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CHAPTERONE
Grim
Life is pretty lonelywhen you’re the harbinger of death.
It doesn’t exactly make you popular at parties.
So, what do you do?
Oh, I just collect dead wandering souls and escort them to the afterlife. No vacations, but at least I get to work outside.
You can clear a room pretty fast.
Not that I go to any parties. The last one I attended was in 1874. Back when I was human.
I can still remember it like it was yesterday. In a way, it was. Time is irrelevant to Grim Reapers. We don’t feel the thick slog of ticking seconds. Time blurs together when you pick up the scythe, whether it’s minutes, hours, days, years, decades, centuries, millennia—it all bleeds together into one long hazy moment.
My only concept of time is remembered from my years as a human and even that is fuzzy.
But I do remember that night. How could I forget?
October 31st, 1874. All Hallows' Eve.
My chap Albert was throwing a Halloween ball at his summer residence beside a lake. I was dressed as King Louis XVI with a bloody red line traced around my neck and a powdered wig on my head.
The band was cranking out hits and everyone was dancing and having a great time. Margaret, a girl I’d known from town, was flirting with me and trying to get me to dance. I wasn’t interested. In fact, I wasn’t interested in any of the girls vying for my eye.
I was drinking heavily that night. A dangerous mix of Whiskey and cider. By the time the band had packed up and left, almost all of the guests were gone, and Margaret was curled up in the arms of some other man, I was drunk as a skunk.
Foolishly, I wandered to the lake and decided to go for a late-night swim. I stripped off my costume and dove into the chilly water with only the silvery light of the full moon reflecting off the clear still surface.
I guess I went too far, or maybe I got a leg cramp, or maybe a part of my pathetic soul wanted to end the misery and sink to the mucky bottom of the lake, but whatever the case, I had drowned.
I just didn’t know it.
My soul was wandering on the shore, clueless to the fact that my body was floating behind me in the middle of the lake, lifeless, soulless, and bloated with inhaled water.
That’s when I saw him coming out of the shadows.
Black hood covering his weathered pale face, long wooden handle of his scythe dragging through the dirt, long curved blade sharp as a guillotine.
The air chilled wherever he went. I shivered as I watched him approach.
I remember the horror at seeing him.
Even with the heavy burden of the millions of souls I’ve gathered throughout my time in black weighing me down, I can still remember.
The Reaper who came for me was an evil one. He relished my terror. He toyed with his victims. He traumatized their souls before sending them off to the afterlife.
These types of Reapers give the rest of us a bad name. Terrorizing is not in the job description. We have to collect souls, not horrify them.
But just like in life, in death there are assholes who relish in the pain of others. And my Reaper was one of them.
“Your soul belongs to me,” he hissed in a ghoulishly sinister voice.
“Quit mucking about,” I shouted, thinking it was Henry or another of my chaps playing a lame joke.
But as the air chilled around me, my breath coming out in a white misty cloud, I knew something was wrong. I turned and saw my body in the lake, my grandfather’s powdered wig floating beside me like a drowned rat.
