How to Reap a Soul (Soul Management Bureau #1)

Prologue

How I, Grymley of Evans Shire, Became a Reaper

There I was, minding my own business. Okay, I wasn’t minding my own business.

I never minded my own business. It’d always been a bit of an affliction.

You might call me nosy, but I preferred the term curious.

And besides, I wouldn’t have gotten to see Prince Jasper’s naked backside if I hadn’t been so curious about seeing it.

I might have been a lowly stable boy shoveling animal shit, but I wasn’t dead. At least not yet. My death came a few minutes later.

Prince Jasper looked left, then right, as if he were afraid of being caught. As if I hadn’t stripped in that very spot a thousand times before the prince broke the rules.

The king held his sons to a different standard than his servants. I could swim wherever I wanted, even in the river just outside the walls. Clearly, Jasper could not.

The prince had been up to something when he demanded that I saddle his horse. “Quietly, stable boy.” The prince had been stiff with tension and hid behind his horse as if that would be enough to keep the king from noticing him if the king arrived at the right moment.

So I followed Prince Jasper to the river and hid behind a bush.

The prince never turned my way, giving me the view I’d been waiting for up to that point in my life.

I’d since seen plenty of backsides, some far nicer than Prince Jasper’s.

His backside was perfectly round and a little bouncy as he stepped into the water, dipping just a toe in.

I fantasized about how his ass would bounce against my touch, though I could never get close enough to the prince in real life.

It was just a fantasy. One that made my cock hard.

I was happy with the fantasy alone, especially since the prince was such a proper prick of a boy, anyway.

But he was a pretty little thing, except for his sharp tongue.

He waded into the water with no small amount of caution.

He was up to his waist when the current swept him off his feet.

He flailed just before disappearing beneath the surface.

He reappeared a moment later, further down the river.

While everything about him was dainty, his scream, when it left his lips, was anything but.

His cry for help followed, but it came between bouts of submersion.

I had a choice. Either I let him drown and pretend I was none the wiser, that I hadn’t been there watching, or I saved him.

If I chose the latter, everyone would know I’d peeked at him during his private moment, which might not have been a big deal if it were anyone else, but I, being a lowly servant to the king, would certainly pay a high price.

They’d hang me for sure, especially since I wasn’t a good liar.

Did weighing my options longer than was proper make me a bad person?

Yes, but in the end, I stripped off my tunic and ran to the water’s edge.

The right thing might get me killed, but dammit all, someone needed to enjoy the prince’s bouncy backside.

Perhaps they’d shut him up with their giant cock.

I might watch it all from my ghostly perch outside his bedroom window.

That was if ghosts were real, of course.

I might be a little obsessed with backsides, especially the bouncy ones. And with shutting up the prince with giant cocks.

The prince wasn’t an amiable person, but he deserved to be saved as much as anyone.

The current had already swept him downstream. I’d always been a capable swimmer, even in a river with a strong current, but I was too far behind him to catch up.

“Swim toward the rocks!” I shouted, then picked up my pace, using the current to my advantage.

The prince tried to speak, but he went under before he could finish.

I was so focused on the prince that I didn’t notice the person standing on the shore at first. It wasn’t until I heard a feminine voice whisper in my ear that I searched for the person it belonged to.

I wasn’t sure what drew my gaze to the woman.

She was too far away for me to have heard those whispers, and I could have sworn the person who spoke was right next to me, inches away at best, not several feet away on the shoreline.

“Grymley of Evans Shire.” I heard her voice as clearly as if she were in the water with me. “You aren’t meant for this life.”

It was as if she grabbed my face and turned me toward her.

Her mouth never moved as she spoke again. But her eyes bore into me as if she were seeing my soul. Perhaps she was. “You will destroy the living realm and be happier for it.”

What did that mean?

The current picked up, sweeping him further away from me. I remained in place. Something held me there, suspending me despite how hard I swam.

The woman disappeared from where she stood on the shore, reappearing next to where the prince had gone under, as if she’d teleported herself from one spot to another.

She seemed to wait there for quite a while, as if she could see the prince beneath the water’s surface. When the prince popped up again, his body floated face down, and his arms bobbed on the surface beside his head.

By some miracle, I could move again and swam toward the shore.

I lay on the bank, trying to catch my breath.

When I could, I stood and stormed over to her, ready to give her a piece of my mind.

But I was brought up short at the sight of none other than the prince standing beside her.

He was as naked as when he’d gone into the water, but he didn’t seem to mind.

If anything, his forehead crinkled with confusion.

It was the oddest thing, but his body still floated in the river. It was as if there were two of him. Two were far too many, in my humble opinion.

When the prince met my gaze, he sucked in a breath. Then, his gaze went to something in the water.

I was a curious creature, so of course it got the better of me, and I turned to see whatever had him so shocked.

I couldn’t breathe when I saw myself, partially above water, floating much the way the prince was. My bottom half was submerged to the point that I could not see it beneath the surface.

The woman’s eyes were as dark as my own when she met my gaze. For the first time, she spoke to me. It was then that I realized she’d never talked to me before. Her voice came to me in my mind as if she’d been inside my head all along.

“I am a ferryman.”

The woman in the black coat, who could talk inside my mind and didn’t have to walk to go from one place to another, terrified me in ways I had never experienced, not then, at any rate. I learned later that my fear was unfounded, but at that moment, I didn’t realize she was kind and caring.

“The afterlife is waiting for you.” Hence, our bodies floating down the river.

The prince began to cry. “But Father hasn’t sanctioned my death.”

“Your father will have his day. Three years, four months, and twenty days from now.” She met my gaze. “You will ferry him into the afterlife.”

I sucked in a breath. “What? Why me?”

The prince scowled. “Yes. Very good question. Why him? I am a prince. Worthy of being someone of such importance.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You find him unworthy, then?”

“He is but a mere stable hand.” The prince seemed to recover faster than I did, having figured out what the hell was going on.

He held his chin high and wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something foul.

Looking back on the moment, I found him utterly ridiculous in that posture, with his cock hanging flaccid between his legs.

I was still stuck on my lifeless body, floating dead, not even ten feet away. Was I an it, since my soul had left the rest of me stranded in the river? I was still walking and talking to a woman who called herself a ferryman, as if that were an ordinary job.

I’d been born into my station. Some might say the prince was luckier than I, simply because he was the son of a king.

I would disagree. He died in a river because the king had forbidden him to enter it, and therefore, he couldn’t swim.

His longing for the kind of freedom I, as someone in a lower station, had was what killed him.

While I still died, I understood, even then, that it was the woman in the cloak who had ended my life by keeping me stationary, not my own failure.

“Grymley is my heir. My blood, the only one left to ferry souls in Region Twelve. He also risked his life to save you. You would not have returned the favor.” I wanted to correct her and say I risked my life for the prince’s stellar backside, but that sounded too crass, even in my own head.

“I’m a descendant of death?” That was news to me.

Not that I knew much about where I’d come from.

My mother had died giving birth to me, having never informed anyone of my paternity.

The castle cook and the stableman raised me from a young boy.

I liked to think they did a damn fine job.

I find my own company satisfactory, after all.

“That you are, boy. Should you want the job, of course.”

Before I could say another word, she snapped her fingers. “Off you go, young prince.”

The prince protested, but it was short-lived.

He stared at something to his left. I saw nothing beyond the strand of trees that marked the start of the Handgrave Forest. The forest was a dangerous place.

No one with a lick of sense went inside.

Many had died. It seemed the prince and I didn’t even have to do that to meet her.

The prince smiled as he walked toward the forest and a door that had suddenly appeared. “A carnival. I’ve always wanted to attend one.”

He disappeared a moment later. The air around him shifted, becoming visible for a brief moment before settling again.

She took my arm next and waited for me to speak. It took me a moment to realize she was waiting for me to accept the job.

“There must be a catch.”

She smiled as if delighted by my statement. “There is. If you accept the position, you’ll never see the afterlife. I will return your body to you, and you will live in it forever.”

Saying I was insecure in my skin would have been an understatement. I wanted lily-white skin like Prince Jasper's, not hands with calluses and skin tanned from too much time in the sun.

“Dying isn’t the worst thing.” Even then, I knew it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be.

“Ferrying souls can be tiring.” Was that another catch?

I bit my lip, weighing my options. “Immortality sounds like a long time on Earth.”

What I didn’t realize at the time was that eternal life could be incredibly lonely.