The Reaper's Sacrifice

by Abigail Baker

  I put my hands on Chad’s body again, this time around his neck, and went for it. I didn’t care if I brought us both down or if the heat was so intense that I annihilated Lethe and all of us in it. I wanted him melted into pudding at my feet.

  This was a vendetta for Eve and Mama and Errol, and I would see it through.

  Chad weakened as my hands cooked through his neck. I knew from experience how debilitating the pain was. When he dropped to his knees before me, I stayed above him.

  His reddened irises rolled back to gray. His tongue pushed out through his teeth as I squeezed harder on his neck. He couldn’t ask for mercy. Had he ever shown mercy to anyone I loved, or to me, I might’ve had the will to give him what he wanted.

  But he never had, so I didn’t either.

  “This is for Mama and Eve,” I growled, with a darkness in my voice that I didn’t recognize.

  Seconds thereafter, I boiled over, reducing Chadwick the Turncoat Eidolon into a blend of brown and white sludge on the floor of Marin’s private office. The pens and pencils floated unceremoniously on a pool of his remains.

  A short distance away, next to where Errol met his end, I saw it again.

  The hipflask. The Phlegethon.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Death comes to everyone, particularly those who deal it.”

  —HermesHarbinger.com

  The flask had enough left of the Phlegethon to rouse Brent and restore his energy. At least, I hoped so. I only needed to get the water on him. Errol had brought the flask into Lethe for a reason, to re-stoke his own fire, or to help another. Errol had done everything with forethought. There wouldn’t be time to throw around hypotheses and run experiments, anyway. I had to believe it would work.

  But restoring Brent’s energy would have to wait because across the room, kneeling over his victim, was Marin. His heat ready for another lightshow against a Stygian I would not see die tonight. This was a battle not just for Brent’s life, but mine, too.

  Marin’s body danced with ripples of red, white, and blue heat. He would not waste time before reducing Brent to nothingness. He would be an idiot otherwise.

  I soared across the room and grabbed a hold of Errol’s discarded hipflask. Twisting off the top, I felt water slosh around inside. Maybe there was enough to give us a boost of energy to end this once and for all. I tossed it back, wincing as the River of Fire burned my throat. Before our final assault, I had barely taken a sip. Now, I gulped enough to send me into a dizzying, thermonuclear rage.

  The last bit, another full guzzle of Phlegethon, I would save for Brent. The instant I could get close enough, I’d pour it over him. But first…my body convulsed. A shockwave ran from my head to my toes. A screech that felt otherworldly poured from my lungs and mouth. Only for an instant did I wonder if I had poisoned myself.

  Then I felt it.

  My skin prickled; my hairs stood on end. The reddened skin that I had always seen as a curse was now my armor. For the first time, I loved this power. I welcomed it to unite with me in one final attack on the corrupt leader of Styx. I was the owner of this power. And this power rallied for me and me alone.

  As Marin’s own power grew and grew, forcing Brent closer to his own liquid death, I struck. With grit and unnatural strength I wrenched Marin from his perch atop of my beloved and sent him flailing across his office to smash inelegantly into a bookcase. Massive, leather-bound books and wood from the case crashed around him, pinning him for a moment.

  But I only needed a moment to do what I couldn’t at Wrightwick. In my gut, which was writhing in anger and desperation, I knew that if I failed, I failed Styx. This was my only chance. I pressed my hand against Brent’s chest, over his heart, and sent everything I had into that place where we were connected. My body quivered as time seemed to slow down. Even Marin, who struggled to regain his footing, appeared to move in slow motion. The spinning earth joined in too, waiting, hoping, just as I was.

  Come on, Brent. We can do this together. Come back to me…I thought. Or rather, I urged.

  I would not concede that I had come this far only to fail. I did not have this gift of Masterhood without reason or cause. I knew, like I knew my face in a mirror or my voice when I spoke, that I could heal him, even though I didn’t know exactly how. But did it matter? Wasn’t instinct just as powerful as knowledge?

  The instant I peeled my hand from his chest, I saw it. There was no burned skull mark left as there had been with Nicholas Baird. It was an inked lotus, one as precise and detailed as the one I had tattooed with my machine onto Errol. The lotus simmered. It crackled. Lines of fire smoldered into black and gray.

  Most importantly—it healed Brent when my skull Deathmark could have destroyed him. It did what I couldn’t do a day before. As much as I wanted to scream out in relief, I remembered who was still nearby waiting to send us both to Erebus of his own accord. Time, which had slowed, returned to lightning speed.

  As Brent came to, his blue eyes half open and taking in the scene before him, I pulled back to take on the monster who had unburied himself from the bookcase. Marin was not thankful like I was. He wasn’t proud that I had brought Brent back from the brink. And he didn’t smile when Brent put a hand across his newest tattoo. That hand, though, was limp. His head lolled from one side to another. With him like this, we would not Match and finish Marin in one fell swoop.

  “Brent!” I tossed Errol’s hipflask at him. The metal canteen hit the floor and came to a stop at his side. He rolled his head toward it. Those blue eyes locked in on the flask. They told me that he knew what to do.

  I had healed my lover. I had given him—us—more time. But for the next few minutes, I was in this battle alone. Marin knew, too. I watched the slightest flicker of amusement in his face as he kicked books away from his path. The emotional reaction was subtle behind his skull face, but it was there. And it was enough to tell me that he would not permit a few minutes to go by—this would end now.

  I had no inkling how a fight between two Scriveners would go down. What I did know was that Marin hadn’t let Errol stand against him in a fair fight. He’d tried the same with me. Perhaps the ultimate showdown was ugly.

  “You ready to die?” I asked, my voice low and strong.

  He flexed his muscles, his own power eager to finish me.

  My own heat flexed its might, pulsating in blue and white, ready to melt a passageway for Marin straight to hell. “Why would you turn against your own kind?”

  “My kind betrayed me,” he said as he held his ground. “Long before Errol took over Wrightwick, my kind thrust me into this position and then turned me into the enemy. Better to cull them than let them oust me.”

  I took notice of Brent’s struggle to recoup his strength.

  “You being a Scrivener is why you didn’t ferry me or any of the others.” The pieces were falling in line. “You couldn’t melt us in front of Styx. You would’ve had to do it in private with Chad.”

  Marin’s body grew hotter. He was preparing to attack as I stumbled across his mastery in manipulation. His strike would come fast. I would need to be ready.

  His stoic skull face never broke when he came at me. My back slammed against the mural of the city of Québec. His hands curled around my neck, pinning me in place. I threw my own hands around his forearms, hopeful that my hot rage would offset his.

  The slightest wrinkle around his black eyes demonstrated his delight. The sting of something on my forearm made me scream. When I looked at my right arm, the flicking of scarlet and gold flames quickly dwindled into smoldering lines. The saccharine odor of my cooked skin burned my throat.

  I squeaked as his fingers crushed my neck. Still, I strained to see what had happened to my arm, to see the very same skull I marked on so many of my own doomed clients. This was a Deathmark. A Deathmark for me.

  I had read about the skill of putting Deathmarks on others from afar. I knew it could happen. Why Marin hadn’t done it sooner was beyond my comprehension, but s
urely it was for spectacle. Everything with him was spectacle.

  Wracked in tremors, my arms glowed. Even if I lived now, I would die soon, because of Marin’s mark. What he didn’t expect was that this fact fueled my fight more than it extinguished it. I was ready. Styx was ready.

  I tossed my head back against the wall and roared. My hands made contact with his chest muscles. I forced every ounce of my existence, every last inch of power into sending Marin to Erebus for all of eternity.

  Had he killed me first? I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

  Summoning the strength of everyone who had suffered by Marin’s hand, I fought. I begged for divine intervention. My very own body rattled the room and everyone in it, sending out tidal waves of radiation.

  I opened my eyes to stare into Marin’s one last time.

  One of us would die. One of us would disintegrate. But it would not be me.

  I had more of a reason to live. So I let out my final, toe-curling battle cry, one I was sure that everyone in Québec City could hear. Stygians would hear it, too. They would come running to finish the rebellion that barely got started.

  My fingers pressed into his skin. The fire in my touch felt unlike me, unlike anything I had ever experienced. The only thing that came even close was the day I put a Deathmark on Nicholas Baird with my hand. And then it occurred to me. Marin’s eyes flickered. He tried to back away because he knew it was coming. It was too late. When he ripped himself back to see what I had done, we both paused in disbelief.

  There, scrawled over top Marin’s bodysuit of ink, was my familiar skull, the Deathmark that I had come to know in my years of tattooing. That skull sent thousands to their deaths. But earlier, I’d left a lotus on Brent’s chest, a flower that rises up from muddy water.

  The skull in all its grim meaning was my Deathmark.

  The lotus was my healing mark.

  Along with my power, the River Phlegethon would oddly be Marin’s end, the one thing on earth that could bring the dead back from the Afterlife.

  “Checkmate, motherfucker.” I was the last one to ever speak to the Head Reaper.

  Marin’s eyes dulled into a death stare. The skin and muscle fibers were the first to melt, leaving behind a true bone skull.

  I roared one more time.

  His bones collapsed, splattering into a pool of mud at my feet.

  Marin, Head Reaper and secret Scrivener, was gone.

  He was gone.

  To my side, Brent had pulled himself up to lean against a wall, his jaw hanging in astonishment. He had witnessed the demise of a beast that had tortured Styx for many decades. Brent looked on with a mix of pride and concentrated despondency. As I descended from my inferno, I wanted to remind him that this was a chance for Styx’s redemption. There was no room for grief.

  Then I noticed my right forearm.

  The Deathmark.

  My relief at removing Marin from his reign of terror vanished. The world fell out from under me. Marin’s finishing blow struck seconds after he descended into his own permanent hell.

  Brent’s wide blue eyes met mine again.

  I waited on bated breath. Maybe he’d tell me this Deathmark was no big deal. Maybe he’d tell me that wearing it now released us from our bond of Grim Reaper and Assignee.

  Maybe…

  “Ollie…I love you,” he strained to say. “Run! Run fast!”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Some have been thought brave because they didn’t have the courage to run away.”

  —Proverb

  Our rendezvous point was the Isle of Orleans, in the same country house. Nearby was the oak tree that Brent and I had climbed before we’d rigged the Interceptor to the roof of the Château in preparation for our first rebellion. Brent knew of this place. He had been the one to suggest we come here after our latest assault was complete.

  There would be no time to regale whoever it made back there with the story of how I melted the Head Reaper who wasn’t even a Reaper. I wouldn’t get to say that Chad was a turncoat. Or that Errol was gone. Papa wouldn’t get to thank me for putting down the monster that had taken his beloved wife.

  None of it mattered as I dragged my exhausted body between the prickly branches of the vineyard toward the house that had become our rebel hideout. I had run, as Brent had ordered. I had run so hard that it took me a mile to catch my breath once my legs gave up on me. Never had I dared to look over my shoulder for Brent, either.

  Now that I had eliminated the Stygian who had been a threat to me since I was born, another threat took his place. This time it was a curse I would never have dared to imagine.

  The Reaper whom I loved was in hot pursuit. He had no other choice—ferrying me was his duty. A Deathmark was meant to snag those souls who had avoided their demise for far too long. My bearing this mark, meant that Fate had determined that I had outlived my time. I wasn’t simply outrunning my Grim Reaper, but the will of a hardhearted Maker.

  I couldn’t reestablish my will to run, even when I thought for a moment that I spotted Brent across the vineyard, coming for me. But I did make it to the house, and banged on the red front door until my fists bled.

  The door was flung open after I had worn through the skin on my knuckles. Disheveled and covered in soot, Delia looked back at me as if I was the walking dead. I was covered in blood and dust. My face was undoubtedly stained with tears.

  She caught me as I stumbled inside, and shoved me upright. “Where are the others?”

  Papa raced to help Delia keep me standing.

  Nicodemus balanced my head between his cool, calm hands.

  The four of us stood in momentary silence, their hands on my beaten body, channeling healing energy. They waited for me to begin. I was a harbinger of good things for Styx, which was hidden beneath my own personal grim news.

  How could I wrap everything up into a neat package? How could I tell them that I had to run and that I needed them to come with me on yet another exhausting pursuit?

  I would do everything I could to heal my own Deathmark. I would tattoo my whole goddamn body to find a way to save myself. But if I couldn’t, if I failed, I needed a backup plan. Xiangu, the Master Scrivener who knew how to remove Deathmarks, was the only Stygian who could help me now. I’d have to hold out hope that she was still alive and willing to assist me.

  I just could not find her without help.

  “They’re all dead,” I said through my tears. “Errol, Chad…Marin.”

  No one showed the slightest hint of celebration at the mention of Marin’s death.

  “Brent… Brent…” I tried to say it but couldn’t. I didn’t need to, either. I yanked my right arm from Delia’s clutches and showed them what I was trying to say.

  The Deathmark sizzled. Marin’s work was crude, similar to the brand I had left on Baird’s face, but it was no less deadly.

  Delia gasped. Papa grabbed my arm to analyze what he surely hoped wasn’t a real Deathmark.

  It was Nicodemus’s downcast expression that held my attention.

  They knew the significance.

  We would run—that’s what their silence told me. We would run hard, fast, and we would put to bed Marin’s posthumous attempt to destroy me forever.

  Did you love this Entangled Select Otherworld? Check out more of our titles here!

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Entangled Publishing and my fabulous editor, Tracy Montoya. As with The Reaper’s Kiss, you helped take Ollie and Brent’s story to another level.

  Thank you to my agent, Suzie Townsend, and all the lovely people at New Leaf Literary.

  A special thanks to my friends and family. It is a blessing that the list of friends and family is too long to put here. Thank you all for understanding when I’d cancel plans to work on edits. Thanks for continually checking in on my progress before dragging me out of the editing cave for some fun and laughs.

  Mom and Dad, thank you. You let me be that introverted kid who was better at making up cre
epy stories than doing her math homework. Thanks for that and for letting me watch scary movies at a really young age. It clearly didn’t do me any harm, did it?

  And, of course, thank you, dear readers. Thank you, thank you, thank you…

  About the Author

  Abigail Baker shares her home with a Siamese cat endearingly named “The Other Cat” and two rescued mutts with mundane human names that people think are cute. In addition to writing about rebellious heroines, she enjoys hiking, discovering craft beers, baking the perfect vanilla bean cupcake, and rock climbing (going as far as scaling 800 vertical feet to the summit of Devil’s Tower National Monument in 2013).

  Abigail won first place in RWA’s Golden Network’s 2011 Golden Pen in Paranormal Romance for Tattoo of Your Name Across My Soul, the book now known as The Reaper’s Kiss (Deathmark Book One). She regularly blogs about life observances at abigailbakerbooks.com, lives at the base of the Rocky Mountains, and can be easily found hiking any of Colorado’s best trails.

  Discover the Deathmark series…

  The Reaper’s Kiss

  Ollie Dormier’s tattoos are deadly. She is a Scrivener—an employee for Death—and her skull tattoos mark her clients for their demise. Ollie is showing the early signs of being a Master…demonstrating power that is forbidden. Reaper Brent Hume is a hot, scruffy rebel, who does marvelous and terrifying things to Ollie’s insides. He needs Ollie’s help—and her skills—to overthrow the evil and corrupt Head Reaper. That is, if he can figure out a way to keep this hot-handed girl cool…and keep his hands off.

  The Reaper’s Embrace

  (coming 2017)

  Discover more Entangled Select Otherworld titles…

  The Hunt