’d slipped some candy into her pocket, and no one had been any the wiser.
No one, that is, apart from Takakura, a girl in Shiine’s class. She’d happened to be in the store at the time and seen everything. She and Shiine never really spoke much, but she’d brought it up the very next day at school.
“Uh, I saw what you did yesterday, and I—I think you should stop doing that kind of stuff…,” Takakura had mumbled in that annoyingly timid voice of hers.
“Don’t you dare tell anyone,” Shiine had snapped back. “If you do, you’ll be sorry.”
She’d thought that threat would be enough, but now she wasn’t so sure.
I messed up. Takakura’s such a wimp that she probably won’t go blabbing to the store or the school, but still…
There was no telling when she might cave and rat Shiine out, and that made Shiine uneasy. If only there was a more reliable way to keep Takakura quiet…
A butterfly fluttered past Shiine’s face, interrupting her thoughts. It was a weird color. It had large black-patterned wings like a swallowtail, but instead of pale yellow, the wings were neon pink. She’d never seen a butterfly like that before. Curious, she began to walk in the same direction it was going. It was almost as if it was leading her somewhere.
The butterfly took Shiine away from her usual route home and eventually flew into a narrow alley.
“…Huh?”
Shiine followed it into the alley but then stopped short.
“I didn’t know we had anywhere like this in town…”
Looking around, she found herself in a deserted little cluster of old-fashioned backstreets. She knew this area pretty well, but she couldn’t remember ever seeing somewhere like this before.
She spotted a vending machine nearby. An old one. It must’ve been there for years—decades, even. Its exterior was starting to rust, the paint was faded and flaking, and the display window had gotten all cloudy. Shiine didn’t remember seeing anything like that around here, either.
✦ ✦ ✦
Then she realized something. She looked into the reaper’s eyes—or where its eyes would have been.
“No way… So you’re actually going to…kill Takakura for me…?”
The tiny apparition didn’t say anything. It didn’t even nod. It simply turned away from her and floated toward the door.
“Whoa! Wait! Wait a minute!”
Shiine hurried after the grim reaper, reaching out to grab it. But once she saw the scythe in its hand, she thought better of it. Instead, she grabbed the now-empty cup, brought it down over the grim reaper, and quickly closed the lid.
Was she thinking that this whole thing had gone beyond a joke and that she didn’t really want to curse Takakura? No, not really.
“She hasn’t done anything wrong…but if she wasn’t around, I wouldn’t have to worry about people finding out about what I did. I can’t let this chance go to waste.”
Shiine’s main concern was that she didn’t want this grim reaper flying off on its own somewhere she couldn’t keep track of it. What if it floated off somewhere without completing its mission? What if it mistook someone else for Takakura and killed them instead? What if it got eaten by a cat or a dog somewhere along the way?
This was Shiine’s first time using a grim reaper, and there was so much she didn’t know about how things like that worked. If possible, she wanted to keep it in sight while it did its job.
“Just stay in there for a while,” she whispered to the little grim reaper inside the cup. “I’ll take you to school tomorrow, and you can deal with Takakura then.”