The Reaper's Embrace Read online

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Discover more Entangled Select Otherworld titles… When Danger Bites

  Diffraction

  Through the Veil

  Bittersweet Blood

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Abigail Baker. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 109

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Select Otherworld is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Edited by Tracy Montoya

  Cover design by Liz Pelletier

  Cover art from iStock

  ISBN 978-1-63375-968-8

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition May 2017

  For Doppler.

  If love alone could have kept you here, you would have lived forever.

  Chapter One

  “Understand…I do not have time for things that have no soul.”

  —Charles Bukowski

  “Good morning, Styx,” said the same monotone voice that had intruded on daily routines for decades. “I am disappointed to report that our soul quotas have fallen behind in the past few weeks. Our work has gone neglected. I have in place a new law that will curb these distractions, should our numbers not pick up in the coming days. I expect that you all will soon understand just how important your jobs are to the balance of life. In other news, terrorist Olivia Iris Dormier is still on the run. It would behoove each of you to keep your eyes open and inform the nearest Watchman should you spot her. She is extremely dangerous.”

  Marin, the Head Grim Reaper of Styx, continued with his usual doom and gloom of soul quotas, our inability to avoid his list of Offenses, and the importance of balance and what it could mean if the human population tips in the wrong direction. Styx is what keeps life and death on Earth in balance. Grim Reapers ferry souls from Earth to whatever lies beyond. And Styx needs Scriveners like me to mark humans whose time in the world of the living is over, because it’s a damn challenging job for the million or so Grim Reapers to find the millions upon millions of souls that are snuffed out every day.

  Marin put gaining personal power over keeping the balance, and he ruled with a violent hand. Thus, most Stygians—what we call the citizens of Styx—lived in terror of getting on his bad side, so they just did their jobs and tried to keep out of trouble. And the others like me fought hard against Marin’s blatant fascism. Still, he stated all his customary threats masked beneath a soothing bass voice and emotionless face. His black eyes looked into every single Stygian who watched a television, trying to find and expose the flaws in each of us.

  Every single day, morning and night, he continued his vitriol. This fascist leader told us that the success of the Earth fell on our shoulders while he remained in the innards of Lethe, his home base, barking out orders that were crimes against Stygians, crimes no one had the power to stand up to. You see, Marin didn’t have to send Stygians to Erebus—our version of eternal hell—for petty crimes. He could have ruled with compassion. He could have helped his fellow Stygians achieve soul quotas and, thus, helped humankind. But he chose the wicked, cruel route. He punished us. He made us live in fear. And he divided us with his rhetoric.

  Marin was a tyrant with the power to destroy us all.

  Good news is that I’d killed him four weeks earlier. Yep. Me. A Master Scrivener who, technically, isn’t supposed to have the power to dethrone and kill the Head Reaper. But, truth is, I developed the requisite skills to melt Marin into a brown sludge in his underground lair. I didn’t mean to kill him. It was him or me. The problem, however, is that no one in Styx aside from my closest allies knows the horrible, domineering, monstrous Head Reaper Marin is dead.

  But thanks to his daily televised messages that continued to play on Stygian television screens across the glode, he was still very much alive in Styx’s eyes.

  He was still issuing orders to seek and destroy me, the wicked, vile Master Scrivener Olivia Dormier, and anyone helping me.

  I hadn’t forgotten what had happened in Lethe four weeks earlier, and I had mixed feelings about this. I hadn’t lost my memory as was typical upon leaving the underground business nest of Death. Anyone who went in and out of Lethe usually had their memories of their time in there erased. No one knew what happened there. Did they shit their pants upon facing their ultimate demise? Who knows? Did they make friends with Marin instead? It would forever remain a mystery.

  I’d escaped Lethe, the realm of forgetfulness, with every single thought intact because Marin hadn’t been there to wipe my hard drive clean. I had done what so many had wanted for decades. I got close enough to the fiend to melt him into pulp.

  But I think I’m getting ahead of myself. So, let me start from the beginning.

  As a Scrivener, my job was to mark humans for the Grim Reapers with a tattoo, which I used to do with a tattoo machine in a little shop in Quebec City. My Deathmark was a skull tattoo. Unwitting humans would feel compelled to come to me, ask for a tattoo, and if it was a skull of any type (usually it was), they were set on the fast track to their demise.

  I learned over the past two years that my skills went far beyond the common Deathmark. I’m a Master Scrivener. I can put a Deathmark on humans and Grim Reapers with my bare hands, no tattoo machine required.

  Not all Scriveners are Masters, though. Hades knows my mentor, Gerard Bastille, wasn’t. He was good at being a regular Scrivener. Excellent, really. But Gerard couldn’t teach me all the skills that a Master like me needed. I learned through action, I suppose. I can also melt Grim Reapers and Scriveners, killing them through the molten heat of my body.

  That’s how I killed Head Reaper Marin.

  That’s why I’m on the run, too.

  Marin wasn’t actually a Reaper but a Master Scrivener like me masquerading as a Reaper. He kept his secret hidden for an impressively long time. I had to give him props for that. He’d basically had all of the Master Scriveners killed a long time ago in what had become known as the Master Scrivener Purge, because we were the only ones who could destroy him. But he hadn’t counted on dreadlock-wearing, hippie Scrivener like me successfully evolving into a Master without someone to train me and help me contain my powers. I’d eventually come across another Master who’d escaped the Purge, Errol Dennison, my second mentor, but I’d already come into my powers quite nicely on my own
. I’d come out on top in our battle, but in his final moment, Marin had left me with my own Deathmark. One last-ditch effort to destroy me for good. He’d also killed Errol.

  I had no one to turn to for guidance now. I was on my own and, though I tried to look like none of this affected me on the outside, inside I was losing my grip on hope.

  While Marin appeared to still be alive, leading Styx as the true Head Reaper, I raced across North America looking for someone to help me heal my Deathmark before my personal Grim Reaper and lover, Brent Hume, caught up to me.

  Lucky me, eh?

  Each human and Stygian has a Grim Reaper assigned to us, the one who will ferry our soul to the afterlife when it’s time to meet our Maker. I fell in love with mine. And when Marin marked me for Death, it became Brent’s job to rip my soul out of my body and send it on the path to Elysia, the good Afterlife, or Erebus, the hellish place. While I hoped for Elysia, I’d rather not have to deal with either one for a good long while. Plus, as one of the only living Master Scriveners, I was going to be necessary to help restore balance once Styx realized Marin was dead. So now, instead of reuniting with my beloved, I was running away from him as fast as my feet would carry me.

  “How many recordings do you think Marin made before you killed him?” asked Delia as we stared at the television screen mounted on the wall of the rundown Denver coffee shop. This shop was not in the least bit quaint like you’d expect from a coffee house in a large city. It was filled with a collection of old chairs and tables, possibly ones left abandoned in an alley, and discolored paintings that had probably been stolen from the nearest doctor’s office. I preferred a more modern, hipster theme to my coffee shop experience, but this one didn’t have a single guest inside, which meant we’d go unnoticed. So, I set aside aesthetics for safety.

  A statuesque, red-haired beauty, Delia Sinclair sat across from me, her hair pulled into a rope of amber silk. Her sort of prettiness had not been lost on anyone who crossed her path from our journey from Québec City to Denver, Colorado. She quickly made friends everywhere she went, something I found to be an asset when crowds looked sketchy. I met Delia at Wrightwick Manor—the same place I met, Errol Dennison. Delia was a Scrivener too, though her powers were more limited. I hated to say she was an average Scrivener, because Delia was hardly average, but she wasn’t a Master. She wasn’t even a practicing Scrivener at the moment.

  But Delia was my friend—one of my best friends. And she was at my side, helping me save myself and, with good fortune, Styx.

  “Marin has been living underground for decades. If he recorded one extra message a day, he’s set for quite some time,” I said, sipping my drink. “He’ll continue fooling Styx for years.”

  Her pout turned downward.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I was hoping you were going to say that he probably only has a month or so. You know, it’d be nice if you said something positive for once. If Styx doesn’t ever find out that he’s dead, what will that mean for—”

  “I know,” I interrupted. “But maybe, Prada, it’s not the right time for Styx to uncover the truth.”

  Delia came to expect my nickname—Prada—for her. It was no longer a jab, like it had been when we first met and had yet to earn each other’s trust. In fact, she accepted the title with pride. “But you have no body or evidence he’s toast. Anyone could take his place and continue ruling on his behalf. What if we end up with someone worse than him?” Delia spent a lot of time thinking about clothes and makeup and if she’d go to bed with Channing Tatum if he approached her (for the record, she would), but she also spent an equal amount of time pondering the future of the world and the catastrophes that could shower down upon us. “And then you suggest just today that we should capture Brent. You are nuts.”

  “Look, I know we can pull this off,” I said into my empty coffee cup, wishing I had paced myself and sipped slower, enjoying the drink. After all, it could be my last. “I wouldn’t have suggested it if I didn’t think we could handle it.”

  “I would prefer that we keep running until Xiangu pops out of a box and saves you.”

  Xiangu was a Master Scrivener. Errol had told me about her, that her skills were out-of-this-world. She was the only known Master Scrivener in history who could heal Deathmarks, or so Errol had said. Xiangu was my only chance of surviving.

  But finding her and convincing her to help me was another story, particularly before Brent caught up to me.

  “We can only run so long. Let’s think outside the box.” I smirked when one of Delia’s red eyebrows rose coyly. In the short time that I’d known her, I had learned just how quick she was to construe any word or combination of words as sexual innuendo. Member. Nut. Box. Red button. Moonflower. Delia had a filthy mind inside her voluptuous feminine poise, a perfect balance between elegance and raunchiness.

  I was surprised when she stopped at the eyebrow. “Come on, Delia. You aren’t going make a sexy comment about box?”

  “Hard to joke about lady bits when you’re talking about trying to capture Brent, Teacup. It’s a death wish if you’ve ever had one.”

  Good point. Still, I was so close to death these days, what did it matter? I should mention that Brent is an Eidolon Reaper, a more powerful type of Grim Reaper whose purpose is to ferry the souls of dying Stygians, not humans. Brent is also really powerful for an Eidolon because he’s been around longer than most. I could possibly kill him with my Master Scrivener powers, but again, I’m in love with the guy, so I’d like to keep him solid if I can. It’d be a shame to melt that handsome face.

  “I’ve given it a lot of thought in the past week,” I said. “Marin used his heat to control the Eidolons who served him. He didn’t have that much more power than us, and he kept several Eidolons prisoner. We can keep one at bay, doncha think?”

  “The one you’re talking about is the strongest Eidolon alive.” She had a great way of reminding me of the stakes and how bleak my future was. Such a good friend. “Ollie, I just don’t understand why you’d want to capture Brent when you can run.”

  Exhaustion and hopelessness forced my shoulders to buckle, and I slumped forward over our table. “Because at some point soon, I won’t be able to run any longer. Better to contain the problem now before it gets out of hand.”

  A person only has so much stamina before she gives in to her fate. Some people outwit and outrun their demise. Some people simply do not have the requisite vitality for life that keeps them ticking into their twilight years. I fell somewhere in the middle. I had avoided my death for long enough. I was growing tired of fighting to live. Very tired.

  But if I could capture him and somehow negotiate—either with him or Xiangu once I find her—for more time, I could make it work.

  Precious little has been said about what happens following a successful revolution in Styx. As far as the history books say, Styx has never undergone a revolution, so what is there to tell?

  There are some Stygian intellectuals who speculated about the “what ifs.” Some have said that the fallout of a revolution would be easy to fix, and others have vehemently debated the opposite.

  I am not an intellectual.

  I’m an artist whose bad choices led to worse outcomes. I painted myself into a narrow, unforgiving corner. As a result, what I’ve become is a rebel who doesn’t speculate on what needs to be done. I act on it and to hell with the consequences.

  I am the reason Styx, whether it is known or not, is leaderless today. So, I am the one who must find a way to clean up the mess that I’ve made—after I stop my personal Grim Reaper, of course.

  Yet I am compelled—forced even—to pause from time to time and ask what happens now that Head Reaper, er, Master Scrivener Marin, is dead? No one knows that I melted the son of a bitch in his super-secret lair beneath Le Château Frontenac in Quebec City.

  The only hints that something is awry or that someone knows the truth are from the HermesHarbinger blog. The rebel site has been vomiting post
after post of theories like: Marin’s face in the newest broadcasts has fewer wrinkles, so they must’ve been recorded years ago. Marin has eyebrows in Monday’s evening news show and has not in the past several years, so it, too, must’ve been recorded long ago. Marin has moved out of Lethe and is hiding in India. Marin is planning to step down and will soon announce his replacement. Marin is a hologram and never existed to begin with.

  I liked the hologram theory. It suited him.

  But with no true Head Reaper in power now, there’s still a big problem. The average Joe Reaper or Eidolon starts the death process. They pull the souls from their bodies and then send them to their final stop by the Head Reaper’s “desk” in Lethe to forget their lives before being accepted into the Afterlife. Otherwise, souls linger somewhere between life and Erebus or Elysia, awaiting their final judgment. Since Marin was a Scrivener and not a true Head Reaper who had the power to send them onward, most of those souls never made it to the Afterlife during the centuries he reigned. He’d had his henchman Chad, an Eidolon, send a few onward in his place, but they’d only done that when things got too cluttered in Lethe. The rest simply hadn’t been Head Reapered to their final rest. Where they are now, I don’t know, but I’d bet my ovaries that wherever that is, they aren’t happy.

  But again, none of this mattered to me.

  Yet.

  Rebellions, wrinkle-free Head Reapers with eyebrows, and billions of forgotten souls were the trees, plants, and wildlife that closed in around my tiny cabin of troubles.

  The Deathmark that Marin left behind on me had to go not today, but yesterday.

  I had not expected that the quest for Xiangu the Master Scrivener would be easy. Anyone who wields enough power to remove Deathmarks was not someone who sat in a tattoo shop on a busy city street in Denver waiting for a slouch like me to come wandering in. This was precisely why we had to capture Brent—to keep him in check so that I would have as much time as I needed to find her.

  “Another coffee,” I said to the teenage boy with tan skin, short black hair, and inquisitive chocolate eyes. He spoke in broken English, so Delia and I pieced together snippets of his story in our brief exchanges. He was from a rural part of China. We knew something was special about him from the moment we had entered The Koffee Klatch an hour ago.