Under Her Cursed Scythe

"Can you be any slower?" her mother queried impatiently.

"I'm sorry." replied Alivia, with an anxious tone, and hurriedly zipped up her black hooded jacket.

"Are you ready now?"

"Yes." Alivia responded passively like a doll.

"Ugh! Finally!" Her mother exhaled a breath of exhaustion and ordered with a cold attitude, "Now stand still and close your eyes."

She picked up the family's grimoire from the dining table and rub a smudge of dark purple liquid upon Alivia's forehead with her thumb while chanting according to what was written on the book.

Purple smoke emerged from nowhere and enshrouded Alivia's face. She could feel a funny scratchy and burning sensation on her skin and her hair at first. Then, after a sharp tang stung her nose, she began to feel her nose, mouth, eyes and chin remotely adjusting in size and position. Pressure was also felt on her head as though an invisible hand was pressing her down and trying to make her appear shorter.

When the purple smoke cleared up, her mother said, "Done! Off you go.", and walked away with her grimoire, preventing Alivia from ever having the chance to get a sneak peek of the content inside again.

'So this is what I look like tonight...' Alivia thought and a moan of disappointment slipped from her lips when she regarded herself in the floor mirror behind her.

From her reflection, she saw a stranger's face with freckles across her cheeks, blonde short hair and ruddy brown upturned eyes. But she preferred yesterday's look more- a Ginger with remarkably large blue eyes shaded by preposterously long lashes and a sharply defined small face covered by milky skin -because it resembled her mother's appearance the most and ironically, taking on that particular stranger's look had made her feel closer to her mother than ever before.

Still, blonde or Ginger, blue-eyed or not… this had been her mask, a mask which she put on and would change every night to make her unrecognizable to anyone, even to herself as she reaped souls out of her preys.

'This is not me…this is not who I am…' She said to herself when she went on her first few "hunting trips"…using this mask as an excuse to obscure the harsh reality and ugly consequences of her actions.

'I am a killer… I am a bloody killer…' Then, at some point in time, putting on the mask became some kind of an "hypnotic suggestion" to put her fear, sympathy, grief… any emotions that made her human aside, and to, psychologically, turn herself into a killing machine.

She found herself becoming reluctant to kill her targets the next two nights. Instead of hunting down her victims and reaping their souls right away, she spent most of her time keeping a close distance to her targets, hesitating, gasping at the air, and drowning in fears as well as self-consciousness that she thought she had already dealt with a long time ago-before she conjured enough strength to complete her task.

This reluctance to kill had come over her so abruptly in that she suspected an enchantment had cast upon her during that night at the mall, whereas she couldn't quite put her finger on what the source was. Certainly, Erika's father couldn't have done it just by gawking hard at her eyes. That's what she believed.

Staring at the unfamiliar face in the mirror, Alivia wondered. 'Can I still do it tonight?'

"Why are you still here? You should be gone by now!" her mother chided when she returned into the living room and spotted Alivia was still there, turning around and around in front of the mirror while appearing to be checking on her "new look".

"Mother!" Alivia jumped at her mother's voice. 'Oh please just one more minute.' She said at the back of her head. 'One more minute won't hurt...I don't want to-'

"What are you waiting for? Go, you moron! Stop wasting time!" her mother ordered and glowered.

"Yes, mother. I'm sorry...I will leave in a second." Alivia stammered, fleetingly shrugging off whatever was in her mind.

She swiftly wore the Reaper's ring, grabbed one of those oil lantern keychains that was empty (there were eight of them in total), put on the enchanted glove (which was made with a special material that could nullify any magical energy and therefore, prevented her touch from becoming lethal when she had the ring on her finger), and climbed up the rooftop.

After smearing blood on the glassy surface of the ring, she murmured an aviation spell. As soon as she could sense energy rising up from the ring wrapped around her finger, she took off from the roof and soared high up into the air. And as though she was walking on an invisible rope high above the sky, she began to edge towards the North West direction.

Before she accelerated her speed and went any further, she heard her mother crying from far below, "You should come home with at least seven souls. Else, do not ever come back! Do you hear me?"