The Reaper's Kiss

by Abigail Baker

  The silvery human shapes hustled to the outside walls when the roars grew louder. And when they did, they exposed a new pack of aggressors, heading off our assault. They were an infantry of Eidolons.

  The redheaded female next to me screamed. Her eyes locked into a death stare when an Eidolon grabbed her and lifted her slight frame off the carpet. Garik threw his shoulder into the shadowy phantom. His effort didn’t hamper the beast. More Reapers threw their own bodies into the struggle. They would bring the Eidolon down by sheer will, if not by power.

  The red lasers of its eyes cut through darkness, and its jaw lowered with purposeful slowness, a warning of forthcoming death. I clapped my hands around its jawbone. At once, shadow withdrew from the enemy’s face and down its neck and body until it reappeared as its humanoid self. I found myself staring into the sea green eyes of a female, clasping what was left of her melted jaw.

  I watched the Eidolon sink to her knees, and that was the last I saw of her. The rebels pushed ahead, trampling everything in their path.

  “Scrivie!” Chad’s associates crowed over the pandemonium.

  “They’re coming,” Garik shouted. “Hurry or you’ll never make it.”

  “The doors.” I hollered back, fear and anxiety welling up in me as I anticipated seeing Brent, Mama, and Papa—hopefully alive.

  Garik dragged me through the crowd of skirmishing Eidolons and Reapers. Bodies slammed against me. Ribbons of blackness grasped for my limbs as if to pull me straight down to Erebus. As we advanced on the double-doors, knowing the monsters were closing in, Garik’s hand fell away from me. He body checked anyone in our way, clearing a path. I sprinted through it to finally reach the doors. Engraved into the wood were hundreds of faces in different states of horror. On each door were set curved brass latches.

  I pumped my fingers to drive extra heat into them. I breathed in one last time.

  “Scrivie!” The Eidolon’s rancid breath almost reached my prickled neck when I threw my hands onto the latches, instantly dissolved the brass, and ripped the doors open.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “You can be a king or a street sweeper,

  but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.”

  —Robert Alton Harris

  The doors slammed against the walls, generating a bang that announced my arrival in style. A brief glimpse around, and I could have sworn I stepped into a Roman Senate chamber. Built in the round, arched walls of bone-white skulls came to a peak in the center of the ceiling.

  Doric columns encircled the room, shouldering the layers of skulls as Atlas bears the weight of the Earth. Staring down from the dome of the ceiling was a face carved from stone. That face, partly skeletal and partly flesh, was the embodiment of Death, hailing his icy welcome to hell.

  I focused on the marble floor stretched out ahead of me. I quieted my trepidation as I grasped onto courage. The stone expanse gave way to a crowding of Grim Reapers in black wingtip shoes and patent leather stilettos.

  I panned upward, scanning each tailored suit and stunned face. There were only three Grim Reapers I wanted to see, and they surely weren’t standing among the group idly discussing politics in expensive shoes.

  I crossed over the room’s threshold. The group shifted, but stood silent, perhaps in awe that I had successfully led the plebian Reapers into the impenetrable and forgotten Lethe.

  The battle outside the doors didn’t stop. I glanced over my shoulder. Rebel souls were pulled into a few Eidolons’ grotesque jaws, while others staved off the shadowy aggressors. Garik was nowhere. Neither were any of the allies I had grown familiar with.

  I gasped when Chad in full wraithlike and ego-bruised fury, exploded through the melee, his trajectory straight at me. He’d reached the threshold when the doors swung shut of their own volition. The floor fissured with the impact. My stance held strong for but a second, and then I staggered back. Chad could have busted through the wooden barricade, but he must have known better because of the Head Grim Reaper on the other side.

  I had a feeling I should’ve known better, too.

  Gradually, I turned back to the cluster of Reapers. Marin hadn’t yet revealed himself, but he had demonstrated his power by slamming those doors. My nerves stood on end. Today, Marin was waiting for me because Death’s highest representative didn’t seek out his victims—his victims came to him, willingly and prostrating.

  An aisle formed between the Reapers as I padded toward the center of the room. I would have expected them to pose a resistance. But when I looked at my scarlet hands and arms, I was reminded that I was an emblazoned Scrivener infamous for palming Deathmarks onto my victims’ faces. A brash smile slid across my lips.

  Breathe—it controls your heat, I repeated with every footfall.

  Marin had used his Watchmen as his messengers since our last face-to-face meeting when I was sixteen. I had only seen him on television or in Reaper Monthly since. Now in the flesh, I saw that age hadn’t touched him here in the bowels of the earth. Time seemed to have stood still for him at an apparent age of thirty-five.

  The silkiness of his china-doll skin and the twinkle of light on his bald head weren’t what made him stand out like a handsome diamond among coal. It never had. It was his vacant, black eyes that had held me prisoner when I saw him on television, and even now, I still felt their draw on my independent will.

  “Well done, Scrivener Dormier.” Marin’s baritone was a foghorn inside the soundless chamber.

  I studied him, trying to think of a witty or upsetting response to his lackluster compliment. Was this the moment he wanted me to stop, lay down, and kowtow to his power? Or was he waiting for my declaration of independence? He left nothing to chance. He was the gatekeeper to the Afterlife. That duty didn’t pair well with carelessness.

  I put one foot in front of the other until I stood all but nose-to-nose with Head Reaper Marin.

  By all expectations, he should have stood ten feet tall, cloaked in layers of black wool, with a skeletal hand curled around the staff of a massive scythe. Such a cliché would have been welcome—even charming—compared to his unassuming, albeit distinguished, appearance.

  The inky voids of his eyes didn’t blink, allowing him extra milliseconds to try to shatter my confidence. His stare didn’t keep me from noticing someone kneeling behind him.

  Brent.

  I may not have seen his face, but I felt his anguish.

  “I’ve come…” My dry throat constricted. “I’ve come to demand the release of Brent Hume and to ask that charges against him and the Balanchines, the rebels, and me be dropped.”

  Marin’s perfect lips stretched into a flat smile.

  “I will give the rebels the sign, and they will unite against you,” I warned.

  His delight ebbed. Pale eyelids flickered over his empty stare.

  As my heart sent rapid-fire signals to my brain to give up and pray for a lesser punishment than death, I resisted. That part of me didn’t recognize that I had everything under control. I had to get out of my own way.

  Marin’s mouth twitched when I curled my blistering hands into fists, a non-trifling threat.

  “You need us,” I said evenly. “There are Stygians out there beyond these walls who want to charge you for the Scrivener Purge. They want to see you beg for mercy, and then they’ll destroy you as you’ve destroyed everyone they love. The only reason you’ve avoided them as long as you have is because you can hide here in Lethe. That’s over now. I will tell them where to find you if you don’t comply.”

  If he had eyebrows, they would have lifted. Instead, curved lines formed across his forehead. The creases reminded me of the strips of bread dough Mama would roll out for her baguettes—thick, milky-white, and unappetizingly shiny.

  “Now’s your chance to apologize and make up for your injustices.”

  Marin didn’t reply. This was his game—force the opponent to be as uncomfortable as possible without ever speaking a word. He did it so effortlessly that I appla
uded him.

  I looked around his shoulder to get a better look at Brent. Marin smugly stepped aside to give me a view of a figure stooped over an entire pond of blood. Those familiar cerulean eyes peered through his sodden hair. I stared down at the same face, beard, and long muscular limbs, but he was the color of death. Ribbons of bulging blue veins unfolded across his naked body like a jumbled roadmap. There was a shattered pain in Brent’s eyes.

  This man was not the rebel I had grown to love, not the Reaper once second-in-command to the Head of Death, not the same man who savored Pixie Stix like they were fine caviar. No matter what Eidolon abilities Brent had possessed, his quivering shoulders screamed that he was near his breaking point.

  “What have you done to him?” I asked.

  “It’s an ancient process. I make prisoners forget their previous selves,” Marin coolly replied. “It is reserved for our most problematic souls.”

  I looked away and curled my lips. I wouldn’t allow myself to cave to heartbreak. Brent needed my strength, not my compassion.

  “As for your demands, Scrivener Dormier, you have no influence over me.”

  “That’s bullshit.” A surge of heat raced in my arms. “Your people want you to hear them, Marin. They want justice. They will get it, if they have to use force.”

  The flesh around his eyes crinkled. “The world will never know where to find me, Dormier. This is Lethe. None of those traitors will remember this place if they leave.”

  “You’re right. None of us in Lethe will remember. I knew that before I came down here. That’s why this entire interaction is being recorded. Anyone in Styx sitting in front of a television is watching what is happening right now. They know where you are hiding. They know how to find Lethe now.”

  He scanned for a film crew and saw none, and then he circled to Brent with measured slowness, the kind that augurs a vile plan.

  For an extended moment, he stared. I simmered with anxiety, fearing Marin was planning Brent’s gory, torturous execution even now. Then, he turned a profile to me and the recording camera watching through my jacket’s buttonhole.

  He reached a hand for my neck. A finger looped around my lotus pendant. I refused to unpeel my gaze from his face—and the doughy creases in his forehead—as he held the lotus in his one-finger grip, his eyes glassy like a feeding shark.

  “I would not throw away Brent Hume’s talent so carelessly. He better serves Styx alive,” he intoned and his gaze locked on the buttonhole of my jacket, where the tiny camera sat. He flattened his palm over the lens, blacking out Styx’s eye into Lethe. “When Eidolon Hume fulfills his job, I’ll pardon the Balanchines and Hume of their disloyalty. That is my word, and I will honor it.”

  “What’s his job?” I was positive I didn’t want to know.

  “Your banishment.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Everybody is special. Everybody.

  Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain, everybody.

  Everybody has their story to tell…”

  —Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

  “Welcome to Marin’s special hell for rebels.”

  I was shoved blindfolded into a wall. I flipped around and felt the rush of air of a door swinging shut. The place would have been effortless to dissolve had my hands not been bound together in front of me, powerless. Prior to being placed in this dungeon, Marin made sure my heat wouldn’t burn through my bonds and prison bars by neutralizing my heat. Much like the inability to remember what happened in Lethe, I also forgot how to access my own power, at least temporarily. There had to be a way to overcome this, and I would need to work with Brent to figure out exactly how.

  But how to do that? How would I find my way to him?

  Not that the guard could see my hands, but I gave him a middle-finger salute. I had been led out of the trial room, stripped down to my white tank top and jeans, and dumped into a prison cell long before I had an opportunity to consider what my capture meant. I had no way of knowing if Styx saw my broadcast or if the others escaped unscathed. And would Marin make Brent finish me in private, or were they setting up for a live broadcast of my execution?

  The psyche plays awful games in dark moments.

  I was crazy to follow through with my plan. Crazier still for telling myself not to get worked up or cry because I would soon learn what the Afterlife was—assuming I made it to the all-things-peaceful-and-glorious-Elysia, rather than being sent straight to serving shit sandwiches in Erebus.

  Faintly drifting above my self-pity was the awareness that someone was nearby. I stilled my breath and listened.

  Slow and controlled breathing moved in, now inches away.

  “Who’s there?” I asked in case they hadn’t meant to scare me.

  A hand landed on my shoulder. My muscles tensed. The touch journeyed across my chest, catching on the seam of my tank top, just above my breasts.

  Another set of fingers found their way around my bicep, stopping for only a second before sliding down my back to rest above my buttocks. I gulped. I was blindfolded, handcuffed, and neutralized. I would be an easy target for any guard who had to scratch an itch. I lifted a knee, but a hand caught it.

  The fingers curled around the inside of my thigh and travelled northward. They cupped my groin and gave an assertive, almost hungry squeeze. I twisted my hips away when a pair of lips covered mine. The hands clutched my cheeks as a tongue slipped between my teeth, plundering for returned affection.

  A snarl escaped me. I threw a shoulder into the person. It was enough to shove him off. I stumbled away and my face collided with the wall. It held me upright as I prayed for whoever was near to take the suggestion and get out.

  But he followed me as I slid along the wall. His footsteps were deliberate and unhurried, terrorizing me with each heel click. I backed into the corner. My breaths were choppy. A pair of arms stretched around my head. My blindfold loosened. The fabric slipped down my face, and my eyes followed its journey to the bloodstained floor and my bare feet.

  The universe fell out from under me. My knees cracked against the concrete. I knelt at his feet, staring at the perfect seam in his black pants.

  Marin ran his tongue along his bottom lip. His wicked face turned my insides out. I was violated in the worst way. He wanted me to see how much power he had to wield over me. I cringed at what else he could take if the mood struck him.

  He flicked the brass pocket watch dangling from the belt loop on his trousers and then slowly knelt at my side, putting one knee to the floor as he rested his weight on the other. He curled a hand around my chin and leveled our gazes.

  “I believed that once you matured, that you and I might connect, that we’d understand one another,” he said.

  I couldn’t articulate a word. I could just taste the bitter flavor he left on my lips.

  His eyes locked on me in the same way Nicholas Baird had locked on me the night I had destroyed him. “You will agree to serve at my side, as my devoted Master Scrivener in Lethe. Your Deathmark will be mine. In exchange, I will suspend everyone’s sentences, so long as you turn them to our side.”

  He waited for my reply, not once blinking in the minutes he held me in his gaze.

  “As Head Scrivener, there’s a lot you can do with such power. You can restore Scriveners to Styx.”

  My head whirled. Head Scrivener? Scriveners looking to me for guidance? I’d be their hero, their savior. I would become a legend. But how could I become Head Scrivener and not feel like a turncoat? How could I not take Marin’s offer? If I didn’t, I’d die by Brent’s hand, and likely everyone I cared about would, too.

  “I’ll get to help Scriveners? I can travel the world, seek them out?”

  Marin’s eyes glazed. “You will not leave Lethe.”

  “Then how—”

  “You will have a liaison to the outside world. That will be your only connection.”

  I didn’t want to stay in Lethe. Spending a lifetime inside a fortress of bedrock with
Marin and his Eidolon freaks was hell ten times over. This deal favored Marin. Not me. Not my dreams or hopes. He would keep me so close that I wouldn’t be able to think about what I wanted for breakfast without him knowing.

  I looked at this schemer who wanted me to hand over my soul to his will. He looked into me, deep past the wall I forced up.

  “They must have told you how to unseat me,” he said.

  I knew, but I chose to keep silent.

  “You would have to put a Deathmark on me, and an Eidolon would then finish the job.” He formed a smirk that barely changed his porcelain expression. “You could not move fast enough, Dormier. Don’t let those fools trick you into believing otherwise.”

  He was right. I didn’t know if I could even replicate the attack on Nicholas. Especially against the Head of Death.

  “Tomorrow at your trial you will proclaim your loyalty to me. You’ll admit your guilt and renounce the rebels. You will agree to my offer, or you will face Erebus like your birth parents.”

  Brent had run halfway across North America and back to save me. No matter how little I knew him or of his past, I knew that I loved him. And I would never have a chance to again tell Brent or Papa or Mama or Dudley that I loved them if I didn’t accept Marin’s deal.

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you?” he prodded.

  Could I sell my soul and stand the heat that would come down on me from Styx’s crumbling society? Or in choosing death, would I destroy everything my parents, foster parents, and Brent had given up for me?

  Oh, I understood. I understood just fine.

  “I have some requests first,” I said. “Pardon Brent, my foster parents, and the rebels at my trial.”

  His answer was a blink. One blink for yes, I suppose.

  “And I want a private moment with Brent tonight.”